Justified True Belief

(●) For fifty-eight years he taught at one seminary in New Jersey, and more American ministers learned their doctrine from him than from anyone else in the century. + Charles Hodge rode into Princeton on horseback in June 1820 to teach Hebrew and Greek for four hundred dollars a year, and he was still teaching there when he died fifty-eight years later. More than three thousand men passed through his classroom in that time. They went out to pulpits in every state and to mission fields on four continents, and a great many of them taught what he had taught them, in the words he had used. He matters to a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is that he set the terms on which conservative American Protestants have argued about the Bible ever since: that Scripture is a body of facts to be gathered and stated rather than a mood to be caught, and that what it says, God says. The second is a pamphlet he wrote at seventy-six, answering the theory Darwin had set out in the Origin of Species and carried further in the two books after it, with three words that are still quoted, usually without the paragraph that follows them. One fact about him is worth keeping. The three volumes of his Systematic Theology run to more than two thousand pages, and he wrote nearly all of them after his sixty-ninth birthday, with one worn-out gold pen whose nibs had spread so far apart that no other hand could use it.

(●) 1797 AD: Born in Philadelphia, the fifth of five children, and fatherless before his first birthday. + He was born at midnight, and he was never sure on which side of it. Writing his reminiscences at seventy-nine he put it this way: in the last moments of the 27th or the first moments of the 28th of December, 1797, in a house on Arch Street three doors from the Christ Church burying ground, he arrived as the fifth and last child. Of the four children ahead of him, only one was still alive. The other three were already in that ground, or one like it: a daughter who had died of yellow fever at two, and a son and a daughter carried off by measles in the same week, while their mother was three days away in a stagecoach trying to get home. His father, Hugh Hodge, had been a surgeon in the Revolution, captured by the British and paroled at Washington’s intervention. He worked through the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1795, wore out his health doing it, and died on 14 July 1798 at forty-three, leaving his widow with two infants: Hugh Lenox at two years and Charles at six months. Everything after that runs through Mary Blanchard Hodge. The family lived on rents from wharf property, and the wharves stopped paying when the embargo and then the war of 1812 shut down Philadelphia’s shipping, which happened to be exactly when her two sons were ready for college. So she took in boarders and put them both through, at her own expense and without either of them losing a year. The brothers were inseparable. Charles wrote later that Hugh, eighteen months older, always went first in the dark, and that he never slept out of his brother’s arms until he was eleven or twelve.

(●) 1816 AD: He entered the four-year-old seminary at Princeton, and found the two teachers whose voices he used for the rest of his life. + He had gone up to the College of New Jersey in September 1812, at fourteen, and graduated in 1815. After a year of reading in Philadelphia his mother let him go back to Princeton, and in the autumn of 1816 he entered the theological seminary there. It was a very small place to be joining. Founded in 1812, it had two professors: Archibald Alexander, a Virginian who had been a frontier preacher before he was a scholar, and Samuel Miller, brought up from a New York pulpit. Alexander in particular got into him and stayed. What Hodge took from him was not a doctrine so much as a habit of counsel. When a student came to him wretched, turning himself over and over looking for some evidence of grace in himself, Alexander would say: look not so much within, look to Christ, dwell on his person, on his work, on his promises, and devote yourself to his service, and you will soon find peace. Hodge was still repeating that sentence from a platform fifty-six years later. He graduated in September 1819, and that October the Presbytery of Philadelphia licensed him to preach, at its meeting in Pittsgrove. Two words there are worth having, because Presbyterian government runs through the rest of his life. A presbytery is the regional council of ministers and elders who oversee the churches of a district, and the General Assembly is the national body above it, meeting once a year with delegates sent up from every presbytery in the country. In the spring of 1820 the seminary asked that Assembly for money to hire an assistant teacher of Hebrew and Greek, and the Assembly authorized a salary not to exceed four hundred dollars. The professors gave the post to Hodge. He rode up from Philadelphia in the last week of June 1820, so hot on the road that he stopped at a store, bought a great sheet of pasteboard, cut a hole in it for his hat, and pinned it on as a sunshade.

