Re-Imagining 'the Witherspoon Tradition'

This essay explores Samuel Miller’s understanding of the epistemological capacity of the mind regenerated by God’s Spirit and sanctified by God’s Word. In response to those who would argue that Miller—as a theologian standing in the mainstream of ‘the Witherspoon tradition’, a founder of Princeton Seminary, and an architect of the Princeton theology—accommodated an epistemological paradigm that was compromised by the naïve realism of the Scottish Enlightenment, this essay establishes that despite what the historiographical consensus contends, he was in fact a consistently Reformed scholar who recognised that the work of God’s Spirit is essential to right knowledge not just of God’s Word, but of his world as well. In so doing this essay offers a fresh perspective not just on Miller’s understanding of the relationship between piety and learning, but also on the understanding of enlightened education that animated the founding of Princeton Seminary in 1812 and that was paradigmatic for those standing in ‘the Witherspoon [or Old Princeton] tradition’ throughout the long nineteenth century.