Few names are so closely tied to the birth of Reformed theological education in the United States as Archibald Alexander. He was the first professor of Princeton Seminary and spent nearly forty years training pastors, at a time when the church was debating how to prepare ministers without losing either rigor or heart.
Born in 1772 in Rockbridge County, Virginia, Alexander grew up in a Presbyterian family of Scottish and Irish descent. He studied under the pastor William Graham and was converted in 1789, still a young man, during a season of spiritual revival in the region.
Ordained in 1794, he pastored churches in Virginia before taking, at age 25, the presidency of Hampden-Sydney College. Nine years later, a student uprising led him to leave the post; he then moved to Philadelphia, where he pastored Third Presbyterian Church until 1812.
That year, the Presbyterian General Assembly founded Princeton Theological Seminary and invited him to be its first and, for one year, only professor. In his inaugural address, he took as his text John 5:39, “search the Scriptures,” a theme that would summarize his entire academic life.
Alexander insisted that scholarship without piety produces cold theologians, and piety without scholarship produces confused enthusiasm. This conviction shaped what became known as Old Princeton, a tradition that united rigorous biblical study and devotional life, and formed disciples such as Charles Hodge.
His story also has an uncomfortable page: like many of his generation in Virginia, Alexander supported the American Colonization Society, which favored sending freed Black Americans to Liberia rather than fighting for an equal society. Decades later, Princeton Seminary itself publicly acknowledged that it had benefited from slave labor in its early years.
He wrote works of devotion and apologetics, among them Thoughts on Religious Experience, along with biographical records of Presbyterian preachers who came before him. Married to Janetta Waddel, he had children who also became pastors and writers.
He died in Princeton in 1851, at age 79. The model he left, of uniting head and heart in preparing those who serve the church, continues to influence seminaries and missionary training programs around the world.
