Faith & Life

About this book

B.B. Warfield stands as one of the greatest of Reformed theologians. He taught for over thirty years at Princeton Seminary, achieving an enormous output of learned and massive books and articles in defence of historic Calvinism.

Faith and Life reveals another side of the man. Warfield kept up the Princeton tradition of Sunday afternoon classes with the students of the Seminary in which, in his own words, ‘the deeper currents of Christian faith and life’ were explored. This book contains some of the memorable addresses he gave on those occasions. Always based on careful use of Scripture (Warfield has been called ‘a master of the Scripture’s meaning’), they are informal yet restrained, urgent yet tender.

The learned theologian had a child-like confidence in his Saviour and in the reality of his own Christian experience. He once told his students, ‘In your case there can be no “either-or”, either a student or a man of God. You must be both.’ Warfield himself was both, as these pages reveal.

Among the various subjects dealt with, two stand out: the work of the Spirit in conviction, faith, adoption, and prayer; and the need for true devotion to Christ and his cause.

Although, on Warfield’s death, Gresham Machen believed that ‘old Princeton’ had died with him, this book can help the type of piety, long eclipsed, for which Warfield stood, to shine forth in its fulness again.