Theopedia

Charles Hodge

Overview

Charles Hodge (1797-1878) was an American Presbyterian theologian who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for fifty-six years, from 1822 until his death.1 He is best known for his three-volume Systematic Theology (1871-1873), which set out Reformed doctrine as a series of facts drawn inductively from Scripture. The work argues against Rome on original sin, against theories that limited biblical inspiration to Scripture’s thoughts rather than its words, and against Darwinism.2 A critic’s attack on him in 1860 drew a public defense from a Scottish contemporary, who called him “one of the ablest and most influential expounders and defenders of Calvinism in the present day.”3

Life and Ministry

Hodge was born in Philadelphia on December 27, 1797, and studied at the College of New Jersey and Princeton Theological Seminary, graduating from the seminary in 1819.1 The Presbytery of New Brunswick ordained him in 1821, and in 1822 Princeton Theological Seminary appointed him professor of Oriental and biblical literature.1 He moved to the chair of didactic theology in 1840, retaining his New Testament exegesis duties alongside it, and held a Princeton chair for the rest of his life.14 In 1825 he founded the Biblical Repertory, later renamed the Princeton Review, which he edited for four decades and to which he contributed more than 130 articles.1

Hodge married Sarah Bache, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, in 1822; she died in 1849, and he remarried Mary Stockton in 1852.1 Two of his sons became Princeton theologians in their own right: A. A. Hodge succeeded him in the chair of didactic theology, and Caspar Wistar Hodge succeeded him in New Testament exegesis.1 Hodge died at Princeton on June 19, 1878.1

Theological Contribution

Theological Method

Hodge opened his Systematic Theology by comparing the theologian’s task to the natural scientist’s: “The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.”2 On this view theology gathers and systematizes the facts Scripture reveals rather than reasoning ahead of them, a restraint he applied even to God’s decrees: “It must be remembered that theology is not philosophy. It does not assume to discover truth, or to reconcile what it teaches as true with all other truths. Its province is simply to state what God has revealed in his Word.”5

The Rule of Faith

Surveying the confessions of the Lutheran and Reformed churches together, Hodge held that “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and are therefore infallible, and of divine authority in all things pertaining to faith and practice.”6 He defended this plenary, verbal inspiration against several rival theories, including one that “limits it to the thoughts, as distinguished from the words of Scripture” on the assumption that the biblical writers chose their own words without the Spirit’s guidance.7 Against each of these partial theories he argued that Christ and the apostles treated the very words of the Old Testament as spoken by the Spirit, leaving no room for a doctrine of inspiration that stopped short of the text itself.7

Original Sin

Against Rome’s teaching that only deliberate, consented-to acts are properly sin, Hodge held that the unbidden stirrings of a corrupt nature are themselves sinful. He wrote that a believer “recognizes as evil in their own nature the first risings of malice, envy, pride, or cupidity,” knowing “that they spring from an evil or imperfectly sanctified nature.”8 Sin, on this reckoning, is a condition of the heart present in the believer before any act of the will.8

Darwinism and the Origin of Man

In the second volume of his Systematic Theology, Hodge argued at length that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was, in substance, atheistic, because it excluded purpose and design from the origin of species: “the system is thoroughly atheistic, and therefore cannot possibly stand,” since it makes God, after calling the first living cell into existence, no longer active in the world.9 He was careful to distinguish this claim from an accusation against Darwin personally, who “expressly acknowledges the existence of God,” and he contrasted Darwin’s theory with the Duke of Argyll’s version of evolution guided throughout by divine law, which he called theistic rather than atheistic.9

Historical Significance

In February 1860, J. A. Wylie published an article in the Scottish newspaper The Witness attacking Hodge, prompting a reply from William Cunningham, principal of New College, Edinburgh, in the same paper. Cunningham wrote that “there is no living man entitled to treat him in the very peculiar style” of Wylie’s article, adding that Hodge was “one of the ablest and most influential expounders and defenders of Calvinism in the present day, and admirably accomplished in almost every department of theological literature.”3

A generation later, Herman Bavinck named Hodge’s inductive, “storehouse of facts” theological method directly in order to distance his own method from it, identifying it as “the Princeton tradition represented by Charles Hodge” and noting that B. B. Warfield’s own approach to theological method differed from Bavinck’s in turn.10 At Princeton itself, Hodge’s chair passed to his son A. A. Hodge, continuing a line of Reformed teaching at the seminary that ran from Archibald Alexander through both Hodges to J. Gresham Machen.11

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Charles Hodge,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed September 1, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 10. ↩ ↩2

  3. William Cunningham, letter to the editor, The Witness, February 29, 1860, quoted in A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge D. D. LL.D.: Professor in the Theological Seminary Princeton N.J. (Philadelphia: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1880), 424, quoted in Jared Heath Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 94n132. ↩ ↩2

  4. Jared Heath Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 93-94. ↩

  5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 535. ↩

  6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 151-152. ↩

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 182. ↩ ↩2

  8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 184-185. ↩ ↩2

  9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 14-15. ↩ ↩2

  10. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science,” n. 27. ↩

  11. Micah John McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 72-73. ↩