Justified True Belief

(●) The last of the old Princeton theologians, who gave conservative Protestantism its doctrine of Scripture and then said out loud what would disprove it. + For thirty-three years Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield held the chair of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and for most of those years he seldom left his own house for more than two hours at a time. His wife Annie was an invalid and he was her nurse. What he did instead of travelling was write. He published very few real books; what he produced was articles, lectures, and reviews, in journals he largely edited himself, and when his colleagues gathered the important ones after his death they filled ten volumes. The standard bibliography of his work leaves out more than a thousand short items on the simple ground that each ran under a page. The subject he is remembered for is the Bible. Warfield took the old Protestant conviction that Scripture is the word of God and restated it with a lawyer’s precision, in terms built to survive cross-examination by the German critical scholarship that was then taking the Bible apart in the universities. Criticism there does not mean fault-finding. It is the ordinary academic business of asking who wrote a document, when, out of what earlier sources, and how reliably it has reached us, and in Warfield’s lifetime that business was being carried through the books of the Bible with enormous confidence and unsettling results. The answer he gave has a name. Almost every conservative English-speaking Protestant who uses the word "inerrant" today, meaning that Scripture, rightly understood, never asserts anything false, is using it in the shape he gave it, whether or not the name means anything to them. He is also, for a reader who arrives expecting a fundamentalist, a consistently surprising man. He thought Christianity was under orders to argue its way into the world’s mind rather than shelter from it. He read Darwin as a boy with enthusiasm and never lost the habit of treating evolution as a question about mechanism rather than a threat. He wrote against segregation in the church in the 1880s, when a white Kentuckian was not expected to. And he told a hall of seminary students that the choice between prayer and study was a slander on both.

(●) 1851 AD: Born on a Kentucky stock farm, into a family that bred cattle on one side and theologians on the other. + Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born on 5 November 1851 at Grasmere, the family place in the bluegrass country outside Lexington, Kentucky. His father William Warfield bred shorthorn cattle and horses and served as a Union officer in the Civil War. His mother, Mary Cabell Breckinridge, came from the most formidable Presbyterian family in the state: her father Robert Jefferson Breckinridge was a leader of the Old School Presbyterians, a seminary professor, an editor, and a politician, and her grandfather John Breckinridge had been Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general. The Old School were the stricter party in the quarrel that had split American Presbyterianism in 1837, the wing that wanted the Westminster Confession subscribed closely and distrusted the revival methods the other side had made room for. That is the household the boy grew up in, and almost everything he became known for is that instinct worked out at the highest level. The family money paid for private tutors rather than school, and the two men who taught him, Lewis G. Barbour and James K. Patterson, both later held university posts. What the boy actually cared about, though, was not doctrine at all. It was natural history. His brother Ethelbert, who wrote the memoir at the front of his collected works, remembered that he collected birds’ eggs, butterflies and moths, and geological specimens, studied the plants and animals of his own neighbourhood, read Darwin’s newly published books with enthusiasm, and counted Audubon’s volumes on American birds and mammals his chief treasure. He was so settled on a scientific career, his brother adds, that he strenuously objected to studying Greek.

(●) 1871 AD: He finished college at nineteen meaning to be a scientist, and wrote home from Germany a year later to say he was entering the ministry. + He entered the sophomore class of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, in 1868, and graduated in 1871 with the highest honours at nineteen, still meaning to be a man of science. Then he did what a well-off young American with a good degree did next, which was to go abroad and study. Illness at home held him up, so it was February 1872 before he sailed: some months in Edinburgh, then Heidelberg. In midsummer he wrote to his parents announcing that he intended to enter the ministry. The letter astonished them. Nothing in his boyhood had pointed that way, and whatever happened to him in Germany he never set down, so we simply do not know what changed. He came back to Kentucky in 1873 and spent a short stretch as livestock editor of the Farmer’s Home Journal, writing up cattle, which is a pleasant thing to know about a man who would spend his life on the doctrine of inspiration. In September of that year he entered Princeton Theological Seminary. The Ebenezer Presbytery licensed him to preach on 8 May 1875, and he took his degree in 1876. Somewhere in those three years the objection to Greek had evidently collapsed, because the subject he took up for the next decade was the Greek text of the New Testament.

