Warfield's Blind Spot?

Letters from the Front: J. Gresham Machen's Correspondence from World War I  ed. Barry Waugh 

This post was going to be about B.B.Warfield (and the Princeton theology more generally) on the church and society, on the character and place of natural law, on and the Reformers’ doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, on the Reformed idea of vocation…….but I discovered that there is hardly anything to say. In all of the ten magnificent volumes of Warfield’s writings, for example, there is scarcely a word about ethics or what is these days called ‘social ethics’, much less is there any work on relating Christianity and culture, or work, or the Reformers' doctrine of the two kingdoms. The two books that collect his shorter writings, except for two short pieces on race, have the same character. Just occasionally a reference to the ‘natural’ turns up, as in the 1915 article ‘God and Human Religion and Morals’.

Such a glaring omission can hardly be explained on the grounds (as it might be these days) that Warfield was a specialist, because he had a great range of interests. It might even be said of him that he did his best to be a specialist on anything he wrote and published on. Not for Warfield the dismissal of some area of enquiry on the grounds that ‘this is not my field’. So how do we explain the omission? Machen, who was interested in culture, said of Warfield that ‘with all his glaring faults he was the greatest man I have known’, and perhaps Warfield’s unconcern over the relation of his faith to culture and to social questions, particularly the relations between faith and the ideas that were influencing the general culture, was one of these glaring faults.

In the case of his predecessor Charles Hodge, his Systematic Theology seems to have been arranged specifically to exclude consideration of such questions. The reader is taken from topics in the application of redemption, ‘sanctification’, to the commandments, to the means of grace, to eschatology. It is true that there is a brief discussion of the civil magistrate in the treatment of the 5^th commandment, but that is all. Nothing about life in the world. The Index contains references to laws of nature, but none to natural law. The church is regarded as a spiritual kingdom, but the two kingdoms conceptuality of Luther and Calvin is absent. And it was almost inevitable that the thorough thematic survey of Warfield’s writings by Fred Zaspel yields a volume whose contents have very much the shape of Hodge’s Systematic Theology. Small wonder that in his recent Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, in his treatment of the United States, David VanDrunen moves from New England Theocracy and Virginian Disestablishment (Ch.6) to Cornelius Van Til (Ch.10).

How can this be accounted for? It’s a puzzle. Here I offer two or three suggestions.

Warfield as a seminary professor

Warfield spent the best part of his career at Princeton, and because of his wife’s affliction travelled much less than he might otherwise have done. He had no children. He was never the permanent pastor of a local congregation. Though he kept abreast of theological developments through literature to an amazing extent – as editor, teacher, and especially as author - he was nonetheless an ivory-tower professor in his habits, a seminarian. He was concerned about the church, especially its confessional integrity and purity but (as far as I can tell) never entered into the rough and tumble of church politics. His interventions seem to have been exclusively literary. Nor does he appear to have been involved in the general culture of his day.

The American situation

Warfield died in 1921. It must also be borne in mind that the America of his day was dominantly Protestant Christian in character, with legislation that reflected that, and general culture in harmony with this ethos. Warfield’s generation had no first-hand experience with secularism as a cultural and political force, nor with the cultural relativism that shelters these days under 'pluralism' and 'freedom of speech'. And the consumerism that is regarded as the criterion of the success of and superiority of modern democracies, to the  rule by dictators and warlords, was still in the future. The Prncetonians took for granted that Christian beliefs underpinned American culture.

More than that, Warfield seems to have had no feel for the expressions of religious belief in the pew and on the pavement. Having no children, there was less chance than is usual of being interested in the youth of his day, except in those young men studying for the ministry. Not being able to travel much, his commitment to the life of the Seminary seems to have been redoubled in its intensity. Warfield was par excellence a theologians’ theologian. Even his more popular or journalistic articles distil the themes of his academic work. In one of these, ‘Christianity and Our Times’ (1914) he cites evidence why it is that so many people are indifferent to the claims of the Church. What evidence? The writings of D.F. Strauss, Rudolf Eucken, and Ernst Troeltsch. They get the blame.

