150 years ago on November 5 one of the English-speaking world's greatest theologians was born near the town of Lexington, Kentucky, in the USA.
He was Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. Today his name is indissolubly linked with that of Princeton Seminary at which he taught theology for more than three decades. There is something rather appropriate about the fact that Warfield was born on Guy Fawkes Day, for in the last 30 or more years he has often been attacked and vilified, even by confessing evangelicals, for his insistence that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant word of God.
Even as a youngster Benjamin Warfield displayed the intellectual gifts and quiet, retiring disposition that became prominent characteristics of his life as a theological teacher. From an early age he was taught the saving truths of the Scripture and soon committed to memory both the shorter and longer catechisms of the Westminster Assembly. And by his mid-teens the Spirit of God had used those truths to bring him to a deep faith in Christ.
