Benjamin B. Warfield
Biographical Sketch by Samuel G. Craig
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born at 'Grasmere' near Lexington, Kentucky,
November 5, 1851 and died at Princeton, New Jersey, February 17, 1921.
His progenitors of English and Scotch-Irish origin, on both his paternal and
maternal sides, were early settlers in this country who like their descendants
took an active and often a leading part in the political, educational and
religious problems of the day in which they lived.
His father, William Warfield, was a well-to-do farmer, owner of a considerable
landed estate, who was a widely recognized authority on the breeding of cattle.
His mother was the daughter of the Rev. Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, D.D.,
LL.D., distinguished as a preacher, Moderator of the 1841 General Assembly of
the Presbyterian Church (Old School Branch), president of Jefferson College in
Pennsylvania, president and professor of theology as well as founder of the
theological Seminary at Danville, Kentucky, advocate of the emancipation of the
slaves and the maintenance of the Union, temporary chairman of the Republican
Convention of 1864 which renominated Abraham Lincoln, and most permanently known
perhaps as the author of two volumes of systematic theology entitled The
Knowledge of God Objectively and Subjectively Considered.
His early education was received in private schools in nearby Lexington where he
was fortunate in having among his teachers Lewis Barbour, afterwards professor
of mathematics in Central University, and James K. Patterson, afterwards
president of the State College of Kentucky. He entered the College of New
Jersey—now Princeton University—as a sophomore and graduated with the highest
honors of his class in 1871 at the age of nineteen. He took an active interest
in undergraduate activities, won prizes for essay and debate in the American
Whig Society and was one of the editors of the Nassau Literary Magazine.
His early tastes were strongly scientific. He collected bird's eggs, butterflies
and moths, and geological specimens; studied the fauna and flora of his
neighborhood; read Darwin's newly published books with enthusiasm; and counted
Audubon's works on American birds and mammals his chief treasure. He came to
Princeton the same year that James McCosh arrived from Scotland to become one of
the most famous of its presidents. That Dr. McCosh did not succeed in making him
a Darwinian, as in the case of so many of his fellow-students, finds its
explanation in the fact, as he himself has told us, that knowing his Origin of
Species and The Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication 'almost
from A to Izzard' he was already a 'Darwinian of the purest water' before coming
under McCosh's influence—a position which he later repudiated, not without
warrant as even biologists have come more and more to admit. During his college
days he took a special interest in mathematics and physics and planned to seek
the fellowship in experimental science but was dissuaded from this by his father
on the ground that he did not need the money in order to pursue graduate studies
and that it would be more profitable for him to spend the time studying in
Europe without being bound to any particular course of study.
His departure for Europe was delayed by family illness with the result that it
was not until February 1872 that he embarked. He first went to Edinburgh. After
spending some time there he transferred to Heidelberg. Writing from the latter
place in the mid-summer of that year he announced his decision to enter the
Christian ministry—an announcement that came as a surprise to his family and
friends as he had given no previous intimation of a serious intention of
studying theology, and was especially pleasing to his mother who had often
expressed the hope that her sons would become ministers. We have no knowledge as
to when or why he made this decision as, like his father, he was ever reticent
with regard to personal matters. It may be added that he had made a public
profession of faith and united with the Second Presbyterian Church in Lexington
in his sixteenth year.
He entered Princeton Theological Seminary in 1878 and was graduated with the
class of 1876. Licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Ebenezer of Kentucky in
1875, he was stated supply of the Presbyterian Church of Concord, Kentucky,
during that summer. During the summer of 1876 he was stated supply of the First
Presbyterian Church of Dayton, Ohio. He received a call to become the pastor of
the latter church but declined it in order that he might go abroad for further
study. On the third of August of that summer he was married to Miss Annie Pearce
Kinkead, daughter of a prominent lawyer, and shortly thereafter they sailed for
Europe where he studied at Leipsic. In the course of the year he was offered an
appointment in the Old Testament Department of Western Theological Seminary in
Pittsburgh but declined the offer because the New Testament had now become his
main interest—a marked change from the time when as a school boy he strenuously,
though unsuccessfully, objected to studying Greek—so his brother Ethelbert has
related—on the ground that since he expected to follow a scientific career he
would have no need for Greek.
