Ryan Schinkel (4:24)

When you started, you had previously been a pastor in western Michigan and then you became one in North Carolina. And you originally, at the start of this project, had only five kids with your wife and now you have nine.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (4:36)

That is true. So I grew up in Grand Rapids in West Michigan, and after I went to seminary in the Boston area, then was a pastor for a couple of years in Iowa, an associate pastor and then a senior pastor. So the lead pastor in East Lansing, just about an hour and a half from where I grew up, right across the street from Michigan State University. Understand you're a Wolverine, but we can be friends. And so I pastored there for 13 years in East Lansing. Wonderful congregation. Loved my time there. And I was about 3, 4 of the way through the dissertation when I received a call to move to Charlotte, North Carolina, to be the pastor at Christ Covenant Church. So that's where I am now. Same Presbyterian denomination, different part of the country. Loved the church I was at and loved the church I'm at now. And one of the reasons why I was interested in that call was the opportunity to teach at Reformed Theological Seminary, which is one of the schools that feeds in a lot of ministers into my theological tribe, into our denomination. So they were gracious enough to give me some time off to finish the dissertation. The whole thing with the dissertation is it's just about momentum. And at least for me, I found I couldn't do this just by taking an hour after the kids were in bed. I needed days, weeks, months at a time to really put forward the effort. So I'm very grateful because I kept pastoring full time while I was doing the dissertation. And if I didn't have churches who were really gracious to give me some summer sabbaticals, several of them in a row, I never would have been able to do it. But I'm really glad now that it's done.

Ryan Schinkel (6:15)

What was the thing that struck you about John Witherspoon? What was the thing that surprised you? We're here at Princeton. Obviously, there are some Princeton connections. Tell us what you discovered about him that other people had not previously looked at.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (6:25)

It's a great question. Because no one wants to do a dissertation and then realized, I'm just saying the same things that everybody's already said. So my dissertation is published now with Rutledge. I finished the program in 2019, and then that came out in 2020. So about five years ago is the Religious Formation of John Witherspoon. And there continues to be more work. So during my dissertation, toward the end of it, Gideon Mailer came out with a book on the American Revolution and John Witherspoon's American Context and really pulled together a number of new strands of historiography on Witherspoon. That was an important book. And when something like that comes out at the end of your dissertation, you panic. Did this person just beat me to just do what I'm doing? But I found it was complimentary because he was arguing some of the same things, but he was focusing on the American career. So most of the interest in Witherspoon has been as either a Founding Father or as an educator. So he was in Scotland. He was a minister in Scotland. He came to America in 1768 to be the president at then the College of New Jersey, and quickly found himself involved in the politics of the day. Most famously the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. And the thing that a lot of scholars have focused on, though they weren't published till after his death, was his lectures on moral philosophy. This was the capstone course at Princeton like it was, as a lot of other schools, the president of the institution would teach to the seniors, moral philosophy, which is a catch all kind of grab bag of economics, jurisprudence, political theory, lots of different things. Natural law, natural theology, virtue. So he taught this course and it wasn't until after he died, in fact, most people don't point this out when they talk about it. But he said very explicitly he did not want anyone to publish his lectures on moral philosophy because he didn't write them out in full. They were lecture notes really. And what we have are just very good lecture notes that students had taken. And there's some different copies. So we're pretty sure that we have an accurate representation of his notes. But they weren't just notes and really an outline. And he would have filled out more than was there. So he was likely wary of just publishing the outline without his full thought on all of it. So we always have to be somewhat careful with that work because that's where he deals with a lot of Enlightenment characters. And he references a lot of the moral philosophy of the day and talks about Francis Hutcheson and mentions Thomas Reid, though he wasn't directly influenced by Reed. Those are the things that scholars have been really keen to dissect. So most of the work on Witherspoon has been founding father, Princeton president, quasi Enlightenment philosopher, and oh, by the way, more than half of his life was spent in Scotland. So I wanted to come at the angle that I thought maybe I could uniquely bring, which is trained in theology as a minister, hopefully well versed in Reformed theology, to show the contours of his thought that had a lot of continuity with what he would have been taught in Reformed theology and really focus on the Scottish half of his career. What made John Witherspoon tick? And the book the dissertation ends with, okay, was he consistent when he came over to America? But I wanted to focus on the first 45 years of his life. Raised in Scotland, educated in Scotland and a parish Minister for over 20 years.

