Princeton Seminary’s Premature Obituary

Abstract

It is widely granted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Princeton Theological Seminary had come to be recognized as an international bastion of evangelical and Reformed orthodoxy. Students, drawn to Princeton from across the USA and many points across the globe, returned home to teach and preach the Christian faith as Princeton had relayed it to them. Since the denominationally-mandated reorganization of this seminary in 1929, conservative evangelicals have circulated a narrative describing the seminary as undergoing a ‘death’ in that year. This essay seeks to show both that the theological reorientation of this seminary was much more gradual than this now-customary narrative would allow, and that the graduates of this seminary from both before and after 1929 went on exercising a wide national and international evangelical leadership for decades beyond the reorganization.