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Princeton in the Nation's Service: Religious Ideals and Educational Practice, 1868-1928
by P.C. Kemeny
Oxford Univ. Press
353 pp.; $45
Do Christians make the best citizens? This question, which has prompted a variety of responses from ethicists, philosophers, and political scientists, has rarely in formed the work of historians writing on American higher education. But as P.C. Kemeny shows, the civic functions of Christianity were as much responsible as the growing prestige of the natural sciences for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transfer of academic authority from Christian liberal arts colleges to secular research universities.
Kemeny's narrative covers Princeton University (until 1896 the College of New Jersey) during the 60-year period (1868-1928) in which James McCosh, Francis Landey Patton, Woodrow Wilson, and John G. Hibben presided over the school—a period during which, de pending on one's perspective, Princeton suffered or benefitted from the way that Anglo-American Protestants had appropriated the Enlightenment. The Presbyterians who sponsored Princeton came to believe that they could have it all: maintain orthodox Christianity, advance the cause of scientific discovery, and contribute to the creation and preservation of a Christian republic.
What brought the curtain down on this juggling act, Kemeny concludes, was not the imperial claims of science, as many historians of higher education have argued. (In fact, as Princeton's president from 1868-88, McCosh kept the pieces of Protestant educational philosophy together in the face of Darwinism and higher criticism's challenges to the synthesis of Christianity and science.) Rather, it became increasingly difficult for Protestant educators to reconcile their responsibility to serve a religiously diverse nation with their traditional conception of a curriculum leavened by the distinctives of Protestant Christianity. Gradually the imperatives of civic duty led administrators to scuttle the university's explicitly Christian mission, although a liberal Protestant faith reassured Princeton's leaders that the school was still a Christian place, furthering Christian civilization in the United States.
Kemeny's book fleshes out for one institution many of the themes that George Marsden develops at large in The Soul of the American University, especially reinforcing Marsden's point that American higher education did not so much secularize as the Protestant theology undergirding it liberalized. But Kemeny's emphasis on the public mission of universities and how it affected the Christian character of higher education makes this book particularly valuable, if also troubling, for believers who desire a greater Christian presence not only in the academy but also in American public life more generally. Princeton in the Nation's Service shows at the very least that the way Protestants in the United States have mixed religious and national ideals has been entirely unsatisfactory, while suggesting that such a mixture is inherently unstable.
D.G. Hart is academic dean and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in California. He is the author most recently of The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), soon to be reviewed in these pages.
Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought
by Philip C. Almond
Cambridge Univ. Press
240 pp.; $54.95
It's hard for those of us living on this side of the Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution to understand the almost unquestioning allegiance that leading theologians in seventeenth-century Britain had to literal interpretations of the Genesis creation account. But we need to remember that the seventeenth century was a time when there was widespread agreement, even among scientists, that the world was created approximately 4000 B.C., and in six literal days. However much they disagreed about the location of the Garden of Eden or the exact meaning of the image of God, these men believed they were living only a few thousand years after Creation.
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