Charles Hodge & His Book

Charles Hodge was one of the most significant theologians of the nineteenth century. He was a key figure in what we call Old Princeton, a theological tradition born at Princeton Theological Seminary. And he gave the church in the United States a tremendous gift: a book. Actually, he gave a three-volume work.

Hodge was born in 1797 and died in 1878. His father was a prominent physician in Philadelphia. He died seven months after Charles was born, so Charles Hodge never knew his father. His father did leave his family some significant resources and had invested some money in the docks of Philadelphia. But during the War of 1812, the Hodge family lost all of their holdings in those docks. Hodge's mother used the money from the sale of their home to purchase a very large home near Princeton, N.J. She rented out parts of the home to boarders so that the family would have income. In 1812, Charles began his studies at Princeton University.

Princeton University (then known as the College of New Jersey) was founded in 1746. In 1812, the college and the Presbyterian denomination founded Princeton Theological Seminary as an independent institution to train ministers. The seminary was headed by a man named Archibald Alexander, who would later be succeeded by Charles Hodge.

Alexander would go over to the university to see if he could identify some students who showed promise for the pastoral ministry. One of the students he identified was Charles Hodge, so Alexander began to invest in him and mentor him. Upon graduating from college in 1816, Hodge entered the seminary, and after finishing there in 1819, he stayed on as an instructor and was eventually appointed as a full professor. He later went to Europe for two years to continue his education. In 1835, he published his first book, a commentary on the epistle to the Romans. But that's not the book we are focusing on.

In those days, the textbook for theology was Francis Turretin's Institutes of Elenctic Theology, a three-volume work in Latin. When Hodge began teaching at Princeton Seminary, students coming to seminary knew Latin. But later, in the 1850s and especially after the Civil War, the United States experienced a higher education boom, so many young people at colleges, universities, and seminaries didn't know Latin. This posed a problem at Princeton, since they couldn't read Turretin.

So, Hodge decided to fill the gap—though very reluctantly, because he had great respect for Turretin. From 1871 to 1873, Hodge wrote his three-volume systematic theology, which has endured as a Reformed classic. But Hodge wrote his systematic with a catch, a challenge to the reader.

As Hodge writes, he introduces theological conundrums and theological issues, and of course he does so in English. He explains the problem and he begins to discuss the various views down through church history and from different theologians on the issue. But when he gets to the punch line, the solution to this theological conundrum, he gives it in Latin, as a long quote from Turretin. In effect, he's saying, "I'll meet you partway here, but you're going to have to do some of the work; you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and you're going to still have to learn some Latin yourself." In this way, Hodge made systematic theology accessible to his fellow Americans, but challenged them to push farther and keep learning.