The
Indispensableness of Systematic Theology to the
Preacher[i]
Benjamin B. Warfield
(1851-1921)
Introduction to Warfield’s article in the
Master’s Seminary Journal (Fall,
1996, pp. 241-9): “A growing misconception in training preachers
has been the idea that appearance is a substitute for
substance, that methodology is more important than
content. On the contrary, the preacher’s main
responsibility to his listeners is to present the truth
as expounded in Systematic Theology. To do this, he must
himself have a firm grasp on Christian doctrine. This is
not to say his preaching must manifest a chilly
intellectualism, but that his knowledge of doctrine must
combine with a warmly evangelistic spirit. The
universally acknowledged principle that what a person
believes will determine how he behaves underscores the
importance of preaching correct doctrine. Whether he
admits it or not, every preacher communicates a set of
beliefs, so it is urgent that he know correct Systematic
Theology. Theology is the best cultivation of the
devotional life of both the preacher and his hearers.”
Note from SSM Editor: Sadly, there are scarcely
any theologians left in pulpits today. What spews from
them cannot even be called “skim milk,” much less whole
milk or meat, because most of it has no basis in
Scripture whatsoever. Gordon Clark expressed it
perfectly when he wrote: “Theology, once acclaimed ‘the
Queen of the Sciences,’ today hardly rises to the rank
of scullery maid; it is often held in contempt, regarded
with suspicion, or just ignored.”[ii]
Evangelical churches are filled to the
brim with entertainment, social activism, and human
philosophy, but the knowledge of God and His Word are
conspicuously absent. And the fault lies at the door of
preachers. Writing in 1947, Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder
of Dallas Theological Seminary, wrote the following in
the Preface to his monumental eight-volume Systematic Theology. It serves as a fitting introduction to Warfield’s
article because it was written 50 years later and shows
that the situation had grown worse; tragically, after
another half century, it is worse still:
Systematic Theology,
the greatest of the sciences, has fallen upon evil days.
Between the rejection and ridicule of it by the
so-called progressives and the neglect and abridgment of
it by the orthodox, it, as a potent influence, is
approaching the point of extinction . . . The unchanging
emphasis in the Scriptures upon doctrine, which subject
is referred to in the New Testament more than forty
times and is that to which a Christina is to “take heed”
(I Tim. 1:3; 4:6,16; II Tim. 3:10, 16, 4:2,3), stands as
a silent rebuke, whether heeded or not, to all modern
notions which belittle the importance of Dogmatic
Theology, and also stands a corrective to those who
neglect any portion of it.
It is no secret that
the average minister is not now reading Systematic
Theology, nor will such writings be found to occupy a
prominent place in his library. Shocking indeed this
condition would have been to ministers of two
generations ago . . .
Few clergymen’s
libraries will included even one work on Theology . . .
A form of modern thinking tends to treat all matters of
doctrine with contempt.
. . . the trend,
unfortunately, is to substitute philosophy, psychology,
and sociology for theology.[iii]
*
* *
Professor [Robert] Flint,
of Edinburgh [1838-1910, Scottish philosopher,
theologian, and professor of divinity], in closing his
opening lecture to his class a few years ago, took
occasion to warn his students of what he spoke of as an
imminent danger. This was a growing tendency to “deem it
of prime importance that they should enter upon their
ministry accomplished preachers, and of only secondary
importance that they should be scholars, thinkers,
theologians.” “It is not so,” he is reported as saying,
“that great or even good preachers are formed. They form
themselves before they form their style of preaching.
Substance with them precedes appearance, instead of
appearance being a substitute for substance. They learn
to know truth before they think of presenting it. . . .
