Benjamin B. Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921), professor of didactic and polemic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887 until his death, the successor of Charles and A. A. Hodge and the last great theologian of Old Princeton. A scholar of the New Testament text before he was a dogmatician, he defended the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, the Westminster Standards and the Augustinian doctrine of grace against the liberalism and perfectionism of his day, in some thirty books and a great many articles and reviews.

Works (27)

• An Answer to Dr. Briggs’ Shortest Catechism — Written on 21 May 1891 and put privately into the hands of a commissioner at the General Assembly, the paper takes the questions put to Dr. Briggs by the directors of Union Seminary, shows how each might have been framed to raise the real issues (Scripture and Reason, inspiration, the miracles, sanctification, the intermediate state) and sets beside each the answers Dr. Briggs had already printed. (1 notes)
• An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament — A primer to the art of textual criticism: the matter of criticism (the manuscripts, versions and fathers, and the causes of variant readings), the methods of criticism (internal and external evidence, genealogy), the praxis of criticism with worked examples, and the history of criticism from Erasmus to Westcott and Hort. (7 notes)
• Biblical Doctrines — Sixteen articles on the doctrines of the Bible, mostly written for Hastings’s dictionaries and the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia: predestination, the foresight of Jesus, the Spirit of God in the Old Testament, the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, the person of Christ, “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”, the Christ that Paul preached, Jesus’ own account of His mission, the New Testament terms for redemption, Christ our sacrifice, renewal, faith, the terminology of love, the prophecies of St. Paul, and the millennium and the Apocalypse. (18 notes)
• Calvin and Calvinism — Warfield’s articles on Calvin and Calvinism, the fifth volume of his works: the sketch of Calvin’s life and work (John Calvin: The Man and his Work), the three long studies of the Institutes (the knowledge of God, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the creation), the article Calvinism from the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, and the history of the Institutes from the Memorial Edition. Chapters 3 and 4 are the book’s text of two essays first printed in the Princeton Theological Review (1909): Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God and Calvin’s Doctrine of God. Calvin as a Theologian, the 1909 address, is not in this volume. (7 notes)
• Calvin as a Theologian — An address on what manner of theologian Calvin was. Warfield asks the hearer to put aside the picture of Calvin as a speculative and logical audacity and shows instead his positiveness, his dependence on Scripture and on the Spirit’s witness, and his place as the systematiser of the Reformation, the theologian of the Holy Spirit. (1 notes)
• Christology and Criticism — Warfield’s historico-critical articles on the person and work of Christ: the divine Messiah in the Old Testament, the people’s misconception of Jesus and the charge of blasphemy, Jesus’ alleged confession of sin, the article on Jesus Christ, Schmiedel’s “pillar-passages”, the “two natures” and recent christological speculation, “Christless Christianity” (against Drews), the twentieth-century Christ, the essence of Christianity and the cross, and an appendix on the supernatural birth of Jesus. (12 notes)
• Counterfeit Miracles — The Thomas Smyth Lectures for 1917–1918, delivered at Columbia Theological Seminary, South Carolina. Warfield argues that the miraculous gifts of the apostolic age were the credentials of the apostles and ceased with them, and then examines the claims to miracle that followed: the marvels of the Fathers and the Middle Ages, the miracles of Lourdes and the Roman Church, the tongues and prophecies of Edward Irving’s congregation, the faith-healing movement, and the mind-cure of Christian Science. (12 notes)
• Critical Reviews — A selection of forty-six of Warfield’s reviews from The Presbyterian and Reformed Review and The Princeton Theological Review, 1890s-1920s, each headed by the book reviewed, with an index of authors. They range over the Bible and its text (Burgon, Kenyon, Dods, Seeberg), the dictionaries and encyclopaedias (Hastings, Cheyne), the person and work of Christ and the atonement (Denney, Sabatier, Sanday, Mackintosh, Weiss, Heitmüller), Calvin and Augustine (Doumergue, McCabe), mysticism (Underhill, Fresenius, Fleming) and the philosophy of religion (McTaggart, Bousset, Otto). (48 notes)
