B. B. Warfield On The Apologetic Nature Of Christian Scholarship: An Analysis Of His Solution To The Problem Of The Relationship Between Christianity And Culture

by Paul Kjoss Helseth

Paul Kjoss Helseth teaches theology and philosophy at Northwestern College, Minnesota.

In The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, the sequel to his highly acclaimed The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief,[1] historian George Marsden proposes that “mainstream American higher education should be more open to explicit discussion of the relationship of religious faith to learning.”[2] He suggests no compelling reason exists for relegating religious perspectives to the periphery of academic life because the postmodernist critique of Enlightenment standards of objectivity has neutralized the intellectual rationale for suppressing perspectives that are considered by many to be “unscientific.”[3] Since the contemporary academy “on its own terms” has no consistent grounds for rejecting perspectives that “are ultimately grounded in some faith or another,” Marsden submits that there ought to be room at the academic table for explicitly religious points of view “so long as their proponents are willing to support the rules necessary for constructive exchange of ideas in a pluralistic setting.”[4] In such a setting, i.e., one where the modus operandi is informed by strict adherence to the ideals of the liberal pragmatic academy, the idea of self-consciously Christian scholarship will be anything but outrageous simply because the rules that govern the life of the academy will be applied “equally to religious and nonreligious views” alike.[5]

While Marsden’s proposal is to be commended because it urges Christian scholars to take part in the life of the academy and to transform university life by working to improve those rules that marginalize the Christian perspective, it may also be critiqued for encouraging Christian scholars to accommodate their scholarly activity to rules of academic comportment that relegate the teaching of the Bible to the status of a mere “background belief.”[6] Christians can reflect on the implications of special revelation within the bounds of the mainstream academy, Marsden contends, but they can do so only “by talking about them conditionally.”[7] They cannot “argue on the basis of their special or private revelations,” in other words, for such revelations are “ultimately mysterious, rather than scientific,” and as such they are inaccessible to those who do not share the Christian worldview.[8] Though such accommodation will certainly afford the Christian scholar a hearing in the postmodern academy, it will do so only at the cost of equating—albeit unintentionally—the authority of Scripture with the authority of the merely subjective imaginations of the naturally religious. Such an approach leaves something to be desired, therefore, not only because it offers little of substance to prevent academic give and take from degenerating into mere “dialogue” (which Marsden rejects),[9] but more importantly because it leaves its practitioners open to the charge that they are covert, if not overt, “perspectivalists.” According to Bruce Kuklick, “perspectivalism” is an essentially postmodern form of analysis that is unbecoming in the Christian scholar because believing academics do not begin “from the conceptually dubious starting point of the perspectivalist.”[10] Whereas committed perspectivalists take part in the life of the academy because they suppose, as outspoken defenders of the naturalistic distinction between religious truth and scientific truth, that there is “no rational way” of adjudicating between the competing “truth” claims of various ways of seeing the world,[11] the Christian takes part because the Christian is convinced that the Christian perspective and the authority upon which it is based are “true,” as J. Gresham Machen would say, “in the plain man’s sense of the word ‘truth.’”[12]

How, then, should Christians who refuse to relegate the authority of Scripture to the status of a “control belief” go about integrating faith and learning?[13] What posture should Christians who refuse to empty Scripture of its objective significance assume, in other words, when interacting with scholarship that is neither exclusively theological nor overtly Christian? The purpose of this essay is neither to argue about the role of the Christian in the secular academy nor to debate about the manner in which Christian commitments should be defended in a pluralistic setting. It is, rather, to place B. B. Warfield’s (1851–1921) response to the modern era’s relocation of the divine-human nexus in its proper historical context, and thereby to set Warfield up as an example of an evangelical scholar who responded to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture in the correct fashion. Whereas the vast majority of Warfield’s contemporaries insisted that Christians should integrate faith and learning by bending Scripture “into some sort of conciliation” with the “latest pronouncements” of modern science, philosophy, and scholarship, Warfield countered with the orthodox contention that “The condition of right thinking … is … that the Christian man should look out upon the seething thought of the world from the safe standpoint of the sure Word of God.”[14] Christians, he argued, should not adopt the “very prevalent” yet heretical tendency of looking at the teachings of God’s word “from the standpoint of the world’s speculations.”[15] Rather, they should repudiate the “habit of ‘concession’” manifest in modern reconstructions of religious thinking and assimilate modern learning to Christian truth on the basis of “the fundamental fact of Christianity—that we have a firmer ground of confidence for our religious views than any science or philosophy or criticism can provide for any of their pronouncements.”[16]

While the following discussion foregoes an extensive analysis of Warfield’s theological method, it proposes that his solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture is exemplary not only because it encourages Christians to “seek” and “embrace” truth wherever it is to be found, but also because it tempers this encouragement with the realization that the seeking and embracing of truth must not be compromised by the pagan tendency to erect “‘Modern discovery’ and ‘modern thought’ … into the norm of truth.”[17] “No one should greet truth from whatever source with more readiness and more enthusiasm than [the Christian scholar],” Warfield argued, for the Christian scholar

has in his hands the norm of truth, in the Word of God. This is the Ariadne clue by means of which he can thread his way through the labyrinths of the world’s thought; this is the touchstone by the art of which he may choose the good and refuse the evil. So long as he clings to it he will build up the temple of truth, whencesoever he quarries the stones. When he loses hold of it, however, he descends into the arena and takes his hap with other men; and going his own way, it is not strange that he is often found with his back turned to God.[18]

I. Truth vs. Experience

Warfield’s views on the integration of faith and learning were formed in an intellectual environment that was being overwhelmed by a struggle over what ideals and values would gain cultural supremacy and dominate in the public square. Gary Scott Smith suggests that “in the years between the Civil War and World War I, a battle for cultural supremacy broke out on many fronts in America. Humanism, the claims of scientism, and intellectual disdain for the Bible wrestled with theism, both Christian and Jewish, for control of American public life.”[19] This cultural battle did not arise in a vacuum, however. It was the immediate manifestation of the more profound crisis of religious authority manifest in the nineteenth-century debate over the essence of Christianity, particularly as it impinges upon the nature of theology and its relationship to religious belief and practice. Whereas orthodox scholars insisted that religion and theology are the parallel products of the objective truth of God “operative in the two spheres of life and thought,”[20] more progressive scholars were compelled by their accommodation of Christianity to abandon to science the whole realm of objective truth, and consequently to regard religion and theology as distinct rather than as intimately related entities.[21] Theology, they argued, must not be regarded as that “science of God” which systematizes the objective truths that underlie and produce religious expression.[22] It must be conceived of, rather, as that “science of faith” or “science of religion” which supplies—at the behest of the “provisional findings” of modern science, philosophy, and scholarship, or that which is ultimately the subjective product of the human soul—merely “the intellectual interpretation” of a really inexpressible subjective experience for a particular time and place.[23] If theology is to sustain vital rather than sterile religious life in each successive age, progressive scholars reasoned, then it must articulate religious truth in a manner that is attuned to the zeitgeist, i.e., to the progressive activity of the divine within nature, history, and culture.