They acquire a solid basis for the manifestation of
their love of souls through a loving, comprehensive,
absorbing study of the truth which saves
souls.”[iv]
In these winged words is outlined
the case for the indispensableness of Systematic
Theology for the preacher. It is summed up in the
propositions that it is through the truth that souls are
saved, that it is accordingly the prime business of the
preacher to present this truth to men, and that it is
consequently his fundamental duty to become himself
possessed of this truth, that he may present it to men
and so save their souls. It would not be easy to
overstate, of course, the importance to a preacher of
those gifts and graces which qualify him to present this
truth to men in a winning way—of all, in a word, that
goest to make him an “accomplished preacher.” But it is
obviously even more important to him that he should have
a clear apprehension and firm grasp of that truth which
he is to commend to men by means of these gifts and
graces. For this clear apprehension and firm grasp of
the truth its systematic study would seem certainly to
be indispensable. And Systematic Theology is nothing
other than the saving truth of God presented in
systematic form.
The necessity of
systematic study of any body of truth which we need
really to master will scarcely be doubted. Nor will it
be doubted that he who would indoctrinate men with a
given body of truth must needs begin by acquiring a
mastery of it himself. What has been made matter of
controversy is whether Christian truth does lie so at
the basis of the Christian hope and the Christian life
that it is the prime duty of the preacher to possess
himself of it and to teach it. It has been argued that
the business of the preacher is to make Christians, not
theologians; and that for this he needs not a thorough
systematic knowledge of the whole circle of what is
called Christian doctrine, but chiefly a firm faith in
Jesus Christ as Savior and a warm love toward him as
Lord. His function is a practical, not a theoretical
one; and it matters little how ignorant he may be or may
leave his hearers, so only he communicates to them the
faith and love that burn in his own heart. Not learning
but fervor is what is required; nay, too much learning
is (so it is often said) distinctly unfavorable to his
best efficiency. Engagement of the mind with the
subtleties of theological construction excludes that
absorption in heart-devotion and in the practical work
of the ministry, which on its two sides forms the glory
of the minister’s inner life and the crown of his outer
activity. Give us not scholars, it is said, but plain
practical men in our pulpits—men whose simple hearts are
on fire with love to Christ and whose whole energy is
exhausted in the rescue of souls.
Surely, if the antithesis
were as is here implied, no voice would be raised in
opposition to these demands. If we are to choose between
a chilly intellectualistic and a warmly evangelistic
ministry, give us the latter by all means. A
comparatively ignorant ministry burning with zeal for
souls is infinitely to be preferred to a ministry
entirely absorbed in a purely intellectual interest in
the relations of truths which are permitted to exercise
no influence on their own lives and which quicken in
them no fervor of missionary love. But the matter cannot
be settled by fixing the eye on this extreme only. What
should we do with a ministry which was absolutely and
blankly ignorant of the whole compass of Christian
truth? Obviously it would not be a Christian ministry at
all. Let it be admitted, then, that it is possible for
men to become so occupied with the purely intellectual
aspects of Christian truth as to be entirely unfitted
for the prosecution of the Christian ministry. It must
be equally allowed that they must have a sound knowledge
of Christian truth in order to be qualified to undertake
the functions of the Christian ministry at all. The
possibility of the abuse of Systematic Theology has no
tendency to arraign its usefulness or even its
indispensableness to the preacher. A high capacity and
love for mathematics may live in a sadly unpractical
brain, and, for aught I know, the world may be full of
pure mathematicians who are absolutely useless to it;
but it does not follow that the practical worker in
applied mathematics can get on just as well without any
mathematics at all. In like manner, though there may be
such a thing as a barren knowledge of even such vital
truth as the Christian verities, there is not and cannot
be such a thing as a fruitful Christian ministry without
a sound and living knowledge of these verities. And it
is very much to be deprecated that men should sometimes
permit themselves to be driven, through their keen sense
of the valuelessness of an inoperative knowledge, to
speak as if no importance attached to that vitalizing
knowledge of divine truth without which any true
ministry is impossible. The warning given us by the
lamented Aubrey Moore [1843-1890, teacher, preacher,
lecturer, apologist, and writer] is sorely needed in our
times. He says: “There are many earnest-minded
Christians who are so morbidly afraid of a barren belief
that they sometimes allow themselves to talk as if to
hold fast to any form of sound words must be formalism;
as if, in fact, the belief in a creed were rather
dangerous than helpful. It is true, of course, as we all
know well, that a right creed cannot save a man, and
that when the bridegroom comes many may be found with
lamps that have no oil; but surely if we discard our
lamps, much of the precious oil we have may be
lost.”[v]
The fundamental principle on which
the indispensableness to the preacher of a sound
knowledge of Christian truth rests is not more surely
rooted in a true psychology than it is illustrated by
universal experience. That “conduct in the long run
corresponds with belief,” as Bishop [Brooke Foss]
Westcott [1825-1901, English scholar, text critic,
preacher, and commentator, although we reject his
textual theory] puts it, “all experience goes to show.”