(●) 1822 AD: At twenty-four he was made a professor, and he married the girl who had boarded in his mother’s house. + The Board elected him Professor of Oriental and Biblical Literature on 24 May 1822 and inaugurated him on 24 September. Oriental, in a seminary catalogue of that period, meant the ancient languages of the Near East, which in practice meant Hebrew and its neighbours. The address he read that day argued a single point: that the moral qualifications of an interpreter of Scripture may all be included under piety. A young man of twenty-four, standing up in front of the men who had taught him, chose to talk about humility. In between, on 17 June, he married Sarah Bache. She was a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, and he had known her since he was fifteen. In the spring of 1813 her widowed mother had moved into the Hodge house in Philadelphia with three children, and Sarah, then fourteen, was the eldest, so the two of them had grown up across a hallway from one another. They came straight to Princeton after the wedding and took lodgings with a colonel’s family. She bore eight children and kept his house for twenty-seven years, until her death in 1849. In January 1825 he began something that mattered almost as much as his teaching. He founded a quarterly journal, the Biblical Repertory, meant at first to do a simple and useful thing: put German biblical scholarship into English for American ministers who could not read it for themselves. It grew into a great deal more than that. Over the next forty-six years he wrote a hundred and forty-two articles for it, enough to fill ten ordinary volumes, and by the end it was the most formidable review any American church had.

(●) 1826 AD: Two years in Europe taught him to read the men he would spend the rest of his life answering. + He sailed in October 1826, leaving a wife and small children behind, and was gone until September 1828. It was not a tour. He went to Paris first for the languages, then to Halle to sit under Friedrich Tholuck, a warm-hearted scholar who had come back to Christian faith out of unbelief and who stayed Hodge’s friend for life, and then to Berlin, where the leading minds of German theology were all within walking distance of one another. There he worked with Ernst Hengstenberg, the conservative Old Testament man, and with August Neander, the church historian. When he left Berlin his friends there filled an album for him, and Neander wrote his lines in Greek: nothing in ourselves, all things in the Lord, whom alone to serve is a glory and a joy. One Sunday in Berlin he went to hear Friedrich Schleiermacher preach. This was the man whose whole way of doing theology he would spend the next fifty years fighting, and the entry he made in his journal that evening is honest in a way that tells you a good deal about him. He did not write that the sermon was heresy. The words were biblical, he wrote, but the whole tenor of it was so general, the ideas so vague and indefinite, that it was impossible for him to understand exactly what the man meant. What those two years bought him is worth stating plainly. American theology in the 1820s met German criticism mostly through rumor and translation, at second or third hand. Hodge came home able to read Schleiermacher and Hegel and the critical commentators in their own language, to quote them accurately, and to tell his students which reports of them were false. His health was better too: he climbed in the Alps for days without trouble, which he put down to the air. It did not last.

(●) 1833 AD: A diseased hip put him on his back for years, so the seminary came to his parlor. + In the spring of 1833 the seminary sent him to canvass the Presbyterian churches of New York City for money to build a chapel, and he spent many days crossing those distances on foot. The leg that had troubled him since his twenties gave out for good. The physicians settled at last on an inflammation of the thigh joint, and what they did about it is hard to read: the hip and thigh and knee blistered, cupped, rubbed with tartar emetic and iodine, and burned from hip to knee with actual fire. In the autumn of 1834 his friend Joseph Henry, the physicist, carried a battery over to the study and applied galvanism to the limb, which meant running an electric current through it, the newest thing medicine had to offer, with no effect anyone could see. On 3 December 1834 he wrote to his brother that he had not walked across the room without a crutch for a year and a half. From the summer of 1833 to 22 February 1836 he met his classes at home. The students filled the study and the back parlor on settees pushed up to the edge of his couch, and between classes the settees were shoved back against the walls. He learned to write lying flat, on a leather-covered board held against his chest by his left arm, and he liked the arrangement well enough to keep it for twenty years after he could have stopped. What came off that board is the surprising part. The winter of 1834 and 1835, with his right leg often bound in a steel splint, produced his commentary on Romans. The same years produced twenty-eight articles for the journal, and two more pieces that went straight into the quarrel then pulling his denomination in half. American Presbyterians had sorted themselves into two parties by this point. The Old School wanted strict subscription to the Westminster Confession, the seventeenth-century statement of doctrine the church had inherited, and distrusted the revival preaching sweeping the country; the New School was at home with those revivals and wanted more room inside the confession than the Old School would allow. In May 1834 Robert J. Breckinridge drew up a declaration called the Act and Testimony, thirty-seven ministers and twenty-seven elders signed it at Philadelphia, and it went round the country for more names. Hodge was Old School himself, and he wrote against it in October 1834 and again in January 1835, on the ground that whatever its signers wanted, a party organized on a paper and a list of names would split the Old School itself and carry the church toward secession. Those two pieces shaped the course the division took when it came, in 1837. He laid aside one crutch, then the other, then walked into the village on 19 June 1843 for the first time in ten years, and used a cane for the rest of his life. He was cheerful throughout, by every account of everyone who was there.

