This quotation deserves unpacking. “Improved methods of philological study” is a reference to higher criticism, the upshot of which is to see the Bible as a significantly human book. “Progress in science” refers to what the above pages outlined. The scientific worldview of moderns is not the same as the mythological worldview of the ancients. Progress means that you don’t go back.

Thayer does not outline the archaeological or historical research he alludes to, but he’s likely referring to the gaps in the archaeological record concerning biblical events. All of this is enough to make a “thoughtful” person blush in embarrassment. To borrow from a car commercial a few years back, the Princetonian view of Scripture was your father’s view. This new generation needs a new view, a view that’s not that of their fathers. It is also important to note what Thayer does not advocate. He does not advocate turning away from Scripture altogether or even in the main. He just wants a milder view, one that allows for some fuzzy boundaries and wiggle room—one that’s not so distressful to thoughtful souls. This is the new view of Scripture that Thayer commends.

Between the American Civil War and the beginnings of the twentieth century, attitudes toward the Bible had changed indeed. These new attitudes brought about a whole new set of categories: modernists, those who saw no need for keeping the ancient book of the Bible or for keeping the religion it spawned; liberals, those who wanted to keep the ancient book of the Bible and Christianity but needed to retool both to fall in line with modern sensibilities; and fundamentalists, those who thought the Bible was as true in all of its particulars for moderns as it was for ancients. Admittedly, fundamentalism is a complicated term, meaning different things to different people at different times. The term does serve well, though, to describe theological conservatives who held to a high view of Scripture during the decades roughly from the 1890s through the 1930s.

The Lion’s Den

These theological conservatives, especially when it came to the doctrine of Scripture, had found a home at Princeton and had a de facto leader in Benjamin B. Warfield, affectionately dubbed “The Lion of Princeton.” Born in the South in 1851, Warfield first began his academic career at Western Seminary near Pittsburgh before moving on to Princeton in 1887. He was returning to his alma mater, having studied there under Charles Hodge. Charles Hodge passed the mantle on to his son A. A. Hodge. After A. A. Hodge’s death in 1886, the mantle passed to Warfield. Warfield not only studied at Princeton, he also spent a year studying overseas in Europe. By 1887 he had already published a number of significant works and had quite a reputation. He was poised, in other words, to carry on Princeton’s role in defending and commending the authority of the Bible and its supernatural worldview.