Ryan Schinkel (10:00)

So to recap, John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence. The only minister to do so was the president of Princeton University, then the College of New Jersey for three decades. Had previously been minister in Scotland in Edinburgh, Presbyterian, led a congregation for several decades, was asked to come over, initially resisted, but his friend and also American founding father Benjamin Rush, convinced him to come over to do so. When he came here, he became the teacher to students like James Madison, the father of the Constitution, as well as future US President alongside, and I think at the same time Aaron Burr. Aaron Burr, future vice president under Thomas Jefferson.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (10:43)

Not quite as illustrious.

Ryan Schinkel (10:44)

No, no. Although more infamous these days. And the known murderer of Alexander Hamilton.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (10:51)

Yeah, that's right.

Ryan Schinkel (10:51)

It was a duel.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (10:52)

It was a duel. It was a duel. Yeah. Bad idea. But yeah.

Ryan Schinkel (10:55)

Well, everyone looks to his work as the president of Princeton and as a founding father and as an influential teacher among many of the people who would shape the structure and execute the laws of the first American government. But you're saying that everyone in the scholarly world has not been paying sufficient attention to his time in Scotland. And so we see John Witherspoon in many different shades or shards, but we don't see the whole picture. And you're thinking the hermeneutical key to understand his life would be his time in Scotland.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (11:27)

Yeah, and that's a very good historical summary of the key points. One of the dominant historical ways of assessing Witherspoon in, say, the last 30 years has been to wonder if there were two Witherspoons. So you probably know a famous Das Adam Smith problem, which the German historiography in particular, sit. Who are these two Adam Smiths? There's Adam Smith of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, who seems to have a rosier view of human nature, and then there's the Adam Smith of the wealth of nations, who seems to be more pessimistic and telling people that you need to just operate according to your own self interest. Now that's a whole separate problem which I think is overblown. And there's ways to understand Smith. Well, there's been a Das John Witherspoon problem. In a lot of the secondary literature. People have said, are there two Witherspoons? And did he literally have a sea change when he took the boat, the Peggy, it was called, and sailed from England, docked in Philadelphia, came over here, only returned to Britain once on really a fool's errand, because it was after the war. And he went back there to raise money. And all of his friends said, this is a little too soon to come back to Great Britain and want money. You just fought a war against us. And he got no money but to make this sea change. Some have said he literally changed many of his core doctrines so that he was part of the popular party, it was called, really the evangelical wing of the Church of Scotland. He was very critical of the Moderate Party, not really liberals, we don't want to think quite conservative liberals, but more latitudinarian when it came to doctrine. And he was always pugnacious. He was a real fighter in the church assemblies and very, very doctrinal, Calvinist, thoroughgoing Presbyterian. So then he comes to America and some of the historiography says all of a sudden now he was fighting against David Hume and against the legacy of Francis Hutcheson, who he was in Scotland. Then he comes here and now he teaches his lectures, a moral philosophy course, and it seems to be cribbed right from Francis Hutcheson's course. Does he have a rosier view of human nature now? So did something radically shift in Witherspoon so that there are really two Witherspoons, the American one and the British one? In a nutshell, my dissertation is arguing no, now we all change, we all have differences over time, but there's a consistency, there's a through line. Yes, his context changed. He was no longer a regular pastor in the same way, though he did preach many Sundays at the church here in Princeton. He was a college president and he was in the Continental Congress for the better part of seven or eight years. And so he had a different vocational calling. But what I tried to show is he didn't jettison any of those older beliefs and in fact, some of the ideas that he espoused here that people quickly label with a big E as Enlightenment, as if people thought of themselves as team Enlightenment, yay or nay, that's not how they saw themselves. But I wanted to show that many of these ideas about the conscience, about virtue, about vice, about natural law, natural theology, these have older antecedents in Reformed theology. He didn't have to learn these from Enlightenment figures. He was always a dabbler. He was profound and a good writer and clear headed and courageous, but he didn't have the depth of philosophical analysis like a Jonathan Edwards would have. But he was good at a lot of things. So yes, he wasn't always plumbing the depths on every subject, but he was consistent as a Presbyterian minister on both sides of the Atlantic, and that we can't really understand him as a Founding Father without also understanding him as a Reformed minister.

