Thursday, August 25, 2005

Checking Up on the Scholars' Work

"The first point is a simple one: just because those who attack the Princeton tradition in general, and Warfield in particular, are world-renowned scholars who may be cleverer and better read than you or I, that does not necessarily make them correct. As with all academic books you read (and, indeed, any productions by members of the pro-Warfield camp such as myself), check the footnotes, check the sources, read the quotations in the original texts so as to determine the immediate theological context of particular statements. You will be surprised how often confident claims about this or that aspect of the Warfield tradition are based upon a less than sure-footed reading of the primary materials, a contrived and forced interpretation of a particular sentence, and sometimes upon no reading of primary material at all."

Carl Trueman, "The Princeton Trajectory on Scripture," in Wages of Spin, p. 96