(●) 1876 AD: He married Annie Kinkead, and a storm in the German mountains soon afterward left her an invalid he nursed for thirty-nine years. + That summer he was supplying the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of Dayton, Ohio, filling in Sunday by Sunday for a congregation with no settled minister of its own, and on 3 August 1876 he married Annie Pearce Kinkead, the daughter of a prominent Lexington attorney. In the autumn the two of them sailed for Europe so that he could study at Leipzig. On a walk in the Harz Mountains of northern Germany they were caught in a violent thunderstorm. Annie never recovered from it. It is worth being careful about what is known here, because the story has grown in the telling. The earliest account, his brother’s, reports a shock to her nervous system from which she never recovered; later retellings have her struck by lightning and permanently paralysed, which the early sources do not say. Her biographers differ over whether the injury was physical, emotional, or both. What is not in doubt is the result. For the next thirty-nine years Annie was an invalid, largely confined to the house, and Warfield nursed her. Colleagues noticed that he was rarely away from home for more than two hours together, and that one domestic fact explains an oddity in the church records: a theologian of his eminence hardly ever appears at a presbytery, a synod, or a General Assembly. Those are the courts, local, regional and national, where Presbyterians argue their business out and vote on it, and they are where a man of his standing would ordinarily have spent a good part of his life. His denomination made its decisions in rooms he could not get to. There are some ordinary objects in the Princeton Seminary archives that say more about those years than any description of them. The Warfields filled scrapbooks with picture postcards, carefully sorted by the part of the world each had come from: Switzerland, Venice and Rome, the colleges of Oxford, Egypt and Japan, Samuel Rutherford’s stone in the churchyard at St Andrews. Neither of them was going to see any of it.

(●) 1878 AD: Nine years teaching New Testament in Allegheny, where at twenty-nine he helped write the article that defined inerrancy. + In September 1878 he became an instructor in New Testament literature and exegesis at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh, and a full professor the following year. Exegesis is the unglamorous work of drawing out what a text actually says, clause by clause and word by word, as against reading one’s own ideas back into it, and that is what he did at Allegheny. Ebenezer Presbytery ordained him as an evangelist on 26 April 1879. His inaugural address of 20 April 1880 took on the question everyone in the room was thinking about: whether the church’s doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the New Testament, the conviction that the whole of it comes from God and not merely its religious high points, was endangered by the assured results of modern criticism. He answered no. His alma mater gave him an honorary doctorate the same year. Something else was happening in those Allegheny years, and a reader who expects a white Kentuckian of that generation to be predictable will not expect it. In 1885 he joined the Presbyterian Board of Missions to Freedmen, the denomination’s agency for work among the men and women who had been slaves until the Civil War. Two years later "A Calm View of the Freedman’s Case" argued that the raising up of the freed slaves was the greatest work before the American people, and in 1888 "Drawing the Color Line" argued that emancipation had ended private bondage and left public subjugation standing, and that Christian men were deserting the fundamental law of the church under the pressure of race feeling. He wrote that while Jim Crow, the whole legal apparatus of segregation, was going up around him. The thing that made his name happened in April 1881. The Presbyterian Review, jointly run by Princeton Seminary and Union Seminary in New York, opened a long series on biblical criticism with an article called simply "Inspiration," signed by A. A. Hodge of Princeton and by Warfield, who was twenty-nine. It did two jobs at once. It stated the doctrine of Scripture at full strength, and it named the precise conditions under which the doctrine would have to be abandoned (T2). Nothing else Warfield wrote has been quoted, attacked, and defended as often.

(●) 1887 AD: He took the Princeton chair of theology and held it for thirty-three years, arguing from an editor’s desk because he could not leave the house. + A. A. Hodge died in 1886, and in the autumn of 1887 Warfield succeeded him as Charles Hodge Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His inaugural address, on 8 May 1888, argued that systematic theology is a science. He taught out of Charles Hodge’s three-volume Systematic Theology and never wrote one of his own; Francis Patton, who gave the memorial address for him, said the reason was simply that Warfield thought Hodge’s was the best textbook there was. The family moved into the campus house where Charles Hodge and then A. A. Hodge had lived, so that three generations of the same theological line kept the same address. Since Annie’s care kept him off the floor of church courts, the journals became the place where he argued. He edited the Presbyterian Review, succeeding Francis Patton; when it folded he planned and produced its successor, the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, from 1890, and that in turn was renamed the Princeton Theological Review, whose first number appeared in January 1903. He ran it until he died. A great deal of what is now read as his collected theology began as an article he had commissioned from himself to answer something published that season.