(●) 1846 AD: Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly at forty-eight, he kept taking the losing side of its quarrels when he thought it right. + In May 1840 he moved to the chair of didactic theology, which means the teaching of Christian doctrine set out in order, as distinct from preaching it on a Sunday or defending it against an opponent, and he held that chair until he died. Six years later the General Assembly of the Old School church elected him its moderator, the minister who presides over that year’s meeting and, for that year, is the nearest thing the denomination has to a voice. He was now the most listened-to Presbyterian in America, and what he chiefly did with the position was lose arguments. The clearest case had come the year before. In 1845 the Assembly resolved, by a large majority, that baptism in the Church of Rome is null and void, so that a convert from Rome had to be baptized over again before he could be received. Hodge argued in his review that the Assembly was wrong, and he did not get there by going easy on Rome. Rome, he wrote, has grievously apostatized from the faith and order and worship of the church, has brought in false doctrines and a superstitious and even idolatrous worship and a cruel government. And yet, he went on, since as a society she still professes the creeds by which men are in fact born to God and nurtured for heaven, we dare not deny that she is still a part of the visible church. That last phrase carries the weight. The visible church is the church as it can be seen and counted from the outside, every society that names Christ and baptizes in his name, as against the invisible church, which is the company of the actually saved, known in full only to God. Hodge was not saying that Rome preaches the gospel purely; he had just said at length that she does not. He was saying that people are in fact brought to God through the creeds she still confesses, and that a body through which that happens cannot be struck off the visible roll. He knew he would be in a small minority for years, said so, and printed it anyway. He did the same in 1861. The Assembly met that May with the war a month old, and Gardiner Spring, a New York pastor, brought in resolutions binding the church to the federal government. Hodge was for the Union and wrote for it in print, then and throughout the war. He also held that a church court has no commission to require a political judgment as a term of communion, which is to say that a man may be in good standing at the Lord’s table and still be wrong about a government. He spoke against the resolutions on that ground and entered a protest when they carried by 156 votes to 66. His best remembered turn on the floor had come the year before, at Rochester in 1860, arguing against James Henley Thornwell of Columbia over whether the church may run its missions through boards: Thornwell held that the church may have only the offices Scripture actually names, which made a standing board of managers a human invention, while Hodge held that the church is free to organize its work however the work requires, so long as Scripture forbids nothing. He never once left the church he kept arguing with.