Fred Zaspel recalls ‘Only three years after Warfield’s death, over 1200 ministers and elders, in the ‘Auburn Affirmation’ formally opposed the right of the General Assembly to affirm such fundamentals as the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection, and his miracles. Just eight years after his death Princeton Seminary was reorganized under the control of theological forces Warfield opposed all his life. And in just another eight years the denomination itself was firmly entrenched in liberalism’. (573) It may be, as Dr Zaspel affirms, that this is evidence that Warfield was the giant holding back the avalanche. Maybe. More likely it shows that a life of teaching theology, and of writing learned theological articles, a life of the utmost orthodoxy and the presence of a godly example, do not by themselves ensure orthodoxy and spiritual life in the pulpits or in the pews. What is passed over in silence is the fact that many of those ministers must have been educated at Princeton in BBW’s time. Warfield grieved at the decline in the Seminary, but seems not to have noticed the state of the tide.

‘Things can only Get Better!’

‘I really believe that the world, on the whole, is getting better, and that the cause of Christ is on the advance. Yet at times I am somewhat startled at the decay of faith, or the prevalence of broad-churchism among all denominations and skepticism among men of the world.’ That was Charles Hodge, writing in 1874 to his life-long friend John Johns, at that time an Episcopalian bishop. I think it is fair to say that Warfield shared this outlook. Yet it is one thing to have the convictions of a post-millenarian, another to believe (as he seems to have believed) that at that time, his time, the church was on a trajectory that would uninterruptedly lead to the latter day glory before Christ’s second coming. Things can only get better. Warfield held the view that the Christian is a microcosm of the world. As the Christian grows in grace, and will presently enjoy the sinless bliss of heaven, so the church, from small beginnings, will eventually Christianize the globe. The days of the ‘little flock’, the ‘remnant of grace’ are being left permanently behind.

Despite the fact that he offered the opinion that he was living in the early days of the church, Warfield viewed the future through this ‘postmillennial haze’ even while doubting that there was to be a literal millennium. It may also be that without realizing it, Warfield’s thought about the progress of the church reflected and was reflected by the growing buoyancy, strength and success of the United States in the decades towards the end of the 19^th century and those of the early 20^th century. The progress of the nation was fuelled by the progress of the church. It seems that the most he can countenance in his fellow-Americans by way of a negative reaction to the Gospel is indifference, as in ‘Christianity and Our Times’ (1914).

And most surprisingly, there is almost nothing in his writings that reveals concern about the First World War and the devastation, the gassings, the loss of the lives of tens of thousands, and the social dislocation that it brought about and its impact on the church. Over 14 million soldiers and civilians perished in the 'Great War'.The contrast with Machen is interesting, though of course they were a generation or more apart. Machen served for over a year as a YMCA Secretary with the forces in France and Belgium. He wrote an insightful short piece, 'The Church in the War', and other pieces. (Coincidentally, Letters from the Front: J. Gresham Machen's Correspondence from World War I, (P and R Publishing) is about to be published.) Stonehouse devotes three chapters of his biographical memoir to Machen and the War and there is a section about the church in the war.

Yet neither Machen nor Warfield seems to have had any concern for the impact of the War on the church; the loss of manpower, the broken-up families. It is as if for all his fierce, life-long polemic against a purely ethical Christianity, Warfield was as complacent as the liberals were when it came to what was happening to society, and the place and fate of the church within it.

So he continued to write of ‘the universal Christianization of the world, - at least, the nominal conversion of all the Gentiles and the real salvation of all the Jews’, hand in hand with which is the growing influence if the Bible. He stated in 1915 that ‘It is the greatest unifying force in the world, binding all the peoples together as the people of the book. Consider how the Bible, as it becomes the book of people after people, assimilates the peoples to one another in modes of expression, thought, conception, feeling, until they are virtually moulded into one people, of common heart and mind’.

