"The proof-texts and passages do prove that Jesus was esteemed divine by those who companied with Him; that He esteemed Himself divine; that He was recognized as divine by those who were taught by the Spirit; that, in fine, He was divine. But over and above this Biblical evidence the impression Jesus has left upon the world bears independent testimony to His deity, and it may well be that to many minds this will seem the most conclusive of all its evidences. It certainly is very cogent and impressive." The Deity Of Christ |
"The Christian's conviction of the deity of his Lord does not depend for its soundness on the Christian's ability convincingly to state the grounds of his conviction. The evidence he offers for it may be wholly inadequate, while the evidence on which it rests may be absolutely compelling." The Deity Of Christ |
"The very abundance and persuasiveness of the evidence of the deity of Christ greatly increases the difficulty of adequately stating it... The deity of Christ is in solution in every page of the New Testament. Every word that is spoken of Him, every word which He is reported to have spoken of Himself, is spoken on the assumption that He is God." The Deity Of Christ |
"Because the deity of Christ is the presupposition of every word of the New Testament, it is impossible to select words out of the New Testament from which to construct earlier documents in which the deity of Christ shall not be assumed. The assured conviction of the deity of Christ is coeval with Christianity itself. There never was a Christianity, neither in the times of the Apostles nor since, of which this was not a prime tenet." The Deity Of Christ |
"In three passages of Matthew, reporting words of Jesus, He is represented as speaking familiarly and in the most natural manner in the world of His Angels (13:41; 16:27; 24:31)... Who is this Son of man who has angels, by whose instrumentality the final judgment is executed at His command?... Who is this Son of man surrounded by His angels, in whose hands are the issues of life?... Who is this Son of man at whose behest His angels winnow men? A scrutiny of the passages will show that it is not a peculiar body of angels which is meant by the Son of man's angels, but just the angels as a body, who are His to serve Him as He commands. In a word, Jesus Christ is above angels (Mark 13:32) -- as is argued at explicit length at the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews." The Deity Of Christ |
"There are three parables recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke as spoken by our Lord in His defence against the murmurs of the Pharisees at His receiving sinners and eating with them. The essence of the defence which our Lord offers for Himself is, that there is joy IN HEAVEN over repentant sinners! Why IN HEAVEN, before the throne of God?... He is representing His action in receiving sinners, in seeking the lost, as His proper action, because it is the normal conduct of heaven, manifested in Him. He is heaven come to earth." The Deity Of Christ |
"All the great designations are not so much asserted as assumed by Him [Jesus] for Himself... If He calls Himself Messiah, He fills that term, by doing so, with a deeper significance, dwelling ever on the unique relation of Messiah to God as His representative and His Son. Nor is He satisfied to represent Himself merely as standing in a unique relation to God: He proclaims Himself to be the recipient of the divine fullness, the sharer in all that God has (Matt. 11:28). He speaks freely of Himself indeed as God's Other, the manifestation of God on earth, whom to have seen was to have seen the Father also, and who does the work of God on earth. He openly claims divine prerogatives -- the reading of the heart of man, the forgiveness of sins, the exercise of all authority in heaven and earth. Indeed, all that God has and is He asserts Himself to have and be; omnipotence, omniscience, perfection belong as to the one so to the other. Not only does He perform all divine acts; His self-consciousness coalesces with the divine consciousness. If His followers lagged in recognizing His deity, this was not because He was not God or did not sufficiently manifest His deity. It was because they were foolish and slow of heart to believe what lay patently before their eyes." The Deity Of Christ |
"Every Christian has within himself the proof of the transforming power of Christ, and can repeat the blind man's syllogism: Why herein is the marvel, that ye know not whence He is, and yet He opened my eyes... To deny that spiritual experience is as real as physical experience is to slander the noblest faculties of our nature." The Deity Of Christ |
"The supreme proof to every Christian of the deity of his Lord is then his own inner experience of the transforming power of his Lord upon the heart and life. Not more surely does he who feels the present warmth of the sun know that the sun exists, than he who has experienced the re-creative power of the Lord know Him to be his Lord and his God. Here is, perhaps we may say the proper, certainly we must say the most convincing, proof to every Christian of the deity of Christ; a proof which he cannot escape, and to which, whether he is capable of analysing it or drawing it out in logical statement or not, he cannot fail to yield his sincere and unassailable conviction. Whatever else he may or may not be assured of, he knows that his Redeemer lives." The Deity Of Christ |