And certainly he is entitled to add that “this
unquestionable principle carries with it momentous
consequences.” “Patient investigation,” he continues,
“will show that no doctrine can be without a bearing on
action. . . . The influence of a dogma will be good or
bad—that is an important criterion of dogma, with which
we are not now concerned—but if the dogma be truly
maintained, it will have a moral value of some kind.
Every religion, and every sect of every religion, has
its characteristic form of life; and if the
peculiarities of these forms of life are smoothed away
by time, it is only because the type of belief to which
they correspond has ceased to retain its integrity and
sharpness.”[vi]
It is therefore that Principal
[Henry] Wace [1836-1924, English preacher and professor]
rebukes the “tendency of some modern historians to
undervalue the influence upon human nature of variations
in religious and moral principles,” as “strangely at
variance with the evidence before them.”[vii]
“The history of the world,” he adds,
“would appear to be in great measure a history of the
manner in which religious ideas, often of an apparently
abstract and subtle character, can determine the future
of whole races and of vast regions of the earth. . . .
The facts of history thus afford conclusive evidence
that the instinct of the Christian world, or rather the
instinct of mankind, has not been mistaken in
attributing extreme importance to those variations in
faith, even on points apparently secondary, by which
Christendom has been and is still so grievously
divided.” The whole case is most concisely put in a
comprehensive passage in the Systematic Theology
of the late Prof. John Miley
[1813-1895, American Methodist Episcopal theologian and
highly respected professor at Drew Theological
Seminary]:
A religious movement with
power to lift up souls into a true spiritual life must
have its inception and progress in a clear and earnest
presentation of the vital doctrines of religion. The
order of facts in every such movement in the history of
Christianity has been, first, a reformation of doctrine,
and then, through the truer doctrine, a higher and
better moral and spiritual life. . . . Such has ever
been and must forever be the chronological order of
these facts, because it is the logical order. When souls
move up from a sinful life or a dead formalism into a
true spiritual life they must have the necessary reasons
and motives for such action. . . . If we should be
consecrated to God in a life of holy obedience and love,
it must be for reasons of duty and motives of spiritual
well-being which are complete only in the distinctive
doctrines of Christianity. These doctrines are not mere
intellectual principles or dry abstractions, but living
truths which embody all the practical forces of
Christianity. The spiritual life takes a higher form
under evangelical Christianity than is possible under
any other form, whether ritualistic or rationalistic,
because therein the great doctrines of Christianity are
apprehended in a living faith and act with their
transcendent practical force upon all that enters into
this life.[viii]
If there be any validity
at all in these remarks, the indispensableness of
Systematic Theology to the preacher is obvious. For they
make it clear not only that some knowledge of Christian
truth is essential to him who essays to teach that
truth, but that the type of life which is produced by
his preaching, so far as his preaching is effective,
will vary in direct relation to the apprehension he has
of Christian truth and the type of proportion of truth