There is one exception to this that I have come across. In a conference address he stated

Men seem to have broken away from the government of conscience, and even from the guidance of the common instincts of humanity. The whole earth appears to have become a churning mass of rage. We see millions of our fellow-creatures flying at one another's throats in a ruthless struggle, and whole countries harried and reduced to ruin. Up from the battle-fields, and up from the wasted lands behind the battle-fields, rise only cries of rage and despair. It is good for us to remember that the Lord God Omnipotent reigns over all. That all this welter of blood and iron He holds well in His hand. That none of it would have occurred without his direction; that nothing can occur in it without His appointment; and I do not say merely that He will overrule it all for His glory, but that all of it will conduce to His praise....In the midst of the turmoil of war, let is remember that war too is of God, and that it too, will in His hands work for good: that even the wrath of man shall be to Him for praise. (Faith and Life, 1916, 26-7)

This is bravely and eloquently spoken. But even here it is as if the church was insulated from what was going on in Europe, that even the church in Europe was insulated from what was going on.

Warfield was at work until the day of his death in 1921 and the output of dogmatic articles continued unabated through the war years and beyond - but scarcely a word more about the war itself or its aftermath.

The Upshot

No natural law and the two kingdoms from Warfield, then, and no social analysis of the church and society. In the void that this left, besides this generally complacent attitude to the society around him, he seems to have developed a sympathy with the neo-Calvinist stress on common grace, and with Kuyper’s general political outlook. He published Bavinck’s paper, ‘Calvin and Common Grace’ in the Princeton Theological Journal (1909). As Peter Heslam has pointed out (Creating A Christian World View, 253-4 ) some of Warfield’s language in his 1908 encyclopaedia article on ‘Calvinism’ is taken almost word for word from Kuyper. Compare Kuyper’s ‘Calvinism is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and from this specific religious consciousness are developed first a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life’ to Warfield’s ‘For the roots of Calvinism are planted in a specific religious attitude, out of which is unfolded first a particular theology, from which springs on one hand a special church organization, and on the other a social order, involving a given political arrangement.’ It is not hard to imagine which book Warfield had open on his desk as he wrote these words, words that incidentally have a surprisingly Schleiermachian ring.

Two final points. While a reappraisal of Warfield’s views on the noetic effects of sin seems to show Kuyper and he closer together, (as we saw in the last post) Warfield seems actually to move closer to Kuyper and Bavinck in his own life time. That’s the first thing. The second thing is this: that if I am right about Warfield’s disinterest in anything non-theological, (and bearing in mind that he was the author of one of the Fundamentals), it is small wonder if fundamentalists continue to see Warfield as their own champion.

All this provides us with a puzzle, or series of puzzles, on which as far as I know no-one has attempted to throw much light.

Warfield and the Dutch

Abraham Kuyper

One of the matters stressed in the writings of Paul Helseth and David P. Smith on Princeton theology, and especially (in Smith’s case) on Warfield is the Princetonians conviction that sin affects not only the affections and the will, but the understanding as well. (Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind (P & R 2010); David P Smith, B.B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship, (Pickwick, 2011)) These days this is referred to as the noetic effects of sin, but used to be called total depravity, a deformation affecting all aspects of the mind. Appreciating this (in the case of Warfield) moves him decisively out of the world of rationalism, and closer to the outlook of the Dutch Calvinists who were his contemporaries, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, with whom he had cordial relations and whom he highly regarded. He refers to Kuyper as a ‘thinker of quality’ who has exercised a ‘remarkable influence’ in Holland. And about Bavinck he says that he ‘brilliantly represents’ the neo-Calvinist outlook.

Yet despite their accord over the noetic effects of sin on the mind, (hereafter NS) Warfield and the Dutch were somewhat at odds in the area of apologetics, and perhaps our renewed appreciation of their agreement on NS makes this harder to understand than if Warfield had believed that reason was unaffected by sin, or less affected, as Van Til thought that he did, and how dozens of our contemporaries do, who believe that the entire tribe of the Princetonians were significantly influenced by what they call ‘Enlightenment rationalism’.

In this short piece I shall touch on factors that in Warfield’s case seem to account for the continued differences between them, but without referring to his encyclopaedia article on Apologetics. This is, perhaps, a mistake, but to be frank I find this production of Warfield’s nearly incomprehensible, and something of an opportunity missed, and I gladly leave to others the task of taking up Ariadne’s thread and telling us what the great man is saying there. So we shall look principally at Warfield’s Introduction to Francis Beattie’s book on apologetics, and his review of Bavinck’s book on certainty, conveniently reprinted next to each other in the second book of his shorter writings.