(●) 1872 AD: At seventy-four he finished the three volumes of his Systematic Theology, and he died six years later, still teaching. + On 24 April 1872 the seminary held a celebration for his fiftieth year as a professor, and the men who had studied under him came back for it. Nearly three thousand of them had sat in his classroom by then. In the address he gave, he told them what Alexander and Miller had been like, and then said the sentence he is most often quoted for: they were not speculative men, they were content with the faith once delivered to the saints, and "I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this Seminary." Taken by itself that sounds like a man congratulating himself on having thought nothing, which is how it is usually quoted. He meant it as a boast, and the next lines explain what kind of boast it was. The Bible is the word of God. That is to be assumed or proved. If granted, then what the Bible says, God says. That ends the matter. The Systematic Theology came out of the same years. He seems to have begun rewriting his lectures into a book around 1864 and to have taken hold of it in earnest in 1867, which made him a man of sixty-nine starting a three-volume work. The manuscript of the first volume went to the printers on 27 December 1870, his seventy-third birthday, and the last volume was finished on 8 October 1872. Two years after that, at seventy-six, he published What is Darwinism? He kept teaching to the end. On his last day of conscious life a visitor found him too weak to talk, holding a hand and answering with the pressure of it. Earlier, seeing his widowed daughter crying beside the bed, he had said to her: "Why should you grieve, daughter? To be absent from the body is to be with the Lord, to be with the Lord is to see the Lord, to see the Lord is to be like Him." He died at six in the evening on Wednesday, 19 June 1878, at eighty. Every store in Princeton closed for the funeral, and at the graveside, in the plot next to the Alexanders, his pastor read the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians over him.

What He Taught

(T1) The Bible is a storehouse of facts, and theology is the science that gathers and arranges them. + Picture a geologist walking a riverbank with a hammer and a notebook. He does not decide on Monday what the rocks ought to be and then go out on Tuesday to find them. He collects, he compares what he has collected, and only then does he say what the layers show. That way of working has a name, induction: reasoning up from particular things you have actually observed to the general rule that covers them. Francis Bacon pressed it on the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, and by Hodge’s youth every American college taught it as simply what honest inquiry looks like. Hodge said the theologian works the same way, and that the Bible is his riverbank. He does not spin a system out of his own head and then go looking for verses to hang on it. He gathers everything Scripture says about a subject, everywhere it says it, compares the passages, and then states the doctrine those facts will carry, and no more. Two things followed, and he cared about both. It made theology public and checkable: if a man brought in a doctrine from his philosophy, someone could ask him to show it in the text, and the demand was fair. And it made him permanently suspicious of theologians who started somewhere else. Schleiermacher had begun from the religious feelings of the believer and worked outward, and Hodge thought that method could produce anything at all, since a man’s feelings are not a fixed body of evidence the way a text is. Christians have pushed back on this, then and since, and the objection is worth stating plainly: the Bible is not a filing cabinet of propositions. It is law and poetry and story and letters, and treating it as a collection of facts can flatten the differences between those things. Hodge knew the objection and did not think it touched him, because facts about a poem are still facts. Whether he was right about that is still argued (†3).

(Q) "The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches." + Source: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. I, Introduction, ch. 1 §5, p. 10. The sentence opens the section headed "The Inductive Method as applied to Theology," and it lands directly after three pages describing how a man of science collects facts, classifies them, and draws out the law. Hodge wanted the parallel to be the first thing a reader met in a three-volume work (T1).

(T2) What the Bible says, God says, and a handful of unexplained discrepancies does not change that. + Almost everybody who reads the Bible at all reads some of it more carefully than the rest. The Sermon on the Mount gets underlined. The nine chapters of names at the front of Chronicles get turned past, and nobody feels much guilt about it. Hodge would not allow the distinction, and the doctrine he held instead has a name: plenary inspiration. Plenary means full. The claim is that the Spirit’s guidance covers the whole of Scripture and not merely its religious high points, so that the history and the genealogies come under it along with the Sermon on the Mount (2 Timothy 3:16). Hodge held it in a strong form, extending it to the words and not only to the ideas. He was careful to say what that does not mean, and the care is easy to miss in a caricature. God uses his creatures according to their nature, he wrote, so the writers were not made unconscious or irrational. They were not like calculating machines grinding out logarithms with infallible correctness. If a Hebrew was inspired he spoke Hebrew, if an educated man he spoke as a man of culture, and if his mind was logical he reasoned as Paul did, while if it was contemplative he wrote as John wrote. The writers stamped their own peculiarities on their pages as plainly as if nothing extraordinary had touched them. He did not hide the difficulties either, and this is where a reader expecting a bully is usually surprised. He granted that the apparent discrepancies are numerous, that most of them concern numbers and dates, that many are copyists’ slips accumulated over centuries of copying by hand, and that a few resist every explanation we can currently give. The case he set beside the concession was small and specific: one sacred writer says that on a given occasion twenty-four thousand men were slain, and another says twenty-three thousand. A thousand men is not nothing, and he did not pretend the gap away. What he asked was what a discrepancy of that size actually shows about the building it sits in, and he answered with the picture he is remembered for.