"Wherever five 'advanced thinkers' assemble, at least six theories as to inspiration [of the Bible] are likely to be ventilated. They differ in every conceivable point, or in every conceivable point save one. They agree that inspiration is less pervasive and less determinative than has heretofore been thought, or than is still thought in less enlightened circles. They agree that there is less of the truth of God and more of the error of man in the Bible than Christians have been wont to believe. They agree accordingly that the teaching of the Bible may be, in this, that, or the other, -- here, there, or elsewhere, -- safely neglected or openly repudiated." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"The church-doctrine of inspiration [of the Bible] differs from the theories that would fain supplant it, in that it is not the invention nor the property of an individual, but the settled faith of the universal church of God; in that it is not the growth of yesterday, but the assured persuasion of the people of God from the first planting of the church until to-day; in that it is not a protean shape, varying its affirmations to fit every new change in the ever-shifting thought of men, but from the beginning has been the church's constant and abiding conviction as to the divinity of the Scriptures committed to her keeping." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"Surely the seeker after truth in the matter of the inspiration of the Bible may well take this church-doctrine as his starting-point. What this church-doctrine is, it is scarcely necessary minutely to describe. It will suffice to remind ourselves that it looks upon the Bible as an oracular book, -- as the Word of God in such a sense that whatever it says God says, -- not a book, then, in which one may, by searching, find some word of God, but a book which may be frankly appealed to at any point with the assurance that whatever it may be found to say, that is the Word of God." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"We know how, as Christian men, we approach this Holy Book, -- how unquestioningly we receive its statements of fact, bow before its enunciations of duty, tremble before its threatenings, and rest upon its promises... Christendom has always reposed upon the belief that the utterances of this book are properly oracles of God. The whole body of Christian literature bears witness to this fact. We may trace its stream to its source, and everywhere it is vocal with a living faith in the divine trustworthiness of the Scriptures of God in every one of their affirmations." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"Before all else, Protestantism is, in its very essence, an appeal from all other authority to the divine authority of Holy Scripture." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"It is our special felicity, that as Reformed Christians, and heirs of the richest and fullest formulation of Reformed thought, we possess in that precious heritage, the Westminster Confession, the most complete, the most admirable, the most perfect statement of the essential Christian doctrine of Holy Scripture which has ever been formed by man. Here the vital faith of the church is brought to full expression; the Scriptures are declared to be the word of God in such a sense that God is their author, and they, because immediately inspired by God, are of infallible truth and divine authority, and are to be believed to be true by the Christian man, in whatsoever is revealed in them, for the authority of God himself speaking therein." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"The church has always believed her Scriptures to be the book of God, of which God was in such a sense the author that every one of its affirmations of whatever kind is to be esteemed as the utterance of God, of infallible truth and authority." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"In the whole history of the church there have been but two movements of thought, tending to a lower conception of the inspiration and authority of Scripture, which have attained sufficient proportions to bring them into view in an historical sketch. The first of these may be called the Rationalistic view. Its characteristic feature is an effort to distinguish between inspired and uninspired elements within the Scriptures. With forerunners among the Humanists, this mode of thought was introduced by the Socinians, and taken up by the Syncretists in Germany, the Remonstrants in Holland, and the Jesuits in the Church of Rome." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"Although this legacy from the rationalism of an evil time still makes its appearance in the pages of many theological writers, and has no doubt affected the faith of a considerable number of Christians, it has failed to supplant in either the creeds of the church or the hearts of the people the church-doctrine that the Bible is inspired not in part but fully, in all its elements alike, -- things discoverable by reason as well as mysteries, matters of history and science as well as of faith and practice, words as well as thoughts." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Inspiration Of The Bible |
"It was no part of the task of the fathers at Chalcedon to invent a new doctrine, and the doctrine which they formulated had no single new element in it. Least of all was the doctrine of the Two Natures itself new... The doctrine of the Two Natures formed the common basis on which all alike stood; their differences concerned only the quality or integrity of the two natures united in the one person, or the character or effects of the union by which they were brought together." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"To discover a one-natured Christ, we must turn to the outlawed sects of the Docetists on the one hand, and the Ebionites with their successors, the Dynamistic Montanists, on the other. Whatever else the church brought with it out of the apostolic age, it emerged from that, its formative, epoch with so firm a faith in the Two Natures of its Lord as to be incapable of wavering." