Mixed Reactions: Princeton and Andover Seminaries and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Scripture focus

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

1 Corinthians 3:6 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

Historian Joseph Conforti called Edwards “a kind of white whale of American religious history” — impossible to ignore, provoking both reverence and revulsion. Deist attacks on Christian orthodoxy had pushed nineteenth-century Christian thinkers toward Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which prized direct, self-evident perception over Edwards's more difficult idealist metaphysics; the result was a century of admiration for Edwards's piety alongside a broad rejection of the philosophical framework beneath it.

This “Methodization” of Edwards, as Conforti named it, meant that his most reprinted works were devotional rather than doctrinal: his Personal Narrative circulated in more than 100,000 copies as the “Conversion of President Edwards,” and the Life of David Brainerd became something like a manual of authentic religious experience for Methodist circuit riders and Baptist missionaries. Even Religious Affections was abridged in transmission — American editors trimmed its harder philosophical distinctions, and John Wesley's British edition ran to only a sixth of its original length.

The clearest institutional battle over Edwards's legacy played out between Princeton and Andover Seminaries. Princeton's founding professor, Archibald Alexander, distrusted Edwards's emphasis on religious affections and preferred the “dictates of conscience” of Common Sense philosophy, while Charles Hodge, who taught there for over sixty years, spoke warmly of what he owed to Religious Affections and Original Sin — showing that even within one seminary, Edwards could be read in sharply different ways.

Key points

• Joseph Conforti's image of Edwards as a “white whale” captures how nineteenth-century Americans could not ignore him yet reacted to him with sharply mixed feelings.
• Scottish Common Sense philosophy displaced Edwards's more demanding idealist metaphysics, even among many who admired his piety.
• Edwards's most widely reprinted works in this century were devotional rather than systematic — his Personal Narrative and the Life of David Brainerd, not his treatises on the will or virtue.
• Even Religious Affections was abridged for wider circulation, with American and British editors quietly cutting its harder philosophical and aesthetic arguments.
• Princeton and Andover Seminaries illustrate the divided reception: Archibald Alexander was cool toward Edwards's affections-centered theology, while Charles Hodge openly praised Religious Affections and Original Sin.

A line worth remembering

a kind of white whale of American religious history

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 38

Related Scripture

• 1 Corinthians 1:12-13
• Galatians 1:6-9
• 2 Timothy 3:14
• Jude 1:3

For reflection and discussion

1. What gets lost when a theologian's devotional writings are kept in circulation while the underlying convictions that shaped them are quietly dropped?
2. Where in your own tradition have you seen a thinker's practical or devotional legacy preserved while their harder theological arguments were forgotten or resisted?
3. Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge, colleagues at the same seminary, read Edwards very differently — what does that suggest about how much any reader's own philosophical assumptions shape what they can receive from a text?