While orthodox scholars were not completely unaware of the potential benefits of switching the discrimen in theology (or that “imaginative construal” of how God is authoritatively present among the faithful)[24] from an objective to a subjective base, they insisted that it could not be sanctioned for two distinct yet interrelated reasons.[25] It could not be sanctioned, they argued, not only because it confounds the objective subject matter of genuinely theological science with “the subjective experiences of the human heart,”[26] but more importantly because it reduces the Christian religion to a natural phenomenon by “casting … men back upon their ‘religious experience,’ corporate or individual, as their sole trustworthy ground of religious convictions.”[27] Although orthodox scholars acknowledged that natural religion is valid religion insofar as it expresses the natural religious tendency of the human heart, they claimed that it is inadequate to the needs of fallen sinners simply because it lacks an effectual soteriological component. Whereas Christianity is soteriologically sufficient precisely because it is based upon a supernatural act of God in history, natural religion cannot meet the supernatural need of the sinful soul because it supplies merely the “natural foundation” for Christianity’s “supernatural structure.”[28] That is to say, it is simply the creature’s response to the perception of God in nature and conscience, and as such it is “unequal” to the “unnatural” conditions brought about by the fall of Adam.[29] Since orthodox scholars were convinced that external, supernatural truth “is the very breath of Christianity’s nostrils,”[30] it follows that they repudiated the progressive solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture not simply because it transformed the Christian religion into “a veritable nose of wax, which may be twisted in every direction as it may serve our purpose,”[31] but rather because it emptied Christian belief of its ability to save fallen sinners from the consequences of sin by throwing them “back on what we can find within us alone.”[32] When natural religion in any form “pushes itself forward as an adequate religion for sinners,” orthodox scholars maintained, “it presses beyond its mark and becomes, in the poet’s phrase, ‘procuress to the lords of hell.’”[33]

In light of the crisis of religious authority manifest in the modern debate over the nature of theology and its relationship to religious belief and practice, it follows that the relocation of the divine-human nexus not only had a tremendous impact upon basic understandings of the subject matter of theological science, but it thereby had a revolutionary impact upon what the goal of the entire theological enterprise was supposed to be. Whereas orthodox scholars were committed to the establishment and systematic explication of an external body of truth that was considered to be the objective basis of saving faith, more progressive scholars resolved to adapt theology to the modern zeitgeist on the basis of their supposition that the traditional standards of external authority had been discredited by the theological, philosophical, and scientific developments of the modern era. The crisis of religious authority that blossomed into the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s must be regarded, therefore, as that struggle which was marked on the one hand by the orthodox theologians’ opposition to theological process and change, and on the other by the liberal or modernist theologians’ (i.e., the New Theologians) accommodation of Christianity to modern culture.[34]Whereas the former group insisted that the modern preoccupation with theological reconstruction was part and parcel of a reduction of the Christian religion to a merely natural phenomenon, the latter argued that orthodoxy’s stubborn refusal to make theology relevant to the thought-world of the modern era manifested nothing less than a gross insensitivity to the immanent activity of the divine within nature, history, and culture, as well as an implicit relegation of the Christian religion to the realm of impotence and meaninglessness. The orthodox refusal to state Christian belief in terms of modern thought could be viewed as nothing less, they maintained, than the kiss of death to the religious life of the Christian community.

II. The Authority of Scripture and the Posture of Christian Scholarship

B. B. Warfield’s participation in this cultural as well as theological controversy was inspired by his rejection of what he considered to be the heretical spirit of the liberal attempt not to assimilate modern learning to Christian truth, but rather to “desupernaturalize” Christianity so as to make it more palatable to the modern mind.[35] Christians must have an attitude “of eager hospitality toward the researches of the world,”[36] he argued, not so that they can determine when a reconstruction of religious thinking is in order,[37] but rather so they can “reason the world into acceptance of the ‘truth’” through the superior science of redeemed thought.[38] “The Christian,” he maintained,

by virtue of the palingenesis working in him, stands undoubtedly on an indefinitely higher plane of thought than that occupied by sinful man as such. And he must not decline, but use and press the advantage which God has thus given him. He must insist, and insist again, that his determinations, and not those of the unilluminated, must be built into the slowly rising fabric of human science. Thus will he serve, if not obviously his own generation, yet truly all the generations of men.[39]

While the consensus of critical opinion would have us believe that the aggressive nature of this solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture is evidence of an accommodation of theology to the rationalistic assumptions of an “alien philosophy,”[40] in fact, Warfield represents the ideal in Christian scholarship for three reasons. First, his solution is based upon the idea that the “source and norm of truth”—“the only really solid basis of all … thinking”—is found in the Word of God.[41] Although Warfield acknowledged that there may be “other sources of knowl edge from which [the Christian] may learn what is true,” he nonetheless insisted that “there is no source of knowledge which will rank with [the Christian] in authority above the written Word of God, or to which he can appeal with superior confidence.”[42] When the Christian comes into contact with “modes of thought and tenets originating elsewhere than in the Scriptures of God,” therefore, “the teachings of God’s word” must be esteemed as authoritative “over against all the conjectural explanations of phenomena by men.”[43] To do otherwise, he argued, i.e., to cede authority to the provisional conclusions of modern scholarship by modifying the teachings of God’s word “at the dictation of any ‘man-made opinion,’” is to fall prey to “the fruitful mother of heresy.”[44]

If Warfield’s solution is ideal in the first place because it refuses to give “decisive weight” to modes of thought that originate elsewhere than in the word of God, it is so, second, because it acknowledges that esteeming Scrip ture as the norm of truth compels the Christian scholar to “seek and embrace” truth wherever it is found.[45] As a Reformed scholar, Warfield was convinced that “zeal in investigation” is one of the “marked characteristics” of Christian scholarship because Christians alone have the moral ability to handle the “touchstone” of truth—Scripture—correctly.[46] In the context of the current discussion, this means at least two things. First, Christians zealously pursue truth “in every sphere”[47] because they recognize that the norm of truth that they hold in their hands is not “a substitute for general revelation, but only … a preparation for its proper assimilation.”[48] Special revelation was not given, they maintain, “to supplant a strictly natural knowledge [of God] by a strictly supernatural knowledge,” but rather “so that the general revelation of God may be reflected purely in minds which now are blinded to its reflection by sin.”[49] Second, it means that Christians engage aggressively in the life of the mind because they are confident that Christians alone have the moral ability to reason “rightly,” i.e., to “see” through the “spectacles” of Scripture.[50] Whereas progressive scholars bend Scripture into conciliation with the latest pronouncements of modern scholarship because they look at the teachings of God’s word from the standpoint of the world’s speculations, the regenerate assimilate modern learning to Christian truth because their scholarship is informed by “the better scientific outlook,”[51] i.e., by the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely, glorious. Christians stand calmly “over against the world,” there fore, not only because they recognize that “the Christian view of the world” is true, but more importantly because they are convinced that they have no reason to fear the “contention of men.”[52] They have the truth, they can discern the truth in all things, and they are confident that everything they encounter will be assimilated to the truth by sifting the good and rejecting the bad.

