The latest contribution to the scholarly literature on the theologians who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from the time of its founding in 1812 to its reorganization in 1929 is an edited volume that focuses on Charles Hodge’s efforts “to defend and transmit” (p. 11) the heritage of Reformed orthodoxy to the post-Enlightenment American context in which he lived. While Hodge is well known for contending that he and his colleagues at Old Princeton “taught nothing new in relation to theology” (p. 105), editor Ryan McGraw and most of the contributors to this volume insist that, in fact, Hodge was “not fully aware” (p. 118) of the manifold ways in which a host of “issues that arose within nineteenth-century America” (p. 11) were having a transformative—though not always an innovative (p. 233)—impact upon his understanding of Reformed orthodox doctrine.

For this reason, the chapters in this volume are extended efforts “to understand Hodge’s ideas in context” by bridging “the gap between Reformed orthodox and American theological studies in relation to [his] self-identification with both” (p. 12). As McGraw puts it in his fine introduction, each of the areas that the contributors to this volume explore—including “Hodge’s use of philosophy,” “his definition of theology as a science,” “his doctrine of God,” “his use of personhood language in relation to the Trinity,” “his treatment of the imputation of Adam’s sin,” “his delineation of church offices,” “[his understanding of] the validity of Roman Catholic baptism,” and “his conception of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper”—illustrates “a clear point of continuity with Reformed orthodox teaching as well as a distinctively American twist in [his] ideas” (p. 11). In short, McGraw and his co-contributors maintain that “only by recovering the Reformed orthodox background from which Hodge drew can we truly appreciate how his post-Enlightenment American context affected his thought” (p. 13) in consequential ways.

As with most edited volumes, some of the chapters in this volume are more compelling than others, and this is the case for several reasons, even though there is something to commend about each chapter. In terms of the overall quality and general usefulness of the volume, it must be said that all of the contributors are more than capable scholars who are well-versed in the distinctive theological emphases of the Reformed orthodox tradition.

Nevertheless, the volume as a whole is compromised by a failure to engage the revisionist assessments of Old Princeton’s relationship to the Scottish intellectual tradition that have been proliferating for the past quarter of a century, a failure that presents itself in the first three chapters and reverberates throughout most of the remaining chapters of the volume. No serious student of American Reformed thought in the nineteenth century denies that Hodge and his colleagues at Old Princeton were realists who were familiar with and even utilized a number of the insights of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers of the eighteenth century. But a growing cohort of revisionist historians is insisting that the form of realism to which they were “overt[ly]” (p. 59) committed was simply not—as the historiographical consensus contends and as most of the contributors to this volume apparently maintain—the Common Sense Realism of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, what these revisionist historians insist is “beyond dispute” (p. 59) is not that Scottish Realism formed the “absolute bulwark” (p. 19) that was at the foundation of the theological thinking of those standing in the Witherspoon or Old Princeton tradition throughout the long nineteenth century. Instead, they are arguing that the Old Princeton theologians—including Hodge—were chastened rather than naive realists. The Old Princetonians affirmed, in other words, precisely what their present-day critics mistakenly contend their efforts “to apply modern scientific methods to theological science” (p. 101) constrained them to ignore, namely that piety should play an “essential”—even a dispositive—role in how Reformed believers should think about and approach the doing of systematic theology (see, for example, p. 93).

To be clear, I am not suggesting that this revisionist literature is beyond challenge or that the work of the revisionist historians to which I am referring has gotten everything so right that there is no longer any need for academic give and take. But for such capable scholars to simply ignore this growing body of revisionist literature is not just curious—especially in an academic discussion of this nature—it betrays an oversight that detracts significantly from the historiographical value of this otherwise impressive volume.

---