Life of Charles Hodge

Charles Hodge is acknowledged to be one of the most influential leaders in the history of the church in America, and perhaps the greatest American theologian of the nineteenth century. yet paradoxically he confessed, ‘I have never advanced a new idea’, and remarked of Princeton Seminary where he taught for more than fifty years, ‘I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this Seminary.’ Hodge went on to explain that his sole object had been to state and vindicate the doctrines of the Reformed faith, not to improve on them. His great achievement, therefore, was that what might have seemed a recipe for stagnation and decline gave rise rather to a period of extraordinary vitality, vigour and advance in the American Presbyterian Church.