Ryan Schinkel (15:30)

A lot of his different treatises when he was in Scotland were written to deal with ecclesiastical disputes. And when he was making his inroads into those disputes, he would reference people like David Hume and others in order not to deal with Enlightenment philosophy, quality Enlightenment philosophy, but to deal with this is what we are preaching, this is what we are teaching to our people in Edinburgh, to our people in Scotland. And I am not dealing with the ideas at the time in order to try and harness what should be the actual church teaching for us. Presbyterians. Would that be the right way of putting it?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (16:04)

Yeah, that's really true. He was concerned first and foremost as a minister and he was very involved in the ecclesiastical politics, you might say. Now you gotta remember the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, as it was called, is the national state church and everyone is de facto a member of their. And so you have somebody like David Hume, who is known for being an infidel. That's the word they would have used back then, though he never formally renounces his membership in the Presbyterian Church and you have a number of people who protected him. So that's what really got Witherspoon upset. And one of the first pieces he ever wrote in the Scots magazine in 1753 is about Lord Kames, who is a jurist and a philosopher and was a ruling elder at the Church of Scotland. So it's because these men had formal positions. And even then, if you're teaching in one of the Scottish universities, you ostensibly are a member of the Church of Scotland. And presumably you're supposed to affirm the doctrinal position of the Church of Scotland, which would be the Westminster Confession and larger and shorter catechisms. So it's in that Witherspoon sees, look, you people don't really believe the things that you say you believe. And he's sensing in his own mind, he thinks the glory of the Church of Scotland is in the past and it's being overrun by those who are protecting David Hume and aren't exercising discipline in the Church like they should, people who are afraid to preach the old doctrines and all of the hard edges of Calvinism. Though he wasn't a Calvinist with a kind of party spirit, meaning he was happy to work well with Anglicans who were basically reformational in their viewpoint. So you're right. One of the reasons when he comes to America, his context is so different in Scotland. He's often on the outside looking in. Now he's a well respected person, his books sell well, he has some honors, he receives an honorary doctorate. And yet the machinery of the Church of Scotland, the politics of it, he's on the outside looking. He loses the votes all the time. Now he comes and he's the president of one of the few institutions of higher learning. He's seen as someone that other people want to get advice from. He gets to know the men that end up as the founding fathers of our country. Country. And so he has a very different place at the table. And he's not, first of all a minister. There isn't even A national Presbyterian Church, and Witherspoon's key in that. But that doesn't take place until 1789 at the very end of his life. So just his realm of controversy was very different. And he's a college president, so he's teaching a course. It wasn't that he thought David Hume didn't have anything to teach or that Francis Hutcheson didn't. His outline wasn't worth anything. He thought they weren't really good Presbyterians, which by his standards, they really weren't. But that doesn't mean they didn't have anything that couldn't have been useful. And so I think he's much more consistent than people have often given him credit for.

Ryan Schinkel (19:21)

It seems when he's in Scotland, he's nostalgic for a stronger Calvinist past, a more devout past, and he's more pessimistic about its future. He also seems to be more conservative against the moderate Presbyterians, but when he's dealing with disputes in the colonies, what will become the United States, he's optimistic about the future and he actually supports a Republican revolution. So he seems to not necessarily change internally, but there seems to be a shift in emphasis when he's here in the country, that the environment brings out things in him that we hadn't seen before. He applies his principles differently. Tell us about not the sea change, but his new application of his energies and his devotion.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (20:03)