Warfield readily recognises the fundamental point that reasoning with an unbeliever about the existence of God, or the state of his soul, will not ensure success, but that this is not a very telling thing to say, as the same can be said of any mode of communication between the parties. Whether it’s sowing or watering, only the Lord can give the increase. Why then does he continue to advocate reasoning with the unconverted?

One factor is that in reasoning we (naturally enough) recognize the importance of reason. And in recognizing the reason we recognize the importance of truth. (ref.) But other factors than this may hold the key to the differences, which seem not to have been noticed, and so I shall dwell on these a little.

Imagine the Kuyperian and Warfieldian approaches to Apologetics (as widely understood) as two limits of a continuum. Then I suggest that renewed awareness of Warfield’s commitment to NS narrows the the continuum, but in a way that moves Kuyperianism in the Warfieldian direction. Both hold to the noetic effects of sin, but Warfield agrees that any argument or strategy of communicating the gospel to sinners depends for its effectiveness on God giving the increase, and God alone can give it, something that Kuyper must surely recognise.

More, each holds to the differential effect of sin on the mind. In some areas its impact is greater than in others. Its impact is less in the case of formal disciplines, logic and mathematics and greater in those disciplines which involve estimates of value, such as history and literature and most of all, religion and those disciplines adjunct to it, theology in its different departments. And each recognizes that those who enjoy the effects of the palingenesis nonetheless live with the effects of unregeneracy until their dying day. Though enjoying God’s special grace, indwelling sin continues to affect reason, emotions and will. The children of light are still, in that sense, totally depraved.

Warfield reckons that the root difference between himself and the Dutch lies in a different understanding of the intensity of NS, and particularly of the effects of regeneration upon the mind. Kuyper held that there are two kinds of people, those who enjoy the regenerating enlightenment of God the Holy Spirit, and those who do not. And correspondingly there are two kinds of science, that conducted by the regenerate, and that conducted by those whose minds remain darkened. Warfield comments

There certainly do exist these “two kinds of men” in the world, - men under the unbroken sway of sin, and men who have been brought under the power of the palingenesis. And the product of the intellection of these ‘two kinds of men’ will certainly give us “two kinds of science”. But the difference between the two is, after all, not accurately described as a difference in kind – gradus non mutant speciem. Sin has not destroyed or altered in its essential nature any one of man’s faculties, although – since it corrupts homo totus – it has affected the operation of them all. The depraved man neither thinks, nor feels, nor wills as he ought; and the products of his action as a scientific thinker cannot possibly escape the influence of this everywhere operative destructive power, although, as Dr Kuyper lucidly points out, they are affected in different degrees in the several “sciences”, in accordance with the nature of their objects and the rank of the human faculties engaged in their structure. Nevertheless, there is question here of perfection of performance, rather than of kind. It is “science” that is produced by the subject held under sin, even though imperfect science – falling away from the ideal here, there, and elsewhere, on account of all sorts of deflecting influences entering in at all points of the process. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject, the general human consciousness, though a less valuable part than it would be without sin. (SSW II 100-1)

There may be a different way of putting this. Two people may each admire a ring but one of them does not know that the peculiar shade of the gold is due to the fact that the gold is Welsh gold. Each recognizes the ring for what it is, and they are capable of distinguishing it from a brooch and a sovereign. Or two may recognize it for what it is but neither know that the peculiar glow of the gold is due to its Welshness, even though one of them knows that the gold is Welsh. The novice and the expert are nevertheless capable of referring to the same object. The point can be put philosophically. Some Reformed critics of Warfield espouse a strong version of the doctrine of internal relations, according to which no one can truly be said know that this is a ring unless they understand all else that it is related to, and especially that it is created by God. In which case an atheist does not, appearances to the contrary, recognize that this is a ring, except where God’s common grace intervenes. Common grace ensures referential success, but not fullness of understanding which (in any case) no one possesses.

