B.B. Warfield > Quotes

“There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be trust as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield

“Grace is free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.”
― Benjamin B. Warfield

“Christ himself deliberately staked his whole claim to the credit of men upon his resurrection. When asked for a sign, he pointed to this sign as his single and sufficient credential.”
― B.B. Warfield

“A love of celibacy and a zeal for martyrdom does not bode well for the future of the sect." - regarding the Essenians”
― B.B. Warfield

“The issue is indeed a fundamental one and it is closely drawn. Is it God the Lord that saves us, or is it we ourselves? And does God the Lord save us, or does he merely open the way to salvation, and leave it according to our choice, to walk in it or not? The parting of the ways is the old parting of the ways between Christianity and autosoterism. Certainly only he can claim to be evangelical who with full consciousness rests entirely and directly on God and on God alone for his salvation.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan Of Salvation

“If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be...Remember his own word, "It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ

“Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of others. And thus it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us, but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ

“The glory of the incarnation is that it presents to our adoring gaze not a humanized God or a deified man, but a true God-man.”
― B.B. Warfield

“In its very nature, prayer is a confession of weakness, a confession of need, of dependence, a cry for help, a reaching out for something stronger, better, more stable and trustworthy than ourselves on which to rest and depend and draw… Prayer, thus, in its very nature, because it is an act of self-abnegation, a throwing of ourselves at the feet of One recognised as higher and greater than we, and as One on whom we depend and in whom we trust, is a most beneficial influence in this hard life of ours. It places the soul in an attitude of less self-assertion and predisposes it to walk simply and humbly in the world.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Faith and Life

“For the Reformation is nothing other than Augustianianism come to its rights: the turning away from all that is human to rest on God alone for salvation.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“The thing for us to do is to pray without ceasing; once having come into the presence of God, never to leave it; to abide in His presence and to live, steadily, unbrokenly, continuously, in the midst of whatever distractions or trials, with and in Him. God grant such a life to every one of us!”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Faith and Life

“Very strange clay this, passive in the potter’s hands, to which the potter can do nothing unless it lets him!”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Studies in Perfectionism

“Perfectionism is impossible in the presence of a deep sense or a profound conception of sin.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Studies in Perfectionism

“In the presence of this mental anguish the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background, and we may well believe that our Lord, though he died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but, as we commonly say, of a broken heart, that is to say, of the strain of his mental suffering.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Emotional Life of our Lord

“As supernaturalism is the mark of Christianity at large, and evangelicalism the mark of Protestantism, so particularism is the mark of Calvinism.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“Surely the Pelagians forgot that man was not made for will, but will for man.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Augustine & The Pelagian Controversy

“When Melanchthon toyed with such ambiguous phrases as "God draws the willing to him," "Free will is man's power to apply himself to grace, he was playing with fire.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“The Calvinist is he who holds with full consciousness that God the Lord, in his saving operations, deals not generally with mankind at large, but particularly with the individuals who are actually saved.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“Where the Spirit is, there is the church; outside the body of the saints there is no salvation.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“The value of “inspiration” emerges, thus, as twofold. It gives to the books written under its “bearing” a quality which is truly superhuman; a trustworthiness, an authority, a searchingness, a profundity, a profitableness which is altogether Divine. And it speaks this Divine word immediately to each reader’s heart and conscience; so that he does not require to make his way to God, painfully, perhaps even uncertainly, through the words of His servants, the human instruments in writing the Scriptures, but can listen directly to the Divine voice itself speaking immediately in the Scriptural word to him.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Inspiration: The Undeniable Truth About the God-Breathed Scriptures

“If heights are to be scaled above man’s native power to achieve, then something more than guidance, however effective, is necessary. This is the reason for the super-induction, at the end of the long process of the production of Scripture, of the additional Divine operation which we call technically “inspiration”. By it, the Spirit of God, flowing confluently in with the providentially and graciously determined work of men, spontaneously producing under the Divine directions the writings appointed to them, gives the product a Divine quality unattainable by human powers alone.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Inspiration: The Undeniable Truth About the God-Breathed Scriptures

“The love of God is in its exercise necessarily under the control of his righteousness; and to plead that his love has suffered an eclipse because he does not do all that he has the bare power to do, is in effect to deny to him a moral nature.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan of Salvation