(Q) "No sane man would deny that the Parthenon was built of marble, even if here and there a speck of sandstone should be detected in its structure." + Source: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. I, ch. 6, p. 170. Hodge has just finished conceding, point by point, that the alleged contradictions in Scripture are numerous, and he answers with a building he expected his readers to have seen in engravings. The paragraph closes on the verse he treats as settling the question, John 10:35 (T2).

(T3) A theology that the praying church cannot say amen to is not a true theology. + Here is something he noticed early and never stopped saying. A great many people carry two theologies at once. One of them lives in their creeds and their systems of divinity; the other lives in their prayers and their hymns, and it comes out when they are frightened or grateful. The two do not always agree, and when they disagree, Hodge thought the second was usually the truer of the two, because the Spirit was teaching there. So he proposed a working test, and it is a generous one for a man with his reputation for hard edges. Admit nothing into your theology that the devotional writings of true Christians of every denomination will not bear out. He thought you could build a thoroughly Augustinian theology out of nothing but the prayers of Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed and Arminians, because on their knees they all confess the same helplessness and the same rescue. He acted on it where it cost him. When the General Assembly of 1845 declared Roman Catholic baptism void, he went the other way, for exactly this reason: whatever Rome has corrupted, men are in fact born to God through the creed she still professes, and a church whose members reach heaven cannot be no church at all. He did not soften a word of his criticism of Rome to say it. He simply refused to let the criticism swallow the fact.

(Q) "It would be safe for a man to resolve to admit into his theology nothing which is not sustained by the devotional writings of true Christians of every denomination." + Source: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. I, Introduction, ch. 1 §6, pp. 16–17. The sentence follows his observation that men often hold one theology in their creeds and another in their prayers and hymns. He is arguing that the inward teaching of the Spirit is evidence a theologian has to take account of, which is a striking thing to find a few pages after the storehouse of facts (T1, T3).

(T4) Darwin’s theory as Darwin framed it shuts design out of nature, and a nature with no design in it has no God in it. + In 1874, at seventy-six, Hodge published a hundred and seventy-eight page pamphlet asking one question. He took his time getting to the answer, and the three words he gave have been travelling on their own ever since, usually without the sentences that immediately follow. Those sentences are the argument, so they are worth having. Start with the word that does the work. Teleology means design: the idea that a thing is as it is for the sake of some end, the way an eye is shaped as it is in order to see. Hodge said Darwinism, as its author actually presented it, has three parts: that living kinds descend with modification from earlier ones, that natural selection is the means, and that the whole process is undirected. The first two he treated as scientific questions, and not ones he was competent to settle. The third he treated as a claim about God, because that is what it is. Rule teleology out of the living world and you have not merely described how creatures came to be shaped; you have said that nobody intended them. And he was explicit that the first two do not carry the third. "It is conceded," he wrote, "that a man may be an evolutionist and yet not be an atheist and may admit of design in nature." He added that he could not himself see how to square an evolutionary account with Scripture, and he said that as his own judgment rather than as something he had proved. His verdict falls on the theory, not the man, and he says so in the same breath as the verdict. The authority he leaned on is the part most people do not expect. Asa Gray of Harvard was the leading American botanist of the day, Darwin’s chief champion in the United States, and a convinced Christian who had spent years arguing that evolution and design fit together perfectly well. Hodge did not reach for an opponent of evolution to make his case. He reached for its foremost American friend. It was Gray who had written that the proposition that the things and events in nature were not designed to be so, carried out logically, is doubtless tantamount to atheism, and Hodge quoted that sentence back at him, saying of another of Gray’s, "We thank God for that sentence." His whole case is that Gray was right about the logic and wrong about Darwin. That is where the argument still sits, a century and a half on. Christians who read Darwin as declining to speak of purpose, rather than denying it, think Hodge convicted the wrong defendant; Christians who read him as Hodge did think the conviction holds. What nobody on either side disputes is the premise underneath the quarrel, which is that teleology is not an ornament on the Christian doctrine of creation but part of its substance: the created order carries the marks of the God who made it (Romans 1:20).