(●) 1900 AD: He fought his own denomination’s revision of the Westminster Confession, lost, and then judged the result harmless. + The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America spent the 1890s and the turn of the century trying to revise the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Reformed standard drawn up in the 1640s, chiefly to soften what it says about predestination and about those who are not saved. Warfield had written against revision in 1890 and fought the second attempt from 1900 onward. His objection was not that the Confession was sacred. It was that the proposed changes would blur a precision the document had already achieved, and that a declaratory statement, a note fixed to a creed explaining how the creed is to be read, is a clumsy instrument that amends a confession sideways instead of openly. He lost. The revision passed in 1903, with two new chapters and a declaratory statement attached. Warfield then examined what had actually been adopted, concluded that it did not alter the system of doctrine the Standards teach, and gave it his support. For a man with a reputation as the fiercest polemicist of his generation, it is a useful episode: he could tell a defeat from a disaster, and he did not go on fighting a battle after the reason for fighting it had gone.

(●) 1915 – 1921 AD: He buried Annie, kept teaching, and died on an evening after meeting his class. + Annie died on 19 November 1915, after thirty-nine years of marriage. There had been no children. He went on working, and the books of these last years are the ones most people now read: The Plan of Salvation in 1915, the devotional conferences collected as Faith and Life in 1916, and Counterfeit Miracles in 1918 (T4). On Christmas Eve 1920 he was taken ill with angina. He recovered enough to pick up part of his teaching again, and on 16 February 1921 he met a class, felt no ill effects from it, and died of heart failure that evening in his seventieth year. He was buried beside Annie in the Princeton cemetery. His denomination’s General Assembly called the loss irreparable and called him probably the most distinguished and learned theologian of the Reformed faith of the day. J. Gresham Machen, then a young New Testament professor at the seminary, wrote home to his mother the day after the funeral that it seemed to him the old Princeton, and it had been a great institution, had died when Warfield was carried out. Eight years later the seminary was reorganised and Machen left to found Westminster. Warfield had died roughly three months after Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands and five months before Herman Bavinck, so that inside a single year the Reformed world lost all three of the men who had been speaking for it.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture is breathed out by God, so the book is God’s own product and not a human record with God added. + Open a Greek New Testament at 2 Timothy 3:16 and you meet a single adjective, theopneustos, on which most of what Warfield is remembered for turns. The old Latin rendering, inspiratus a Deo, "inspired by God," suggests a breathing into, as though God took a human book and put something of himself inside it, the way a glassblower breathes into a shape that is already there. In 1900 Warfield went through every surviving use of the word in Greek literature, pagan, Jewish and Christian, and argued that the picture runs the other way. The word means God-breathed, breathed out. What it describes is the product of God’s breath, in the same way that in Genesis the world is the product of a word and the man is the product of a breath. The English Standard Version now renders the verse "All Scripture is breathed out by God," which is Warfield’s reading carried into an English Bible. The obvious worry is that this turns Luke and Paul into stenographers taking dictation, and Warfield spent as much energy denying that as asserting the rest. The word he used for what happened is one the older theologians had already coined for God’s working in and through second causes. A second cause is any ordinary agent inside the world that God works through rather than around: rain falling on a field, a surgeon’s hands, a man sitting down at a table with a pen. The word is concursus, Latin for a running together. Two causes, one divine and one human, produce one effect, and neither is cancelled by the other. Luke interviews witnesses and sorts his material like any careful historian, and Luke writes what God intends. Paul dictates a letter in a temper about a particular church in a particular year, and Paul writes Scripture. The human fingerprints on the books, a physician’s vocabulary in one place, a fisherman’s rough Greek in another, are not damage to the divine product. On this account they are how God made it. This is why Warfield thought the question could not be settled by counting difficulties. If the book is a divine product, then what it asserts, it asserts truly, and the doctrine stands or falls with that (T2).