Right. And it's not to say that there weren't significant changes. The Presbyterian Church in 1787 works to change their doctrinal standards. The Westminster Confession of Faith. This is a really big deal. So the Westminster Confession goes back to 1646 and the Catechisms of 1647 in London. So 140 years later. Now, these are not sacred documents for Presbyterians like the Bible, but they're really important. And they say they believe that, you know, and I'm a Presbyterian, this teaches what they think the Bible teaches. And yet he's part of the committee that changes a few places in those Confessions, and those few places have to do with the role of the civil magistrate. So whether he had different views in Scotland, which he kept concealed and then revealed here, or likely he didn't have to give it a whole lot of thought because just the assumed party line in Scotland and then the making of an American here, there's a very different political machinations and threats. So he comes out strongly in favor of civil and religious liberty. Now, he was outspoken for both in Scotland, but they took a different shape. And so He's a part of this committee which revises his own doctrinal standards to now say the civil magistrate no longer going to be responsible for stamping out heresies, for suppressing blasphemy. That there's now the chief role of the civil magistrate. He assumes he's going to be a Christian, but the chief role is to see that all denominations of Christians can practice their religion freely. So it is really a revolutionary development. And if there is a change of mind in Witherstone now, he ever writes like, here's why I changed my mind. But he had one set of confessional standards in Scotland and then he's a part of a group that changes those standards. So there's some shift in his mindset when it comes to how can the church most efficiently, most faithfully function in this context. And you're right, people often think of America's can do spirit and there's more optimism. And one of the things was it's easier to be optimistic when you're in charge than when you're not. So that's part of it. He's on the outside looking in now. He is in charge. And just take Presbyterian history, which I know best of other religious histories. There were divisions in the Presbyterian Church here in the 1740s and 50s over the revival. And Witherspoon was pro revival, but in a way that the anti revival side could still tolerate. So he was a unifying choice when he came over here to be the president of Princeton, because Princeton wasn't officially Presbyterian, but it was unofficially really led by Presbyterians. And he doesn't encounter moderates in the same way they had in the church in Scotland. So the sort of Presbyterians in his home church in Scotland maybe don't really believe the Westminster Confession. They really haven't been very Calvinist for a long time. They just want to talk about virtue and don't really want to talk about the cross or the gospel. That's what he's dealing with. And he really has very little of that with Presbyterians. They're just much more thoroughly evangelical in their spirit. They just haven't had the same history and the same path. So you're absolutely right that he is more optimistic about the church here. He's more optimistic about the country. He becomes never anti King George iii, but definitely against a monarchy and for a republican, small R form of government. These are important changes, as you said, applying many of the same convictions, but now in a new scene.

Ryan Schinkel (24:04)

When he became president of Princeton, slightly less than half of all Princeton Students would go and enter into ministry. But during his tenure, it dropped down to about a quarter, and by the end of it, it was only about 13%. Now, this was someone who was in a more committed religious environment. He was directing his students towards the study of more English letters and oratory, politics and industry, towards more practical affairs outside of purely ministerial roles. Partly, I'm guessing that's due to the creation of the American government. But I'm wondering, how did that shift from a more religious centered to a more politically centered society? What did he make of that transition with his pedagogy as Princeton's president?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (24:48)

That's a really important question. So Princeton receives its first charter in 1646, second charter in 1746, 1748. And Princeton was never under church control officially, and it was never under state control. Private institution. But as I said, it has its institutional heritage with Presbyterians. Most of the board members are Presbyterian, and it sees itself as not sectarian, but it's more or less the Presbyterian equivalent of what Congregationalists are doing in New England or Anglicans in Virginia. But Princeton always had in its charter those twin aims of both cultivating piety and virtue and then also science in letters. Today's language might be faith in learning. Those were the twin pillars. In fact, Ashbel Green, who was also a Presbyterian minister and a later president of Princeton and wrote the biography of Witherspoon, said toward the end of his life, may it never be that Princeton would ever lose sight of either of these aims. Now, we could talk about to what degree it holds those aims, but he said, we don't want this to become just a place shape ministers or make ministers. That's why Princeton Seminary as a separate institution forms in 1812. But he said, we never want it to be a place devoid of Christian faith and Christian influence. So Witherspoon inherits that. And that was very much in keeping with how he was taught in Edinburgh. And from the very beginning, I think his first inaugural lecture was something on the unity of science and piety. So he always saw Princeton as being a place that had those two aims. The average student size, we have to remember, was very small. About 20 was the average now during the Revolutionary War, it's barely hanging on. It's a handful of students. I think the peak was 37 students either right before or right after the war. But we're really dealing with, most years, a couple of dozen students. And you're right, total number of graduates, it's less than 200. I think during his time, about a Quarter of them went into the ministry, but still it's a significant number. At the First Presbyterian General assembly, he can look out and see more than half of the Presbyterian ministers are Princeton grads, and way more than a quarter of them, almost a third, I think, were directly taught by Witherspoon. So he still has a significant influence. So we don't want to overstate. Part of it is just more people are coming. And as more people come, even if you're still producing several ministers a year, producing more who do other things. But you're right, it does show something of a change, if not in America, then at least maybe the opportunities in this new republic. We need statesmen, we need educators, and there's a famous list. How impressive. The list of people that came directly from Witherspoon when he was president, vice president, a president, several senators, congressmen, attorneys general, foreign ministers, jurists, judges, college presidents. So Princeton really was an incubator for the whole republic. And part of that is there's just not that many institutions to go around. So he was serving the needs of the new nation. And to be fair, I think it's a fair critique that I might make to say he maybe lost a little bit of that early emphasis on this is a training ground for ministers. One of the first things he reflects on when he gets here in one of his first lectures, he's talking about how he preached to 1300 people back in Paisley, Scotland. When he comes to prison, this is just backwater. This is just rural. Must feel like the end of the world for him coming from the United Kingdom. And he says how much he misses preaching to that people. But then he says that someone had told him in coming here and taking this role, every gownsman is a legion, meaning everyone from the academy can go forth and be a legion, can spread the gospel across the land. So he definitely came here with a mindset that he wanted to train up men who would be ministers and then spread the gospel throughout this new continent. And I don't think he ever lost sight of that. But you're right that other things came to be at least equal to that, and perhaps it sometimes surpassed it.

