posture allowed Warfield to actually join with the critics of the Princeton position as God's agents (or as some view it, as prophets) in the task of restoring the inerrant original.
HOW THE CONSERVATIVE SEMINARIES WERE CORRUPTED1
Year after year, Enlightenment critics wore down the orthodox Calvinist and other conservatives by pointing out the many discrepancies (variant readings) within the textual data. Warfield proved untrue to his original goal and finally abandoned the scholastic, creedal approach. He determined that if text criticism - German Enlightenment text criticism - could be separated from the higher criticism that fathered it, with common sense at the helm, it could lead the Church safely to the goal. Moreover, if errors and "corruptions" within our present copies could be acknowledged, then perhaps just around the corner lay the pristine autographa waiting to be restored by God's good Providence. Yet textual criticism invariably leads to higher criticism in rejecting eventually the historical and miraculous in God's Word. The denial of this point has allowed the promotion of the many modern translations over the past century. It is a myth that text criticism is harmless to faith.
For the early Princetonians, authority had rested in the providentially preserved text which had been employed by the Church throughout its history, that same text having been used by the Spirit of God to bring about the Reformation. It was B.B. Warfield who brought the Enlightenment to Princeton. The following quote depicts the depths of the deception into which he plunged after his return from Leipzig, a deception which has greatly aided in the satanically guided move to bring us back to the Roman Catholic "Bible" and - eventually - to the Pope.
"I have been surprised, in comparing the Revised Testament with other versions, to find how many of the changes, which are important and valuable, have been anticipated by the Rhemish (Roman Catholic) translation, which now forms a part of what is known as the Douay Bible. ... And yet a careful comparison of these new translations with the Rhemish Testament, shows them, in many instances to be simply a return to this old version, and leads us to think that possibly there were as finished scholars three hundred years ago as now, and nearly as good apparatus for the proper rendering of the original text."2 (author's emphasis and parenthesis)
Soon after Warfield's death in 1921, higher criticism entered Princeton and the Seminary was reorganized in 1929 to more fully accommodate critical thought. The facile certainty that Westcott and Hort's system seemed to offer Warfield vanished as later text critics abandoned the notion of being able to reconstruct a "neutral" text based on Codices B and A. "Eclecticism" (which has long despaired of discovering an archetypal, autographic text - apparently because in their judgment, no such entity ever existed!) became the standard approach in text criticism, and it dominates to this hour.
The adoption of the German methods and the reorganization of Princeton are part of Warfield's legacy. Another part of his legacy is that his position on inerrancy was continued through the godly professors whose lives he had influenced such as Robert Dick Wilson, J. Gresham Machen, Oswald Allis, and Cornelius Van Til. These all left Princeton at the 1929 reorganization and went on to establish Westminster Theological Seminary. Tragically, they carried with them Warfield's warped reinterpretation of the Westminster Confession which professes the "scientific" text criticism of Westcott and Hort as God's means of eventually "restoring" the autographic text. As a result, Westminster Seminary soon became "frozen in time".
1 Letis, Edward Freer Hills' Contribution to the Revival of the Ecclesiastical Text, op. cit., the material written under this heading has been adapted from pp. 86, 87, 103-105.
2 Benjamin B. Warfield, Collection of Opinions, Vol. II, pp. 52-53.
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