Charles Hodge

Charles Hodge (1797–1878)

Charles Hodge was born on December 28, 1797, in Philadelphia, the son of Hugh Hodge, a physician, and Mary Blanchard Hodge. His father died of yellow fever within months of his birth, leaving his mother, a woman of formidable piety, to raise Charles and his elder brother Hugh Lenox on slender means. She kept the household together by taking in boarders and by the sheer force of her discipline, and Hodge would say in later life that whatever he owed to anyone, he owed first to her. The pattern of that upbringing, a Presbyterian home in which doctrine was learned at the table before it was studied in the classroom, never really left him.

His schooling led him by stages to the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where he graduated in 1815 in the midst of a revival that swept the campus. He made public profession of faith at about that time, and the line between his conversion and his vocation was short. He entered Princeton Theological Seminary, founded only three years earlier, and studied under Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller, the two men who gave American Presbyterianism its intellectual backbone in the new century. From Alexander he received a theology that joined Reformed scholasticism, especially the Swiss divine Francis Turretin, to a warm and experiential piety. He was licensed in 1819 and ordained in 1821, and the seminary kept him from that point: he was appointed instructor in Oriental and biblical literature in 1820 and professor in 1822.

In 1826 he left for two years of study in Europe, in Paris and then in Halle and Berlin. The journey widened him in ways he had not expected. He heard Schleiermacher preach, studied Hebrew and Arabic under Silvestre de Sacy and Gesenius, and came to know the pietist August Tholuck, who became a lifelong friend. He returned convinced that German critical scholarship was an enemy to be understood rather than ignored, and equally convinced that its theological conclusions were not to be borne. Those two convictions, courtesy and refusal, mark nearly everything he did afterward. In 1825 he had founded the Biblical Repertory, later the Princeton Review, which he edited for some forty years; it became the leading organ of conservative Reformed opinion in America.

Hodge's life in the church was lived largely at one address. He taught at Princeton for more than fifty years, and by his own reckoning instructed upwards of three thousand students. In 1840 he moved to the chair of exegetical and didactic theology, and from 1851 he added the work of polemical theology. He preached regularly, and the Sunday afternoon conferences he held with students were remembered long after the lectures were forgotten. His home life was settled and affectionate. He married Sarah Bache in 1822, and after her death in 1849 he lived on with his children and, in later years, his grandchildren. He lost a number of them, as nearly everyone then did, and bore it without display.

He was a controversialist by duty rather than temperament. He defended Old School Presbyterianism in the schism of 1837 and 1838, and he opposed the revivalist theology of Charles Finney and the New Haven divines, whose emphasis on the free power of the will seemed to him to hollow out grace. On slavery he was, by the lights of his later critics, a failure. He held it to be a social condition the Bible regulated rather than condemned, opposed immediate abolition, and in the Civil War years wrote against the Presbyterian church's endorsement of the Union cause. That position cost him standing among those who judged it a moral evasion, and it belongs in any honest account of him.

Hodge marked the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship in April 1872, with colleagues, former students and delegates from many countries in attendance. In his reply he said that he was not conscious of having brought forward any new idea. He died in Princeton on June 19, 1878, and was buried in the Princeton Cemetery.

His Writing and Its Influence

Hodge began writing in the early 1820s, and nearly everything he produced came out of the classroom or the review he edited. His first major book, a commentary on Romans, appeared in 1835, and it set a pattern: exegesis first, then doctrinal inference, then the objections answered one by one. Commentaries on Ephesians and on both letters to the Corinthians followed. The occasion for the Romans commentary was partly polemical, since it was written against the moral-government theology of the New Haven school and the Arminian drift he saw in revivalism, but its tone was that of a teacher more than a combatant. Alongside the books ran the long stream of essays in the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, several of which were gathered later as Essays and Reviews. A history of the Presbyterian church, The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, grew from the same journalistic labor.

His great work is the Systematic Theology, published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873 when he was well past seventy. It distilled decades of lectures to students, and it remains the fullest statement of Princeton theology. He built it on Scripture treated as a storehouse of facts, in the manner of the natural sciences, and on the Reformed confessions as the best digest of what the church had learned from them. His sources were Turretin above all, with the Westminster Standards and the Reformers close behind. He wrote with unusual clarity and without ornament, and he argued by laying the opposing view out fairly before refusing it. His treatment of the atonement, of justification by imputed righteousness, and of the inspiration and authority of Scripture became a standard for American conservative Protestants. On the last of these his language about the Bible's inerrancy, later sharpened by his successors A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, shaped the twentieth-century debate over scriptural authority in ways he could not have foreseen. His What Is Darwinism? of 1874 concluded that the theory, as then presented, amounted to atheism, though he left room for the question of how God worked in nature to be pursued.

The immediate impact was felt through his students, who carried Princeton doctrine into pulpits and colleges across the country and into missionary fields abroad. The Systematic Theology was translated and widely used, and it became the textbook of American Presbyterianism for generations. In the twentieth century he was the common reference point for the fundamentalist and modernist quarrels, claimed by one side and attacked by the other. Reassessment has been mixed. Some historians have argued that Hodge's Scottish common-sense philosophy and his scientific model of theology bent the Reformed tradition toward rationalism, and that he understated the experiential piety he inherited from Alexander. Others hold that this criticism, associated with Ernest Sandeen and later Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, misreads him, and that he stands closer to Turretin and Calvin than his critics allow. His defense of slavery has meanwhile been counted against him by recent scholarship with increasing severity, and rightly so. The question of how a theologian so careful with Scripture read it so badly on this point remains open.

Who should read Hodge: Readers who want to see what the Reformed tradition looked like when it was confident, systematic and fully at home in the American church. He is valuable for pastors and students who think doctrine is best learned by watching an argument built patiently from the biblical text. He is not for readers seeking devotional warmth, stylistic beauty or an easy conscience about his age, and those who come to him should read the Systematic Theology alongside the history of its blind spots. He is for those willing to work through a mind that valued being exact over being moving.