• Faith and Life — Forty-one addresses given to the students at the Sunday afternoon conferences in the seminary’s Oratory, each on a text of Scripture: Elijah at Horeb and Old Testament religion, the wrath of man, childlikeness, the conviction and the outpouring of the Spirit, prayer, the witness of the Spirit to our sonship, the alien righteousness, peace with God, entire sanctification, the mystery of godliness, and God’s holiness and ours. (41 notes)
• Is Jesus God, Introductory Note — Warfield explains how the little volume arose: the members of a Princeton Seminary class, in the Centennial Session of 1911-1912, answered a series of six questions leading from what the Church teaches of the Deity of Christ to the conclusion that Christ is God. He says why one essay is printed on each of the earlier questions and two on each of the later, and commends the work of these young men to a candid reading. (1 notes)
• Paul on Women Speaking in Church — A reply to a friend who asked what the Greek words laleo and lego mean in 1 Corinthians 14:33-39, and whether verse 34 forbids all women to speak or preach in church. Warfield shows that laleo is simply “to talk” and carries nothing disparaging, then argues from 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 that the prohibition is precise, absolute and all-inclusive, grounded in the order of creation and the fall, and that the difference between Paul and the feminist movement lies in their view of the race as families or as individuals. (1 notes)
• Predestination in the Reformed Confessions — Warfield surveys what the Reformed confessions of 1523-1675 say of predestination. The first part follows the documents from Zwingli and the Swiss through Calvin and his pupils to the German, Brandenburg and Thorn confessions, noting how cautiously some of them treat reprobation and election. The second sets out the confessions themselves, in their own words, from the Zwinglian and Bohemian to the Genevan, French, Belgic, Scottish, English and Irish articles, the Westminster standards, the Canons of Dort and the Helvetic Consensus, with the points they hold in common: the sovereignty of election, the reality of reprobation, the unity of the decree and the infralapsarian or supralapsarian view of its object. (1 notes)
• Revelation and Inspiration — Ten essays and two appendices on the Bible as revelation and as the inspired word of God: the biblical idea and the theories of revelation, the biblical idea of inspiration, the New Testament’s use of “Scripture”, “God-inspired” (theopneustos), “It says” and “Scripture says” as one, “the oracles of God”, the real problem of inspiration and its relation to criticism, and, in the appendices, the divine origin of the Bible and the formation of the New Testament canon. The first volume of the works published under the will of Warfield’s committee. (14 notes)
• Studies in Perfectionism, Part 1 — The German half of Warfield’s study of perfectionism, the seventh volume of his works: Albrecht Ritschl and His Doctrine of Christian Perfection (two articles), “Miserable-Sinner Christianity” in the Hands of the Rationalists (three articles, from Ritschl and Wernle to Pfleiderer and Windisch), “Die Heiligungsbewegung” (the German Fellowship Movement and its sanctification teaching, from Pearsall Smith’s campaign to the Gnadau Conference), and The German Higher Life Movement in Its Chief Exponent, Theodor Jellinghaus. Warfield asks of each what the perfectionism of the day taught and how far the claim to sinlessness agrees with the Reformed doctrine of sin and grace. Most of the articles first appeared in The Princeton Theological Review (1919-20); Die Heiligungsbewegung in Bibliotheca Sacra and the study of Jellinghaus in The Biblical Review (1919). (8 notes)
• Studies in Perfectionism, Part 2 — The English and American half of Warfield’s study of perfectionism, the eighth volume of his works: Oberlin Perfectionism (Asa Mahan, Charles G. Finney and the Oberlin teaching), John Humphrey Noyes and His “Bible Communists” (the Oneida community), The Mystical Perfectionism of Thomas Cogswell Upham, The “Higher Life” Movement (Pearsall Smith, Boardman and the Keswick teaching) and “The Victorious Life”. Each first appeared in The Princeton Theological Review, Bibliotheca Sacra or The Union Seminary Review, and the footnotes are the study’s own, with the documents. (6 notes)
• Studies in Tertullian and Augustine — Five studies of the two great Latin Fathers: Tertullian and the beginnings of the doctrine of the Trinity (three articles from The Princeton Theological Review, 1905–1906), a sketch of Augustine (from the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics), Augustine’s doctrine of knowledge and authority, Augustine and his Confessions, and Augustine and the Pelagian controversy (the introductory essay of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. V). (5 notes)
• The Acts and Pastoral Epistles (Introductions and Notes) — The introductions to Acts, to the Pastoral Epistles and to Philemon, and his notes on the renderings of the text. (4 notes)
