Few theologians are more aligned with American Presbyterianism in its early years than Samuel Miller (1769-1850). Miller attended the Presbyterian Church’s first General Assembly in 1789. In 1801, he served as a commissioner at the all-important assembly meeting that forged the Plan of Union. He helped found the denomination’s first seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, in 1812, where he served as its second professor from 1813 to 1850. During his tenure, he guided the seminary and denomination through controversy, disruption, and division. He died in 1850, beloved by the members of the Presbyterian Church. Though Miller remained a Presbyterian by conviction, he was first and foremost an evangelical.
Miller grew up in Dover, Delaware with an evangelical father, John Miller (1722-1791). John attributed his spiritual conversion to the revivalist preaching of Samuel Sewell (1652-1730) at the Old South Congregation Church in Boston. John then entered the pastoral ministry of two Presbyterian Churches in Dover, the United Church of Dover, and Duck Creek. Under the influence of his father’s Christian principles and teachings, Samuel Miller sought out further education at the University of Pennsylvania which had origins under the leadership of George Whitefield (1714-1770) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). Miller “read divinity” under his father however, after John Miller’s death in 1791, Samuel continued to study theology with the President of Dickinson College, Charles Nisbet (1736-1804), an outspoken evangelical sympathizer. Furthermore, for twenty years before he went to Princeton, Miller served as pastor of the United Churches in New York City along with revival supporter John Rodgers (1727-1813).
The thesis of this paper is to present Samuel Miller as a case study of the evangelicalism between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To establish this thesis, we will trace Miller’s archival sermons from Dover, New York City, and Princeton. Before reviewing his published works, we will examine his lectures, missionary correspondence, (William Carey, John Ryland, etc.), which promotes his conviction that evangelicalism should be carried on globally. Given his evangelicalism, it is suspected that he would fully embrace the position of David W. Bebbington when he defined evangelicalism as bibliocentric, conversionistic, cross centric, and activistic but in a different way from the previous century. Miller faced different opponents than did Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), and John Wesley (1703-1791) and that will be explored.
The paper will be divided up in the following manner coinciding with Bebbington’s definition:
I. Sermons in Dover
II. Sermons and Missionary Correspondence in New York City
III. Lectures, Sermons, and Published works at Princeton Seminary
After affirming that Miller embraced a global evangelical, we will make a few preliminary conclusions.