Ryan Schinkel (29:13)

Now he is elected to the Second Continental Congress and arrives with the New Jersey delegation just a couple days before the vote on July 4 for the adoption of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Before that, a couple months before, he gives a very famous sermon on the divine Providence over the passions of men. Can you tell us a bit about that sermon?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (29:36)

It's one of the most important sermons in the History of the United States, most scholars agree, preached in May, not far from where we're recording this. So there was a church that met at Princeton, which is called the First Presbyterian Church, or just the Presbyterian Church. It didn't really function fully as a kind of organized church until the very end of Witherspoon's life, but it was basically a place where the college president was supposed to preach on Sundays. You have to remember that all of the presidents of Princeton had been Presbyterian ministers until quiz time. Do you know who the first Princeton. Little trivia. First Princeton president who was not a Presbyterian minister.

Ryan Schinkel (30:22)

Must have been before Woodrow Wilson.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (30:23)

No, it was Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was the first one. Now, he comes from a family of Presbyterian ministers from the south, and he himself was Presbyterian, but he was not a Presbyterian minister. Yeah. So Witherspoon's time, it was the tradition. The college president, he's a Presbyterian minister and he's going to preach at the church. So that's where this message was given. It was a fast day. It was a national declared day of prayer and fasting for the nation that didn't quite exist as a nation yet. And it's got that sort of obscure title from an obscure place in the Psalms and the first half of the sermon, and anyone could go Google it. You can read it any number of places. The dominion of God over the affairs of.

Ryan Schinkel (31:07)

Over the passions of men.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (31:08)

Yeah. Dominion of Providence over the passions of men. The first half of it is Come to Jesus sermon. It's about you. It would be a shame if you so focused on your temporal state that you forgot about your eternal state.

Ryan Schinkel (31:20)

The fact that we are being cast by our enemies, we are being destroyed, we are being ravaged. That is actually showing God's sovereignty and power in our lives.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (31:30)

That's right. That's right. Hence the title. Providence was a very key doctrine, and that this is God's working in our lives. And then the second half of the sermon, he. And this is important, says, you will bear witness. This is the first time I've ever brought politics into the pulpit. And it's true. I've read all the sermons of Witherspoon that have been published, and there's nothing, tons of them, but dozens of them. And except for these fast days, they would have these in Scotland, too. That's the only time where you'd get some sense of current events, because that's a national day of prayer and fasting. And he might mention something about what's going on in the wider world. Otherwise there's nothing of that nature. So this is one of those fast days. And he says, my rule throughout my whole ministry is I preach the Bible. I am not here preaching about current events or politics. Anyone could go read his sermons. They're not hard to read, and they bear that out. You could hardly tell what century he's in most of the time. But then he says, need to talk about the affairs in our nation. And that's where he comes out very strongly. Those who were paying attention already knew he was for independence, but he comes out in favor of independence. He sees it's going to be the best way to secure civil and religious liberty. He's very careful to say all along he doesn't think King George is wicked despot, but he thinks he's very misinformed. And he has a lot to say about how we ought to conduct this war, how we ought to do so honorably. And he says there ought not to be swearing among our soldiers. So he's thinking like a minister. But he comes out very strongly to say that really the cause of righteousness in our land is for independence. And this was published widely. It was republished in some places in Britain at times. Loyalists or Britons who didn't like it would publish it and publish their own commentary alongside of it. Because he's making the case for independence. But for someone of Witherspoon's stature and as a minister and as the president, and surely it mattered because he had been trained, he had studied in Great Britain, and he had only come over eight years earlier from Great Britain to now be saying absolutely, we ought to be free and independent was a significant message for someone like him to be giving.

