Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born on November 5, 1851, and grew up at Grasmere, the family farm near Lexington, Kentucky. The Warfields were Presbyterians, members of the Second Presbyterian Church in Lexington, and from childhood Benjamin was catechized in the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms. Young Warfield developed a love for science, collecting natural-history specimens and poring over the recent publications of famed naturalist Charles Darwin. Warfield assumed that he would pursue a career in science and for this reason did not want to study Greek.1 Indeed, during his three years studying at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), Warfield focused mainly on mathematics and science. He graduated in 1871 at the top of his class.
After graduating college, Warfield spent time in Europe, studying at Edinburgh and Heidelberg. In 1872, while he was at Heidelberg, he wrote home to say that he planned to enter the ministry, a vocation his mother had long desired for him. The following year, Warfield began his studies at Princeton Seminary under the aged Charles Hodge. In 1874, while Warfield was his student, Hodge published What Is Darwinism?, in which he concluded: “It is Atheism.”2 Like his teacher, Warfield always firmly rejected any account of nature that excluded design and purpose, and he would spend much of his career seeking to navigate the relationship between evolutionary science and a thoroughgoing adherence to the inerrancy of Scripture.
Warfield graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1876 and that summer married Annie Kinkead. The two traveled to Leipzig, where Warfield pursued further studies. Returning to America in 1877, he spent some time filling the pulpit at First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. In 1878 he accepted a position teaching New Testament at Western Theological Seminary. The following year he was ordained as an evangelist and made full professor. In 1881, Warfield co-authored with A. A. Hodge, who had succeeded his father in the chair of theology at Princeton, the article “Inspiration,” a classic exposition of the inerrancy of Scripture.
After A. A. Hodge’s death in 1886, Warfield took his place at Princeton the following year. He would remain there thirty-four years. During this time, he taught much of a generation of Presbyterian ministers, edited the Presbyterian and Reformed Review for over a decade, and wrote incessantly on such topics as the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, Christology, apologetics, and the Westminster Confession. He engaged the controversies of his day without hesitation, writing on evolution, critiquing perfectionism and faith healing, and denouncing segregation. After nearly two months of failing health, Warfield died on February 16, 1921, having taught one of his classes earlier that day.
1 Ethelbert D. Warfield, “Biographical Sketch of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield,” in Revelation and Inspiration, by B. B. Warfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), vi.
2 Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1874), 177.
Warfield was known as a fighter, and he knew what was worth fighting for. He held Scripture in the utmost regard and was uncompromising in his defense of its authority and inerrancy. He was a scholar of the first rank, whose formulation of the doctrine of inspiration has been hugely influential in American Protestantism over the past century. J. Gresham Machen, one of Warfield’s students and later assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton, testified to his importance in articulating and fighting for the truth. Writing shortly after Warfield’s funeral, Machen opined, “It seemed to me that the old Princeton—a great institution it was—died when Dr. Warfield was carried out.”3 But Warfield should not be remembered only as a fighter and a scholar. In a 1911 address that is read by seminarians to this day, he asserted, “A minister must be learned, on pain of being utterly incompetent for his work. But before and above being learned, a minister must be godly.” There could be no “either–or,” he told them—“either a student or a man of God. You must be both.”4
3 J. Gresham Machen, letter of February 20, 1921, quoted in Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, 50th anniversary ed. (1954; repr., Willow Grove, PA: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2004), 266. 4 B. B. Warfield, “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” in Selected Shorter Writings, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 1:411–12.
“Inspiration is that extraordinary, supernatural influence (or, passively, the result of it,) exerted by the Holy Ghost on the writers of our Sacred Books, by which their words were rendered also the words of God, and, therefore, perfectly infallible.”
—“Inspiration and Criticism” (1880), in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel G. Craig (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948), 420.
“Scripture must needs be fulfilled, for what is contained in it is the declaration of the Holy Ghost through the human author. What Scripture says, God says.”
—“The Biblical Idea of Inspiration” (1915), in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel G. Craig (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948), 145.
“When our Lord came down to earth He drew heaven with Him. The signs which accompanied His ministry were but the trailing clouds of glory which He brought from heaven, which is His home.”
—Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 3.
“Put your heart into your studies: do not merely occupy your mind with them, but put your heart into them. They bring you daily and hourly into the very presence of God; his ways, his dealing with men, the infinite majesty of his Being form their very subject-matter. Put the shoes from off your feet in this holy presence!”
—“The Religious Life of Theological Students,” in Selected Shorter Writings, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 1:416.
“Inspiration” (1881, with A. A. Hodge) An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1886) The Lord of Glory (1907) The Plan of Salvation (1915) Counterfeit Miracles (1918) The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (1948, posthumous collection) Perfectionism (1931, posthumous collection)
At Westminster Seminary California, study Warfield and other scholars who have shaped the church by laying a rich theological foundation that continues to equip pastors and church leaders for faithful ministry.
