"Straight from the Laboratory of John Wesley" -- B. B. Warfield Reviews Lewis Sperry Chafer's "He That Is Spiritual" (Part One)
Lewis Sperry Chafer
He That is Spiritual (1917)
Part One
B. B. Warfield held the chair of Polemical and Didactic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from the Fall of 1887 until his death in 1921. His job title sounds a bit stodgy perhaps, but there was nothing stodgy about Warfield or the duties associated with the prestigious chair which he held. Simply put, it was Warfield’s task to defend the Reformed and Presbyterian faith from any and all challenges. For most of his career, Warfield devoted his time and energy to combating the new German critical scholarship then making its way into the American theological bloodstream. The famous Briggs case comes to mind, along with the numerous essays reprinted in Inspiration and Authority (P & R), and Christology and Criticism and Studies in Theology (from the ten volume Oxford edition of his collected works). But German critical scholarship was not the only theological threat to catch Warfield’s attention.
Warfield spent the last few years of his life addressing the errors of one Charles Grandison Finney, along with critiquing various “Higher Life” movements as the volume of Warfield’s collected essays on these matters, “Studies in Perfectionism” (P & R) attests. Warfield also turned his critical gaze upon a number of evangelical luminaries including Andrew Murray and R. A. Torrey (the founder of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now Biola University). But the man singled out for Warfield’s most biting critical review was Lewis Sperry Chafer.
Lewis Sperry Chafer (b. February 27, 1871 – d. August 22, 1952) was the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary. Chafer is considered by many to be the preeminent dispensational theologian in the first half of the 20th century. Chafer was the author of a seven-volume systematic theology first published in 1947, which has remained in print. Chafer’s Systematic Theology was the standard dispensational theology text and served a role much like Louis Berhof’s Systematic Theology did for the Reformed tradition.
Chafer was also the author of a best-selling and influential book on the Christian life, entitled He That Is Spiritual published in 1917. It was this book which provoked the ire of the Lion of Princeton, painfully evident in Warfield’s “Review” of He That Is Spiritual published in the Princeton Theological Review, XVII, no. 1-4, 1919.
I will consider Warfield’s “Review” of Chafer in several parts.
________________________________________________________
He That Is Spiritual. By Lewis Sperry Chafer. [New York: “Our Hope” Press, 1918], 12 mo., pp. x.–151. Price, 75 cents.
Warfield opens his review by identifying the central issue at hand. Chafer is an evangelical (i.e., he believes the gospel) and a Presbyterian (the denomination in which he is ordained). But he’s also become the champion of various “higher life” doctrines which are antithetical to his evangelical and Presbyterian convictions. From the get-go, it is clear why Warfield grants Chafer little quarter.
Mr. Chafer is in the unfortunate and, one would think, very uncomfortable, condition of having two inconsistent systems of religion struggling together in his mind. He was bred an Evangelical, and, as a minister of the Presbyterian Church, South, stands committed to Evangelicism of the purest water. But he has been long associated in his work with a coterie of “Evangelists” and “Bible Teachers,” among whom there flourishes that curious religious system (at once curiously pretentious and curiously shallow) which the Higher Life leaders of the middle of the last century brought into vogue; and he has not been immune to its infection. These two religious systems are quite incompatible. The one is the product of the Protestant Reformation and knows no determining power in the religious life but the grace of God; the other comes straight from the laboratory of John Wesley, and in all its forms—modifications and mitigations alike—remains incurably Arminian, subjecting all gracious workings of God to human determining. The two can unite as little as fire and water.
Chafer was a Presbyterian minister who supposedly committed himself wholeheartedly to the Westminster Standards which views the Christian life as a life-long struggle against sin as the outworking of justification sola fide. Yet Chafer sees nothing wrong (or inconsistent) by describing the Christian life as one of a choice between being “spiritual” or remaining “carnal.” The higher life teachers to which Warfield refers include Hannah Whitall Smith, who was a prominent figure in the “Higher Life” movement in England and America, and who with her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith were prominent figures in the “Keswick Movement.” Keswick theology held that sincere Christians should seek to advance from a normal, ordinary, lower-level Christian experience to a “higher life” of victory over sin called the “second blessing.” This “second blessing” is achieved, ironically, when the Christian stops trying to advance to this higher level, and in a moment of spiritual breakthrough simply “claims it” by faith. Its roots are undeniably Wesleyan and Arminian.
This was hardly the intellectual company a Presbyterian minister ought to be keeping. Warfield labels Chafer’s associates as “evangelists” and “bible teachers,” since many of these fellow-travelers are self-appointed, not properly ordained, and operate outside of denominational or confession boundaries and supervision. Warfield calls them a “coterie” (i.e, a clique or a klatch), referring to pretentious perfectionism associated with this movement, operating independently of the Presbyterian church and its officers to whom Chafer ought to be accountable.
