B.B.'s Book Reviews

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield loved books. He was a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and lived right on campus. Princeton at this time was a fairly tight campus, with not many buildings. Most of the students lived in Alexander Hall; they even ate there, and there were some classrooms there also. On either side of Alexander Hall were very stately homes—the Hodge and Warfield homes.

On the first floor of Warfield's home is his study. It is a very impressive room, with very high ceilings, probably twelve feet or fourteen feet high. And it has bookshelves that go floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The bookshelves are contoured around the door and around the windows. When Warfield occupied that house, those bookshelves were chock full of books. In fact, he had so many books that they wouldn't fit on the shelves. Pictures of him in his study show stacks of books on the floor and on the desk. Warfield was surrounded by books—he loved books, read books, engaged with books, and, of course, wrote many books of his own.

In his will, he requested that his colleagues at Princeton publish his collected writings, and so we have this wonderful ten-volume set of the works of Warfield. In the tenth volume is a collection of his book reviews. During his time as a professor, he wrote many book reviews for the Presbyterian and Reformed Review and for the Princeton Theological Review. Let's take a look at one of these reviews.

Revelation and Inspiration was written by Reinhold Seeberg and published by Harper in 1909. Warfield begins his review by saying, "Professor Reinhold Seeberg is one of the leaders of that school of recent German thought, the object of whose research is a 'Modern Positive Theology.'" Warfield explains what that means. This "modern positive theology" meant to modernize the historical faith of the church. In other words, it was then the dawn of the twentieth century, and proponents of this view believed it was necessary to bring the ancient faith of Christianity out of a prescientific era and into the modern world.

Seeberg's book looked at one doctrine in particular: the doctrine of revelation and the doctrine of inspiration. Warfield continues in his review, "The task which professor Seeberg has set before himself is not a new one; it is rather a task which everyone who has not liked the 'old doctrine' of revelation and inspiration has set before himself for the last hundred years. 'The kernel and the husk' has been the watchword of a century's criticism and reconstruction of Christian doctrine."

What is meant by the expression "the kernel and the husk"? This view argued that the Bible is like a husk of corn. It contains not the words of God but the words of men. But somewhere nestled inside all of that husk is the kernel. Somewhere in all of those words of men and man's telling of his religious experience is the kernel of eternal truth. And so, through biblical scholarship, theologians who were carrying out this project of trying to modernize Christianity were trying to locate the kernel.

You can imagine what Warfield thinks of this book: not much. At the end of his review, he says, "Christianity is neither a mere philosophy nor an empty illusion: it is objectively real and subjectively operative, and finds its rooting both in its inspired record and in its spiritual efficacy.'"