Essays and Reviews

Essays and Reviews is a collection of articles by Charles Hodge, gathered in 1857 from the pages of the Princeton Review, the quarterly he edited for decades while teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. Hodge was the leading voice of Old School Presbyterian theology in antebellum America, and the periodical was his chief instrument for addressing the church. The volume reprints pieces written in response to the controversies of the day: the Presbyterian division of 1837, disputes over church polity and the validity of Roman Catholic baptism, the New England theology and its revivalist offspring, and the speculative systems arriving from Germany and finding American champions.

The essays share a method more than a single subject. Hodge reviews a book, a movement, or a church-court decision, states the opposing position carefully and at length, and then tests it against Scripture and against the settled confessions of the Reformed churches. His consistent conviction is that Christian doctrine is not a product of each generation's insight but a body of truth received from the Bible and rightly summarized in the Westminster Standards. He is wary of novelty in theology, of philosophical systems laid over the biblical text, and of any view of the church that makes salvation depend on the mediation of an institution or a ritual. Alongside the polemic runs a steady pastoral concern: that sin be taken seriously, that the atonement be understood as a real satisfaction of divine justice, and that the believer's confidence rest on Christ's work and not on his own religious experience.

The collection endures as a window into the mind that shaped American Reformed orthodoxy before the Civil War, and into the habits of a theological tradition that argued in public, at length, and in print. Much of what Hodge later systematized in his three-volume Systematic Theology appears here in the form of live argument, which makes the essays useful for seeing why he held his positions and not only what they were. They also record the shape of mid-nineteenth-century American church life, when questions of doctrine, polity, and national feeling were tightly bound together.

Who should read this: students of American Presbyterianism, Reformed theology, and nineteenth-century church history will find primary material here that summaries cannot replace, and readers who admire the Systematic Theology will enjoy meeting its author in a more combative mode. It is not a devotional book, and it is not an introduction to the Christian faith; readers looking for warmth, spiritual direction, or a first book of theology should begin elsewhere. Those unfamiliar with the controversies it addresses will need patience with the period's debates.