But even if the effects of regeneration were complete, and the children of light had every taint of sin removed in this life, Warfield doubts whether ‘the science produced by the two classes of men could be treated as absolute. Sinful and sinless men are, after all, both men; and being both men, are fundamentally alike’. Warfield might say that the differences between the two is a matter of perfection of performance, and not of kind. And this outlook seems to entail a denial of the strong doctrine of internal relations. There are different degrees of understanding the ring. Warfield’s understanding of our knowledge of things is more granular than some of the his critics; we can know that this is a ring but be in ignorance of much about it. Not every fact is an interpreted fact, and those that are may have different layers of interpretation, some of which may be separable from the others and may convey to the intelligent enquirer truth but not the whole truth. So I suggest that the differences in outlook on these questions may boil down to a philosophical difference. (Whether or not he gained this outlook from Scottish Common Realism I leave others to try to answer.)

However, despite these differences, the outlook of Warfield may be closer to that of neo-Calvinism than we have seen so far. He writes appreciatively of Kuyper’s and Bavinck’s work on common grace, and of Kuyper’s writings on social and political questions. We shall try to estimate the significance of these similarities next time.

B.B.Warfield

B.B. Warfield's Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship

David Smith’s book is a sustained refutation of the widespread view that Old Princeton in general and such as Charles Hodge and (especially) B. B. Warfield in particular were Calvinists who were overly influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, mediated to them by means of the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid and others. This view entered the scholarly community (or was invented there) by Sydney Ahlstrom, and taken up by others such as Mark Noll and George Marsden. So pervasive has this view become so widespread that just as ‘Bill Shankly’ immediately suggests ‘Liverpool’ and ‘Sir Alec Ferguson‘ suggests ‘Manchester United’, so ‘B.B.Warfield’ immediately suggests ‘Rationalist Calvinist’. But this close association is unwarranted, argues Dr Smith. His view nicely complements the work of Paul Helseth, who has plausibly argued that Princeton worked with an epistemology with a moral dimension to it, Augustinian ‘right reason’.(“Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (P &R, 2010))

Smith pursues his project by developing several distinct strands of Warfield’s work as an author, strands which converge in the conclusion that there is at best (or at worst) only an incidental and partial reliance on Reidian realism, so that nothing that Warfield claims regarding Christian theology may be said to depend on it. The scene is set in the first instance, in a number of interesting chapters which appropriately set the scene, chapters on historiography and philosophical and theological changes in the nineteenth century, and a resume of the course of Warfield’s life. He rather takes for granted that the reader will know already what Scottish Common Sense Realism is.

He considers Warfield’s own response to these charges in Chapter Four ‘Princeton and Warfield: Responses to Contextual Issues’. Here he considers the early years of Princeton, and the fact its theological outlook predates the Scottish Enlightenment. There may be ‘correlation’ at places between Scottish Realism and the Princetonian theological outlook, there, is no dependence. (Smith is fond of ‘correlation’ as an expository term, by it I think he means ‘partial correspondence’. The railway may run alongside the canal for part of its length, but the canal does not depend on the railway, it ‘correlates’ with it. In fact it was there long before the railway.) Of course if Jonathan Edwards had not had fatal effects from his small pox vaccine things might have been different. He would certainly have brought original ideas to the seminary. Smith’s point is that common sense realism ‘simply has nothing to say about many of the doctrinal matters that are organically united to the Confession’. (95) Further, Warfield is alert to the fact that arguments have premises, and that these premises often have a philosophical character. They are ‘presuppositions’ in one sense of this polymorphic term.

The remaining four chapters all have a connection with apologetics. Apologetics provides the context for Warfield’s conception of systematic theology discussed in Chapter 5. Warfield thinks of the truths of systematic theology to be organically connected and connected to all other truths, for ‘truth is organic and unified’. (121, 123) But this makes Warfield sound rather like Leibniz, and Leibnizianism would certainly have been an original idea at Princeton. The truths of Christian systematic theology are no doubt consistent with ‘my lawnmower is broken’ but truths about my lawnmower are hardly organically connected with the truths of the creed, simply consistent with them. So I think there may be some exaggeration here, or perhaps a failure to see that Warfield was not committed to a doctrine of internal relations. I think this may be relevant to estimating Warfield’s relation to Van Til and ‘presuppositional’.