“It belongs to the very essence of the type of Christianity propagated by the Reformation that the believer should feel himself continuously unworthy of the grace by which he lives. At the center of this type of Christianity lies the contrast of sin and grace; and about this center everything else revolves. This is in large part the meaning of the emphasis put in this type of Christianity on justification by faith. It is its conviction that there is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only “when we believe.” It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be. It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest. There is never anything that we are or have or do that can take His place, or that can take a place along with Him. We are always unworthy, and all that we have or do of good is always of pure grace. Though blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ, we are still in ourselves just “miserable sinners”: “miserable sinners” saved by grace to be sure, but “miserable sinners” still, deserving in ourselves nothing but everlasting wrath. That is the attitude which the Reformers took, and that is the attitude which the Protestant world has learned from the Reformers to take, toward the relation of believers to Christ.

from '"Miserable-Sinner Christianity" in the Hands of the Rationalists”
― B.B. Warfield

“Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of others. And thus it is not to mere self-
denial that Christ calls us, but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing
ourselves. Self-denial for its own sake is in its very nature ascetic, monkish. It concentrates our whole
attention on self; self-knowledge, self-control--and can, therefore, eventuate in nothing other than the very
apotheosis of selfishness. At best it succeeds only in subjecting the outer self to the inner self, or the lower
self to the higher self; and only the more surely falls into the slough of self-seeking, that it partially conceals
the selfishness of its goal by refining its ideal of self and excluding its grosser and more outward elements.
Self-denial, then, drives to the cloister; narrows and contracts the soul; murders within us all innocent
desires, dries up all the springs of sympathy, and nurses and coddles our self-importance until we grow so
great in our own esteem as to be careless of the trials and sufferings, the joys and aspirations, the strivings
and failures and successes of our fellow-men. Self-denial, thus understood, will make us cold, hard,
unsympathetic,--proud, arrogant, self-esteeming,--fanatical, overbearing, cruel. It may make monks and
Stoics,--it cannot make Christians.
It is not to this that Christ’s example calls us. He did not cultivate self, even His divine self: He took no
account of self. He was not led by His divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses of His
own soul to brood morbidly over His own needs, until to gain His own seemed worth all sacrifice to Him. He
was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once
for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead
us, His followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to
comfort. Wherever men strive, there we will be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift.
Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our
fellows: it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every
man’s hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means many-sidedness of spirit, multiform activity,
multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but a
thousand lives,--binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their
lives become ours. It means that all the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter
these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. It is, after all, then, the path to the highest
possible development, by which alone we can be made truly men.
Not that we shall undertake it with this end in view. This were to dry up its springs at their source. We
cannot be self-consciously self-forgetful, selfishly unselfish. Only, when we humbly walk this path, seeking
truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall find the promise true, that he who loses his life
shall find it. Only, when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and example, we take no account of
ourselves, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself
also: “Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him.” The path of self-sacrifice is the path to glory.”
― B. B. Warfield, The Gospel of the Incarnation

“THERE ARE fundamentally only two doctrines of salvation: that salvation is from God, and that salvation is from ourselves. The former is the doctrine of common Christianity; the latter is the doctrine of universal heathenism. "The principle of heathenism," remarks Dr. Herman Bavinek, "is, negatively, the denial of the true God, and of the gift of his grace; and, positively, the notion that salvation can be secured by man's own power and wisdom. 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name.' Gen. 11:4.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Plan Of Salvation

“It is death that is the object of his wrath,”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Emotional Life of our Lord

“They are of Divine origin and therefore of the highest value for all holy purposes.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Inspiration: The Undeniable Truth About the God-Breathed Scriptures

“Jesus’ anger is not merely the seamy side of his pity; it is the righteous reaction of his moral sense in the presence of evil. But Jesus burned with anger against the wrongs he met with in his journey through human life as truly as he melted with pity at the sight of the world’s misery: and it was out of these two emotions that his actual mercy proceeded.”
― B.B. Warfield, The Emotional Life of Our Lord

“What John tells us, in point of fact, is that Jesus approached the grave of Lazarus, in a state, not of uncontrollable grief, but of irrepressible anger.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Emotional Life of our Lord

“It is characteristic of John’s Gospel that it goes with simple directness always to the bottom of things. Love lies at the bottom of compassion. And love is attributed to Jesus only once in the Synoptics, but compassion often; while with John the contrary is true — compassion is attributed to Jesus not even once, but love often. This love is commonly the love of compassion, or, rather, let us broaden it now and say, the love of benevolence; but sometimes it is the love of sheer delight in its object. Love to God is, of course, the love of pure complacency. We are surprised to note that Jesus’ love to God is only once explicitly mentioned (Jno. xiv. 31); but in this single mention it is set before us as the motive of his entire saving work and particularly of his offering of himself up. The time of his offering is at hand, and Jesus explains: “I will no more speak much with you, for the prince”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Emotional Life of our Lord