Finally, Warfield’s solution is ideal because it recognizes that assimilating modern learning to Christian truth is the means to moving the church of God forward in her apologetic task. Here Warfield distinguished between the terms “apologies” and “apologetics.” Whereas “apologies” are defenses of Christianity “against either all assailants, actual or conceivable, or some particular form or instance of attack,” “apologetics” is “a positive and constructive science” that undertakes “not the defense, not even the vindication, but the establishment … of that knowledge of God which Christianity professes to embody and seeks to make efficient in the world.”[53] While “apologies” thus derive their value from that which is incidental to the propagation of the Christian religion, namely the defense of Christianity against “opposing points of view,” “apologetics” is of the essence of propagation.[54] Indeed, apologetics

finds its deepest ground … not in the accidents which accompany the efforts of true religion to plant, sustain, and propagate itself in this world … but in the fundamental needs of the human spirit. If it is incumbent on the believer to be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is impossible for him to be a believer without a reason for the faith that is in him; and it is the task of apologetics to bring this reason out in his consciousness and make its validity plain.[55]

Seen in this light, Warfield’s solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture makes clear that assimilating modern learning to Christian truth does not merely sustain the task of apologetics; it constitutes the task of apologetics. It follows, therefore, that “the men of the palingenesis” must engage aggressively in the life of the mind not to argue the unregenerate into the kingdom of God, but rather to establish the integrity of “the Christian view of the world” by urging their “‘stronger and purer thought’ continuously, and in all its details, upon the attention of men.”[56] In so doing, they bring the “thinking world” into subjection to the gospel of Christ, and thereby lay the groundwork for the Spirit to work saving faith where he sovereignly chooses, i.e., to “give to a faith which naturally grows out of the proper grounds of faith, that peculiar quality which makes it saving faith.”[57] While some scholars will no doubt object that such an approach owes more to Enlightenment philosophy than it does to a consistently Reformed epistemology, Warfield’s position in fact is incom prehensible apart from his clear stand within the epistemological mainstream of the Reformed camp. Indeed, such an approach is virtually unintelligible apart from Warfield’s forthright endorsement of the classical Reformed distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel, and as such it has little if anything to do with an accommodation of theology to the forbidden fruits of Enlightenment thought.[58]

III. The Relationship between Warfield and Kuyper

To this point we have seen that Warfield’s solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture represents the ideal in Christian scholarship for three reasons: It esteems Scripture as the norm of truth; it acknowledges that this esteem compels the Christian scholar to seek and embrace truth wherever it is to be found; and it insists that the seeking and embracing of truth is the means of moving the church of God forward to joyous conquest. Having thus distinguished between the assimilation of modern learning to Christian truth on the one hand and the accommodation of Christianity to modern culture on the other, some attention should be given to the Kuyperian and quasi-Kuyperian pronouncements that pervade Warfield’s writings. Given the intensity of the contemporary debate over how Christians should go about integrating faith and learning, such an accounting will amplify the genius of Warfield’s conception of Christian scholarship, for it will demonstrate that the aggressive nature of his solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture was informed not by an implicit rationalism, but rather by an unambiguous affirmation of the supremacy of the Christian worldview.[59]

In his recent analysis of six lectures delivered by Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) at Princeton Theological Seminary in the fall of 1898, Peter Heslam suggests that despite the apparent differences between Warfield and Kuyper on key issues of religious epistemology, Warfield’s conception of Calvinism “was … indebted to Kuyper’s exposition of it at Princeton” in at least four ways.[60] According to Heslam, Kuyper’s Stone Lectures helped Warfield to understand that Calvinism “represented a broad movement in society and culture, not restricted to the church or doctrine; that it emanated outwards from its central source in the religious consciousness; that this religious consciousness represented the purest and most advanced stage in the develop ment of religion; and that Calvinism offered the best prospects for the future of Christianity.”[61] Heslam then goes on to cite the following quotation as evidence that Kuyper’s influence on Warfield was so profound that Warfield eventually came round to acquiescing even in Kuyper’s insistence “on the radical influence of worldview on [the] scientific enterprise.”[62] Commenting on the publication of a series of lectures delivered by James Orr at Princeton Seminary in 1905, Warfield enthusiastically and, as Heslam would have us believe, uncharacteristically responded that,

Their publication … will carry to a wider audience their fine exposition of the fundamentals of Christian anthropology and their vigorous protest against a tendency, apparently growing among us, “to wholesale surrender of vital aspects of Christian doctrine at the shrine of what is regarded as ‘the modern view of the world’” (p. vi). What renders this protest most valuable is that it is particularly directed against weak evasions of the issue raised by the conflict between the Christian view of the world and that “congeries of conflicting and often mutually irreconcilable views” which is commonly spoken of as the “modern view.” Dr. Orr has the courage to recognize and assert the irreconcilableness of the two views and the impossibility of a compromise between them; and to undertake the task of showing that the Christian view in the forum of science itself is the only tenable one. This task he accomplishes with distinguished success: and this is the significance of the volume.[63]

While Heslam’s comprehensive examination of Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism is noteworthy for its incisive treatment of the Dutch theologian’s genius, his assessment of the significance of the above quotation cannot be sustained because it is based upon the assumption that Warfield and Kuyper in fact disagreed on key issues of religious epistemology. According to Heslam, Warfield and his colleagues at Old Princeton were at epistemological odds with their more consistently Reformed brethren from the Netherlands because the Princetonians were scholastic empiricists whose “infatuation” with Enlightenment categories of thought left them without the epistemological wherewithal to affirm the scientific superiority of the Christian view of the world.[64] Warfield’s “glowing” review of Orr is regarded as evidence, therefore, not of continuity with the assumptions of the Princeton tradition, but rather of a deviation from those assumptions, and thus as evidence that Warfield was won over—in principle if not in fact—to the presuppositional views of the Renaissance man from Amsterdam.[65] Though Heslam concedes that Warfield’s more mature writings continue to affirm the value of apologetics, he nonetheless insists that these writings manifest a “less triumphalistic,” perhaps domesticated Warfield, chastened by the realization that there is more to religious epistemology than the cold analysis of brute facts.[66]

What, then, should be made of Heslam’s assessment? Were Warfield’s Kuyperian and quasi-Kuyperian pronouncements evidence that he was inspired by Kuyper to move away from the assumptions of Old Princeton in a more presuppositional direction? Two factors, both of which can be found in Warfield’s pre-1898 writings, suggest answers to these questions. The first has to do with Warfield’s insistence that the regenerate alone can see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely glorious. Whereas the consensus of critical opinion would have us believe that Warfield stood outside of the epistemological mainstream of the Reformed camp because he was indifferent to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology, Warfield, in fact, was thoroughly Reformed because these concerns were of critical importance in his religious epistemology despite its apparently rationalistic rigor. The justification for this contention is to be found in the moral, rather than the merely rational, nature of his thought. Like his predecessors at Princeton Seminary, Warfield was convinced that the operation of the intellect involves the “whole soul”—mind, will and emotions—rather than the rational faculty alone. He concluded, therefore, that the regenerate alone can see revealed truth for what it objectively is, because only in the souls of the regenerate is there “perfect interaction” between the objective and subjective factors that impinge upon religious epistemology and underlie religious life and practice.[67]

One of the principal texts that substantiates this claim is an extremely significant yet often overlooked essay entitled, “Authority, Intellect, Heart” (1896). In this article, published a full two and a half years before Kuyper delivered his Stone Lectures in the fall of 1898, Warfield outlined the anthro pological context within which his epistemological views must be interpreted. The key passage, which sets his endorsement of the classical Reformed distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel on top of his clear commitment to the unitary operation of the soul, reads as follows:

Authority, intellect, and the heart are the three sides of the triangle of truth. How they interact is observable in any concrete instance of their operation. Authority, in the Scriptures, furnishes the matter which is received in the intellect and operates on the heart. The revelations of the Scriptures do not terminate upon the intellect. They were not given merely to enlighten the mind. They were given through the intellect to beautify the life. They terminate on the heart. Again, they do not, in affecting the heart, leave the intellect untouched. They cannot be fully understood by the intellect, acting alone. The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God. They must first convert the soul before they are fully comprehended by the intellect. Only as they are lived are they understood. Hence the phrase, “Believe that you may understand,” has its fullest validity. No man can intellectually grasp the full meaning of the revelations of authority, save as the result of an experience of their power in life. Hence, that the truths concerning divine things may be so comprehended that they may unite with a true system of divine truth, they must be: first, revealed in an authoritative word; second, experienced in a holy heart; and third, formulated by a sanctified intellect. Only as these three unite, then, can we have a true theology. And equally, that these same truths may be so received that they beget in us a living religion, they must be: first, revealed in an authoritative word; second, apprehended by a sound intellect; and third, experienced in an instructed heart. Only as the three unite, then, can we have vital religion.[68]

If Heslam’s assessment does not account for Warfield’s epistemological assumptions, it also fails to address Warfield’s pre-1898 opposition to defending the “minimum” of Christianity. In “Heresy and Concession,” an article that was published in early 1896, Warfield announced that he was opposed to any approach to doing apologetics that is based upon the assumption that the “minimum” of Christianity is all “that is worth defending, or all that is capable of defense.”[69] What he meant by this opposition is later made clear in his “Introduction to Francis R. Beattie’s Apologetics” (1903), perhaps his most sustained critique of the Kuyperian approach to apologetics. The apologist’s function, he argued, “is not to vindicate for us the least that we can get along with, and yet manage to call ourselves Christians; but to validate the Christian ‘view of the world,’ with all that is contained in the Christian ‘view of the world,’ for the science of men.”[70] Apologetics, Warfield explained,

does not concern itself with how this man or that may best be approached to induce him to make a beginning of Christian living, or how this age or that may most easily be brought to give a hearing to the Christian conception of the world. It concerns itself with the solid objective establishment, after a fashion valid for all normally working minds and for all ages of the world in its developing thought, of those great basal facts which constitute the Christian religion; or, better, which embody in the concrete the entire knowledge of God accessible to men, and which, therefore, need only explication by means of the further theological disciplines in order to lay openly before the eyes of men the entirety of the knowledge of God within their reach.[71]

But what, we must ask, was at the heart of this opposition to defending the “minimum” of Christianity? Why was Warfield so opposed, in other words, to reducing the all-encompassing task of “apologetics” to the level of a bare “apology”? The answer to these questions goes to the core of the matter and it is to be found back in “Heresy and Concession,” the pre-1898 essay in which Warfield articulates the methodological assumptions that inform his aggressive response to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture. Warfield was opposed to defending the “minimum” of Christianity, in short, because he was convinced that the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is extends beyond the scope of Scripture itself to all truth, be it scientific or religious. The basis for this contention stems from his understanding of the authority of Scripture. Scripture, Warfield argued, is not only the “source and norm” of religious truth, but it is the “interpreter” and “corrector” of modern thought as well.[72] It is, in other words, the standard for measuring “right thinking” of all kinds, and as such it is “superior in point of authority” to the provisional conclusions of modern scholarship.[73] Since Warfield was convinced that the view of the world that is mediated through Scripture is objectively, as opposed to merely subjectively or pragmatically, true, he urged the regenerate to engage aggressively in the life of the mind not so that they can impose a partisan interpretation of revealed truth upon a credulous public, but rather to establish the integrity of the only view of the world that accords with what is objectively true, i.e., with the way things objectively are.

In light of Warfield’s pre-Stone inclination to affirm the preeminence of the Christian view of the world in all areas of learning, it follows that the presence of Kuyperian elements in Warfield’s writings is evidence not that Warfield was inspired by Kuyper to move away from the assumptions of Old Princeton in a presuppositional direction. It is evidence, rather, that there was perhaps more in common between the epistemological views of Warfield and Kuyper, of Old Princeton and Amsterdam, than has hitherto been acknowledged. If this revisionist interpretation has any merit, it indi cates that the epistemological assumptions that have typically been regarded as the coin of the realm in the Kuyperian camp were in fact always present in the Princeton tradition. More important, it explains why Warfield was confounded by Kuyper’s reticence to engage in an offensive apologetic. Given the probable continuity between Warfield and Kuyper on key issues of religious epistemology, it is more than likely that Kuyper’s approach to apologetics was “a standing matter of surprise” to Warfield not because Kuyper refused to advance the kingdom by appealing “to the natural man’s ‘right reason’ to judge of the truth of Christianity,”[74] as the consensus of critical opinion would have us believe. It was a matter of surprise, rather, because he was reluctant to do what Warfield believed must of necessity be done even when there is “no opposition in the world to be encountered and no contradiction to be overcome,”[75] namely establish the integrity of the grounds of faith by urging “‘his stronger and purer thought’ continuously, and in all its details, upon the attention of men.”[76] It is entirely possible, therefore, that it was Kuyper’s perceived indifference to the necessity of establishing the grounds of faith, i.e., his perceived tip of the hat to an astonishing fideistic tendency, that led Warfield to conclude that

no mistake could be greater than to lead [the men of the palingenesis] to decline to bring their principles into conflict with those of the unregenerate in the prosecution of the common task of man. It is the better science that ever in the end wins the victory; and palingenetic science is the better science; and to it belongs the victory. How shall it win its victory, however, if it declines the conflict? In the ordinance of God, it is only in and through this conflict that the edifice of truth is to rise steadily onwards to its perfecting.[77]

IV. Implications for the Integration of Faith and Learning

Having proposed a viable explanation for the presence of Kuyperian and quasi-Kuyperian pronouncements in Warfield’s response to the modern era’s relocation of the divine-human nexus, it remains to be seen how Warfield’s solution is relevant to the contemporary evangelical debate about the integration of faith and learning. Warfield’s solution is of relevance for three reasons. In the first place, it encourages Christian scholars to engage zealously in the life of the mind without allowing naturalistic scholarship to define the objective realm around which the merely subjective “stuff” of religion must orbit. Although Warfield acknowledged that “all truth is God’s”[78] and that “men of all sorts … work side by side at the common task” of building up the temple of truth,[79] he nonetheless insisted that true interpretations of reality—the best interpretations of reality—are possible only when general revelation is looked at through the spectacles of special revelation. In contrast to most interpretations of American church history, Warfield’s epistemology here shows remarkable continuity with that of consistently Reformed scholars like Jonathan Edwards.[80] Like Edwards before him, Warfield was convinced that genuinely Christian scholarship depended upon the new birth. The regenerate alone can see revealed truth for what it objectively is, he argued, because the regenerate alone can discern the spiritual excellence of what is rationally perceived by looking at it through the spectacles of Scripture.[81] Since Warfield was convinced that Christians alone have the moral ability to “see and savor God in every branch of learning,”[82] he concluded that they must engage aggressively in the life of the mind not so that they can “find a place for theology within the picture of reality defined by scientific naturalists,” but rather to assimilate modern learning to Christian truth through the superior science of redeemed thought.[83]