Following his return to America, late in the summer of 1877, he became assistant
pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore but resigned this position
after a short period to accept another call from Western Theological
Seminary—this time as instructor in New Testament Language and Literature. Going
there in September 1878 as an instructor he was appointed professor the
following year. It was not until then (1879) that he was ordained as a minister
of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.
He remained at Western Theological Seminary for nine years during which he won a
reputation as a teacher and Biblical exegete rarely attained by so young a man.
He was then forced to make a difficult decision by the fact that following the
death of Archibald Alexander Hodge he received a call from Princeton Theological
Seminary to occupy the chair of Systematic Theology made famous by Charles
Hodge. In view of the exceptional gifts as an exegete he had displayed and the
promise they offered for the future along that line, many of his wisest friends
and well-wishers questioned the wisdom of his accepting this new call. Years
afterwards, if our memory serves us right, William Robertson Nicoll, the
distinguished editor of The British Weekly, expressed the opinion in that
publication that it was a thousand pities that Warfield did not continue to make
the New Testament his chief field of study in the belief that such were his
qualifications as an exegete that had he done so he might have ranked with Meyer
and others as a New Testament commentator. It must have been a difficult
decision for him to make. Doubtless he was influenced, as his brother Ethelbert
has intimated, by the fact that Charles Hodge, his revered teacher, had begun
his career as a theological professor as a student and exegete of the New
Testament. Be that as it may, the years spent at Western Theological Seminary
were not wasted years from the standpoint of the more than thirty-three years
spent at Princeton. Rather they were years of training and preparation apart
from which he might not have become the distinctly Biblical theologian he became
by way of eminence among recent theologians. It may be added that in 1881 he had
declined a call to occupy the Chair of Theology at the Theological Seminary of
the Northwest at Chicago—now McCormick Theological Seminary.
Warfield was a volummous writer During his lifetime he published the following
volumes Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1886); The
Gospel of the Incarnation (1893); Two Studies in the History of Doctrine (1893);
The Right of Systematic Theology (1897); The Significance of the Westminster
Standards (1898); Acts and the Pastoral Epistles (1902); The Power of God Unto
Salvation (1903); The Lord of Glory (1907); Calvin as a Theologian and Calvinism
Today (1909); Hymns and Religious Verse (1910); The Saviour of the World (1915);
The Plan of Salvation (1915); Faith and Life (1916); and Counterfeit Miracles
(1918). The bulk of his writings, however, made their first appearance in Bible
dictionaries, encyclopedias and theological magazines, especially the
Presbyterian and Reformed Review and its successor the Princeton Theological
Review. Following his death, sufficient of this material to make ten large
volumes was selected by his literary executors, Ethelbert D. Warfield, William
Park Armstrong and Caspar Wistar Hodge, and published by the Oxford University
Press….
Warfield received the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1880 and that of Doctor of
Laws in 1892 from the College of New Jersey; that of Doctor of Laws from
Davidson College in 1892; that of Doctor of Letters from Lafayette College in
1911; and that of Sacrae Theologiae Doctor from the University of Utrecht in
1913.
Perhaps no better description of Warfield as a man and as a writer has been
made, or could be made, than that given by Francis Landey Patton, president of
Princeton Theological Seminary and ex-president of Princeton University, in the
Memorial Address he delivered by invitation of the Faculty of Princeton
Theological Seminary in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, May 2, 1921.
'Dr. Warfield,' he said, 'was a most imposing figure. Tall, erect, with finely
moulded features and singular grace and courtesy of demeanor, he bore the marks
of a gentleman to his fingertips. There was something remarkable about his
voice. It had the liquid softness of the South rather than the metallic
resonance which we look for in those who breathe the crisp air of a northern
climate. His public utterance took the form of a conversational tone, and his
sentences often closed with the suggestion of a rising inflection, as if he
invited a hospitable reception from his hearers. He lacked the clarion tones of
impassioned oratory, but oratory of this kind was not natural to him. He kept
the calm level of deliberate speech, and his words proceeded out of his mouth as
if they walked on velvet. But public speaking was not his chosen form of
self-expression. He was pre-eminently a scholar and lived among his books. With
the activities of the Church he had comparatively little to do. He seldom
preached in our neighboring cities, was not prominent in debates of the General
Assembly, was not a member of any of the Boards of our Church, did not serve on
committees, and wasted no energy in the pleasant but perhaps unprofitable
pastime of after-dinner speaking. As was to be expected, therefore, he was too
much of a recluse to be what is known as a popular man. His public was small,
but it covered a wide area and he reached it with his pen. Through the pages of
the Presbyterian and Reformed Review and later of the Princeton Theological
Review, he was speaking regularly to men who waited eagerly to see what he had
to say concerning the latest book on New Testament Criticism or the most recent
phase of theological opinion. It is difficult, of course, to estimate the
influence he exerted in this way, but geographically speaking it was widely
extended, and I may be pardoned perhaps for saying somewhat extravagantly that
his line has gone out into all the earth and his words to the end of the world.
