Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

“ The Assembly of divines which framed the Confession, may be said, humanly speaking, to have come just at the last moment of time when such an Assembly was possible, when the Church was still under the happy influence of a marvellous revival, when the Word of God was felt as a living, quickening, transforming power, and preached not as a tradition, but as the very power and wisdom of God, by men of ripe scholarship and devoted piety, who have remained our models of earnest preaching and our guides in practical godliness, even unto this day. ”

“ The prevalence of the evolutionary hypotheses has removed all motive for denying a common origin to the human race, and rendered it natural to look upon the differences which exist among the various types of man as differentiations of a common stock. The motive for denying their conclusiveness having been thus removed, the convincing evidences of the unity of the race have had opportunity to assert their force. ”

“ We have but to open our eyes to see that the living Church of God is already one in the unity of the Spirit, or awaits, for its full realization, only the spirit of oneness in our hearts. If it were, indeed, true that "our Church" constitutes the whole true Church of God, then we should beware of excluding from our pulpits any whom God has called to preach His Word. But if we all who, under many names, hold fast to the one head, are, by common communion with Him, united into one spiritual body, it by no means follows that each member is not required to do its own work in its own appointed way. ”

“ Thus it has come about, that, in the progress of scientific investigation, the motive for demanding illimitable stretches of time for the duration of life, and specifically for the duration of human life on earth, has gradually been passing away, and there seems now a very general tendency among scientific investigators to acquiesce in a moderate estimate — in an estimate which demands for the life of man on earth not more than, say, ten or twenty thousand years. ”

“ Continuity and harmony of teaching is only attainable within the limits of the doctrinal standards. With respect to all that is beyond or outside them, successive teachers may and do differ; the people are confused, and grow first doubtful, then agnostic, and then oppositive. If we would have the people pass beyond the first principles of the faith, we must pass just in that proportion beyond them in our Creed—which is not only our official testimony to the truth, and our official text-book of doctrine, but our standard of teaching to all our pastors. ”

“ Even some early evolutionists, it is true, played for a time with theories of multiplex times and places where similar lines of development culminated alike in man (Haeckel, Schaffhausen, Caspari, Vogt, Büchner) , and perhaps there is now some sign of the revival of this view; but it is now agreed with practical unanimity that the unity of the human race, in the sense of a common origin, is a necessary corollary of the evolutionary hypothesis, and no voice raised in contradiction of it stands much chance to be heard. ”

“ And although it is the duty of every church, as of every individual, to see to it that she does not profess a faith she does not believe, yet her convictions are not the measure of the truth. Its norm and standard are elsewhere; and a church's convictions are rather the measure of herself than of the truth. It is the duty of every church to believe and profess faith in all that the Bible teaches. And when we speak of revising a creed, the real question is not (as has been often supposed) whether the church still believes the creed, but whether the Bible still teaches it ”

“ These are the question of the Antiquity of Man and the Unity of the Human Race, to both of which a large historical interest attaches, though neither of them can be said to be burning questions of to-day.
The question of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth. ”

“ Thus, while the theology of the Reformed churches was being matured, and the course of controversy was bringing it about that the deepest and broadest lines of thought, which run through all the Christian ages, were engrossing the minds of men, a body of pious and devoted preachers of the word was being prepared, who could not state the precious truths of the Gospel without suffusing their statement with the breath of true godliness. ”

“ In a word, a creed, in the sense of a doctrinal standard, as distinguished from a liturgical form, must be extensive enough not only to witness to the essential Christianity of a people, but to enable them, on the one hand, to testify through it to the truth of God as they have attained knowledge of it—for testimony to truth against heresy and error from within is only second in importance to testimony to truth against heathenism and error from without—and to protect them, on the other hand, in their Christian rights in the administration of the Gospel. ”

“ God's electing love is the highest manifestation of His love for man, not (as some seem to think) a limitation of it: it does not make His general love without effect—it gives it effect. That the Confession lays most stress on it, is to preserve the right proportion of faith and to glorify God's general love, not to derogate from it. Doing so it makes everything of love, bases its whole fabric on it, and all the more glorifies it that it does not forget God's justice. After the Bible, it is the most perfect charter of the divine love current among men. ”

“ Presbyterians are no relic-worshippers; they claim the right, and have exercised it, of adapting their Creed to their living faith. But when nothing is to be gained and perhaps much lost they will not fail to consider it a certain vandalism to throw away, merely in the license of change, a flag under which so many battles have been fought and so many glorious victories won, and perhaps even more glorious defeats suffered. They will not keep the old, merely because it is old ”

