Benjamin B. Warfield’s View Of Faith And History A Critique in the Light of the New Testament -- By: Daniel P. Fuller

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 11:2 (Spring 1968)
Article: Benjamin B. Warfield’s View Of Faith And History A Critique in the Light of the New Testament
Author: Daniel P. Fuller


Benjamin B. Warfield’s View Of Faith And History *
A Critique in the Light of the New Testament

Daniel P. Fuller

[* A guest paper Presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Toronto, December 27, 1967.]

We evangelicals have drawn heavily upon B. B. Warfield’s formulation of the Biblical doctrine of inspiration - and rightly so - in order to construct and maintain our own distinctive evangelical position. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent today that one’s theological position is not only determined by one’s understanding of the authority of the Bible but also by the way one relates faith to history. Just as Warfield has helped us in formulating our doctrine of inspiration, so he can help us with our understanding of faith and history, for he worked out the doctrine of inspiration within a very basic conviction about the relationship between faith and history.

I. Warfield’s View of Faith and History

The sum of Warfield’s conviction regarding this relationship was that faith which credits the Bible as the verbally-inspired, inerrant Word of God rests ultimately upon the empirical stuff of history and the world around us. In his essay, “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” Warfield said:

It is not on some shadowy and doubtful evidence that the doctrine (of verbal inspiration) is based - not on an a priori conception of what inspiration ought to be. .. but first on the confidence which we have in the writers of the New Testament as doctrinal guides, and ultimately on what-ever evidence of whatever kind and force (that) exists to justify that confidence. 1

Just what these evidences are which justify confidence in the teaching of the Biblical writers regarding inspiration, as well as every other doctrine, is clearly stated in Warfield’s treatise on Calvin’s doctrine of the knowledge of God. It is the marks of the Bible’s divinity, or the indicia, as Warfield termed them, which in and of themselves convey the inescapable evidence that credits the Biblical writers as trustworthy. A list of these indicia was given in the Westminster Confession, chapter I, section 5:

We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteen of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine,

the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the world (which is to give glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection the...

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