he presents in his preaching. As Bishop Westcott puts
it: “Error and imperfection in such a case must result
in lives which are faulty and maimed where they might
have been nobler and more complete”; and, on the other
hand, “right doctrine is an inexhaustible spring of
strength, if it be translated into deed.”[ix]
In directly the same line of remark
that saint of God, Dr. Horatius Bonar [1808-1889,
Scottish Presbyterian preacher and poet], urges that:
“All wrong thoughts of God, whether of Father, Son, or
Spirit, must cast a shadow over the soul that entertains
them. In some cases the shadow may not be so deep and
cold as in others; but never can it be a trifle. And it
is this that furnishes the proper answer to the flippant
question so often asked: Does it really matter what a
man believes? All defective views of God’s character
tell upon the life of the soul and the peace of the
conscience. We must think right thoughts of God if we
would worship him as he desires to be worshiped, if we
would live the life he wishes us to live, and enjoy the
peace which he has provided for us.”[x]
And what is true of the doctrine of
God is true of every other doctrine about his ways and
works; as Dr. Westcott phrases it, “The same law which
holds good of the effect of the ideas of God and of a
future life and of the incarnation in their most general
form, holds good also of the details of the view upon
which they are realized.”[xi]
Accordingly Dr. Alexander
Whyte [1837-1921, great preacher of the Free Church of
Scotland] testifies to the relation of right belief and
all the highest devotion, in a striking passage which we
cannot forbear quoting somewhat in full. He writes:
One of the
acknowledged masters of the spiritual life warns us
against “an untheological devotion.” “True
spirituality,” he insists, “has always been orthodox.”
And the readers of the Grammar of Assent will
remember with what masterly power and with what equal
eloquence it is there set forth that the theology of the
Creeds and Catechisms, when it is rightly understood and
properly employed, appeals to the heart quite as much as
to the head, to the imagination quite as much as to the
understanding. And we cannot study Andrewes’ book [his
Private Devotions], his closet confession of
faith especially, without discovering what a majesty,
what a massiveness, what a depth, and what a strength,
as well as what an evangelical fervor and heartsomeness,
his theology has given to his devotional life. . . . In
the Grammar its author says
that for himself he has ever felt the Athanasian Creed
to be the most devotional formulary to which
Christianity has given birth. We certainly feel
something not unlike that when Andrewes takes up the
Apostles’ Creed, or the Nicene Creed, or the Life of our
Lord, or his Names, or his Titles, or his Offices. When
Andrewes takes up any of these things into his
intellect, imagination, and heart, he has already
provided himself and his readers with another great
prayer and another great psalm. So true is it that all
true theology is directly and richly and evangelically
devotional.[xii]
Readers of Dr.
Palmer’s Life of Thornwell will recall a parallel testimony to what the
reading of the Westminster Confession did for
Thornwell’s soul; and we can ourselves testify from
experience to the power of the Westminster Confession to
quicken religious emotion, and to form and guide a
deeply devotional life. “So true is it,” to repeat Dr.
Whyte’s words, that “all true theology is directly and
richly and evangelically devotional.”