Warfield moves on to address the specific errors of He That Is Spiritual.
Mr. Chafer makes use of all the jargon of the Higher Life teachers. In him, too, we hear of two kinds of Christians, whom he designates respectively “carnal men” and “spiritual men,” on the basis of a misreading of 1 Cor. 2:9 ff (pp. 8, 109, 146); and we are told that the passage from the one to the other is at our option, whenever we care to “claim” the higher degree “by faith” (p. 146). With him, too, thus, the enjoyment of every blessing is suspended on our “claiming it” (p. 129). We hear here, too, of “letting” God (p. 84), and, indeed, we almost hear of “engaging” the Spirit (as we engage, say, a carpenter) to do work for us (p. 94); and we do explicitly hear of “making it possible for God” to do things (p. 148),—a quite terrible expression. Of course, we hear repeatedly of the duty and efficacy of “yielding”—and the act of “yielding ourselves” is quite in the customary manner discriminated from “consecrating” ourselves (p. 84), and we are told, as usual, that by it the gate is opened into the divinely appointed path (pp. 91, 49). The quietistic phrase, “not by trying but by a right adjustment,” meets us (p. 39), and naturally such current terms as “known sin” (p. 62), “moment by moment triumph” (pp. 34, 60), “the life that is Christ” (p. 31)., “unbroken walk in the Spirit” (pp. 53, 113), “unbroken victory” (p. 96), even Pearsall Smith’s famous “at once”: “the Christian may realize at once the heavenly virtues of Christ” (p. 39, the italics his). It is a matter of course after this that we are told that it is not necessary for Christians to sin (p. 125)—the emphasis repeatedly thrown on the word “necessary” leading us to wonder whether Mr. Chafer remembers that, according to the Confession of Faith to which, as a Presbyterian minister, he gives his adhesion, it is in the strictest sense of the term not necessary for anybody to sin, even for the “natural man” (ix, 1).
Despite his supposed allegiance to the Westminster standards, Chafer has fully embraced the language and categories of the “higher life” notions of sanctification even though Chafer states he opposes them. Warfield chides Chafer for speaking of “engaging the Holy Spirit” as though one were hiring a contractor to renovate a kitchen. Ouch. Warfield has little use for the most egregious slogans of the higher life movement; “yielding,” “letting God,” “making it possible” for God to do things. The worst offense, among the others, is Chafer’s warm embrace of the two-tiered Christian life scheme, with the schlubs (the carnal Christians) who are content to live in defeat, over against those who choose to live in victory mode in their supposed moment by moment triumph over all known sin. A well-deserved sarcasm drips from Warfield’s pen, provoked by Chafer’s warm embrace of an Arminian scheme in which human willing, not God’s appointed means (word and sacrament), are determinative factors in the Christian life. Chafer’s “Presbyterianism” is rather thin. And Warfield is going to remind Chafer of his prior commitments.
Warfield does laud Chafer for not going where his higher life tendencies would otherwise take him—especially to Pentecostal expressions. Yet, as Warfield will point out, Chafer’s view is self-contradictory and while rejecting the higher life labels, actually embraces many higher life views.
Although he thus serves himself with their vocabulary, and therefore of course repeats the main substance of their touching, there are lengths, nevertheless, to which Mr. Chafer will not go with his Higher Life friends. He quite decidedly repels, for example, the expectation of repetitions of the “Pentecostal manifestations” (p 47), and this is the more notable because in his expositions of certain passages in which the charismatic Spirit is spoken of he has missed that fact, to the confusion of his doctrine of the Spirit’s modes of action. With equal decisiveness he repels “such man-made, unbiblical terms as ‘second blessing,’ ‘a second work of grace,’ ‘the higher life,’ and various phrases used in the perverted statements of the doctrines of sanctification and perfection” (pp. 31, 33), including such phrases as “entire sanctification” and “sinless perfection” (pp. 107, 139). He is hewing here, however, to a rather narrow line, for he does teach that there are two kinds of Christian, the “carnal” and the “spiritual”; and he does teach that it is quite unnecessary for spiritual men to sin and that the way is fully open to them to live a life of unbroken victory if they choose to do so.
As for any sort of “second work” of grace in the Christian life, Chafer rejects the terminology yet at the same time embraces a “carnal” vs. “spiritual” distinction among Christians. But what is the carnal vs. spiritual categorization if not a distinction between a lower and a higher level of Christian experience and progress? Those who “choose” to be spiritual (unlike those who do not), Chafer says, can go on to live a life of unbroken victory over sin. How is this not a “higher life,” or “second blessing” even if Chafer rejects the terminology. Chafer is walking a fine line all right, a view he can maintain only by living with a self-contradictory position. Warfield is merely pointing out the obvious. Chafer’s Presbyterianism and his Wesleyan higher life views, can unite as little as fire and water.
End of part one.