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Making Our Way Back To Warfield, February 14, 2009
John Meeter collected a hundred and thirteen articles, endeavoring firstly to remind us of the voluminous writing Warfield bequeathed to us. Secondly, he wished to demonstrate that Warfield's work is still growing in public demand and scholarly respect. Thirdly, he wished to cast a wide variety of his work, best exhibiting the full range of ability that made Benjamin B Warfield the unique man he was. This handsome two-volume set is testimony to all that and an inveterate faithfulness to Scripture marked by all his studies.
HOW TO GET RID OF CHRISTIANITY (1900) :
'The historical elements of Christianity ceased to interest men; the 'ideas' alone attracted them. And it was inevitable that under the heat of this new zeal for the underlying conceptions the whole of Christianity should, in many minds, be sublimated into nothing else but 'ideas' - which they would naturally identify with their own.' 1:54-55
Warfield found that much contemporaneous theology was ahistorical, and not only in regard to church history, as now the skeptics were extending their claims to that of the historicity of the Bible being indefensible, specifically with regard to the revelation of the OT. A wave of great scholarly doubters eerily originated closer to home: Great Britain and the USA. Prone to subversive influences from culture and false prophet alike as amply demonstrated in the preceding century of antisupernaturalism, unassuming pew holders were being misled into believing these fabrications attempting to replace divine history with a merely natural one. BBW burgeoned in his indemnification of the scriptural record by showing that all attempts at reductionist or revisionist history was borne of minds independent of the Bible's witness.
DREAM (1908) :
BBW withstood the view that as prophecy became more prominent in the NT so dreams were used less frequently of God, expostulating that the divine dream never was a common occurrence in biblical times to begin with, as widely held. Warfield opposed theological literature that presented dreams in such a way as to make the receiver a communicant of God's special revelation. 'Indeed, we must extend the control of divine Providence to the whole world of dreams.' 2:165 Warfield argued instead that modern dreams might well be used intermittently by a sovereign God to direct the affairs of men, but not to the effect of producing special revelation as 'throughout Scripture the creative epochs are the supernaturalistic epochs.' 2:155 Warfield was certain a gulf-wide dissimilarity exists between providential and revelatory means, and was cautious not to be deprecatory of either.
HOW SHALL WE BAPTIZE? (1911) :
Putting in the hard yards with respect to the mode of baptism:
'In a word, not only can we not discover in the NT any authoritative directions for the right performance of the rite, but it is impossible to be quite sure precisely how the acts of baptism alluded to in the NT were performed. He who goes to the NT, therefore, in the hope of obtaining exact information as to how to baptize, is doomed to a quick disappointment.' 2:335 Exegesis of the highest conceivable standard resolved that the Gk word for baptism and baptise, 'baptizo', with its cognitive prepositions and demonstrative pronouns, was inconclusive with regard to establishing the mode of baptism in all of the NT contexts. 'We can no longer treat the theology of Greek prepositions as an exact science in the way Westcott did.' F F Bruce, The Gospel & Epistles Of John, Eerdmans, 1983, pg 200. In an era prior to a multitude of versions, by way of importing the manuscripts, BBW had no ability to foresee that his textual affirmations would effectively bring into question certain modern translation's variants.
'Certainly, never in the ancient church, and, for all that appears, never before in the middle of the 17th century, was it customary to baptize by laying fully clothed recipients down on their backs in the water.' 2:348
THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES (1903) :
'The mark of a miracle, in a word, is not that it is contra-natural, but that it is extra-natural and more specifically that it is supernatural.' 2:168
'The question as to miracles is therefore, not precisely the question of the supernatural. There are modes of the supernatural that are not miracles.' 2:170 BBW understood that all of providence is supernaturally from God and therefore that, e.g. rain, was not a miracle. Both providence and immediate miracle are works of God. Warfield sought to redress the ill-conceived understanding of God's pervasive immanence through eliciting God as the first cause: 'We may hold them to be improbable, to the verge of the unprovable; but their possibility is inherent in the very nature of God.' 2:175 I think most highly of the way BBW argued from empirical evidence to personal faith, attesting to exceptional debating skill.
PAUL'S USE OF THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE (1903) :
Experience-saturated as our culture is, it was an appeal to Scripture overturned (Rom 5: 1-21) that Warfield used to create consciousness of experience-centered faith in his time, demonstrating the profitability of all Scripture for reproof and correction, specifically in answer to the growing challenge of subjectivism.
BBW set out to investigate the in vogue 'argument from experience' which had for its response a religious phenomenon. Whilst agreeing in principle to the exegetical fact that Paul was using the believer's own experience to found scriptural assurance, 'Paul is far from justifying the position of those who will accept as true only those elements of Christian teaching which they can verify by experiment.' 2:145 Warfield categorically denied the exclusivity of the claim that experience begets proof or that to 'throw the whole weight of the evidence of Christianity upon it, or to seek to enhance its value by disparaging all other forms of evidence' was ever the apostle's intent.
In three related chapters dealing with the framers of the Westminster Confession, BBW justifiably articulated afresh their settled convictions on THE ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPHS, THE DOCTRINE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE, and THE DOCTRINE OF INSPIRATION found in the Confession, and confirmed existence of these doctrines in the framers' individual writings. 'And if we are to interpret their words in the Confession historically, we cannot do otherwise than say that they meant by the emphasis they laid on inspiration, to assert an all-pervasive divine character for Scripture as the product of inspiration, extending to the words and securing inerrancy.' 2:575-576 While it might be true to say that the origin of the term 'inerrancy' may be found with Warfield, Warfield joyfully established historical precedent in an advance echelon that had gone before old Princeton.
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