• The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation — Warfield traces how the doctrine of the salvation of infants dying in infancy has been held in every age of the Church and yet corrected: the Fathers’ necessity of baptism and Augustine’s mildest damnation, the medieval mitigation, the teaching of Rome, the Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed doctrines from Zwingli to Dort and Westminster, the “ethical” tendencies of later Protestantism, and the doctrinal development which makes the salvation of the infant rest on God’s electing grace. (1 notes)
• The Gospel of the Incarnation — Two sermons on the incarnation. The first, on John 6:38-39, takes “the end of the incarnation”: Christ came down from heaven to do the Father’s will, which is the salvation of all that the Father has given Him, and the sermon draws out what this says of the covenant of redemption, the particularity of salvation, and the believer’s assurance. The second, on Philippians 2:5-8, takes the example of the incarnation: the self-emptying of Christ as the pattern of the Christian’s self-sacrifice. (2 notes)
• The Lord of Glory — Warfield surveys every title the New Testament gives Jesus — Jesus, Christ, Lord, Son of Man, Son of God — book by book, from Mark through the Apocalypse, to show that the conviction of His deity is not a late layer laid over the gospel story but the presupposition of every part of the New Testament, the Synoptic Gospels and their supposed primitive sources included. (14 notes)
• The Making of the Westminster Confession — Warfield’s study of the Westminster Assembly’s making of the Confession from its Minutes. The first part sets out how the Confession was made: the commission of the Solemn League and Covenant, the Committees and the order of their reports, the chapters one by one with the dates of their debate, and what the Assembly sent to Parliament. The second takes the third chapter, Of God’s Eternal Decree, and follows its formulation against the Irish Articles of 1615, with the three versions set in parallel columns and the debates on each section, especially the sixth. (2 notes)
• The Plan of Salvation — Warfield sets out the possible answers to the question how God saves, as a series of choices, each narrowing the last: naturalism or supernaturalism (autosoterism against salvation from God), sacerdotalism or evangelicalism (the Church as the channel of grace, or God working immediately on the soul), universalism or particularism, and, within particularism, the order of the decrees — ending in Calvinism as evangelicalism consistently held. (6 notes)
• The Power of God unto Salvation — Eight sermons preached in the chapel of the Theological Seminary at Princeton: on the revelation of man in Christ, the saving Christ, the argument from Christian experience, the paradox of omnipotence, the love of the Holy Ghost, the leading of the Spirit, Paul’s earliest gospel in 1 Thessalonians, and false religion and the true. (8 notes)
• The Right of Systematic Theology — The introduction by James Orr, and Warfield’s article on the right of systematic theology to exist, first printed in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review. Against the claims that Christianity is life and not doctrine, fact and not theory, feeling and not thought, and that doctrine is only a passing form, Warfield argues from Christianity’s own character: it comes as truth, makes its appeal to the mind, and so asks to be set in order. He draws on the French and German writers of the day, Sabatier, Astié, Bois, Rivier, Ritschl and others. (2 notes)
• The Saviour of the World — Nine sermons preached to the students of Princeton Seminary, each opening with its text: the prodigal son, the one Name under heaven, the Lamb of God, God’s immeasurable love in John 3:16, the gospel of Paul, the glorified Christ, the risen Jesus, the gospel of the covenant, and the imitation of the incarnation in Philippians 2. (9 notes)
• The Westminster Assembly and Its Work — Two articles from The Princeton Theological Review of 1908. The first is the history of the calling of the Westminster Assembly: the conflict of King and Parliament over the Church, the Long Parliament, the ordinance of 1643 that convened the Divines to advise it, and the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots that turned an advisory body into the framer of a uniform religion for three kingdoms. The second follows its work: the Directory for Church Government and for Ordination, the Directory for Worship, the Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and what became of them. (2 notes)
• Two Studies in the History of Doctrine — The first study traces the origin and nature of Pelagianism, the external history of the controversy, Augustine’s part in it and his theology of grace. The second follows the doctrine of the salvation of infants from the Fathers through the medieval mitigation, the drift in the Church of Rome, the Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed teaching, to its ethical tendencies. (13 notes)