“ Perhaps, at bottom, we are face to face here, in more or less developed form, with one application of the modern doctrine of the "Christian consciousness." But at all events it has little fitness among us. Presbyterians do not look upon their creed as the expression of what their people believe: but rather as the expression of what they ought to believe. Like the perfect moral standard of life—the divine perfection; this creed strives to represent the perfect intellectual standard of faith—the divine truth. ”

“ The Confession already provides firm ground for all who believe that all those that die in infancy are elect, and it does this without dogmatism and without sacrificing its moderation and calm guardedness of statement. Why sacrifice this? No one can doubt that what the Confession asserts is exactly true: that "elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when and where and how He pleaseth." ”

“ The more the Westminster Confession of Faith is studied, and the better it is understood, the less likely is it to be either abandoned, explained away, or patched up with scraps of cruder new thinking. ”

“ Preterition, or negative reprobation, is an eternal decree of God, purposing within Himself to deny unto the non-elect that peculiar love of His wherewith election is accompanied, as, also, that special grace which infallibly bringeth to glory. ”

“ Church with the Church of God, and seeks the fusion of all denominations into one external body on account of difficulty in conceiving of the Church as one amid a multiplicity of forms of organization, creed, and life. The last few years have given birth to many schemes to secure Church unity by some external means, or in some external sense—by inclusion in a common organization, as if unity were attainable "by building a great house around a divided family," or by enforced uniformity in forms of worship, or the like—none of them the product of a truly liberal spirit. ”

“ If we, however, range the world over and gather together indiscriminately all the objections that have been made to the Westminster Confession during these last years, we are in danger of confusing even such opposite points of view as these. In the midst of such an agitation for change as has arisen in the American Church during the last months, therefore, it seems necessary for us to take a general glance over the Presbyterian world with a view to tracing the causes which are working in one place or another, to the production of this restlessness. ”

“ Overstrictness of formula is not, however, the cause of all the restlessness, as over against the Westminster Standards, which is, at present, exhibiting itself in the churches, nor even of all that arises apart from doctrinal disharmony with the Westminster Confession. It has grown quite common to hear objections directed wholly against its form; it is alleged that it is too long, too full, too detailed, too analytical, too scholastic, too logical, or too polemic to serve properly as a creed for the profession of a Church's faith. ”

“ Enough has been already quoted to point out that the Westminster divines had in mind, as, indeed, they could not fail to have, the very obvious and necessary distinction between God's sovereign decree of preterition—"negative reprobation," as Arrowsmith calls it—which must be as free and sovereign as election itself, of which it is, indeed, but the negative statement; and his dealing with those thus passed by, which depends on their deserts. The fact that men are sinners does not affect the sovereignty of preterition; it only affects the treatment they are left to by preterition. ”

“ It may easily be inferred from what I have just said that I do not think our present formula a lax one. It is a liberal one; as liberal as it ought to be; as liberal as it is safe to be; as liberal as is consistent with the Church's witness to and guardianship over the truth of God. But it is in no sense a lax formula. It is, on the contrary, a binding formula—a strict formula—in the use of which no man can honestly accept our Confession of Faith and not be a sound Calvinist. ”

“ As they are the most complete, so are they the most carefully framed, and the most inclusive, and the most acceptable, of all the standards of the Reformation. It can scarcely be necessary to stop to point out in detail the characteristic excellences of the Confession: its clear analysis, its lucid definitions, its atmosphere of devout piety, its completeness, its logical exactness, the richness of its phraseology. It will perhaps be more useful to occupy ourselves with some remarks upon a few of the chief objections that are most commonly brought against it. ”

“ It is so perfectly gratuitous as almost to reach the level of the sublime. And when Dr. Van Dyke adduces "the ambiguous phrase 'elect infants dying in infancy,'" as sanctioning "the popular impression that we hold the abhorrent doctrine of the damnation of infants," and as, therefore, one of the three cases in which the necessity for revision is obvious, he renders it easy for us to reply that the phrase is not, properly speaking, "ambiguous," and that the Confession is certainly in no need of revision to guard it from a wholly unreasonable interpretation. ”

“ Now certainly it is worth while saying to these brethren that they have no grievance, that they have not accepted the Confession for more than the system of doctrine, and that seeing that they are not asked to assert that its forms of statement are absolutely perfect and incapable of improvement, they ought to think twice, or even thrice, before they enter into the unsettling path of revision, without prospect, or indeed possibility, of at all bettering their relation to it. ”

“ And, on the other hand, the men of tenderness of conscience and pure heart toward God and men, have leaned not only to the Confession of the permanently central truths, but to the eager and solemn Confession of whatever truth the time and its trial called for—to its Confession not only individually, but by the unanimous and accordant voice of the witnessing Church of Christ. ”