If Warfield’s solution is relevant in the first place because it is fundamentally opposed to both methodological naturalism on the one hand and anti-intellectualism on the other, it is relevant, second, because it suggests that the contemporary division between Warfieldians and Kuyperians has its genesis in the unresolved—and misunderstood—tension between Warfield and Kuyper. When we consider the contemporary debate in light of Warfield’s clear stand within the epistemological mainstream of the Reformed camp, it becomes immediately clear that at the heart of the tension between Warfieldians and Kuyperians is the unresolved question of the relationship between regeneration and scholarly activity. Do the regenerate simply see revealed truth differently than the unregenerate, and are the views of the unregenerate thus just as viable as those of the regenerate? Or, do the regenerate see revealed truth for what it objectively is, and do they as a consequence have a rational basis for claiming that the views of the unregenerate do not accord with objective reality despite the fact that they follow logically from their starting premises? While it is no doubt true that precisely how general and special revelation should interact in the minds of the regenerate is a question that warrants ongoing consideration, to suggest that the regenerate and the unregenerate look at general revelation in the same manner—to suggest, in other words, that the views of the unregenerate are just a viable as those of the regenerate—is to suggest that the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is will have little or no consequence in the prosecution of the task of Christian scholarship. A further implication, moreover, is that the Christian religion is only subjectively or pragmatically true, and thus of no more significance than the merely subjective aspirations of the naturally religious.[84]

Finally, Warfield’s response to the modern era’s relocation of the divine-human nexus is relevant because it calls attention to the inherently slippery nature of the enterprise he confidently referred to as “progressive orthodoxy.”[85] Though Warfield was convinced that he lived in an age in which the primary responsibility of the church involved establishing the integrity of the biblical worldview over and against the critical reconstructions of those who “cheerfully give up the substance, but never the name of Christianity,”[86] he nonetheless “had no quarrel … with the notion that men’s understanding of Christianity will advance as their understanding of both natural and special revelation is corrected and enlarged.”[87] Indeed, he refused to equate the “construction” of theology with the “destruction” of theology,[88] and as a consequence he insisted that the science of theology should proceed into the future “on the basis of the already ascertained truth of the past.”[89] Whereas scholars like Mark Noll laud Warfield and his colleagues at Old Princeton for holding, among other things, “that the findings of science should be enlisted to help discover proper interpretations of Scripture,”[90] others like David Hall are convinced that Warfield jettisoned proper interpretations of Scripture because he inconsistently allowed science to have “at least theoretical preeminence over Scripture, at least as an intermediate hermeneutic.”[91] He was willing to suggest, in other words, “that if an ‘indisputable’ result of thorough induction manifestly contradicted an existing doctrine of the church, the theologian must reconsider his interpretation of God’s word, and see if he has not misunderstood it.”[92]

While the question of whether Noll or Hall is correct in his assessment of Warfield is beyond the scope of this essay, what is of immediate relevance is the question of how those who affirm that “all truth is God’s truth” should distinguish “God’s truth” from “Satan’s error.”[93] How, specifically, should those who have the ability to “reason rightly” interact with the conclusions of naturalistic scholarship, and when, more importantly, does their attempt to sift the good and reject the bad cross the line that separates assimilation from accommodation?[94] Commenting on the inherently conflicted nature of conservative scholarship that makes Scripture “potentially nonfalsifiable” by reading the Bible “through the lens of empirical science,” John Mark Reynolds and Paul Nelson articulate the point that all who are concerned about the absolute authority of Scripture would be wise to consider.[95] “There is something troubling,” they argue,

about the fact that there is no built-in limit to the amount of accommodation [i.e., assimilation] possible. What is meant by the statement “The Bible is true” if accommodation [i.e., assimilation] proceeds past a certain point? People holding this view, or any view like it, would need to clarify how far they are willing to stretch language before giving up the initial premise. As the argument stands now, the Bible could theoretically be made to say the opposite of its “plain sense” and still be defended as “scientifically accurate.” This is disconcerting.[96]

While no party to the contemporary debate has any intention of undermining either the integrity or the authority of Scripture, the controversial nature of Warfield’s solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture is a reminder to scholars on both sides of the divide that the line between assimilation and accommodation—between “progres sive orthodoxy” and “modernism”—is razor thin and difficult to discern. As such, Warfield’s response to the modern era’s relocation of the divine-human nexus is finally relevant because it is a call to those who have the mind of Christ and hold the norm of truth in their hands to do scholarship in a manner that self-consciously accords with presuppositions that are consistently Christian.[97]

