P & R Publishing has just released a book that looks very interesting. It’s a paperback titled
B.B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, edited by Gary L.W. Johnson. The nine contributors include David B. Calhoun, who wrote a fine two-volume
history of Princeton Seminary, where Warfield taught. Most of the contributors have a connection with either
Princeton or Westminster Seminary, or both. They put together a collection of essays about Warfield’s life, his theology, and his siding with J. Gresham Machen and the fundamentalists against the liberals, among other topics.
Maybe you’re not that familiar with Warfield. Unfortunately, neither am I. He isn’t as well-known today as he deserves to be. Eleven years after Warfield’s death in 1921, a young minister from Wales “discovered” him in a library while on holiday in Toronto. The man was Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who spent his mornings in the library poring over the ten-volume works of Warfield. Lloyd-Jones later wrote a review of Warfield’s Biblical and Theological Studies, in which he called Warfield “the greatest theologian of the past seventy years in the English-speaking world” (cited in Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, p. 285). This was almost life-changing for Lloyd-Jones and was one of the main providences that helped him to become the eminent doctrinal preacher that he was. What impressed him about Warfield was that “as in the older Reformed authors, here was theology anchored in Scripture, but with an exegetical precision more evident than in the older authors, and combined with a devotion which raised the whole above the level of scholarship alone” (Murray, p. 286). He soon procured his own copy of the ten-volume works. Perhaps B.B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought will introduce this great warrior of the Faith to a new generation of theologians. I’m certainly looking forward to getting a copy.
The book can be ordered online here.
Download a PDF version of the
Table of Contents
Foreword by David B. Calhoun
Introduction by Mark Noll
New Book on B.B. Warfield
P & R Publishing has just released a book that looks very interesting. It’s a paperback titled B.B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, edited by Gary L.W. Johnson. The nine contributors include David B. Calhoun, who wrote a fine two-volume history of Princeton Seminary, where Warfield taught. Most of the contributors have a connection with either 
Warfield's works are classics, especially his works on Christ: The Person and Work of Christ, and The Lord of Glory. Of the first title, Joel Beeke wrote, "Warfield's massive volume, second only to Owen's, sets forth the doctrine of Christ exegetically and polemically. Composed in the context of the so-called 'quest for the historical Jesus,' Warfield stresses that the only Jesus discoverable in the new Testament is a supernatural person."
ReplyDeleteRegarding Warfield's work The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Beeke notes that it is "the twentieth-century classic." "Warfield," Beeke writes, "is essential reading for understanding the 'old Princeton' position on divine inspiration." ("Annotated Bibliography of Reformed Doctrinal Works" in Reformed Confessions.
I, too, am very interested in reading this new biography. Thanks for the post Tim!