Princeton Theologians - Theology

Theology

Mark Noll, an evangelical Church historian, sees the "grand motifs" of the Princeton Theology as being

Devotion to the Bible, concern for religious experience, sensitivity to the American experience, and full employment of Presbyterian confessions, seventeenth-century Reformed systematicians, and the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense.

Allegiance to the Bible as the supreme norm was common in the 19th century, and not a distinctive of the Princeton theologians. Princeton was, however, distinguished by the academic rigor with which it approached the Bible. Alexander and his successors sought to defend the doctrines they found in the Bible against rival claims from learned scholars. Charles Hodge saw faithfulness to the Bible as the best defense against higher criticism as well as the religion based on experience of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Princeton theologians saw themselves in the line of Reformed protestantism stretching back to John Calvin. The dogmatics of Francis Turretin, a Reformed scholastic of the 17th century, was the primary textbook of theology at Princeton. In a world which increasingly valued the new over the old, these theologians preferred the theological systems of the 16th and 17th centuries. The various Reformed confessions were viewed as harmonious voices of a common theological tradition, which was simply a distillation of the teaching of the Bible.