At the conclusion of his magisterial biography of Charles Hodge, Paul Gutjahr observes that many conservative American Protestants “still carry some portion of Princeton Seminary's cane of orthodoxy” with them today as they seek to articulate their theological commitments to contemporary audiences (Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 385). Paul Helseth's study of the relationship between religious psychology and doctrine in the thought of the Seminary's theological architects is a potent example of this phenomenon. He offers a lucid, cogent argument aimed at the theological rehabilitation of the Princeton School's appropriation of modernity.

The title notwithstanding, this is not a work of historical analysis so much as an epistemic and hermeneutical apologetic for Reformed religious psychology, and for Princeton's rightful place within that tradition. It is especially concerned to address the divide in contemporary evangelical thought between conservatives, who continue to emphasize the centrality of doctrine, and post-conservatives, who largely reject propositional religious knowledge in favor of lived religious experience located within communities. Thus his arguments will primarily be of interest to those who are concerned about this issue, or who are interested in the intramural philosophical and theological debates it has engendered.

Helseth traces out the arc of a “consensus” interpretation of Princeton theologians as imprudently rationalistic, running in its historical form from Sydney Ahlstrom and Ernest Sandeen through the likes of Mark Noll and George Marsden, and in its theological application in the work of Jack Rogers, Donald McKim, Stanley Grenz, and Robert Webber. Indebted to the faculty psychology of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the Princetonians were said to place too great an emphasis on the positive capabilities of the cognitive intellect to ascertain the truth of the Christian revelation, and the doctrines derived from it. For those on the theological side of this interpretive consensus, Princeton's rationalism put it out of step with the Reformed tradition, and more importantly, out of step with postmodern epistemologies, which for post-conservatives warrants the rejection of its entire theological program of positivist propositionalism.

Helselth offers a revisionist interpretation of the influence of Common Sense philosophy on the key figures at Princeton, namely Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, Benjamin Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. He argues that far from being rationalists, each affirmed classical Reformed religious epistemology. Human reason does not operate independently of either the will or the emotions; thus knowing is an act of the whole person, and not simple intellection. Far from placing an unwarranted confidence in the capabilities of autonomous reason, they consistently allowed for the moral component in the understanding, particularly the noetic effects of sin upon the ability of humans to think about God and the world in which they live. They rejected the very rationalist apologetics they are thought to have embraced, which relied on appeals to the reasoning of the unregenerate to discover the truth of the Christian message. Rather, the Princetonians saw apologetics as an instrument to be used by the Holy Spirit in the process of creating a graced or regenerate knowing of truth in the subject.

Just as importantly, their religious epistemology helped to reinforce the importance of doctrine, or the propositional knowledge of God, rather than diminish it. In one sense their attention to the holistic nature of knowing, and to the limitations this places upon the adequacy of the human mind in light of its estrangement from God, might seem to position the Princetonians beside the postmodern rejection of epistemic confidence, or at least make their intellectual program amenable to post-conservatives. But the effect was quite the opposite: it was precisely because of the limitations on human knowing that the Princetonians argued that the mind needed a non-subjective source of knowledge about God (revelation), and it was their reliance the Reformed notion of a Spirit-induced ability in the regenerate mind to recognize truth about God and about the world God has made, that gave them confidence to assert that the mind could know that the propositional conclusions drawn from revelation were in fact faithful representations of religious truth. But far from being a sterile collection of propositions, theology was for the Princetonians the product of an ever-evolving, never-completed negotiation between divine revelation, human reasoning, historical context, and scientific progress.

The second purpose of Helseth's project is to critique the epistemological assumptions of post-conservative evangelicals. Here the book's cogency falters somewhat. It is difficult to see what relevance the epistemological rehabilitation of the Princetonians would have for post-conservative evangelicals. It may well be that Rogers, McKim, and their theological confederates have simply misread Warfield and others as over-confident rationalists. But this historiographical mistake hardly seems to touch upon their epistemic and hermeneutical program. The Princetonians would be of little use to them regardless of their religious epistemology, since post-conservatives are fundamentally opposed, it would seem, to the kind of propositional religious knowledge embraced both at Princeton and by conservative evangelicals. It may be that the Princetonians were far more theologically and epistemologically subtle and sophisticated than they have been given credit for, but this seems unlikely to bridge the divide in the contemporary evangelical theological method. And Helseth may be correct in noting that post-conservatives have surrendered their theology to postmodern agnosticism in the same way that religious liberalism surrendered its theology to modern skepticism, but criticizing their historiography of American Presbyterianism seems a moot point.

In the end, the book's ambitions may represent both its limitations and its promise. On the one hand, Helseth takes on an impossibly broad range of issues, from American theological history and the nature of Reformed apologetics to the task of Christian scholarship in the secular academy and the need for theological rapprochement among contemporary evangelicals. On the other hand, Helseth's work suggests promising new lines of research, both in terms of historical investigation and in terms of theological reflection, which ought to stimulate scholars interested in either subject to seek answers to the questions that the book has raised.