THE THEOLOGY OF B.B. WARFIELD
A systematic survey
By Fred G. Zaspel. IVP/Apollos. 624 pages. £24.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-482-4
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield lived from 1871 until 1921 and was professor of theology at Princeton University in the USA. He had an extremely fine mind and a deep personal faith in Christ. He turned out to be one of the greatest champions of biblical faith of the modern era, defending evangelical Christianity against both liberalism and extremism.
Warfield never wrote a systematic theology of his own. In many ways this book seeks to fill that gap. Dr. Fred Zaspel has done a fine job in reading the whole corpus of Warfield’s works and seeking to systematise his teaching in such areas as apologetics, bibliology, the character of God, Christ, salvation, the Spirit and sanctification, etc. In the preface, Sinclair Ferguson speculates that the reason Warfield never wrote a systematic theology was partially due to the very high esteem in which he held his predecessor at Princeton, Charles Hodge. He did not wish to be seen to be vying with his mentor. While that may be so, one also gets the impression that Warfield was a theological polemicist, ready to defend the faith at whichever point was under attack at a particular time. Hence his work is of a somewhat disparate nature.
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