Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) is one of the oldest and most distinguished institutions of theological education in the United States. Founded by the Presbyterian Church in 1812, for two centuries PTS has trained professional and lay clergy for the ministry. James Moorhead, a professor of church history at the seminary since 1984, was asked by the seminary to produce a history of the school for its two-hundredth birthday in 2012. In accepting and then completing such an ambitious task, Moorhead has produced what amounts to a model for how educational institutional histories should be written. He eschews a narrow focus on the institution itself, and instead offers his readers a history which places ‘the seminary's vision and goals within the larger ecology of American religion, culture, and society’ (p. x). His is a story of a school which sought to influence American culture, but at the same time struggled with how that same culture was influencing it. It is narrative history at its best – readable, engaging and insightful.

Historians who set out to write magisterial institutional narratives are inevitable forced to make choices. They need to determine principles of narrative organisation, the selection of their archival sources and settle upon points of emphasis. Moorhead is no different. He readily admits that he had no desire to write an exhaustive (and probably exhausting) history of the seminary. Instead, he focuses on trying to capture the ideals which lay behind the school's sense of mission and daily practices. His primary goal focuses on attempting to understand PTS's basic values and ‘the way these interacted with – and sometimes against – the religion and culture of the time’ (p. x). To accomplish this goal he mainly mines secondary sources to weave his tale of the seminary's founding and growth. Rarely does he turn to primary documents to tell his story, probably because a thorough examination of the vast array of primary sources would have never allowed him to finish his history, much less keep it to a single volume. As his story shows us, the vast amount of secondary source material is daunting enough.

Moorhead's history also demonstrates a clear preference, in the tradition of his mentor, the great Yale religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom, for heavily biographical inflected historical narratives. Moorhead's story is driven by telling the stories of those central to the development of PTS, ranging from Archibald Alexander, the seminary's founding professor, to more contemporary figures such as Freda Ann Gardner, the seminary's first female tenured professor, and Iain Torrance, the seminary's president in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Prior histories of PTS have been confined largely to narrow topics or truncated spans of time. David Calhoun, in what to this point has been the most notable history of the seminary, produced the hitherto most comprehensive study of the school in his two-volume treatment of PTS published in 1994 and 1996. Calhoun's study ended with the school's great theological split and faculty schism in the early twentieth century led by J. Gresham Machen. Moorhead's history is thus notable for the way in which it offers the first synthetic treatment of the school after the polarising events of the late 1920s. He has a wonderful section contextualising the Southern cultural and theological influences on Machen, which helped lead Machen to spearhead an ‘Old School’ faction within the school's faculty to leave the seminary in 1929 to found the conservative Presbyterian Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

Moorhead follows his treatment of Machen with perhaps one of the best discussions to be found anywhere on the frightfully understudied John A. Mackay, who took over the presidency of PTS in 1937 and found himself responsible for stabilising the school and redefining its identity in the aftermath of the devastating battles with Machen and his compatriots, Robert Dick Wilson, Oswald Allis and Cornelius Van Til. Mackay was an absolutely pivotal figure in the seminary's twentieth-century story as PTS sought to place itself within the bounds of its conservative theological past while seeking to be relevant in an ever more modern and liberal age. Moorhead gives us a glimpse of just how important Mackay was in ushering in a new age of American Presbyterianism not only for the seminary in particular, but for the denomination more generally both nationally and internationally.

Moorhead's history is valuable and enjoyable for several reasons. It is an easily digested story, written in lucid prose and beautifully formatted by Eerdmans Publishing Company on high-quality paper with dozens of colour photographs. It is also a history which manages to be comprehensive within its goal of attempting to understand the core tenets that those at the seminary revered and used to guide the school over time. Moorhead clearly admires PTS, but he does not deify it. His is a study which will stand for years to come as a valuable scholarly resource for those who wish to see a broader sweep when considering the role of PTS in American religious culture. It is a most welcome addition to the histories of American Presbyterianism, American religion and American theological education.