(Q) "What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic; that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism." + Source: Charles Hodge, What is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874), p. 177. This is the answer the whole pamphlet has been building toward, and the qualification arrives in the same paragraph as the verdict, which is why quoting the first three words alone misrepresents him (T4). "Dr. Gray" is Asa Gray of Harvard, Darwin’s foremost American defender, whose own words Hodge is holding him to.

(Q) "Tholuck said that Schleiermacher, when sitting in the evening with his family, would often say, 'Hush, children; let us sing a hymn of praise to Christ.' Can we doubt that he is singing those praises now?" + Source: Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. II, p. 440, footnote. The footnote hangs off the opening page of his demolition of Schleiermacher’s account of Christ, the system he thought had done more damage than any other in the century. In the note he recalls attending that church in Berlin as a young man, and the hymn sheets handed out at the door, which he says were evangelical and spiritual in an eminent degree and full of gratitude to the Redeemer. Then, at the foot of a page devoted to taking the man’s theology apart, he expresses the hope of meeting him in heaven.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Princeton held his line for fifty years, and through Warfield it became the doctrine of Scripture most American evangelicals inherited. + The chair passed within the family and then within the school. His son Archibald Alexander Hodge came alongside him in 1877 and took the full duties of the chair in 1878, and when the son died in 1886 it passed to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, who had been Charles Hodge’s own student and who held it from 1887 until his own death in 1921. In 1881 the younger Hodge and Warfield published a joint article, "Inspiration," in the Presbyterian Review, and it gave the doctrine the form later generations fought over. Scripture, they argued, does not merely contain the word of God, it is the word of God, and it is without error in the original autographs. That last phrase needs unpacking, because it does a great deal of work. The autographs are the original manuscripts the biblical authors themselves wrote out. Not one of them survives. What we have instead are thousands of copies made by hand, no two of which agree in every particular, so the claim is about what God gave rather than about any manuscript a scholar can pick up and read. Critics have called that a claim conveniently placed beyond checking; defenders have answered that a doctrine of inspiration was always about what was inspired, not about what a copyist did with it afterward. The argument has been running ever since. The line ran on. J. Gresham Machen taught New Testament at Princeton from 1906, carried the same convictions into Christianity and Liberalism in 1923, and left with others to found Westminster Theological Seminary when Princeton was reorganized in 1929. When American evangelicals set out a statement on biblical inerrancy in Chicago in 1978, a century after Hodge’s death, they were working a seam he had opened.

(†) His commentaries outlived his system, and pastors who want nothing to do with Princeton still preach out of them. + Charles Spurgeon, a Baptist in London who owed Princeton nothing at all and was not in the habit of flattering Presbyterians, compiled a guide for preachers telling them frankly which commentaries were worth their money and which were not. Of Hodge on Ephesians he wrote: "Most valuable. With no writer do we more fully agree." Of the others: "The more we use Hodge, the more we value him. This applies to all his commentaries." That is the judgment that stuck. Romans, First and Second Corinthians and Ephesians are all still in print and still handed to seminary students, more than a century and a half on. The smaller book travelled further than any of them. The Way of Life ran to three hundred and eighty pages, written in 1841 for the American Sunday School Union, and it was meant to lay the gospel out for educated young people in plain words. The Union’s publishing committee had representatives from every evangelical denomination on it, and Alexander, reading the manuscript, predicted that a committee that broad would never agree to put its name on anything so definite. They adopted it unanimously. The London Religious Tract Society reprinted it at once, it was translated into Hindustani, and thirty-five thousand copies went out in America alone. Scribner arranged with Thomas Nelson of London and Edinburgh for a British edition of the Systematic Theology, made with Hodge’s cordial approval and on terms he thought generous, so it reached Scotland and Ireland from the start. His Belfast pupil Robert Watts became professor of systematic theology there and taught out of it. It has been reprinted in every generation since.

