Warfield on Apologetics

B. B. Warfield was asked to write an essay on Apologetics for The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. In the days before the internet (with Wikipedia and AI search functions), or Bible software such as Logos with massive theological databases, these multi-volumed theological encyclopedias (Christian versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition) were standard fare in any theological library, whether that be a seminary, a church library, or even a pastor’s study. The essays were written by the best scholars of the time and were considered the definitive statements on the subject matter upon which they wrote. Warfield wrote a number of such essays on various topics during his long and illustrious career. His entry “Apologetics” is one of his most significant. You can find the entire article here: Warfield on Apologetics.

After defining Apologetics as a discipline “derived from the Greek apologeisthai, which embodies as its central notion the idea of `defense," Warfield moves on to describe the history, tasks, divisions, and value of defending the Christian faith.

When addressing the value of the discipline, he laments the corrosive influences of the two great enemies of the Christian faith, rationalism and mysticism.

The convictions of the Christian man, we are told, are not the product of reason addressed to the intellect, but the immediate creation of the Holy Spirit in the heart. Therefore, it is intimated, we may do very well without these reasons, if indeed they are not positively noxious, because tending to substitute a barren intellectualism for a vital faith. It seems to be forgotten that though faith be a moral act and the gift of God, it is yet formally conviction passing into confidence; and that all forms of convictions must rest on evidence as their ground, and it is not faith but reason which investigates the nature and validity of this ground. "He who believes," says Thomas Aquinas, in words which have become current as an axiom, "would not believe unless he saw that what he believes is worthy of belief."

For Warfield, any biblical conception of faith must be directed to its object—the objective facts of Christianity brought to life in the human heart by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Though faith is the gift of God, it does not in the least follow that the faith which God gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without cognizable ground in right reason. We believe in Christ because it is rational to believe in Him, not even though it be irrational. Of course mere reasoning cannot make a Christian; but that is not because faith is not the result of evidence, but because a dead soul cannot respond to evidence. The action of the Holy Spirit in giving faith is not apart from evidence, but along with evidence; and in the first instance consists in preparing the soul for the reception of the evidence.

Apologetic arguments cannot save anyone, but they do play an important role in establishing the ground of faith when properly conceived.

This is not to argue that it is by apologetics that men are made Christians, but that apologetics supplies to Christian men the systematically organized basis on which the faith of Christian men must rest. All that apologetics explicates in the forms of systematic proof is implicit in every act of Christian faith. Whenever a sinner accepts Jesus Christ as his Saviour, there is implicated in that act a living conviction that there is a God, knowable to man, who has made Himself known in a revelation of Himself for redemption in Jesus Christ, as is set down in the Scriptures. It is not necessary for his act of faith that all the grounds of this conviction should be drawn into full consciousness and given the explicit assent of his understanding, though it is necessary for his faith that sufficient ground for his conviction be actively present and working in his spirit. But it is necessary for the vindication of his faith to reason in the form of scientific judgment, that the grounds on which it rests be explicated and established.

Warfield eschews any notion of a purely intellectual faith (rationalism) or a pure matter of the heart (mysticism) grounded in mere assumptions. Theology is a science and establishes that body of knowledge which is the object of faith.

Theology as a science, though it includes in its culminating discipline, that of practical theology, an exposition of how that knowledge of God with which it deals objectively may best be made the subjective possession of man, is not itself the instrument of propaganda; what it undertakes to do is systematically to set forth this knowledge of God as the object of rational contemplation. And as it has to set it forth as knowledge, it must of course begin by establishing its right to rank as such. Did it not do so, the whole of its work would hang in the air, and theology would present the odd spectacle among the sciences of claiming a place among a series of systems of knowledge for an elaboration of pure assumptions.