The Life of Charles Hodge

                                                           by his son, A.A. Hodge

                                                                       Published by the Banner of Truth Trust 

Charles Hodge is one of the towering figures in the history of Reformed Christianity in America. He lived from 1797 to 1878 and from 1820 till the end of his life taught at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. As a preacher, as the long-time editor of The Princeton Review, as a writer, and especially as a professor of theology, he made an enormous contribution to American and world Christianity. Through his commentaries on several of the New Testament letters and through his three-volume Systematic Theology, his influence continues to this day

My interest in Hodge was stimulated by a little book called Princetoniana. It is from the pen of a Scots minister by the name of C.A. Salmond who, as a student at Princeton, had the privilege of being taught both by Charles Hodge and his son, A.A. Hodge. It contains brief biographical sketches of each, together with some class and table talk of Hodge the younger which Salmond himself jotted down. I was to encounter Charles Hodge later on in the pages of David Calhoun’s superb two-volume history of Princeton Seminary. I found myself increasingly drawn to him and resolved to find and read the major biography of him by his son.

Easier said than done.  I never saw it once on a second-hand booklist and got to read it only by borrowing a copy from the Evangelical Library in London. I hoped at the time that someone would reprint it. Some years later the Banner of Truth did exactly that and, as usual, very attractively.

The biography is long (extending to over 600 pages) and is undoubtedly of greatest interest to ministers and students of theology. It is not difficult reading, however, and since Hodge is such an attractive character as a man and as a Christian (as well as as a theologian and expositor of Scripture), and since the biography is so full of human interest, I can warmly recommend it to any mature Christian reader.  

The reading of the borrowed copy back in 1998 led to an address on Charles Hodge for a ministers’ fraternal. The substance of that address was later made available to my congregation in Carlisle PA in booklet form and later still in a series of three articles published in the Banner of Truth magazine. The first of these articles will be posted soon on this blog. I hope that for those unable to command either the necessary time or interest for the 600 page biography they will prove an interesting and helpful substitute. Perhaps there are others of you who will be prompted to buy the biography and read it.

One quotation with which to close: “Not Rutherford himself was more absorbed with the love of Christ. Around this central sun and so near it as to be always aglow with its beams, his whole being revolved. Christ was not only the ground of his hope but the acknowledged sovereign of his intellect, the soul of his theology, the unfailing spring of his joy, the one all-pervading, all-glorifying theme and aim of his life”.

David Campbell