ABSTRACT
Gideon Mailer has challenged the notion that John Witherspoon abandoned his evangelical convictions and moved to an anthropocentric understanding of ethical perception. As the President of Princeton, Witherspoon took on new responsibilities. He had to raise funds, recruit students, furnish the library, and carry significant teaching responsibilities. In both halves of his career, but especially in America, Witherspoon felt free to pontificate on the leading issues of the day. If Witherspoon’s role changed in the last quarter century of his life, so did his place. Witherspoon often talked wistfully about what he had left behind in Scotland. While Witherspoon never changed his stance on human depravity, he expressed more optimism about the future once in America. Witherspoon’s ‘peculiar talent’, observed Green, was ‘presenting the Calvinistic doctrines in popular form, and in a manner the least offensive to those who do not hold them; while he maintained them firmly in their substance’.
