“Ten Hours Over Your Books”

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was a conservative professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921.  He was part of what students and professors at Westminster Seminary like to call “Old Princeton,” referring to the days before the seminary became liberal in its theology, and the conservative Bible scholars left a generation later to form Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  More information about him can be found here.

Here is a great quote by B. B. Warfield from “The Religious Life of Theological Students.”  Actually, the whole essay seems like a great quote!  Westminster Seminary California gave new students this short essay at our new student orientation, and in it Warfield reminds us that we need not create a false dichotomy between theological study and personal piety:

Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. ‘What!’ is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books, on your knees?’ Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God? If learning and devotion are as antagonistic as that, then the intellectual life is in itself accursed, and there can be no question of a religious life for a student, even of theology…Put your heart into your studies; do not merely occupy your mind with them, but put your heart into them. They bring you daily and hourly into the very presence of God; his ways, his dealing with men, the infinite majesty of his Being form their very subject-matter (pp. 2, 6).

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