Notes

1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
2. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.
3. Ibid., 30.
4. Ibid., 30, 45.
5. Ibid., 57.
6. Ibid., 48-51.
7. Ibid., 52.
8. Ibid., 48, 50.
9. Cf. ibid., 45, 57-58.
10. Bruce Kuklick, “On Critical History,” Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds., in Religious Advocacy and American History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 59–61.
11. Ibid., 59.
12. J. Gresham Machen, “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance,” God Transcendent, ed. Ned Stonehouse (1949; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 165. The word “perspectivalism” can be used in both benign and pernicious senses. In the benign sense, it refers to that view of epistemology that simply acknowledges that all truth claims are grounded in metaphysical perspectives or “worldviews.” In the pernicious sense—the sense in which I am using the word above—it refers to that far more foundational view of epistemology that denies even the possibility of absolute truth by reducing the worldviews that inform truth claims to the level of subjective preference. Such perspectivalism is the kiss of death to Christian scholarship, I contend, not only because it has its genesis in a naturalistic understanding of knowledge, but more importantly because it eradicates the basis for claiming that the Christian worldview is superior—both objectively and subjectively—to all others. Let me make clear at this point that I am in no way suggesting that Marsden is a perspectivalist in this sense of the term. I not only recognize that he explicitly rejects this understanding of perspectivalism, but more importantly I applaud and admire his unambiguous stand for Christian truth in the postmodern academy. At the level of method, though, I wonder if his opposition to “tendentious” scholarship lends itself to asking Christians to act AS IF they are perspectivalists in this sense of the term. Given the non-subjectivistic nature of the Christian faith commitment, how do Christians in the postmodern academy go about affirming the objective truthfulness of the Christian worldview when doing so necessarily involves engaging in “tendentious” scholarship, which Marsden insists has no place in the academy? While I do not have anything resembling a definitive answer to this question, I do not see what strategic benefit there is in playing by rules that deem claims to absolute truth out of bounds from the start. See Marsden’s discussion of “Christian schizophrenia” in Outrageous Idea, chap. 3.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. B. B. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, 2 vols., ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970 and 1973), 2: 676, 677, 674–75.
15. Ibid., 675.
16. Ibid., 675, 677. Assimilating modern learning to Christian truth involves sifting “the good” and “‘discarding whatever is at variance with the gospel.’” Cf. 2: 675, 672.
17. Ibid., 674, 676-77.
18. Ibid., 674.
19. Gary Scott Smith, The Seeds of Secularization: Calvinism, Culture, and Pluralism in America 1870–1915 (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1985), 39. See especially chap. 3, “The Clash of Worldviews: Secularism vs. Calvinism.”
20. B. B. Warfield, “Authority, Intellect, Heart,” Shorter Writings, 2: 668; cf. B. B. Warfield, review of Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought, by Seven Oxford Men, Critical Reviews, vol. 10, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1932; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 325.
21. Cf. John William Stewart, “The Tethered Theology: Biblical Criticism, Common Sense Philosophy, and the Princeton Theologians, 1812–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990), 79. The developments of the modern era that led to the separation of the epistemological realms of religion and science include: (1) The epistemological skepticism of Kant, cf. William Livingstone, “The Princeton Apologetic as Exemplified by the Work of Benjamin B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen: A Study of American Theology, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1948), 117–18; Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981), 103. (2) The anti-intellectualism of Schleiermacher and the Romantic tradition, cf. Livingstone, “The Princeton Apologetic,” 68; Stewart, “The Tethered Theology,” 77–79; Lloyd Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), 37. (3) The Absolute Idealism of Hegel, the naturalistic standards of evolutionary theory, and the relativizing influence of the historical consciousness, cf. Kenneth Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 8–12; Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition, 22–24; Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 (University of Alabama Press, 1982), 17. (4) The progressive developments within American evangelicalism, cf. Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition, 69; William Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 13, 48; George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750–1858 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994). According to Kenneth Cauthen these developments fostered the formulation of three principles that together characterize the template of the modern mind. These principles, the endorsement of which led to the emergence of the New Theology, are continuity (due to evolutionary theory and Hegel’s Abso lute Idealism), autonomy (the adoption of an internal rather than an external source of authority), and dynamism (because of continuity, all external standards of religious authority are provi sional because all things are in the process of dynamic change). He suggests that the dominating motif of the era—that motif which was responsible for the critical importance of the other two—was that of continuity. Continuity, he contends, manifests itself “in every area of thought and permeates all liberal theology.” Cauthen, Impact of American Religious Liberalism, 9. That Warfield would have agreed with Cauthen at this point is clear. For Warfield’s take on how the concept of evolution has fostered the virtual obliteration of “a distinguishable supernatural,” cf. B. B. Warfield, “Christianity and Revelation,” Shorter Writings, 1: 26–7; B. B. Warfield, “Christian Supernaturalism,” Studies in Theology, vol. 9, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1932; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 28–33.
22. Orthodox scholars were convinced that just as systematic theology forms “the crown and head” of theological science, so too theology forms “the apex of the pyramid of the sciences by which the structure [of truth] is perfected.” Since the subject matter of genuinely theological science “indirectly” includes “all the facts of nature and history,” orthodox scholars concluded that the scope of theological science must not be restricted to that which is merely the subjective product of the human soul. They repudiated, in other words, the modern distinction between religious truth and scientific truth as invalid. B. B. Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” Studies in Theology, 64, 71, 72–74. On the relationship between the “parts” which constitute the organism of “theology,” cf. B. B. Warfield, “The Task and Method of Systematic Theology,” Studies in Theology, 91–92.
23. Warfield, review of Foundations, 322–24. The accommodation of Christianity to scholarly conclusions that signal when a new theological interpretation of religious experience is needed is really an implicit appeal to the authority of human nature. This is because what is meant by modern thought “is our own ‘science, philosophy, and scholarship’—which seems to be only a naive way of transferring the claim of infallibility from ‘Christianity’ and ‘its theology’ to ourselves.”
24. David Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 205–6.
25. One of the potential benefits is the elimination of the need to integrate faith and learning. If it is indeed true that religious truth is subjective merely then there is no compelling need to relate it to the “objective” conclusions of modern scholarship. Warfield clearly believed that such anti-intellectualism is “the indirect product of unbelief, among men who would fain hold their Christian profession in the face of an onset of unbelief, which they feel too weak to withstand.” In this regard, cf. B. B. Warfield, “Evading the Supernatural,” Shorter Writings, 2: 681.
26. B. B. Warfield, “Apologetics,” Studies in Theology, 7; cf. Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” 56. Obviously, this confusion is the logical consequence of abandoning to science the whole realm of objective truth.
27. B. B. Warfield, “Mysticism and Christianity,” Studies in Theology, 658. The attack upon the principle of external authority was waged on two fronts: The metaphysical side—“in general, a neo-Kantianism mediated through Albrecht Ritschl”; and the “mystical” side—which stressed “subjective religious experience as the norm and authority of Christian faith.” Cf. Livingstone, “The Princeton Apologetic,” 175–80; Warfield, “Apologetics,” 14–5. On the value judgments which cultivate the religious life of the Christian community, cf. B. B. War field, “The Latest Phase of Historical Rationalism,” Studies in Theology, 591–605; B. B. Warfield, review of Mystik und Geschichtliche Religion, by Wilhelm Frensenius, Critical Reviews, 357–58; B. B. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2:94. On how the mystic substitutes “his religious experience for the objective revelation of God recorded in the written Word,” cf. Warfield, “Mysticism and Christianity,” 651, 655. For a good summary statement of the relationship between Christianity, mysticism, and historical rationalism, cf. Warfield, review of Mystik, 362–65. On the ontology that calls the semen deitatis into action, cf. 359. On the relationship between the adoption of an internal standard of authority and autonomy, cf. Cauthen, Impact of American Religious Liberalism, 12ff; and Averill, American Theology, 36ff. On the relationship between an internal standard of authority and natural religion, cf. B. B. Warfield, review of Mysticism in Christianity, by W. K. Fleming, and Mysticism and Modern Life, by John W. Buckham, Critical Reviews, 366–67; B. B. Warfield, “Recent Reconstructions of Theology,” Shorter Writings, 2:291, 293; Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” 57; Warfield, “Mysticism and Christianity,” 656, 658.
28. Warfield, “Mysticism and Christianity,” 661.
