Charles Hodge

Life

Hodge was born in December 1797 in Philadelphia. Some sources give his date of birth as the 27th, others as the 28th. His father, Hugh Hodge, a physician, died shortly after Charles was born, and Charles was raised by his mother. He entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1812 and graduated in 1815. In early 1815, while still a student, he made a public profession of faith before the church during a revival on campus. He then studied under Archibald Alexander at Princeton Theological Seminary, graduating in 1819, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1821.

In 1820 he began teaching at his alma mater, the seminary, and in 1822 he became professor of Oriental and Biblical Literature. From 1826 to 1828 he studied in Paris and in Halle and Berlin, Germany, under leading scholars of the day such as Gesenius, Tholuck, Hengstenberg, and Neander. In 1840 he moved to the chair of theology, and from 1851 until his death he led the seminary. He died in Princeton on June 19, 1878. His son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, was also a theologian and succeeded his father in leading Princeton Theological Seminary.

Ministry and Achievements

• Teaching: Over more than half a century he is reported to have taught some 3,000 students. In 1872 a celebration marked the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship.
• Journal: In 1825 he founded the quarterly Biblical Repertory, later renamed the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review. Hodge edited it for more than forty years and made it the principal voice of Old School Presbyterian theology.
• Writings: His first book, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1835), established his reputation as a scholar. He also published The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (1840), and late in life he produced his major work, the three-volume Systematic Theology (1871–1873). He adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith and used the work of the seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Francis Turretin as a textbook.
• Church activity: When nineteenth-century American Presbyterianism divided into the conservative Old School and the New School, Hodge sided with the Old School. In 1846 he served as moderator of the Old School General Assembly. He vigorously defended biblical inerrancy, the doctrine that Scripture, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is without error. The theological tradition that began with Archibald Alexander and continued through Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen is commonly called "Princeton Theology" (or "Old Princeton Theology").

Influence on the Korean Church

Hodge died before Protestant missions in Korea began in earnest. However, missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterians) contributed greatly to early Korean Presbyterian missions and to the founding of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pyongyang, and some of them were graduates of Princeton Theological Seminary. For this reason, Hodge and Princeton Theology are often discussed in accounts of how Korean Presbyterian theology took shape. Korean theologians today continue to study his Systematic Theology as a representative work of orthodox Reformed theology.

Assessment

The historian of American Christianity Sydney Ahlstrom judged that without Hodge, American Reformed theology would have taken an entirely different course. The historian Mark Noll regarded him as an apologetic theologian who stood against the challenge of modernist theology. Reformed scholars hold that he exemplified a "biblical systematic theology" that built doctrine from Scripture without being swept along by liberal theology.

At the same time, scholars also discuss the influence on his theology of Protestant scholasticism, represented by Turretin, and of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Because he stood in the Calvinist tradition, his soteriology, including his doctrine of predestination, differs from the understanding of denominations that follow Wesleyan theology, such as the Methodist and Holiness churches. Even so, he is sometimes described as one who, within Presbyterianism, rejected overly narrow views of church polity.