(Q) "What it affirms is that the Scriptures owe their origin to an activity of God the Holy Ghost and are in the highest and truest sense His creation. It is on this foundation of Divine origin that all the high attributes of Scripture are built." + Source: B. B. Warfield, "God-Inspired Scripture," The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 11 (January 1900), p. 130. The closing lines of a forty-page study of one Greek adjective, the sort of thing Warfield did for relaxation. The whole article is an argument that the word points to where Scripture came from rather than to what it does to a reader.

(T2) A proved error in Scripture would sink the doctrine, and he stated the doctrine so that it could be sunk. + Think of a friend who insists he is never late, and who treats every late arrival as traffic rather than lateness. After a while he has not told you anything about his punctuality, because nothing you could observe would count against what he said. A claim that cannot fail is not really a claim. Hodge and Warfield refused that shelter. Other conservative writers of the period were quite prepared to say that the inspiration of Scripture was a spiritual matter, untouched by whatever the historians and the scientists happened to turn up. The 1881 article says the opposite. A proved error contradicts not only the doctrine but the Bible’s own claims about itself, so the honest question is whether such errors can be produced, and the article goes on to set out what a critic would have to establish in order to produce one. The list is exacting, and it has three items on it. First, that the disputed statement really stood in the original manuscript, rather than creeping in later under the hand of a copyist. Second, that the interpretation which creates the problem is really the sense the passage was meant to bear, and not one laid on it from outside. Third, that this sense is genuinely irreconcilable with some fact of history or science that is itself certain. Hodge and Warfield believed that nobody had ever established all three of those together in a single case. That first condition is the famous one, and the argument about it has never stopped. Inerrancy, on this account, belongs to the autographs, meaning the original manuscripts as the authors themselves produced them. Not one of those survives. You can hear what a critic wants to say at that point, and it is a fair thing to want to say: how very convenient, to hang a doctrine on documents nobody can go and look at. Defenders answer that the text of the New Testament can be recovered from the thousands of surviving copies with very high confidence, so the qualification costs little in practice; critics answer that a doctrine anchored to documents nobody can inspect can never be tested where it would count. Warfield himself was no stranger to the manuscripts. He spent his first professional decade on New Testament textual criticism and wrote an introduction to the discipline, so he knew better than most exactly how close and how far the copies stand. The honest summary is that he built the qualification because the manuscript evidence required it, and that it does soften the doctrine’s exposure to counterexample (†4).

(Q) "A proved error in Scripture contradicts not only our doctrine, but the Scripture claims, and, therefore, its inspiration in making those claims. It is, therefore, of vital importance to ask: Can phenomena of error and untruth be pointed out?" + Source: A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, "Inspiration," The Presbyterian Review 2 (April 1881), p. 245. The sentence comes just after the authors have declined the softer position taken by theologians they admired, who kept inspiration and kept the errors too. The article ends with a line the two of them plainly enjoyed writing: that we possess a Bible written by the hands of men indeed, but also graven with the finger of God.

(T3) Christianity came into the world under orders to reason its way to the world’s mind. + Warfield’s opponent in this quarrel was not an unbeliever. It was Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian, newspaperman and prime minister, whose Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology Warfield had personally introduced to American readers in 1898, and behind Kuyper stood Herman Bavinck, the third of the three men then speaking for the Reformed world. Kuyper held that sin damages the mind itself, so that believers and unbelievers are not doing the same science when they look at the same world. Two men can stand in front of the same fossil, or the same manuscript, and come away disagreeing, not because one of them has overlooked something on the table but because they began from different first principles, meaning the handful of things each takes for granted before he examines anything at all. On that view argument cannot carry anyone from unbelief to faith, since the two sides are not reasoning from the same starting points, and apologetics arrives late and does modest work. Apologetics is worth pausing on, because the word has drifted. It does not mean apologising. It comes from the Greek apologia, the speech a defendant makes in court, and it is the word Peter uses when he tells Christians always to be ready to make a defence to anyone who asks a reason for their hope (1 Peter 3:15). An apologist is a man in the witness box, not a man saying sorry. Warfield answered Kuyper in 1903, in a long introductory note he wrote for an American book on the subject. His argument runs in three steps, and they are short enough to hold in the head all at once. Faith is a form of conviction. Conviction is grounded in evidence. Therefore evidence has a genuine part to play when a soul is converted, and the organised, systematic evidence that we call apologetics has a genuine part to play in the Christianising of the world. Not a small part, not a merely defensive part, not a service offered to the already convinced so that they can get their heads to agree with their hearts. A primary part. What he did not say matters as much as what he did. Warfield was a Calvinist to the bone and never claimed that an argument could make a Christian. Only the Spirit of life gives life to a dead soul, and he says so in the same passage. His claim was that the Spirit ordinarily works through evidence rather than around it, in the way a man is persuaded of anything else. The disagreement with Kuyper was about the ordering of means. It was never about who does the saving.

