German attacks naively thinking that lower criticism, dealing as it does with the "concrete facts", remained immune to the "speculations" of the higher critics.

B.B. Warfield's Common-Sense philosophy allowed him to adopt the "scientific" text criticism method of Westcott and Hort. He accepted their claim that they had constructed a "neutral" text. The fact that W-H had arrived at such a determination without any reference to theology made their arguments all the more compelling for Warfield. He reasoned that this method must be God's means of restoring the true text (humanistic). Thus he had shifted from his former view of "providential preservation" to one of "providential restoration" in the new text of Westcott and Hort. This was a radical change of interpretation of the Westminster Confession.

Eventually Warfield and his colleague in textual studies, Philip Schaff, feeling that "enlargement is not alteration, development is not revolution, elaboration is not correction" (does not this sound akin to theistic evolution?) came to delight in the notion of updating the old creedal standards. They came to desire a revision of the Westminster creed that would be in accordance with "the advanced stage of theology".

Shortly after his return from Leipzig, the Westcott-Hort text was published (1882). Benjamin B. Warfield gave it a review that would forever endear it to conservatives in the United States. Philip Schaff, himself an accomplished textual scholar, was so impressed with Warfield's elucidation of the Westcott-Hort method of "genealogy" that he invited Warfield to explain it in his Companion To The Greek Testament And English Version. This was tantamount to elevating Warfield to the first rank in this discipline in America.

John Burgon, a high Anglican priest but opposed to ritualism, spent most of his adult life at Oxford. Burgon, who eventually became the Dean of Chichester, viewed Westcott and Hort in a much different light. He saw them as guilty of importing the apostate German method into the British Isles. Warfield despised Burgon, an irony as they were fellow inerrantist, because he relied on theology to interpret textual data. Indeed, this is the correct world view, frame of reference and approach that the Christian should bring to every issue of life. To the contrary however, Warfield felt that the faithful should follow the same method as did the "Enlightenment" scholars, treating Scripture as any other piece of literature, without reference to either its inspiration or uniqueness. Thus Warfield took every opportunity to discredit Burgon's theological arguments in order to distance modern Presbyterians from the suspicion of resisting "scientific" scholarship by an appeal to theology.

Having been encouraged by A.A. Hodge to defend the Princeton view of verbal inspiration against an attack by the critical theories of Charles S. Briggs, Warfield found himself on the horns of a dilemma. His challenge was to act as champion and come to the rescue of Princeton in response to Briggs and other critics and still protect his own reputation as an emerging future authority in text criticism. Yet text criticism was the one discipline which seemed to undermine the Princeton view of verbal inspiration more than any other! Warfield had become a contradiction. While admitting on the one hand that in text critical matters the Bible was as any other literature, Warfield had to contend that it was still the verbally inspired Word of God.

For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God (John 12:43). This was a demanding task indeed, but not intellectually beyond Warfield's abilities. Warfield's solution was to shift his doctrine of inerrancy to include only the original autographa; no longer holding to the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible of the Reformers, the Traditional Text. Thus he moved that if the locus of providence were now centered in restoration via "Enlightenment" textual criticism, rather than preservation of the traditional texts, then we need not concern ourselves with the criticisms lodged at the text of Scripture presently (and historically!) used in the Church. This

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