In Praise of Warfield

I’ve read a fair amount of criticism of B. B. Warfield over the last couple of months so I’ve collected some of the nice things people have said about him too:

Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones said:

His mind was so clear and his literary style so chaste and lucid that it is a real joy to read his works and one derives pleasure and profit at the same time.

http://www.bibleteacher.org/BBwartoc.htm

J. Gresham Machen said:

When I returned from Germany in 1906, I entered, as instructor in the New Testament department, into the teaching staff of Princeton Theological Seminary....Warfield was Professor of Systematic Theology (or "Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology," as the chair was then more sonorously and vigorously called). And what a wonderful man he was! His learning was prodigious. No adequate notion of its breadth can be obtained even from his voluminous collected works. Consult him on the most out-of-the-way subjects, and you would find him with the "literature" of each subject at his tongue's end and able to give you just the guidance of which you had need. Now and then, in wonderfully generous fashion, he would go out of his way to give a word of encouragement to a younger man. The old Princeton was an environment in which a man felt encouraged to do his very best.

http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/reformationink/bbwauthority.htm

Warfield’s student F. T. McGill wrote:

Dr. Warfield possessed the most perfect combination of faculties of mind and heart that I have ever known in any person … the most Christ-like man I have ever known.

http://www.evangelical-times.org/Articles/Nov01/nov01a11.htm - quoted by Thomas G. Reid Jr in Warfield Commemoration Issue, 1921-1971, Banner of Truth, 89 (Feb. 1971) p.18.

John De Witt (1842-1923), Professor of Church History at the Seminary, who had known three other notable systematic theologians of the time (Charles Hodge; W. G. T. Shedd, 1820-1894; and Henry B. Smith, 1815-1877) was ‘not only certain that Warfield knew a great deal more than any one of them, but … disposed to think that he knew more than all three of them put together’.

R. W. Cousar, Benjamin Warfield: His Christology and Soteriology, PhD thesis, Edinburgh University, 1954, p.7.

Thomas G. Reid Jr called him: “the last of the great Princeton systematic theologians.”

Henry Krabbendam said:

Warfield, undoubtedly the most distinguished representative of the Old Princeton position on Scripture, never grew weary in his extensive writings on the subject to defend the plenary, verbal inspiration, and therefore the inerrency, of the Bible. His repeated and thorough preoccupation with the inspiration of Scripture has not only placed a stamp on American Reformed and Presbyterian thought but has even gained him the accolade of being the greatest contributor ever to this theme.

‘B. B. Warfield Versus G. C. Berkouwer on Scripture’ (pp413-446) in Geisler, Norman L. (ed) Inerrancy (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1979) p413, citing God’s Inerrant Word, ed. J. W. Montgomery, (Minneapolis, Bethany Fellowship, 1974, p115

Dr Casper Wister Hodge Jr (Warfield’s successor in the chair of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary) said in 1921:

We think today of Archibald Alexander, that man of God, the first professor in this seminary; of Charles Hodge, whose Systematic Theology today remains as probably the greatest exposition of the Reformed theology in the English language; of Archibald Alexander Hodge, a man of rare popular gifts and an unusual metaphysical ability; and last but not least, excelling them all in erudition, of Dr. Warfield…. At the time of his death he was, I think, without an equal as a theologian in the English-speaking world. With Drs. Kuyper and Bavinck of the Netherlands he made up a great trio of outstanding exponents of the Reformed faith.

Dr George L. Robinson said:

Dr Warfield was the best teacher I ever had either in America or Germany. I took notes under him assiduously; and the notes I took I have used more than those of all other professors together. He taught us with rare clarity and persuasiveness. He combined quizzing and lecturing in the most marvellous way. He kept a man on his feet from twenty to thirty minutes, interrogating him and in Socratic style informing him.

Quoted in Warfield, B. B., Selected Shorter Writings, ed. Meeter, John E., vol 1, (Nutley, NJ, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970), p.viii, ix