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Book Reviews 347
tribute to Hodge after 50 years of teaching theology, a comment was quoted
from a critic of his position: “It is enough for Dr Hodge to believe a thing to
be true that he finds it in the Bible”. It was the comment of someone who
was being carried away by the flood of unbelief that was wreaking such havoc
in the divinity colleges of the time, but it stated the truth, and this attitude
was, under God, the source of Hodge’s greatness.
Another contemporary, William Paxton, who was in sympathy with
Hodge’s outlook, emphasised “scripturalness” as a marked feature of his
teaching, and added: “He taught, not what he thought, but what God said”.
Paxton elaborated this important comment further: “With him, the simple
question was, What do the Scriptures teach? And when this was ascertained
by the light which the study of the original languages and exegetical investigation
threw upon it, he did not think that it was our province to stop and
inquire whether this was in harmony with our own reason, but to accept it
with a humble and trustful spirit. When God speaks, and we understand His
meaning, there is nothing left for us but to bow and adore.” Many of the
theologians of Hodge’s time had already left that attitude far behind. In this
respect, as well as in others, he is a beacon that Christians of the twenty-first
century would do well to follow.
Hodge was also a commentator of note, having written expositions of four
of Paul’s larger Epistles. B B Warfield, another of Hodge’s successors at
Princeton, believed “that Dr Hodge’s sense of the general meaning of a passage
was unsurpassed. He had all of Calvin’s sense of the flow and connection
of thought.”
A friend, Henry Boardman, expressed the view that one of the most
conspicuous features of Hodge’s religious character was humility, which
was an immense tribute to the reality of divine grace in his soul. Boardman
went on to comment on one aspect of this humility: “His vast learning taught
him that he had barely crossed the border of that boundless domain of truth
which stretches off in every direction into the infinite”. And again, as a tribute
to Hodge’s godliness: “So clear was his apprehension of the spotless holiness
of God, so transcendent his views of the love of Christ and the debt we
owe Him, and so inwrought his sense of the turpitude of sin, that he could
only think of himself as a poor, miserable sinner saved by grace ineffable,
whose best services are utterly unfit to be presented to God, whose purest
aspirations were too impure to be accepted save through the ever-prevalent
intercession of the great High Priest”.
These men, we can be sure, would not wish to suggest that Hodge was
perfect. But he was a sinner saved by grace and attained an eminent place
among those who not only contributed to instructing their contemporaries,