"We want to be on the frontier of theological thought," says James I. McCord, president of the Princeton Theological Seminary. "We want to discuss the major issues confronting Christendom. We want a campus with sufficient openness that the whole church can converse with it."
Beginning this week, the better part of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. will be conversing with—and congratulating—Princeton Theological. The oldest, biggest and best of Presbyterian divinity schools is starting a 14-month celebration of its 150th anniversary. The most notable parishioner of Gettysburg's Presbyterian Church, Dwight Eisenhower, is honorary chairman of the celebration. Among the many churchmen who have agreed to lecture at Princeton in the coming months are such famed non-Presbyterians as Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America, Willem A. Visser 't Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and Swiss Theologian Karl Barth.
Princeton Theological has been historically tied to the varying fortunes of its founding body: the Presbyterian Church.
Nearly a third of the graduates from the Presbyterian-run College of New Jersey at Princeton, which was founded in 1746, entered the ministry during the 18th century. But even then churchmen detected the growth of godlessness on the campus. In 1812, responding to such fears, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church set up a seminary "to provide for the Church an adequate supply and succession of able and faithful ministers of the New Testament; workmen that need not be ashamed, being qualified rightly to divide the word of truth." Though its 14 neat yellow-grey stone buildings are located next door to the Princeton campus, the seminary has always been independent of the university.
The new seminary reflected the ortho doxy of its early teachers. The first professor hired, Dr. Archibald Alexander, was a strict, commonsensical Calvinist who believed that God's truth in the Bible was like a seal and "the human heart was like wax that receives the imprint of the seal." Another early teacher, Samuel Miller, endlessly lectured students on such matters of etiquette as why they should not spit tobacco juice on the carpet. "I have known a few tobacco chewers in whom this habit had reached such a degree of concentrated virulence," he wrote, "that they even compelled persons of delicate feelings, especially females, to leave the room, or the pew, and retire in haste to avoid sickness of stomach."