(Q) "It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to its dominion. Other religions may appeal to the sword, or seek some other way to propagate themselves. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason, and stands out among all religions, therefore, as distinctively 'the Apologetic religion.'" + Source: B. B. Warfield, introductory note to Francis R. Beattie, Apologetics; or, The Rational Vindication of Christianity (1903), p. 26. He goes straight on to say that it is solely by reasoning that Christianity has come this far on its way to its kingship, and solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet. On the same page he turns back to the Dutch, calling it a standing matter of surprise that the brilliant school of Christian thinkers he has been arguing with should be tempted to make little of apologetics.

(T4) The miraculous gifts were the credentials of the apostles, and they ended when the apostles did. + An ambassador arrives in a foreign capital carrying letters that prove he speaks for his government. The letters are not the message; they are what makes the message worth hearing from this particular man. That is how Warfield read the miracles of the New Testament church: not as the ordinary furniture of Christian life, but as the credentials of the men God had authorised to found it. In 1917 he gave the Thomas Smyth Lectures at Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina, published the next year as Counterfeit Miracles. The book works through the claims one era at a time: the healing shrines and relics of the early and medieval church, the miracles required for Roman Catholic canonisation, the Irvingites of the 1830s (a London congregation that revived prophecy and tongues), Christian Science, the faith-healing movements and mind cures of his own day. The verdict is negative throughout, and it rests on two legs. In principle, the New Testament ties the extraordinary gifts to the apostles, and Hebrews 2:3-4 presents signs and wonders as God’s attestation of a message first spoken by the Lord and then confirmed by those who heard him, which is an office that closes when its holders die. In fact, Warfield argued, the historical record of claimed miracles after that generation does not survive examination. The position has a name: cessationism, the view that the miraculous gifts ceased with the apostolic age, as against continuationism, the view that they remain available to the church. Warfield is the modern cessationist case, and nearly every later argument on either side is conducted with his book on the table. Two things he did not say are worth keeping in view. He did not deny that God answers prayer, or that God heals; he denied that the gift of miracles continues as a standing endowment of the church. And he did not treat this as a small matter of church order. On his reading, a church that keeps expecting its own credentials has misunderstood whose credentials they were. That is precisely where a great many Christians think he went wrong (†4).

(Q) "These gifts were not the possession of the primitive Christian as such; nor for that matter of the Apostolic Church or the Apostolic age for themselves; they were distinctively the authentication of the Apostles. They were part of the credentials of the Apostles as the authoritative agents of God in founding the church. Their function thus confined them to distinctively the Apostolic Church, and they necessarily passed away with it." + Source: B. B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (1918), chapter 1, "The Cessation of the Charismata," p. 6. He has just spent several pages insisting, against the general impression, that the apostolic churches were full of these gifts, and that a congregation without them would have been the odd one. The narrowing comes immediately afterward, and it is the hinge of the whole book.

