Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 44:2 (Fall 1982)
Article: The Princetonians and Scripture: A Reconsideration
Author: Randall H. Balmer

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WTJ 44:2 (Fall 1982) p. 352

The Princetonians and Scripture:
A Reconsideration

Randall H. Balmer

In recent years, a good deal of controversy has attended the interpretation of the nineteenth-century theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary. Modern scholars have faulted them for relegating the Holy Spirit to a role of diminished importance and for purveying an and scholasticism.1 But the most spirited charge has centered on the Princetonians’ doctrine of Scripture.

On this issue Ernest Sandeen’s work on Fundamentalism and Princeton theology continues to hold center stage. In the September 1962 issue of Churck History he published “The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism,” which was followed in 1970 by a larger treatise entitled The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930. In both works, Sandeen argues that the Princetonians (notably Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and B. B. Warfield) departed from the Westminster Standards by removing the witness of the Holy Spirit from a consideration of the veracity of

WTJ 44:2 (Fall 1982) p. 353

Scripture; in place of traditional Presbyterian convictions, they allegedly substituted an ironclad, rationalistic doctrine of biblical inerrancy.2 In so doing, claims Sandeen, these later Princetonians formed a “unique apologetic” shared neither by their contemporaries nor by their predecessors at Princeton.3

According to Sandeen, this “unique apologetic” was comprised of three elements: first, the idea that biblical inspiration extends to the very words of Scripture; second, that the Bible itself teaches its own inerrancy; finally, and for Sandeen the most innovative, that errorlessness extends only to the original autographs of Scripture and not to copies or translations.4 Together, these articles combined to form what he characterizes as a “significant retreat” from the views of earlier Princetonians in particular and the Westminster Standards in general.5

I

Serious questions have been raised elsewhere concerning the assertion that the later Princetonians broke with the views of their predecessors.6 Although it is true that a shift of emphasis is

WTJ 44:2 (Fall 1982) p. 354

discernible in the later writings—the notion that the Holy Spirit is the final witness to the truth of Scripture is conspicuously abse...

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