Summary
In order to understand Westminster Seminary, where Carnell enrolled in the fall of 1941, one must first know something about Princeton Seminary, for Westminster would never have come into being except for certain developments that split Princeton into factions in the 1920s. Since its founding in 1812 under the leadership of the Reverend Archibald Alexander, who was appointed its first president by the Presbyterian General Assembly, Princeton had stood unbendingly for strict Calvinistic Reformation theology as articulated in the writings of the seventeenth-century Swiss scholastic François Turretin. The boast of Alexander's protégé and successor, Charles Hodge, that “a new idea never originated in this seminary,” should not be dismissed as stubborn anti-intellectualism but should be seen rather as the serene confidence of one who is convinced that God has vouchsafed eternal truth to human care in the inspired words of the Bible, that the Reformation rediscovered the truth buried under centuries of ecclesiastical debris, and that the mandate of modern Christians is simply to deepen their understanding of and commitment to the truth, which never changes. As his successor Francis Patton once said:
Now Princeton Seminary, it should be said, never contributed anything to these modifications of the Calvinistic system. She went on defending the traditions of the Reformed Theology. You may say that she was not original: perhaps so, but then, neither was she provincial. She had no oddities of manner, no shibboleths, no pet phrases, no theological labels, no trademark. She simply taught the old Calvinistic Theology without modification: and she made obstinate resistance to the modifications proposed elsewhere, as being in their logical results subversive of the Reformed Faith. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical MindThe Case of Edward Carnell, pp. 42 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988