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"So fixed in the Christian consciousness was the conception of the Two Natures of the Savior, that nothing could dislodge it. We shall have to come down to the radical outbreak which accompanied the Reformation -- Transcendental or Socinian -- for the first important defection from it after the early Dynamistic Monarchianism; and it was not until the rise in the eighteenth century of the naturalistic movement known as the Enlightenment that there was inaugurated any widespread revolt from it." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"The constancy with which the church has confessed the doctrine of the Two Natures finds its explanation in the fact that this doctrine is intrenched in the teaching of the New Testament. The Chalcedonian Christology, indeed, in its complete development is only a very perfect synthesis of the biblical data. It takes its starting-point from the New Testament as a whole, thoroughly trusted in all its declarations, and seeks to find a comprehensive statement of the scriptural doctrine of the Person of Christ, which will do full justice to all the elements of its representation... The final statement is not a product of the study, therefore, but of life; and was arrived at, externally considered, through protracted and violent controversies, during the course of which every conceivable construction of the biblical data had been exploited, weighed, and its elements of truth sifted out and preserved, while the elements of error which deformed it were burned up as chaff in the fires of the strife." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"Arising out of the embers of the Arian controversy, there is first vigorously asserted, over against the reduction of our Lord to the dimensions of a creature, the pure deity of his spiritual nature (Apollinarianism); by this there is at once provoked, in the interests of the integrity of our Lord's humanity, the equally vigorous assertion of the completeness of his human nature as the bearer of his deity (Nestorianism); this in turn provokes, in the interests of the oneness of his Person, an equally vigorous assertion of the conjunction of these two natures in a single individuum (Eutychianism): from all of which there gradually emerges at last, by a series of corrections, the balanced statement of Chalcedon, recognizing at once in its 'without confusion, without conversion, eternally and inseparably' the union in the Person of Christ of a complete deity and a complete humanity, constituting a single person without prejudice to the continued integrity of either nature... This key unlocks the treasures of the biblical instruction on the Person of Christ as none other can, and enables the reader as he currently scans the sacred pages to take up their declarations as they meet him, one after the other, into an intelligently consistent conception of his Lord." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"The doctrine of the Two Natures is not merely a synthesis of all data concerning the Person of Christ found in the New Testament; it is the doctrine of each of the New Testament books in severalty. There is but one doctrine of the Person of Christ inculcated or presupposed by all the New Testament writers without exception... all are at one in the inculcation or presupposition of the common doctrine of the Two Natures." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"To say that Christ Jesus is 'in the form of God' is then to say not less but more than to say shortly that he is God: for it is to emphasize the fact that he has in full possession and use all those characterizing qualities which make God the particular Being we call 'God'; and this mode of expression, rather than the simple term 'God,' is employed here precisely because it was of the essence of the Apostle's purpose to keep his reader's mind on all that Christ was as God rather than merely on the abstract fact that he was God." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"In effect, the Old Testament divine names, Elohim on the one hand, and Jehovah and Adhonai on the other, are in the New Testament distributed between God the Father and God the Son with as little implication of difference in rank here as there." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"It is probable that Paul's appropriation specifically of the divine designation 'Lord' to Christ was in part at least occasioned by his conviction that he, as God-man, has become the God of providence in whose hand is the kingdom... In a word, the term 'Lord' seems to have been specifically appropriated to Christ not because it is a term of function rather than of dignity, but because along with the dignity it emphasizes also function." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"The Christology of the Synoptic Gospels is indistinguishable from that of Paul, and this is as true of the Christology of Mark as of that of Matthew or of Luke... The Synoptic conception of the Person of Christ is just that doctrine of the Two Natures which, as we have seen, is given expression in Paul's Epistles and is everywhere presupposed in them as the established faith of the Christians of the middle of the first century, and of any earlier date to which the retrospective testimony of this body of Epistles may be allowed to extend." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"It is undeniable that the Christ of the whole body of New Testament writers, without exception, is a Two-Natured Person -- divine and human... The doctrine of the Two Natures of Christ is not merely the synthesis of the teaching of the New Testament, but the conception which underlies every one of the New Testament writings severally; it is not only the teaching of the New Testament as a whole but of the whole New Testament, part by part. Historically, this means that not only has the doctrine of the Two Natures been the invariable presupposition of the whole teaching of the church from the apostolic age down, but all the teaching of the apostolic age rests on it as its universal presupposition." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"The critic comes to his task with a settled conviction, a priori established, that Jesus was a mere man, and must have been thought of by his followers as a mere man; and sets himself to search out in the extant literature modes of expression which he can interpret as 'survivals' of such an 'earlier' point of view. Meanwhile, there is no evidence whatever that these modes of expression are 'survivals,' or that there ever existed in the Christian community an 'earlier' view of the person of Christ than that given expression in the New Testament writings." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"In a word, not only is the doctrine of the Two Natures the synthesis of the entire body of Christological data embodied in the pages of the New Testament; and not only is it the teaching of all the writers of the New Testament severally; but the New Testament provides no material whatever for inferring that a different view was ever held by the Christian community. The entire Christian tradition, from the beginning, whatever that may be worth, is a tradition of a two-natured Jesus, that is to say, of an incarnated God. Of a one-natured Jesus, Christian tradition knows nothing, and supplies no materials from which He may be inferred." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"If Jesus was both the Son of God, in all the majesty of true deity, and a true child of man, in creaturely humility -- if, that is, He was both God and man, in two distinct natures united, however inseparably and eternally, yet without conversion or confusion in one person -- we have in His person, no doubt, an inexhaustible mystery, the mystery surpassing all mysteries, of combined divine love and human devotion." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"For the Christ of history was not unconscious, but continually conscious, of His deity, and of all that belongs to His deity. He knew Himself to be the Son of God in a unique sense -- as such, superior to the very angels and gazing unbrokenly into the depths of the Divine Being, knowing the Father even as He was known of the Father... Of this Jesus, the only real Jesus, it cannot be said that His consciousness was entirely human; and a Jesus of whom this can be said has nothing in common with the only historical Jesus, in whom His divine consciousness was as constant and vivid as His human. The doctrines of the Two Natures supplies, in a word, the only possible solution of the enigmas of the life-manifestation of the historical Jesus... It is, indeed, the self-testimony of our Lord Himself, disclosing to us the mystery of His being. It is, to put it briefly, the simple statement of the fact of Jesus, as that fact is revealed to us in His whole manifestation. We may reject it if we will, but in rejecting it we reject the only real Jesus in favor of another Jesus -- who is not another, but is the creature of pure fantasy. The alternatives which we are really face to face with are, Either the two-natured Christ of history, or -- a strong delusion." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol III, The Two Natures And Recent Christological Speculation |
"The upshot of it all is that it is very generally felt that, somehow, in the Old Testament development of the idea of God there is a suggestion that the Deity is not a simple monad, and that thus a preparation is made for the revelation of the Trinity yet to come... The Old Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what is in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before... Thus, the Old Testament revelation of God is not corrected by the fuller revelation which follows it, but only perfected, extended and enlarged." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol II, The Biblical Doctrine Of The Trinity |
"Without special revelation, general revelation would be for sinful men incomplete and ineffective, and could issue, as in point of fact it has issued wherever it alone has been accessible, only in leaving them without excuse (Romans 1:20). Without general revelation, special revelation would lack that basis in the fundamental knowledge of God as the mighty and wise, righteous and good, maker and ruler of all things, apart from which the further revelation of this great God’s interventions in the world for the salvation of sinners could not be either intelligible, credible or operative." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"The religion of the Bible is a frankly supernatural religion." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"The religion of the Bible thus announces itself, not as the product of men's search after God, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God, forming a people for Himself, that they may show forth His praise. In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"There is the revelation which God continuously makes to all men: by it His power and Divinity are made known. And there is the revelation which He makes exclusively to His chosen people: through it His saving grace is made known... The one is addressed generally to all intelligent creatures, and is therefore accessible to all men; the other is addressed to a special class of sinners, to whom God would make known His salvation. The one has in view to meet and supply the natural need of creatures for knowledge of their God; the other to rescue broken and deformed sinners from their sin and its consequences." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"On the entrance of sin into the world, destroying this communion with God and obscuring the knowledge of Him derived from Nature, another mode of revelation was necessitated, having also another content, adapted to the new relation to God and the new conditions of intellect, heart and will brought about by sin. It must not be supposed, however, that this new mode of revelation was an ex post facto expedient, introduced to meet an unforeseen contingency. The actual course of human development was in the nature of the case the expected and the intended course of human development, for which man was created; and revelation, therefore, in its double form was the Divine purpose for man from the beginning, and constitutes a unitary provision for the realization of the end of his creation in the actual circumstances in which he exists." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"One of the most grievous of the effects of sin is the deformation of the image of God reflected in the human mind, and there can be no recovery from sin which does not bring with it the correction of this deformation and the reflection in the soul of man of the whole glory of the Lord God Almighty." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"We should bear in mind that the intellectual or spiritual quality of a revelation is not derived from the recipient but from its Divine Giver. The fundamental fact in all revelation is that it is from God." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"The completely supernatural character of given in theophanies is obvious. He who will not allow that God speaks to man, to make known His gracious purposes toward him, has no other recourse here than to pronounce the stories legendary." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"In the view of the Scriptures, the completely supernatural character of revelation is in no way lessened by the circumstance that it has been given through the instrumentality of men. They affirm, indeed, with the greatest possible emphasis that the Divine word delivered through men is the pure word of God, diluted with no human admixture whatever." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
The process of revelation through the prophets was a process by which Jehovah put His words in the mouths of the prophets, and the prophets spoke precisely these words and no others." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"It is quite clear from the records which the prophets themselves give us of their revelations that their intelligence was alert in all stages of their reception of them." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"God is Himself the author of the instruments He employs for the communication of His messages to men and has framed them into precisely the instruments He desired for the exact communication of His message." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"The Spirit is not to be conceived as standing outside of the human powers employed for the effect in view, ready to supplement any inadequacies they may show and to supply any defects they may manifest, but as working confluently in, with and by them, elevating them, directing them, controlling them, energizing them, so that, as His instruments, they rise above themselves and under His inspiration do His work and reach His aim... Although the circumstance that what is done is done by and through the action of human powers keeps the product in form and quality in a true sense human, yet the confluent operation of the Holy Spirit throughout the whole process raises the result above what could by any possibility be achieved by mere human powers and constitutes it expressly a supernatural product." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"It is supposed that all the forms of special or redemptive revelation which underlie and give its content to the religion of the Bible may without violence be subsumed under one or another of these three modes — external manifestation, internal suggestion, and concursive operation. All, that is, except the culminating revelation, not through, but in, Jesus Christ. As in His person, in which dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, He rises above all classification and is sui generis; so the revelation accumulated in Him stands outside all the divers portions and divers manners in which otherwise revelation has been given and sums up in itself all that has been or can be made known of God and of His redemption. He does not so much make a revelation of God as Himself is the revelation of God; He does not merely disclose God’s purpose of redemption, He is unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. The theophanies are but faint shadows in comparison with His manifestation of God in the flesh. The prophets could prophesy only as the Spirit of Christ which was in them testified, revealing to them as to servants. one or another of the secrets of the Lord Jehovah; from Him as His Son, Jehovah has no secrets, but whatsoever the Father knows that the Son knows also. Whatever truth men have been made partakers of by the Spirit of truth is His (for all things whatsoever the Father hath are His) and is taken by the Spirit of truth and declared to men that He may be glorified." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |
"The entirety of the New Testament is but the explanatory word accompanying and giving its effect to the fact of Christ. And when this fact was in all its meaning made the possession of men, revelation was completed and in that sense ceased. Jesus Christ is no less the end of revelation than He is the end of the law." The Works Of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol I, The Biblical Idea of Revelation |