Warfield's Concession to Liberalism in Apologetics

Benjamin Warfield was a Presbyterian theologian who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887 to 1921. Personally, I love Warfield. He is probably one of the greatest American theologians (perhaps second only to Jonathan Edwards). However, I think Warfield's approach to answering the higher critics of his day may have been a concession to the modern rationalism which fueled the liberal theology of his critics.

The higher critics with whom Warfield was contending believed that the Bible contained errors. They held the moral and ethical teachings in the Bible suspect. Ultimately, these critics held to a worldview which denied the supernatural realm and so sought to explain the Scriptures in a way that excluded supernatural events. The explicit major premise of the critics was that the Bible contained historical, scientific, and factual errors. The implicit minor premise was that the Bible contained statements concerning ethical, spiritual, and religious issues that went beyond what could be proven to be true. Therefore, these critics concluded, since the Bible is unreliable in scientific and historical issues that can be tested, it is also likely unreliable in matters of religion and spirituality which cannot be tested.

Warfield sought to answer these critics by challenging (and essentially inverting) their explicit major premise. Warfield argued that the Bible was reliable in matters that could be tested (history and geography, for example). And since the Bible can be shown to be reliable in these areas, he concluded, we can also trust the Bible in matters which cannot be tested (theology and ethics, for example). In this way Warfield argued that the Bible was completely trustworthy.

But while I would whole-heartedly agree with Warfield's conclusion, there seems to be a few problems with his approach.

1. The argument is lost before it begins. We have already compromised the authority of God’s Word when we begin to appeal to the supposed higher authority of human reason.
2. At best Warfield arrives at probability. There is a logical leap that occurs when he moves from that which can be tested to that which cannot be tested. It is logically possible that a source might be reliable in all matters which can be verified while remaining unreliable in matters which cannot be verified.
3. There is a question as to who should have the burden of proof (note that this is a moral question!). As Christians, we begin with God and His revelation in the Scripture. This is our highest standard of proof. When we accept the burden of proof on the terms of the unbeliever, we have alread conceded (see problem 1 above). Warfield accepts the burden of proof and, in so doing, concedes to the rationalist worldview.

So while I appreciate Warfield and his legacy in almost every respect, I am more inclined to follow the method of apologetics espoused by his predecessor, Cornelius Van Til, who along with J. Gresham Machen, left Princeton Seminary to form Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929.*

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*Note that the theological prolegomena followed by Van Til can also be seen in Dutch Reformed theologicans such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, as well as apologists Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and the theological tradition of Westminster Theological Seminary, Westminster Seminary California, and Reformed Theological Seminary.