It cannot be a
matter of indifference, therefore, what doctrines we
preach or whether we preach any doctrines at all. We
cannot preach at all without preaching doctrine; and the
type of religious life which grows up under our
preaching will be determined by the nature of the
doctrines which we preach. We deceive ourselves if we
fancy that because we scout the doctrines of the creeds
and assume an attitude of studied indifference to the
chief tenets of Christianity we escape teaching a system
of belief. Even the extremest doctrinal indifferentism,
when it ascends the pulpit, becomes necessarily a scheme
of faith. As a bright writer in The Atlantic Monthly
puts it, men are always found believers in either
the head or the tail of the coin. Even “Renan’s
followers have their pockets crammed with beliefs of
their own, bawling to the public to try them; they
trundle their pushcarts down the boulevard, hawking new
creeds: `Par ici, mes amis, par ici! Voici des
croyance neuves, voici la Verite!’“[xiii]
Beliefs old or beliefs new, we all
have them; and when we take our place in the rostrum in
their behalf we perforce become their teachers. There
may be Christian truths of which we speak as if they
were of infinitesimally little importance, because, as
Aubrey Moore caustically puts it, “from first to last we
know infinitesimally little about them”;[xiv]
but we need not fancy that we are
teaching nothing in so speaking of them, or are failing
to preach a dogmatic faith or by it to mold lives in
essaying to occupy a position of indifference. To
withhold these truths from our hearers is not merely a
negative act, nor can their loss act merely negatively
upon their spiritual development. A mutilated gospel
produces mutilated lives, and mutilated lives are
positive evils. Whatever the preacher may do, the
hearers will not do without a system of belief; and in
their attempt to frame one for the government of their
lives out of the fragments of truth which such a
preacher will grant to them, is it any wonder if they
should go fatally astray? At the best, men will be
“driven to a kind of empirical theologizing, attempting
with necessarily imperfect knowledge to coordinate for
themselves the truths of religion and those which follow
as consequences from them”;[xv]
and so will build up an erroneous
system of belief which will mar their lives. At the
worst, they will be led to discard the neglected or
discredited truths, and with them the whole system of
Christianity—which they see, even though the preacher
does not see, to be necessarily correlated with them;
and so will lapse into unbelief. In either case, they
may rightly lay their marred or ruined lives at the
preacher’s door. It is not given to one who stands in
the pulpit to decide whether or not he shall teach,
whether or not he shall communicate to others a system
of belief which will form lives and determine destinies.
It is in his power only to determine what he shall
teach, what system of doctrine he shall press upon the
acceptance of men, by what body of tenets he will seek
to mold their lives and to inform their
devotions.
By as much, however,
as the communication of a system of belief is the
inevitable consequence of preaching, by so much is the
careful formation of his system of belief the
indispensable duty of the preacher. And this is but
another way of saying that the systematic study of
divine truth, or the study of Systematic Theology, is
the most indispensable preparation for the pulpit. Only
as the several truths to be presented are known in their
relations can they be proclaimed in their right effects
on the soul’s life and growth. Systematic Theology is,
in other words, the preacher’s true text-book. Its study
may be undertaken, no doubt, in a cold and unloving
spirit, with the mind intent on merely scholastic or
controversial ends. In that case it may be for the
preacher an unfruitful occupation. But so undertaken it
has also lost its true character. It exists not for
these ends, but to “make wise unto salvation.” And when
undertaken as the means of acquiring a thorough and
precise knowledge of those truths which are fitted to
“make wise unto salvation,” it will assuredly bear its
fruit in the preacher’s own heart in a fine skill in
rightly dividing the word of truth, and in the lives of
the hearers as a power within them working a right
attitude before God and building them up into the
fulness of the stature of symmetrical manhood in
Christ.
[i] From the
Homiletic Review (February 1897), pp. 99-105, as
reprinted in John E. Meeter (editor), Selected
Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol.
II (Phillipsburg, N. J.:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1973),
280-88.
[ii] Gordon Clark, In
Defense of Theology (Milford,
MI: Mott Media, 1984), p. 3.
[iii] Vol. 1, pp. v-vi,
viii.
[iv] As reported in
The Scotsman for Nov. 13,
1888.
[v] Some Aspects of
Sin 20.
[vi] The Gospel of
Life 48,
57.
[vii] The Foundations
of Faith 194-98.
[viii] Vol. 1, 48-49; cf. also
40.
[ix] Westcott, Gospel
of Life 58.
[x] The Gospel of
the Spirit’s Love 22.
[xi] Westcott, Gospel
of Life 55.
[xii] Lancelot
Andrewes and His Private Devotions 49-51.
[xiii] Henry T. Sedgwick,
Jr., in The Atlantic Monthly (August 1896):188.
[xiv] Moore, Some
Aspects of Sin 26.