(T5) How long the human race has been on earth, and by what process the body of man was formed, are questions Scripture leaves open. + Anyone who has handled an old family Bible has seen the dates printed down the margin: 4004 BC beside the first verse of Genesis, and the rest of the Old Testament dated from there. Those margins carry the chronology Archbishop James Ussher worked out in the 1650s, and generations of readers took the margin for the text. Warfield’s 1911 article on the antiquity of man begins by prising the two apart. The genealogies of Genesis, he argues, were not compiled to tell anybody how much time had passed, and they will not carry the arithmetic that has been laid on them. So the Bible does not assign a short span to human history. A particular way of reading it does, and that way of reading it rests on nothing solid. Behind this sits the wider position, and it is the reason the arch-defender of inerrancy gets quoted with enthusiasm by both sides in the modern argument over creation and evolution. Warfield had read Darwin as a boy and never acquired the reflex of alarm. He held one distinction and held it hard: evolution can never be a substitute for creation. As an account of the method God used it might turn out true or false, and that is a question for the evidence to settle rather than for theology to rule on in advance. He went further in 1915. Reading Calvin’s account of the six days, he concluded that Calvin’s own doctrine of creation, for everything except the souls of men, was an evolutionary one, since after the first act of calling matter out of nothing everything else arose through the working of those same second causes under God’s hand (T1). He was not a Darwinian in the modern sense, and it would be dishonest to enlist him as one. He rejected accounts that made the process self-explanatory and left God with nothing to do. He insisted on the unity of the human race, and insisted on it for a theological reason rather than a scientific one: Paul’s teaching that all men descend from one man, and that one man’s obedience answers another man’s fall, will not survive the loss of it (Acts 17:26; Romans 5:12-21). But on the age of the earth and the mechanism of the body he thought the question genuinely open, and he thought saying so cost the doctrine of Scripture nothing at all.

(Q) "The question of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth." + Source: B. B. Warfield, "On the Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race," The Princeton Theological Review 9 (January 1911), p. 1. On the same page he sets out the rule he applied to the whole subject: that the argument can never rest until it is understood everywhere that evolution cannot act as a substitute for creation, but at best can supply only a theory of the method of the divine providence.

(Q) "Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. 'What!' is the appropriate response, 'than ten hours over your books, on your knees?'" + Source: B. B. Warfield, "The Religious Life of Theological Students," an address at the autumn conference of Princeton Theological Seminary, 4 October 1911. He is speaking to young men who have begun to suspect that their studies are drying them out, and who have been told by well-meaning people that the cure is less study. He tells them the choice is false, and that if learning and devotion really were opposed then the intellectual life would be cursed and there could be no religious life for a student of theology at all. The address is also the best answer to the caricature. Warfield has been read for a century as a cold rationalist with a filing system where his heart should be, and the man who wrote this also wrote hymns, preached the seminary chapel sermons collected in The Saviour of the World, and nursed one invalid for thirty-nine years without complaint that anyone recorded.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His statement of the doctrine of Scripture became the standard text of conservative Protestantism, and still is. + The 1881 article and the essays that followed handed a whole movement its vocabulary, and the movement has been using it ever since. In 1910 the General Assembly of his own denomination named the inerrancy of Scripture first among five doctrines it declared essential. Between 1910 and 1915 the twelve paperback volumes of The Fundamentals, the series that gave fundamentalism its name, carried the Princeton doctrine to a mass readership; ninety essays went into those volumes, and one of them, on the deity of Christ, was Warfield’s own. From there the line runs through J. Gresham Machen, who took it into the modernist controversy of the 1920s and then into Westminster Theological Seminary when he founded it in 1929, and on to Carl F. H. Henry and the mid-century evangelical movement, who wrote it into the doctrinal basis of their new societies and seminaries and defended it all over again in their own generation. Then, in October 1978, close to three hundred evangelical leaders met in Chicago and produced the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, still the reference document for the position. Its tenth article affirms that inspiration applies strictly to the autographic text of Scripture, "which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy." That is Warfield’s qualification, word for word in substance, written into the founding charter of modern evangelical inerrancy ninety-seven years after he first put it in print.

