B. B. Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921)

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born on November 5, 1851, at Grasmere, his family's estate near Lexington, Kentucky, the eldest son of William Warfield, a breeder of prize shorthorn cattle, and Mary Cabell Breckinridge, whose father, Robert J. Breckinridge, was among the most prominent Presbyterian ministers in the nation. It was a household of land, livestock, and learning, and the young Warfield's first passion was not theology but natural science. He read widely, studied the breeding of cattle with an almost professional eye, and showed a mathematical bent that would later serve the exactness of his prose. The Civil War cut across his childhood in a border state where families were divided; his Breckinridge kin stood on both sides of the conflict.

He entered the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, and graduated in 1871 with distinction, having pursued mathematics and science. Princeton Theological Seminary followed in 1873, and then a year of study in Europe at Edinburgh, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. He returned to the United States convinced that his calling lay in the study of Scripture and doctrine. He was ordained in 1879 and served briefly as a supply preacher in Baltimore, but pastoral ministry was never his path. In 1876 he had married Annie Pearce Kinkead, and the two were caught in a lightning storm while honeymooning in Germany. The shock left Annie permanently an invalid, and for the remaining decades of their marriage Warfield was her constant caretaker. He rarely left Princeton for more than a couple of hours at a time, and he arranged his working life around her needs. It is one of the quieter facts about a man often remembered as a formidable controversialist.

He taught New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, from 1878, and in 1887 he was called to Princeton Theological Seminary as Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology. He held that chair for thirty-three years. There he became the leading voice of what is now called Old Princeton theology, standing in the line of Charles Hodge and Archibald Alexander and defending Reformed orthodoxy, confessionally grounded in the Westminster standards, at the very moment when historical criticism and theological liberalism were gaining ground in American Protestantism. He was a Presbyterian of the old school, and he held the denomination's doctrinal standards as binding commitments rather than as suggestions.

His inner life is harder to read than his arguments. Unlike many of the writers in this library, Warfield left no account of a dramatic conversion or a season of spiritual crisis; his faith seems to have been received from his family and deepened by study and prayer. Those who knew him spoke of a courtly, reserved man, devoted to his wife and devout in the daily habits of the Reformed tradition. His public manner in the classroom and in controversy was exacting and sometimes severe. Contemporaries describe him as a scholar who believed that a mistaken doctrine of God was a serious matter and who did not soften his judgments to spare feelings.

He was also a man of broad sympathies in some directions. He admired Calvin deeply, wrote with warmth about Augustine, and read the whole sweep of church history with the thoroughness of a specialist. He opposed what he saw as perfectionism in the holiness movements and was critical of aspects of the Keswick teaching, positions that drew counterargument and some resentment. In the early twentieth century, as the denomination moved toward the theological breadth that would soon fracture it, he found himself increasingly out of step with the direction of American Presbyterianism.

Warfield died on February 16, 1921, in Princeton, New Jersey, after a heart attack, only months after his wife had died. He had given his working life to a single seminary and a single cause.

His Writing and Its Influence

Warfield began publishing in the 1870s, and nearly everything he wrote appeared first as a journal article, review, or lecture rather than as a book. He wrote constantly for the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, which he helped edit, and for its successor, the Princeton Theological Review, which he edited from 1903 to 1921. Reviews were his native form. He read the new German criticism, the new English apologetics, and the newest American religious movements with equal care, and answered them in prose that was dense, exact, and rarely ornamental. His earliest sustained work was in New Testament textual criticism, and his Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1886) showed that the scholar who would defend the Bible's authority had mastered the manuscripts first.

His central contribution was his doctrine of Scripture. Working with his colleague Archibald Alexander Hodge, he wrote the 1881 article "Inspiration," and over the following decades he developed it in essays later gathered as The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. He argued that the Bible is the Word of God written, produced by a divine superintendence that worked through the personalities and circumstances of human authors without erasing them, and that this inspiration extends to the very words of the original text. Later controversies over the term "inerrancy" run through his formulations, and in the twentieth century he was claimed as the foremost modern defender of that doctrine and attacked as its inventor. Historians still dispute whether he restated the Reformed tradition or sharpened it in new directions to meet new pressures. His essays on the person of Christ, collected in The Lord of Glory (1907), and on the Trinity, drawn from his work on Augustine and Calvin, showed that his scholarship served worship. His one major work on Calvin's theology, Calvin and Calvinism, treated the Reformer as a doctrinal theologian of lasting authority.

His polemical writing was equally substantial and more severe. Counterfeit Miracles (1918) argued that the miraculous gifts of the apostolic age ceased with it, a position that made him the touchstone for cessationist teaching and an opponent of the Pentecostal movement then emerging. Perfectionism, published posthumously, gathered his criticism of the holiness teachings. Readers who find his tone unsparing are not wrong, and those sympathetic to the movements he opposed have long judged him unfair to them. He did not write to reassure.

His immediate influence ran through his students and through the seminary itself, and it weakened sharply once Princeton's governing board was reorganized in 1929, a few years after his death. J. Gresham Machen, who had learned from him, left to found Westminster Theological Seminary, carrying the Old Princeton tradition into a new institution. In the long run Warfield became the reference point for conservative Reformed and broader evangelical theology on Scripture, and his collected essays, published in ten volumes by Oxford University Press in 1927 and 1932 and later reissued by Baker, are still read and cited. Reassessment of his work has been continuous and sharp, with historians such as Mark Noll and Peter Hicks debating how faithfully he represented the tradition he claimed.

Who should read Warfield: Readers who want the case for the full authority of Scripture made by a scholar who knew the textual evidence and the opposing arguments better than most of his opponents. He suits those formed in Reformed or evangelical churches who have inherited the doctrine of inspiration without ever seeing it argued. He is not for readers seeking devotional warmth, personal narrative, or generosity toward rival traditions. He wrote as a professor and a polemicist, and what he offers is clarity and conviction.