But it hard to exaggerate the importance of apologetics for Warfield or the exalted terms in which he writes of it. Apologetics is not subordinate to systematic theology, much less to practical theology. It is the ‘culminating department of systematic theology’. (195) That is, it establishes: the possibility of systematic theology by establishing the being of God as personal, the creator of all things, and their preserver and governor; the religious nature of man; of the supernatural factor in history; the divine origin of Christianity, and the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as God’s revelation of God for the redemption of sinners. (200-1) Of these five areas, as we know, Warfield himself devoted much of his time and talents to elaborating a defence of the authority and inspiration of Scripture. In his eyes such a defence involves the use of the reason, not as a mere mechanical fact-acquirer, but as right reason, involved in the proper weighing of all the relevant data according to their true measure and worth. So apologetes cannot reason a person into right views of Scripture, or into the kingdom. The regenerating and illuminating work of the Spirit are necessary for a proper appreciation of the evidence. Nevertheless there are views of Scripture which are according to reason. So there is an important interplay between the subjective, the state of the enquirer, his stock of beliefs, his values etc., and the objective, the knowledge that there is to be had of the world of time and space, of nature and grace.

Both Ahlstrom from one point of view and Cornelius Van Til (205) from another are mistaken in characterizing Warfield’s procedure here as ‘rationalistic’ in the senses that he is operating with a purely person-neutral view of reason. We shall return to this theme. At this point Smith introduces the difference of view of apologetics between Warfield and the Dutch Calvinists, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, with whom he had cordial relations. Warfield thinks that they held that because ‘the evidences’ are not sufficient to bring a person to faith in Christ, then deployment of them – Apologetics – is unnecessary, and even perhaps harmful. But Warfield held that the objective argument is required while recognizing that saving understanding and saving faith are the work of the Holy Spirit who opens the eyes of the blind to some at least of the relevant data. Warfield puts the point like this:

But this faith that the prepared heart yields – is it yielded blindly and without reason, or is it yielded rationally, and on the ground of sufficient reason? Does God the Holy Spirit work a blind and ungrounded faith in the heart? What is supplied by the Holy Spirit in working faith in the heart surely is not ready-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new power to the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the mind.

Behind these differences with the Dutch is an intricate network of issues to do with the nature of faith and assurance, to which we might turn on a later occasion.

The last chapter concerns the application of Apologetics. The chief development of the critique of the Ahlstrom (and Van Til) argument is to reassert Warfield’s emphasis on the noetic effects of sin. Dr Smith does not go into what this means, but I take it that it includes chiefly the willful distortion or neglect of data and their grounds (unconscious or otherwise). (250) What Warfield refers to as the subjective side of believing and knowing distorts the apprehension of data (the objective side) on account of the working of what the Apostle Paul refers to as ‘the lusts of the mind’. There is a great deal of evidence produced that this is Warfield’s view. In addition he gives recognition to what the author calls ‘the historical character of truth’. (242) What one misses in Warfield is at length discussion of how the noetic effects of sin variously affect the study of science and other intellectual disciplines.

The account presented in these overlapping chapters, is engaging and in general persuasive. It seems to me that Dr Smith establishes the distinctively Christian character of Warfield’s thought in apologetics, especially the noetic effects of sin. This fact alone is enough to refute Ahlstrom’s and Van Til’s outlooks. Smith shows that this note sounds throughout Warfield’s writings, not only in his elaborate articles, and more popular journalism, but also his addresses to students and faculty of Princeton Seminary reprinted in Faith and Life. One question that this raises is how this fact should affect our estimate of the differences and similarities of Warfield to Kuyper and Bavinck. It may be that the Dutch also miss Warfield’s emphasis on the effects of sin on the mind, as Van Til evidently did. All being well, we shall reflect on Warfield and Dutch Calvinism in a later post.

In this post I have tried to identify the main claims of Dr Smith regarding Warfield. For what it is worth I think that the material establishing the noetic effects of sin is stronger than his argument that the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy is only partly correlated with Warfield’s theological views. Such a partial correlation is what is to be expected. After all such philosophy offers a general account of concept and belief formation and the ‘basicness’ of certain beliefs. Besides his establishing his important thesis, in doing so Dr Smith has incidentally drawn attention to other features of Warfield’s outlook which I hope in time to take a look at.