Great Theologians: Benjamin B. Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921), who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887-1921, is arguably the greatest American biblical and theological scholar.  While growing up on a Lexington, Kentucky cattle farm, Warfield was nurtured in the categories and content of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF). By the age of six, he had memorized the Shorter Catechism, along with the Scripture proofs, and then went on to the Larger Catechism. Warfield graduated from Princeton at nineteen with highest honors and “won the Thompson prize for the highest rank” his junior year.[1] His academic prowess appeared to be destined for math and science upon graduation from college, but to the surprise of his family he decided to go to Princeton Seminary. David B. Calhoun, in his magisterial two volume work on Old Princeton, summarized Warfield’s intellectual legacy:

“By profound study and extensive reading in English, German, French and Dutch, B. B. Warfield, to a degree that has rarely been equaled, excelled in the whole field of theological learning—exegetical, historical, doctrinal. . . . John De Witt said that he had known intimately the three great Reformed theologians of America in the preceding generation—Charles Hodge, W. G. T. Shedd and Henry B. Smith—and that he was certain not only that Warfield knew a great deal more than any one of them, but that he knew more than all three of them put together!”[2]  

Warfield was a prolific writer, although he never wrote a traditional single or multi-volume systematic theology text. Instead, his views on Christian theology are gleaned from his numerous occasional writings. Some are long, academic discourses, while others are shorter more popular pieces. Today, a great bulk of his work can be accessed in the two-volume set of his Selected Shorter Writings and the ten-volume set of his Collected Works. Beyond these sets, however, are over 780 book reviews, 46 of which comprise the tenth volume in the Collected Works that is 486 pages. By my own estimation, if one was to place the other reviews in books the size of volume ten of the Collected Works, one could fill at least another six books.

However, Warfield did not merely have a ready pen, but a powerfully precise one harnessed for the propagation of the Reformed faith, or what Warfield deemed as nothing less than biblical Christianity. He was regarded as the apologist for the Reformed faith in the English speaking world during his life-time. Despite being misrepresented by scholars of his own time and after his death, Warfield’s essays illumine the reader to how the doctrines of the Christian faith are their own defense. And so, throughout his writings he explained all the major doctrines of the Christian faith from the Reformed Calvinistic perspective, showed their organic relations to each other, and how they refuted the naturalistic systems of thought popular in Protestant Liberalism, and even some expressions of Protestantism that sought to distance themselves from liberalism.  

Warfield’s unrivaled value is on display in both the breadth and depth of his scholarship and his unveiling of the emptiness of views of Christianity that actually embrace naturalistic presuppositions. While he was known for his devastating critique of Protestant Liberal theology, Warfield also did not fail to reveal how aberrant forms of evangelical theology proceeded on the same naturalistic lines as Protestant Liberalism. His polemics against the perfectionism of what came to be known as the “Higher Life Movement” are a shining example of this.

Perhaps Warfield’s most overlooked motif, but which sits at the root of his thought is his affirmation that biblical doctrine is an organism. For Warfield, this was no mere metaphor. Rather, he believed that biblical doctrine is actually a living organism, because it is nothing less than the expression of the presence and power of the living God, who is truth itself, in the thought and life of those God regenerates and renews for salvation. Rather than directing us to think of systematic theology along rationalistic lines of thought, Warfield directs us to understand both the nature and results of systematic theology as living, creative and unavoidably bearing fruit.

It is not surprising then, based on both the quantity and quality of his theological scholarship, that B. B. Warfield is regarded by some as one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church.