(†) His quarrel with Kuyper over apologetics split the Reformed world, and both sides still claim him. + Cornelius Van Til arrived at Westminster out of a Dutch Reformed background and built what is now called presuppositional apologetics. The name sounds forbidding and the idea is not. A presupposition is simply something you are already standing on before you start arguing, the way a man measuring a room has already assumed that his tape measure does not change length. Van Til held that there is no neutral ground between belief and unbelief to argue from, because the unbeliever is standing on the Christian God whether he admits it or not; so the argument is not that the evidence adds up to God, but that without God nothing would add up at all. Van Til understood himself to be combining Kuyper and Warfield, and said so. Where the two conflicted, however, he took Kuyper’s side, and old Princeton’s method became the thing his students were trained to correct. The counterattack came in 1984, when R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner and Arthur Lindsley published Classical Apologetics, a defence of the older evidential method and a book-length critique of Van Til, written openly in Warfield’s succession. The argument is still live in Reformed seminaries, which is a strange afterlife for a disagreement between two men who agreed with each other about nearly everything else, and who thought well enough of one another that one of them wrote the preface introducing the other to America.

(†) Historians have argued for fifty years over whether he restated the old doctrine or invented a new one. + Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970) argued that the Hodge and Warfield doctrine, with its appeal to autographs nobody has, was a nineteenth-century novelty manufactured under the pressure of criticism rather than the historic faith of the church. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim pressed the case much further in The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (1979): on their telling, the older tradition, Augustine and Calvin included, had held Scripture infallible for salvation while leaving its incidental science and history alone, and Princeton had hardened a pastoral confidence into a technical claim. John Woodbridge answered in Biblical Authority (1982), going back through the sources the thesis rested on to see what they actually say, and Richard Muller’s later work on post-Reformation Reformed theology has made the older Reformed theologians look a good deal less accommodating than the thesis needs them to be. The fair summary is that the case for Warfield’s continuity with the older tradition has worn better than the case against it. Nearly everyone concedes, all the same, that the precision, the technical vocabulary, and the sheer weight placed on the autographs belong to his century and not to Calvin’s. The man himself took longer to recover than the doctrine. Mark Noll, surveying the school in The Princeton Theology, remarked that evangelicals were still waiting for a treatment of old Princeton as sophisticated and as refined as the work of the Princetonians had been, and the first book-length treatment of Warfield’s theology as a whole, by Fred Zaspel, did not appear until 2010.

(†) Where Christians part company with him: gifts he declared over, and autographs nobody can read. + Warfield was a Christian theologian, so this ledger records disagreements inside the household rather than a gap between the gospel and a system outside it. Two of them come straight out of his own work, and a third is a matter of temper. - The cessation of the gifts. Counterfeit Miracles stands on two legs, and the second is weaker than the first. The argument from principle, that the extraordinary gifts served to authenticate the apostles, is a reading of the New Testament that many Christians find persuasive and many do not. The argument from fact is a universal negative covering nineteen centuries: that no genuine miracle has occurred anywhere since the apostles died. Warfield examined a great many claims and found them wanting, which is honest work, but no survey of claims can establish a negative that large, and the book asks a historical judgment to carry a theological conclusion. It also tends to present continuationists as people importing credulity into the faith, when the better of them are simply reading 1 Corinthians 12-14 and noticing that the terminus Paul gives for prophecy and tongues is "when the perfect comes" (1 Corinthians 13:8-10), which Christians have been arguing about since Chrysostom and which is plainly not dated to the death of the last apostle. The largest Christian movement of the century after Warfield’s death grew up on the far side of his verdict, and the ordinary expectation across much of the global church that God still heals has not been dislodged by it. - The autographs. His own qualification is the place where friendly and unfriendly critics meet. Inerrancy is claimed for manuscripts that no longer exist, and the practical effect is that the doctrine’s test case is always just out of reach: any apparent error can in principle be referred to a copyist. Warfield had real reasons for the move, he knew the manuscript evidence as well as anyone alive, and he did not use the autographs as a hiding place. But he also wrote, in the same article, that the doctrine could be disproved by a proved error (T2), and the qualification that makes his claim precise is the same one that makes staging that disproof very hard. A reader is entitled to notice both halves. - The temper. He could be merciless in print. The reviews are often withering and the two volumes on perfectionism read in places like a prosecution rather than an examination, which is part of why the caricature of the cold Princeton logician stuck to a man who spent four decades nursing his wife. None of this touches what he was mainly for. He met the strongest critical scholarship of his age on its own ground, in its own languages, without retreating into piety and without conceding the point, and he left behind an account of Scripture that a century of argument has not managed to replace.