Ryan Schinkel (33:48)

And as I understand, like a good Presbyterian, he serves on over a hundred committees.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (33:52)

Yes.

Ryan Schinkel (33:52)

While in Continental Congress, eventually also signs the Articles of Confederation. He is not part of the Constitutional Convention because he's dealing with the Presbyterian Church within New Jersey. But his influence comes along, of course, through Madison and others. Near the end of your book, you make a good argument that Madison's famous line in Federalist 51, that if men were angels, there would be no need of government. Which then implies because men aren't angels, there is need for good government. That was possibly influenced by John Witherspoon's teaching about total depravity, among other Calvinist themes, especially when Madison was the first non divinity graduate student at Princeton. So for anyone who's not at Princeton Theological Seminary, James Madison is your first PhD student of some sort.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (34:39)

Madison, yeah.

Ryan Schinkel (34:40)

Tell us specifically about some of these Calvinist influences. That had influenced some of the Founders through Witherspoon. And what specifically was this thing you were saying about Madison in this line?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (34:51)

So because Madison is so important for our country, Father of the Constitution, president, Princeton graduate, the most famous student under Witherspoon. There's a lot of debate about his influence on him. But the influence for Madison doesn't just start with Witherspoon. His grammar school, his high school, we would call it, were also Scottish Presbyterian tutors. So he had been raised under this kind of teaching. And it was his father who specifically, because Madison's Virginian wanted him to go to Princeton. And he stays an extra year. It wasn't a graduate degree per se, but he stays another year to study and personally be mentored and be instructed by Witherspoon. So there's definitely a connection, not only taught, but that he seems to have really liked and followed Witherspoon. And Witherspoon spends extra time. Remember, this is not 10,000 students. These are a few dozen students. So you can really get to know these students. They're living in Nassau Hall. And at this point, Witherspoon hasn't yet moved out to his country home in Tusculum, a couple miles away. He's right there. So they certainly had a lot of close connections. Without wanting to make Madison into something he's not, and pretend that he has lots of flowery language about his commitment to Christ or Reformed theology, he doesn't. But it's not just Witherspoon. It's even before that. And I'm convinced by the scholars who see that there are these influences, and I think you see them in Federalist Papers 51, 10 other places. What we might call the Calvinist language is total depravity. But you don't even have to use that. You can just say a constrained view of man. I think that though, among the founders, if you gave them all a sheet of paper, write down what is your anthropology? What do you believe about the person of man, they wouldn't have all said exactly the same thing. But I think there was enough of a shared consensus that on the one hand, man is made in the image of God and therefore has dignity, has possibility, is capable of virtue, and because God has revealed something to us in the natural order, that even those who aren't Christians can have a certain kind of virtue. There's a lot of Enlightenment debate about the nature of true virtue, but they would have agreed that virtue on some level is possible. They wouldn't have had a Republican government if they didn't believe that government by the people could be virtuous. At the same time, I think most of the founders shared this constrained view of the human person that saw when human beings get together, they are liable to do bad things. Some of this is part of a Lockean view of the social contract. You have to give up some of your liberty in order to protect, because otherwise people are going to steal, they're going to take things from you. It's a view of human nature that says, you know what, people are going to act in selfish ways. And Madison certainly conveys that, most famously in Federalist 51, that government needs to counteract government. That's why we have checks and balances, because men aren't angels. And so you need somebody to govern men. And then who will govern the government? Listen, you need a government that's prone to its own internal frustrations because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, to use the adage that came later. And so I think these ideas Witherspoon held throughout his life. He's always using these little quips about what is the story of humankind if not the story of man's lost estate in sin. He always sees that though men are capable of virtue, there is this proneness to corruption, to selfishness, to vanity, to ambition, to avarice. And I think most of the Founders, Madison among them, see the same kinds of things. That's why Hamilton was not a supporter of the French Revolution, said they're throwing off religion in the French Revolution. They don't have an accurate appraisal of what human nature is like. I think the Founders, Madison included, had that sense, if Calvinist isn't the right word, Augustinian constrained something, a view of human nature that said we need a system of government that is going to work not for people at their best, that's not realistic, but can frustrate people when they're at their worst.