(†) His critics answer that he mistook the science of his own youth for the shape of all knowledge. + The criticism deserves its strongest form. Hodge’s confidence in the inductive method did not come out of the air; it came from Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the school of Thomas Reid that ruled American colleges when he was a student. Reid had answered the skeptics by insisting that the human mind is built to read the world reliably and that ordinary people may trust their faculties without a philosophical warrant. Take that for granted, add Bacon’s method, and the theologian’s job looks exactly like the naturalist’s: collect, sort, state. The objection is that this was a local and passing picture of knowledge that Hodge treated as the permanent one. John Williamson Nevin, a Reformed theologian at Mercersburg who had once been a Princeton man himself, argued in Hodge’s own lifetime that the church is a living organism with a history rather than a heap of doctrines, and that a method built for cataloguing specimens will always miss what grows. Later critics have added that Hodge’s boast about no new idea named a real limitation rather than a virtue, and that a text with genres and a history needs reading, not quarrying. His defenders answer on two fronts. First, the boast was about fidelity, not sterility: Hodge’s rule was never "nothing new" but "nothing the text will not carry," and he applied it against his own church’s majority more than once when the majority had gone beyond the text (T3). Second, whatever its philosophical limits, the method did what he wanted it to do. It made his reasoning visible, so that anyone could see the passages a doctrine rested on and argue with him about them. Almost nobody on either side of the argument has ever complained that Charles Hodge was unclear.

(†) Where his own record fails: he defended the slaveholder’s conscience, and he held two women as property. + This has to be set out in full, because the man himself insisted that a doctrine is judged by all the facts and not by the convenient ones. - What he argued. In an article in his own journal in 1836, reprinted later in his Essays and Reviews, Hodge held that Scripture nowhere calls slaveholding as such a sin. Christ and the apostles received slaveholders into the church without first requiring them to free anyone, he wrote, and from that he concluded that a Christian who makes slaveholding a bar to communion has gone beyond his commission. He knew perfectly well that abolitionists called the thing manstealing, robbery and piracy. He brushed that aside as denunciation rather than argument. - What he argued in the same breath. He also wrote that many of the laws of the slaveholding states are opposed to the simple principles of morals, that they are sinful and ought to be rescinded, and he named them one by one: forbidding slaves to marry, separating married couples, withholding religious and intellectual instruction, and taking a laborer’s earnings beyond his keep. He expected the gospel to end slavery gradually, as he believed it had ended serfdom, and he warned the South that the alternative was catastrophe. Within thirty years he was right about the catastrophe. - What he did. Princeton’s own historical research records that in 1828, with his family growing, he purchased a woman named Henrietta, and that a few years later he held an enslaved woman named Lena. His careful defense of the slaveholder’s conscience was not written from a distance. It was written by a slaveholder in his own study. - Why the distinction collapses. He asked whether slaveholding in the abstract is condemned in Scripture, and then applied the answer he got to a system that never existed in the abstract for a single day. Every enslaved person in America was there because of an act Scripture treats as a capital crime: "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). And the laws he asked the states to rescind were not abuses at the edges of the system. They were the system. The law of God forbids returning a runaway to the master he fled (Deuteronomy 23:15–16), and the United States returned them by federal statute. - What his own rule required. He taught that the theologian must gather every fact the Bible gives on a subject and state only what those facts will carry (T1). On this subject he weighed the household instructions of the apostles heavily and let the manstealing statute, the exodus, and Philemon press on him far less. The failure is not that he lacked a method. It is that he did not run his own. He was no defender of secession; he argued in print for the Union in 1861 and after, and he thought the institution an evil that ought to end. Neither of those facts lifts the ledger. Henrietta and Lena are on it, and so is the argument that made room for them.