Theopedia

Archibald Alexander

Overview

Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) was an American Presbyterian theologian and educator, the first professor of Princeton Theological Seminary from its founding in 1812 until his death. He directly mentored Charles Hodge, who named his own son Archibald Alexander Hodge after him.1

Life and Ministry

Alexander was licensed to preach in 1791 and ordained by the Hanover presbytery in 1794, after which he served seven years as an itinerant pastor in Charlotte and Prince Edward counties, Virginia.2 He was president of Hampden-Sydney College from 1797 until a student revolt forced his retirement in 1806, then pastored Philadelphia’s Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church from 1807 to 1812.2 When the Presbyterian General Assembly established Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812, Alexander became its first professor, a post he held for thirty-nine years until his death in 1851.12

Theological Contribution

Writing against Rome’s denial that concupiscence, the corrupted inclination toward sin remaining in believers, is itself sinful (and not only the acts it produces), Alexander argued that the papal position, if applied consistently, “would prove too much: it would prove that even the acts of concupiscence are not sinful,” since those acts follow just as necessarily from the underlying corruption as the corruption itself does from human nature after the fall.3

He also wrote three Princeton Review essays, later collected as “The Early History of Pelagianism,” “Original Sin,” and “The Inability of Sinners,” answering the New England “New Divinity” movement’s revisions to the doctrines of original sin and human inability.4 In his own A Treatise on Justification by Faith (1837) and Practical Truths (1851), he affirmed the active obedience of Christ: Christ’s own perfect law-keeping credited to believers alongside his bearing of sin’s penalty.1

Historical Significance

Alexander was the first in a line of Princeton faculty, Charles Hodge, then A. A. Hodge, then J. Gresham Machen, who each affirmed the active obedience of Christ against those who limited Christ’s saving work to bearing sin’s penalty alone; he wrote to Hodge directly praising his defense of the same doctrine.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Micah John McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 72-73. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Archibald Alexander,” accessed August 30, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Alexander. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Jared H. Moore, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” in A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 124-25. ↩

  4. Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Tertium Quid: The Failure of Recent Attempts at a Via Media,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 385n93, citing Archibald Alexander, “The Early History of Pelagianism,” “Original Sin,” and “The Inability of Sinners,” in Princeton Versus the New Divinity: Articles from the Princeton Review (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2001), 52-140. ↩