Category: B.B. Warfield

We believe this doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures primarily because it is the doctrine which Christ and his apostles believed, and which they have taught us. It may sometimes seem difficult to take our stand frankly by the side of Christ and his apostles. It will always be found safe. -B.B. Warfield, The Inspiration of the BIble

The Bible’s having been written by men and evidencing their unique personalities does not negate that Scripture is the very word of God as Warfield argues below:

God is Himself the author of the instruments He employs for the communication of His messages to men and has framed them into precisely the instruments He desired for the exact communication of His message. There is just ground for the expectation that He will use all the instruments He employs according to their natures; intelligent beings therefore as intelligent beings, moral agents as moral agents. But there is no just ground for asserting that God is incapable of employing the intelligent beings He has Himself created and formed to His will, to proclaim His messages purely as He gives them to them; or of making truly the possession of rational minds conceptions which they have themselves had no part in creating. And there is no ground for imagining that God is unable to frame His own message in the language of the organs of His revelation without its thereby ceasing to be, because expressed in a fashion natural to these organs, therefore purely His message. -B.B. Warfield, The Biblical Idea of Revelation

One of the most grievous of the effects of sin is the deformation of the image of God reflected in the human mind, and there can be no recovery from sin which does not bring with it the correction of this deformation and the reflection in the soul of man of the whole glory of the Lord God Almighty. Man is an intelligent being; his superiority over the brute is found, among other things, precisely in the direction of all his life by his intelligence; and his blessedness is rooted in the true knowledge of his God – for this is life eternal, that we should know the only true God and Him whom He has sent. Dealing with man as an intelligent being, God the Lord has saved him by means of a revelation, by which he has been brought into an ever more and more adequate knowledge of God, and been led ever more and more to do his part in working out his own salvation with fear and trembling as he perceived with ever more and more clearness how God is working it out for him through mighty deeds of grace. -B.B. Warfield, The Biblical Idea of Revelation

The religion of the Bible thus announces itself, not as the product of men’s search after God, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God, forming a people for Himself, that they may show forth His praise. In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion. Or rather, to speak more exactly, it announces itself as the revealed religion, as the only revealed religion; and sets itself as such over against all other religions, which are represented as all products, in a sense in which it is not, of the art and device of man. -B.B. Warfield, The Biblical Idea of Revelation

Men have always and everywhere judged that a supernatural man, doing a supernatural work, must needs have sprung from a supernatural source. If there had been nothing extraordinary in the coming of the Savior into the world, a discordant note would have been struck at this point in the “heterosoteric” Christianity of the New Testament, which would have thrown it in all its elements out of tune. To it, it would have been unnatural if the birth of the Savior had been natural, just because it itself in none of its elements is natural, but is everywhere and through all its structure, not, indeed, unnatural or contra-natural, but distinctively supernatural. – B.B. Warfield in The Supernatural Birth of Jesus

Christianity certainly did not just “grow up”; it was founded. And subsequently to its founding, it has not “run wild,” gone off in this or that direction according as some contentless “informing spirit” or “germinal life” within it may have chanced to lead it; it has been held strictly, more strictly than any other religious movement, to its fundamental type, by constant references back to its foundations. For whatever reason, on whatever ground, it has kept a constant check upon itself lest it should depart from type, and has shown an amazing power, after whatever aberrations, continually to return to type. Its eye has been fixed not merely in forward gaze but in backward as well. It has manifested a unique capacity of growth, justifying its Founder’s comparison of it to the mustard-seed and to the leaven; but, after all is said as to the transformations it has suffered, its slacknesses, its degenerations, its failures, its growth has lain not in the gradual development of a content for itself, but in the steadily increasing assimilation of its environment to itself. – B.B. Warfield in The Essence of Christianity

A Christianity without redemption – redemption in the blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sin – is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. Precisely what Christianity means is redemption in the blood of Jesus. – B.B. Warfield in Christless Christianity

To those who think that you can have Christianity (a way of life) without the historical Christ (God-man), Warfield replies:

Unquestionably, Christianity is a redemptive religion, having as its fundamental presupposition the fact of sin, felt both as guilt and as pollution, and offering as its central good, from which all other goods proceed, salvation from sin through an historical expiation wrought by the God-man Jesus Christ. The essence of Christianity has always been to its adherents the sinner’s experience of reconciliation with God through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. – B.B. Warfield in Christless Christianity

Liberal theologians accuse the early Christians of revising Jesus so that He is more than man because of their predispositions. The Jesus we read of according to them reveals their subjective thoughts concerning Jesus and not objective history. Below Warfield argues that the liberal theologians are guilty of the same crime, they don’t believe in the supernatural, so they revise Jesus to fit their predispositions.

In the absence of all positive proof that Jesus was not what His followers represent Him, we must accept Him as what they represent Him. To refer subjectively to the faith of His followers what they refer objectively to His person, for no other reason than that it would seem to us more natural that He should have been something different — what we choose to think Him rather than what they knew Him to be — is only to be guilty ourselves, in the portrait which we form of Jesus, in an immensely aggravated form, of the fault of which we accuse them. B.B. Warfiled, Concerning Schmiedel’s “Pillar Passages”

The rise of Christianity was a phenomenon of too little apparent significance to attract the attention of the great world. It was only when it had refused to be quenched in the blood of its founder, and, breaking out of the narrow bounds of the obscure province in which it had its origin, was making itself felt in the centers of population, that it drew to itself a somewhat irritated notice. The interest of such heathen writers as mention it was in the movement, not in its author. But in speaking of the movement they tell something of its author, and what they tell is far from being of little moment. – B.B. Warfield in Jesus Christ