29. Ibid., 659-61; cf. B. B. Warfield, “Faith and Life,” Shorter Writings, 1: 366; Warfield, review of Mystik, 362. On how “Christianity is superinduced upon and presupposes natural religion and forms with it the one whole which is the only sufficing religion for sinful man,” cf. 362-63; see also Robert Swanton, “Warfield and Progressive Orthodoxy,” Reformed Theological Review 23 (October 1964) 76-77. On the inherent “moralism” of natural religion, which involves a trust for salvation in native moral capacities rather than in the sovereign grace of God and as such necessarily deteriorates into a salvifically ineffectual religion of works, cf. B. B. Warfield, “What is Calvinism?” Shorter Writings, 1: 391; cf. also Warfield’s chapter entitled “Autosoterism,” in B. B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation (1915; reprint, Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1918), 37-63. On the inherent moralism of all who tend “to reduce to the vanishing- point the subjective injury wrought by Adam’s sin on his posterity,” B. B. Warfield, “Imputation,” Studies in Theology, 304, cf. B. B. Warfield, “On the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” Shorter Writings, 1: 216-18.
30. Warfield, “Christian Supernaturalism,” 29.
31. Warfield, review of Foundations, 322. On the definite meaning of the word “Christianity,” cf. B. B. Warfield, “‘Redeemer’ and ‘Redemption,’” Biblical Doctrines, vol. 2, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1929; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 396.
32. Warfield, “Mysticism and Christianity,” 659.
33. Ibid., 661; cf. Warfield, “Christian Supernaturalism,” Studies in Theology, 38-41.
34. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 2. Historical analysis has established that the New Theology was occasioned by the perceived need “to adjust the ancient faith to the modern world.” Cauthen, Impact of American Religious Liberalism, 5. The New Theologians insisted that “The repetition of old answers can serve no purpose. New answers must be framed, and these answers must be couched in the ‘terms of modern thought.’” Warfield, review of Foundations, 322. As such, the agenda of theological liberalism was driven by the notion that a living faith must come to terms with the modern world. While modern interpreters generally agree upon how to characterize the primary elements of the liberal program, there is no consensus on how to classify the purveyors of theological liberalism. Should “liberals” and “modernists” be lumped together into one category as I have done? Or, should they be differentiated according to the relative priority of their methodological starting point, i.e., according to their starting point in revelation (evangelical liberals) or in science (modernist liberals)? Although most modern interpreters answer this question by distinguishing between evangelical and modernist liberals—for example, cf. Averill, American Theology, 100ff; Cauthen, Impact of American Religious Liberalism; and Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of it All, 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 13–80, William Hutchison’s insights on the matter deserve thoughtful consideration. Hutchison maintains that “Such a differentiation [makes] sense as embodying an opinion about the theological consequences of varying modes of liberal advocacy; [but] it [is] not very helpful in clarifying what liberals themselves had intended.” Few liberals, he contends, denied that Christian revelation is normative in some sense, and as a consequence few intended to repudiate the essential substance of Christianity. “The deeper difficulty in any sharply drawn distinction between liberals who built on revelation and those who allegedly began with science or culture was that it could not deal with the liberals’ crucial contention that this distinction is, from the start, largely invalid. The antinomies that such a system of classification presupposes—between sacred and secular, between a starting point in revelation and a starting point in reason or in science—were precisely what proponents of this movement … sought to minimize… .” Hutchinson, Modernist Impulse, 8–9.
35. Warfield, “Christian Supernaturalism,” Studies in Theology, 29.
36. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Shorter Writings, 2: 674.
37. “No one will doubt,” Warfield argued, “that Christians of to-day must state their Christian beliefs in terms of modern thought. Every age has a language of its own and can speak no other. Mischief comes only when, instead of stating Christian belief in terms of modern thought, an effort is made, rather, to state modern thought in terms of Christian belief.” Warfield, review of Foundations, 322.
38. B. B. Warfield, “Christianity the Truth,” Shorter Writings, 2: 213.
39. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 103.
40. This is the general theme of John Vander Stelt’s Philosophy and Scripture: A Study of Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, NJ: Mack Publishing Co., 1978). The Dutch and Neo-Orthodox branches of the Reformed camp generally agree with this critique of Old Princeton. Contemporary interpreters who endorse this critique are indebted in one way or another to Sydney Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24 (1955) 257-72. See, for example, Ernest Sandeen, “The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism,” Church History 31 (1962) 307-21; Samuel Pearson, “Enlightenment Influence on Protestant Thought in Early National America,” Encounter 38 (Summer 1977) 193-212; and George M. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 219–64. Older studies that are critical of the “intellectualism” of Old Princeton include Ralph Danhof, Charles Hodge as Dogmatician (Goes, The Netherlands: Oosterbaan and le Cointre, 1929); John O. Nelson, “The Rise of the Princeton Theology: A Generic History of American Presby terianism Until 1850” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1935); Livingstone, “The Princeton Apolo getic.” For a critical rejoinder to this line of argumentation see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind: The Moral Context,” JPH 77, 1 (Spring 1999) 13-28.
41. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Shorter Writings, 2: 674, 675.
42. Ibid., 2: 674.
43. Ibid., 2: 677, 679.
44. Ibid., 2: 677, 675.
45. Ibid., 2: 677, 674.
46. Ibid., 2: 674.
47. Ibid.
48. B. B. Warfield, “Augustine’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,” Tertullian and Augustine, vol. 4, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1930; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 222.
49. Ibid. Cf. Warfield, “Christianity and Revelation,” Shorter Writings, 1: 27-28.
50. Warfield, “Augustine’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,” 222. For a discussion of the place of “right reason” in the Princeton tradition, see Helseth,“‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind: The Moral Context.” For an extensive analysis of the alleged difficulties associated with Warfield’s apologetical appeal to “right reason,” see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “B. B. Warfield’s Apologetical Appeal to ‘Right Reason’: Evidence of a ‘Rather Bald Rationalism’?” The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 16, 2 (Autumn 1998) 156-77. For an assessment of how the issues addressed in this essay are related to the ongoing debate in the Reformed camp over apologetical method, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC: A Reconsideration,” WTJ 60 (Spring 1998) 109-29.
51. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 100–2. While Warfield acknowledged that there “do exist … ‘two kinds of men’ in the world” who give us “two kinds of science,” he insisted that the difference between the science of the regenerate and the science of the unregenerate is not “a difference in kind,” but rather a difference in “perfection of performance.” The science of the regenerate is of a higher quality than that of the unregenerate, he argued, not because it is “a different kind of science that [the regenerate] are producing,” but rather because the entrance of regeneration “prepares men to build [the edifice of truth] better and ever more truly as the effects of regeneration increase intensively and extensively.”
52. Ibid., 2: 100, 103.
53. Warfield, “Apologetics,” 3.
54. Ibid., 15.
55. Ibid., 4. The apologist must validate the truth that is being established simply because faith, though it is a moral act and the gift of God, “is yet formally conviction passing into confidence.” Validation is necessary, therefore, because an intellectual conviction of the truth of the Christian religion is “the logical prius of self-commitment to the Founder of that religion,” B. B. Warfield, “Review of De Zekerheid,” Shorter Writings, 2: 113. From this it follows that the apologetical task is focused primarily on the labor of the apologist, and only secondarily on that which is beyond his/her control, namely the mind of the unregenerate.
56. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 102, 103; cf. 104–105.
57. Warfield, “Review of De Zekerheid,” Shorter Writings, 2: 120, 115. What is supplied by the “creative energy” of the Holy Spirit in the new birth is not, Warfield argued, “a ready-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new ability of the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the understanding.” Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 99.
58. Cf. George M. Marsden, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science,” in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 122–52. Marsden clearly believes that Kuyperians (who “emphasize that any discipline is built on starting assumptions and that Christians’ basic assumptions should have substantial effects on many of their theoretical conclusions in a discipline”) are less indebted to Enlightenment categories of thought than are Warfieldians (“those who believe in one science or rationality on which all humanity ought to agree”). While defenders of Warfield must concede that he and his colleagues at Old Princeton employed the categories of Scottish Common Sense Realism to buttress their “intellectualism,” they need not concede that Old Princeton’s emphasis upon objective truth and the primacy of the intellect in faith is ipso facto evidence of accommodation to Enlightenment categories of thought. Interestingly, the charge of accommodation to Enlightenment categories has also been made against Kuyperians. Cf. Donald Fuller and Richard Gardiner, “Reformed Theology at Princeton and Amsterdam in the late Nineteenth Century: A Reappraisal,” Presbyterion 21 (1995) 89-117. For an analysis of my revisionist interpretation of Old Princeton, see Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind”; Helseth, “B. B. Warfield’s Apologetical Appeal to ‘Right Reason’”; and Helseth, “The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC.”
59. For an overview of the broad outlines of the methodological debate between Warfieldians, Kuyperians, and hybrids in between, see Marsden, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlighten ment Science,” 149–52.
60. Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 255. See also Peter S. Heslam, “The Meeting of the Wellsprings: Kuyper and Warfield at Princeton,” PTR 6, 1 (January 1999) 15-17.