Ryan Schinkel (39:19)

There is a statue of John Witherspoon on the Princeton campus, and it has five books. Now, four of the books are named. You have Hume, you have John Locke, Isaac Newton is a name, just says Principia. Then you have Cicero. And the fifth one is unnamed. And it doesn't matter how you look at it, you can't find any wording. Apparently the statue had to be put up before that could be finished. But what do you think of those four books? Would you take any of them away? And what would you put as a fifth book?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (39:48)

I'd put the Bible as the fifth book, just to be fair to Witherspoon, because that is what he taught.

Ryan Schinkel (39:55)

If you had to take out Hume, since Hume, along with Thomas Paine, especially in The Footnotes of 1776 Sermon, was an object of criticism from Witherspoon, what would you put instead of humus? Something that he would be teaching positively besides the Bible.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (40:09)

Part of the argument in my book is he was taught theology from Benedict Pictet, who was a professor at the turn of the 1600s into the 1700s in Geneva. And that was the Latin textbook that everybody at Edinburgh learned. And you can see he imbibed his Philosophy of Natural Reason, his basic Calvinist theology, from Pictet. And what most people don't spend much time on is he also lectured on divinity. Now, part of it is because we seem to have a very incomplete set of his lectures, because it just stops when he looks like he's only like 8th of the way through these lectures. But very traditional, sort of evangelical, Reformed, not too many hard edges. He's often the sort of person in both theology and philosophy. If he'll talk about, here's five different views, and if he can find a way to make all the views kind of coalesce, he'll do that. So Pictet might be one. I just walked by the statue and it's a good reminder. I forget which the books are. It's an odd collection of books. I see why those books are there. Those are indicative of a teacher of the liberal arts and an instructor and an educator. He would have been familiar with all of those, but it's not like he did a lot with Cicero or a lot with Newton. There were others, even Francis Hutchison, even Adam Smith. I'm trying to think of who he references. He liked a lot of the Port Royal Jansenists, some of the French Catholics.

Ryan Schinkel (41:46)

References George Whitfield sometimes.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (41:48)

George Whitefield, yeah. He liked the revivals. He was fluent in French. He grew up speaking that with his father. He would sometimes translate for French dignitaries when they were here. So he always liked the French Calvinists. He taught French. So I would have done a Bible or a theology book, but, you know, I'm a Presbyterian pastor.

Ryan Schinkel (42:06)

No shame in that.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (42:07)

No. Well, amen. Good.

Ryan Schinkel (42:08)

One question to round things out. Witherspoon showed an example of how someone could be formed by a religious spirit but also be active in the public square, active with a civic spirit. What kind of model does he provide? What kind of lessons can we draw in our own current, very different circumstances? Something I'm thinking of. Something you've written on quite a bit is we lack, to use James K. Smith's phrase, cultural liturgy, about how to deal with American civics and politics in a way that can disentangle but also mediate between religious and civic devotion. What should that moral and spiritual grammar be? How can Witherspoon provide inspiration for that?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (42:52)

That is a really key question for our day. And that really, even in the last five years, there's been certainly in my circles, a lot of conversation about Witherspoon. And it's not for no reason that there's Witherspoon Institutes and Witherspoon's hall. His name, rightly so, has become synonymous with a serious Christian engaged in the public square. And what does that look like? So I think there's several things I would say lessons. One, he was a man of firm convictions throughout his life, so he didn't sacrifice those convictions. I've made the argument. I don't think he. With the exception of changing his mind on civil magistrate, he didn't change any of his doctrinal commitments. So I think as Christians in the public square, people of faith in the public square, we don't have to leave those behind. Second, he was also willing to talk and to work with those who didn't share those. So this is one of the amazing things, because in Scotland, he looked at the glorious past of the covenanters in the 1600s, the Presbyterians, who said, we're a covenanted nation, and all of us, Christ is the King of this realm. And then he's here and he signs a document with 55 others, declaration, some Presbyterians, Anglicans, one Catholic, a very wealthy Catholic, and Latitudinarians, Deists, all Christians of some kind. But, you know, Jefferson and Franklin are not very good Christians.

Ryan Schinkel (44:28)

Heterodox.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (44:29)

Yeah, heterodox.

