# Theology as Worship by B.B. Warfield

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2006/05/16/theology-as-worship-by-bb-warfield/
- Published: 2006-05-16T20:33:22-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“The systematic theologian is pre-eminently a preacher of the gospel; and the end
of his work is obviously not merely the logical arrangement of the truths which 
come under his hand, but the moving of men, through their power to love God with
all their heart and their neighbours as themselves; to choose their portion with
the Saviour of their souls; to find and hold him precious; and to recognise and 
yield to the sweet influences of the Holy Spirit whom he has sent. With such truth
as this he will not dare to deal in a cold and merely scientific spirit, but will
justly and necessarily permit its preciousness and its practical destination to 
determine the spirit in which he handles it, and to awaken the reverential love 
with which alone he should investigate its reciprocal relations. For this he needs
to be suffused at all times with a sense of the unspeakable worth of the revelation
which lies before him as the source of his material, and with the personal bearings
of its separate truths on his own heart and life; he needs to have had and to be
having afull, rich, and deep religious experience of the great doctrines with which
he deals; he needs to be living close to his God, to be resting always on the bosom
of his Redeemer, to be filled at all times with the manifest influences of the Holy
Spirit. The student of systematic theology needs a very sensitive religious nature,
a most thoroughly consecrated heart, and an outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon him,
such as willfill him with that spiritual discernment, without which all native intellect
is in vain. He needs to be not merely a student, not merely a thinker not merely
a systematizer not merely a teacher – he needs to be like the beloved disciple himself
in the highest, truest, and holiest sense, a divine.”

–B.B. Warfield, _Studies in Theology: The Works of B. B. Warfield_, vol. 9, (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991 rep.), pp. 86-87.