My Encounter with the Enlightenment
I know I have talked about how I lost my faith before. But I’ve never talked about it in the terms I’m going to be describing it in this post and the next. It has to do with what happened with my notion of “truth” when I went to Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton Theological Seminary is not administratively connected to Princeton University – it simply is in the same town, across the street, and has a shared ancient history. What is now Princeton University started off in the mid-18th century as a place to train Christian ministers. Eventually the school split, with the Seminary, under a different administration, becoming its own entity. By the time I went there as a 22-year-old in 1978, Princeton was a leading a Presbyterian seminary whose mission is to train ministers for the Presbyterian Church. I had never even stepped foot in a Presbyterian church and really knew almost nothing about it, or about Princeton Seminary. But I suspected that many of the students and faculty there were not really [...]