Ryan Schinkel (44:30)

Jefferson had his own version of the

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (44:31)

Bible, Jefferson had his own version of the Bible, which is not a good thing to do. Yet Witherspoon's Abel, because of some of this common language, the challenge for our day is there's just so much more pluralism. And I don't mean even in a philosophical sense. I just mean an objective sense. So many different ideas, views that if you were an educated person in America, you could have very different views. And Witherspoon disagreed with Thomas Paine as much as he appreciated the impetus he gave for the revolution. He didn't like his subsequent work because he was very hard on religion. But you had a lot of the same. You were reading a lot of the same things, you were drinking from many of the same fountains and so Witherspoon, who's a committed Presbyterian minister, is reading the same natural law, natural theology, rights law, philosophy, and then somebody like Thomas Jefferson, who's a heterodox Christian of some kind. But he still is operating with a basic kind of Christian assumption about a providentialism in the world, about monotheism, about a God, about the necessity of virtue. And I think insofar as we have some of those common ground to find that language. You know, I'm unashamed as a minister. I'm preaching for people to get saved. I preach for people to believe in Christ and repent of their sins. That's what I'm doing as a preacher. And we need to find language without ever being ashamed of that. We need to find language in the public square of saying, how do we live together as Americans when that's not what you believe? And I do think Witherspoon gives us from a very different time, at least gives us an opportunity to say, what might this look like, that he was able to hold on to what he believed, talk with some of the language of the day, be engaged with and be involved in institutions. I'm thankful for a place like the James Madison program here. Unless we're going to devote ourselves to these institutions. That means we need to do more than just fire off on the Internet saying our piece and saying what we like or don't like. We need to be invested in institutions that are really helping to shape how we talk about things and bring people together to talk about them and do so in an unapologetic way. And I think that's part of the lesson from Witherspoon, too. Ashbel Green famously said, besides George Washington, he never met a man who had so much presence. He was a force of nature, had a gravitas about him, that he was really sincere in what he believes. Christians are in the public square. Conservatives are in the public square. They ought to do so in a way that's willing to listen to others, talk to others. I think natural law, natural theology, gives us at least some bridges to have some of those conversations and then do so in a way that's humble and yet unapologetic about what we believe.

Ryan Schinkel (47:27)

Amen to that. Also, a Scottish accent talking about the power of God over the passions of men always helps.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (47:34)

That always helps. And they said his Scottish accent was difficult to understand sometimes.

Ryan Schinkel (47:38)

One last question, and thank you for your time. Dr. DeYoung, if it was you who was doing the interview, instead of you being interviewed, it was John witherspoon and you could ask him one question. What would it be?

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (47:48)

What would I ask John Witherspoon? That is a fascinating question. Well, can I cheat and give two?

Ryan Schinkel (47:55)

Sure.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (47:57)

So just the intellectual curiosity of our moment. I would want to ask him, what did you mean to accomplish by changing the Westminster Confession and the Civil Magistrate just flesh that out? That's a very live issue in my world. So I had intellectual curiosity with some payoff for audacity. Tell me more about what took place there and what you did and what you meant by it. And then as a Christian and a pastor, maybe more importantly, I'd want to say you've done a lot of things, John, in your life. What have you learned about how has Jesus shaped you in this? How has God shaped you in this? What have you learned as a Christian in the many avenues that God has given you as a pastor with some success, a college president, a politician, an educator, a philosopher, a writer? Tell me what you've learned about God. That would be the more important question. Tell me about your heart.

Ryan Schinkel (48:58)

And while I would want to know what was it like to have Aaron Burr as one of his students and also what he might make of present controversies today, however, we shall have to stick with dealing with the legacy and his memory. Dr. DeYoung, you have been extremely helpful with that. So thank you so much for coming on to Madison's Notes to start off Season five with us. We greatly appreciate it.

Dr. Kevin DeYoung (49:18)

Great to be with you. Keep up the good work.

Podcast Host/Announcer (49:20)

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Madison's notes, with Dr. Kevin DeYoung as our guest. If you're interested in hearing more about this topic, Dr. DeYoung gave a lecture on John Witherspoon and the spirit of 1776 earlier this winter, the video of which can be found on the James Madison program website as well as the JMP YouTube page. Further, a transcript for this interview will be made available on the new Madison's Notes substack page along with a copy of the audio recording. If you desire further Madison's Notes content, please check our episode catalog and subscribe to receive future ones. We are always grateful for any likes and positive ratings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast.