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The historic Calvinist churches that still enjoyed significant leadership in American public life thoroughly incorporated common sense and republican emphases into their theology. In general, these theologians condemned the revolutions in France and were suspicious of the “infidel” Thomas Jefferson and his friend James Madison. American Calvinists were, however, not unified; their disputes grew from the different approaches they took to the problems of religious organization and national civilization posed by the new American nation.

Edwards Amasa Park championed Edwardsian Calvinism from the Jacksonian era until the very close of the nineteenth century. His own training at Andover in the irenic divinity of Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods, his application as rhetorician of the work of Hugh Blair and George Campbell and his exposure in Germany to the Vermittlungstheologie of Friedrich Tholuck gave specific definition to his theological project. Park ought not to be viewed as a romantic idealist in the line of Horace Bushnell or as a proto-liberal in advance of the Andover liberals who succeeded him. Instead he commingled epistemology and methodology derived from Lockean empiricism, Baconian induction, natural theology, and Scottish commonsense realism. As a formidable apologist for his revivalist inheritance, Park conserved the substance and prolonged the influence New England Theology by securing for it modes of expression well fitted to his nineteenth-century audience.

Chapter forty-two examines one of the most titanic theological battles of Hodge’s career. It recounts the many articles published in the Repertory and Bibliotheca Sacra as Hodge and Edwards Amasa Park at Andover Seminary sparred over the exact nature and reliability of biblical language. Park argued that for a different between figurative and descriptive language in the Bible. Hodge held that no such distinction existed. Reason alone could understand the Bible; an intuitive faculty was not needed, nor was it reliable.

Chapter Fifteen offers an overview of the influence of the ideology of democracy on American Protestantism. American theology began to change in the early nineteenth century as Americans increasingly believed in an egalitarian ethic. Princeton Seminary remained firmly committed to a high sense of God’s sovereignty and the implications that had for a hierarchical church governance structure.

This concluding chapter reviews how the Andover Seminary supported a cadre of Christian scholars who helped revolutionize intellectual life in nineteenth-century New England. It discusses Sara Paretsky's 1977 dissertation, which describes the creative process of intellectual outreach that more familiar narratives of theological declension during this period failed to capture. Authored by an intellectual historian who turned to crime fiction instead of building an academic career, this work invites readers to take up where Paretsky's inquiries into post-Calvinist American intellectual life left off, perhaps with the independent spirit of Paretsky's feminist detective V. I. Warshawski. The important thrust of Paretsky's argument can be appreciated by comparing it to Mark Noll's, the best-known historian of American Calvinism in the early twenty-first centuries.

This introductory chapter traces the origin of the Andover Seminary back in 1810, and finds a noteworthy band of intellectual Calvinists. They tried to take in the compass of human learning: classics, languages, biblical studies, philosophy, and natural science—in addition to the orthodox theology which they preached. The men who founded the seminary belonged to a new type of Christian intellectual. Unlike their predecessors, for whom all paths of knowledge led to theology, these men explored learning for the sake of scholarship as well as religion. Because their work revolved around twin centers of faith and knowledge, this new type can be called the Christian scholar. As a result, the theological seminary at Andover provided an impetus for its early faculty members to concentrate on the emerging disciplines of philology and textual criticism.

Chapter forty-six examines Hodge’s relationship with James Henley Thornwell, perhaps the most influential southern Presbyterian of his generation. The two men seldom agreed. As conservative as Hodge was in his theological views, Thornwell was even more conservative. Thornwell approached the Bible as a strict constructionist. If the Bible did not actually say it, then it could not be true. The effects of Thornwell’s approach included his opposition to voluntary societies and boards being used by the American Presbyterian Church. Hodge supported the use of such boards and societies. Thornwell also believed in a higher status for the Ruling Elder than did Hodge. Ultimately, Thornwell lost faith in his northern Old School brethren and became a founding member of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America. He also helped found The Southern Presbyterian Review.