The most influential American Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century. He was educated at Princeton College, Princeton Seminary, and during a two-year tour of German theological institutions from 1826 to 1828. He taught biblical literature at Princeton Seminary from 1822 to 1840, when he became Archibald Alexander's successor as professor of exegetical and didactic theology, a position which he held until his death. Hodge used his position as editor of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (founded 1825) to expound his own version of orthodox Calvinism and to attack theologies which deviated from it, such as the New Haven theology of N. W. Taylor, the revivalism of Charles Finney, and the Mercersburg theology of John W. Nevin. Hodge wrote widely on church politics (including the Presbyterian schism of 1837 and reunion of 1868), popular piety (including his 1841 exposition for the American Sunday School Union, The Way of Life), books of the Bible (including commentaries on Romans, Ephesians, I and II Corinthians), and on contemporary affairs (including discussion of the Civil War and an attack on Darwinism). But he is most remembered for his Systematic Theology, a three-volume, 2,000-page work published in 1872-73. He was hard-working, earnest, prolific, and the most complex of the conservative theologians who shaped education at Princeton Seminary from 1812 to 1929.
Hodge's theology grew out of his commitment to an authoritative Bible, his respect for Reformed confessions and for the European Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century, and his belief in the necessity of living piety. He regularly employed the thought forms of inductivist science and the categories of Scottish commonsense philosophy. Yet except for the introductory remarks of his Systematic Theology, these philosophical assumptions were not as influential as they were for other Princeton theologians. Hodge's Calvinism exalted God as the source of salvation and of all good. It was the basis for his belief that the Catholic Church and the Oxford Movement overestimated the saving power of the church, that Charles Finney and Horace Bushnell, in their different ways, underestimated the affect of sin upon native human capacities, and that the New England theologians overindulged modern assumptions about sina dn grace at the expense of biblical convictions. Although Hodge was known best in his own day as a polemicist and as a popular exponent of Calvinistic spirituality, he has received more attention in recent years for his efforts to defend the authority of the Bible in opposition to the early findings of higher criticism.
M. A. NOLL