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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“Fads were exaggerated into fanaticisms, foibles into gospels.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Studies in Perfectionism

“In a word, what is declared by this fundamental passage is simply that the Scriptures are a Divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them.”
― 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

“If miracles are to be common, everyday occurances, normal and not extraordinary, they cease to attract attention, and lose their very reason of existence. What is normal is according to law. If miracles are the law of the Christian life they cease to serve their chief end.
The contention of the faith-healers overlooks numerous important Biblical facts. Primarily the fact that the miraculous gifts in the New Testament were the credentials of the apostles, and were confirmed to those to whom the apostles had conveyed them--whence a presumption arises against their continuance after the apostolic age. ... Paul did not share the views of our modern faith-healers.”
― Benjamin Warfield, Counterfeit miracles

“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

“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

“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

“...prayer is a means of grace above everything else because it is in all its forms conscious communion with God. This is the source of all grace. When the soul is in contact with God, in intercourse with God, in association with Him, it is not only in an attitude to receive grace; it is not only actually seeking grace; it is already receiving and possessing grace. And intercourse with God is the very essence of prayer.”
― Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Faith and Life