His writings impress me as the fluent, easy, offhand expression of himself. He
wrote with a running pen, in simple, unaffected English, but with graceful
diction, and only a moderate display of documented erudition. His weapon in
controversy was the sword and not the battle-axe. His gleaming blade had a keen
edge, but the quarte and tierce of logical encounter went on without loss of
temper or lapse of good behaviour. His mental machinery was in constant use. It
never rusted and was always ready for the work it had to do. Something is
undoubtedly lost in the transfer of thought to the printed page. We see it
through a glass darkly—darkly, sometimes because we look through a cloudy
medium, and sometimes the prismatic colors of the lens have a confusing effect
upon our vision. But Dr. Warfield's style was the servant of his thoughts and
expressed them accurately and clearly. He made no phrases, pointed no epigrams,
did not have the habit of putting his own image and superscription on some
common coin of speech and sending it forth as his seal and sign—manual of
originality.'
What most impresses the student of Warfield's writings—apart from his deeply
religious spirit, his sense of complete dependence on God for all things
including especially his sense of indebtedness as a lost sinner to His free
grace—is the breadth of his learning and the exactness of his scholarship.
Caspar Wistar Hodge, his immediate successor at Princeton Seminary and long his
associate, in his Inaugural Address after referring to the illustrious men who
had given the institution fame throughout the world for sound learning and true
piety, such as Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge and Archibald Alexander Hodge,
spoke of Warfield as 'excelling them all in erudition.' John DeWitt, long the
professor of Church History in Princeton Seminary and himself a man of no mean
scholarship, once told the writer that he had known intimately the three great
Reformed theologians of America of the preceding generation— Charles Hodge,
W.G.T. Shedd and Henry B. Smith—and that he was not only certain that Warfield
knew a great deal more than any one of them but that he was disposed to think
that he knew more than all three of them put together. A less sympathetic
writer, Otto A. Piper, professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at
Princeton Seminary, has written: 'Aided by an indefatigable study of the New
Testament Criticism and interpretation, patristics, church history and Reformed
theology and familiar with all that had been written in foreign languages, he
expounded in innumerable articles the truths of the Bible and, based on the
Bible, those of the Westminster Confession.' The wide range of Warfield's
scholarship is intimated even if not fully indicated by Dr. Piper. To do that it
is necessary to direct attention to the fact that to a degree that has rarely if
ever been equaled, at least in America, Warfield made the whole field of
theology—exegetical, historical, doctrinal, polemical and apologetical—the
object of thorough-going study. It is safe to say that he was qualified to
occupy with rare distinction any of the principal chairs of theological
instruction, so that he was one of the few professors who, no matter what the
question put to him might be, rarely if ever needed to side-step it by saying
that it did not belong to his department. There have been few if any who have
had less need to fear the taunt: 'If I knew as little as you do, I too might
believe as you do.' Moreover, as his brother Ethelbert has pointed out, he 'read
widely over a wide range of general literature, including poetry, fiction and
drama and often drew illustrations from the most unexpected sources.' Those who
refer to him as a 'fundamentalist' (he was in the broad sense in that he held
that Christianity has a specific content of its own, factual, doctrinal and
ethical, that was given it once and for all by Christ and His apostles and that
Christianity exists in the world today only to the extent to which that content
is confessed by word and deed), not in order to stress the genuineness of his
Christianity but rather in order to disparage him as a scholar, only advertise,
in the words of Patton, their 'ignorance of his exact scholarship, wide
learning, varied writings, and the masterly way in which he did his work.'
|