61. Ibid., 255.
62. Ibid.
63. B. B. Warfield, review of God’s Image in Man, and its Defacement, in the Light of Modern Denials, by James Orr, Critical Reviews, 136–37.
64. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 190; cf. chaps. 5, 7, especially 123–32 and 176–92.
65. Ibid., 256.
66. Ibid.
67. Warfield, “Authority, Intellect, Heart,” Shorter Writings, 2: 669.
68. Ibid., 2: 671. For an extensive analysis of Old Princeton’s understanding of the relationship between moral character and moral activity, see Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind”; Helseth, “B. B. Warfield’s Apologetical Appeal to ‘Right Reason’”; and Helseth, “The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC.”
69. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Shorter Writings, 2: 677.
70. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” 2: 104.
71. Ibid., 2: 105.
72. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Shorter Writings, 2: 674, 679.
73. Ibid.
74. Jack Rogers, “Van Til and Warfield on Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” in E. R. Geehan, ed., Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 154.
75. Warfield, “Apologetics,” 4.
76. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 103. This statement will be misinterpreted if it is not filtered through Warfield’s endorsement of the distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel.
77. Ibid.
78. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” Shorter Writings, 2: 674.
79. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Shorter Writings, 2: 102.
80. The claim of epistemological continuity between Warfield and scholars like Edwards can be justified on the basis of Warfield’s endorsement of an Augustinian understanding of “right reason.” For an extensive analysis of this epistemological construct see Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind”; Helseth, “B. B. Warfield’s Apologetical Appeal to ‘Right Reason’”; and Helseth, “The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC.”
81. Cf. John Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1998), 43–45.
82. Ibid., 43. With respect to Edwards’ (and, I would add, Warfield’s) distinction between speculative rationality (that which grasps “natural things”) and spiritual rationality (that which grasps “divine things”), Piper anticipates the predictable objection: “One might object that the subject matter of psychology or sociology or anthropology or history or physics or chemistry or English or computer science is not ‘divine things’ but ‘natural things.’ But that would miss the first point: to see reality in truth we must see it in relation to God, who created it, and sustains it, and gives it all the properties it has and all its relations and designs. To see all these things in each discipline is to see the ‘divine things’ and in the end, they are the main things.”
83. Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 97. For an incisive response to evangelicals who “accept not just the particular conclusions that [naturalistic] scientists have reached but also the naturalistic methodology that generated those conclusions,” see Johnson’s response to Nancey Murphy, “Phillip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin,” Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith 45 (March 1993) 26-36, in Reason in the Balance, 97–110, 235. Johnson insists that “Theists who accept a naturalistic understanding of knowledge fatally undercut their own intellectual position,” for in so doing they unwittingly endorse the naturalistic distinction between religious truth and scientific truth, and thereby abandon to “science” the whole realm of objective truth.
84. In this regard, I like the following statement by Phillip Johnson. Speaking of the contradiction between theism in religion and naturalism in science, Johnson, Reason in the Balance, 101, writes: “If evidence of divine action in the history of the universe is conspicuous by its apparent absence, then we may still choose to believe that the universe would disappear if God did not constantly uphold it with his mighty (but scientifically undetectable) word of power. Wise metaphysical naturalists will smile at these transparent devices, but they will not openly ridicule them. Why should they—when theists implicitly comply with the naturalistic doctrine that ‘religion’ is a matter of faith not reason?”
85. Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” 78.
86. Warfield, review of Foundations, 324.
87. Samuel G. Craig, introduction to B. B. Warfield, Biblical and Theological Studies, Samuel G. Craig, ed. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952), xliii.
88. Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” 78.
89. Swanton, “Warfield and Progressive Orthodoxy,” 86. “Progressive orthodoxy,” Warfield reasoned, “implies that first of all we are orthodox, and secondly that we are progressively orthodox, that is, that we are ever growing more and more orthodox as more and more truth is being established…. In any progressive science, the amount of departure from accepted truth which is possible to the sound thinker becomes thus ever less and less, in proportion as investigation and study result in the progressive establishment of an ever increasing number of facts…. It is of the very essence of our position at the end of the ages that we are ever more and more hedged around with ascertained facts, the discovery and establishment of which constitute the very essence of progress. Progress brings increasing limitation, just because it brings increasing knowledge. And as the orthodox man is he that teaches no other doctrine than that which has been established as true, the progressively orthodox man is he who is quick to perceive, admit, and condition all his reasoning by all the truth down to the latest, which has been established as true.” Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” 78–79.
90. Mark Noll, “Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield on Science, the Bible, Evolution, and Darwinism,” Modern Reformation 7 (May/June 1998) 18-22; see also idem, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 177–208.
91. David Hall, “Holding Fast the Concession of Faith: Science, Apologetics, and Orthodoxy,” A Paper Presented to the 47th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, November 1995, Philadelphia, PA, 10.
92. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 118. While I agree with Hall that evangelicals “ought to be leery” of surrendering aspects of historic orthodoxy to what he incisively calls “idea-fads of modernity,” I am not entirely convinced that allowing accepted interpretations of Scripture to be challenged by the indisputable conclusions of scientific investigation necessarily entails setting the authority of science over that of Scripture itself. Certainly, all but the most progressively inclined will agree that accepted interpretations of Scripture should not be jettisoned cavalierly, if at all. But does it therefore follow that accepted interpretations should never be challenged? Does it follow, in other words, that Christians should discount scientific findings even if those findings will establish conclusively that an accepted interpretation of Scripture was never truly scriptural—i.e., true—at all? Obviously, these questions go to the core of the debate between scholars like Noll and Hall.
93. I am indebted to Rev. Ian Hewitson for framing the question in this fashion.
94. These questions are admittedly troublesome in part because no matter how they are resolved the potential for accommodating to the spirit of the age—and thereby of endorsing, either explicitly or implicitly, what J. Gresham Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” PTR 24 (1926) 50, called “one of the chief shibboleths of modern skepticism,” namely the notion that religious truth is distinct from scientific truth—appears very real. Conservatives who insist upon reading Scripture in light of the latest conclusions of modern scholarship are clearly in danger of bending Scripture into conciliation with conclusions that are not really true but merely “idea-fads of modernity.” As such, they are in danger of acting as if the Christian religion is merely a subjective phenomenon that must be brought into conformity with the prevailing mind of the day, and therefore of thinking like those who are convinced that scientific truth and religious truth occupy different epistemological realms. Certainly this is one reason why arguments that are critical of Old Princeton’s openness to certain aspects of evolutionary theory are so forceful. See, for example, Hall, “Holding Fast the Concession of Faith,” and David W. Hall, “Angels Unaware: The Ascendancy of Science over Orthodoxy in Nineteenth Century Reformed Orthodoxy,” Paper presented at the Wheaton Theology Conference, April 1994. On Old Princeton’s attitude toward evolutionary theory, cf. Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion, Mark Noll and David Livingstone, eds. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1994); Mark Noll and David Living stone, eds., B. B. Warfield’s Writings on Evolution, Scripture, and Science (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, forthcoming); and Bradley John Gundlach, “The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1995). But if conservatives who read Scripture in light of modern scholarship are in danger of accommodating to the “idea-fads” of the present day, it is entirely possible that those who refuse to bring the non-“idea-fads of modernity” to bear upon the interpretation of Scripture are in danger of enshrining the “idea-fads” of an earlier day. They are in danger, in other words, of regarding as true a previous generation’s inability to look at general revelation through the spectacles of special revelation, and thus they too are in danger of treating the Christian religion as little more than an essentially subjective phenomenon. How, then, should Christians proceed? Perhaps we should begin by proceeding patiently and cautiously, allowing accepted interpretations of Scripture to be challenged only after generations of those who have the mind of Christ and hold the norm of truth in their hands have sorted truth from error on the basis of sound exegesis. I would suggest, moreover, that when we are having difficulty determining which conclusions of modern scholarship are “provisional” and which ones are “indisputable,” we would be wise to assume a posture that defers to orthodox interpretations of Scripture.
95. John Mark Reynolds and Paul Nelson, “Young Earth Creationism,” in J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds, eds., Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 69.
96. Ibid., 69-70.
97. I would like to thank David W. Hall, Ian Hewitson, Wynn Kenyon, D. G. Hart, Ardel B. Caneday and Mark MacVey for their helpful comments on significant portions of this essay.