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Charles Hodge Biography & Facts

Charles Hodge (December 27, 1797 – June 19, 1878) was a Reformed Presbyterian theologian and principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. He was a leading exponent of the Princeton Theology, an orthodox Calvinist theological tradition in America during the 19th century. He argued strongly for the authority of the Bible as the Word of God. Many of his ideas were adopted in the 20th century by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Biography Charles Hodge's father, Hugh, was the son of a Scotsman who emigrated from Northern Ireland early in the eighteenth century. Hugh graduated from Princeton College in 1773 and served as a military surgeon in the Revolutionary War, after which he practiced medicine in Philadelphia. He married well-born Bostonian orphan Mary Blanchard in 1790. The Hodge's first three sons died in the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 and another yellow fever epidemic in 1795. Their first son to survive childhood, Hugh Lenox, was born in 1796. Hugh Lenox would become an authority in obstetrics, and he would remain especially close with Charles, often assisting him financially. Charles was born on December 27, 1797. His father died seven months later of complications from the yellow fever he had contracted in the epidemic of 1795. They were brought up by relatives, many of whom were wealthy and influential. Mary Hodge made sacrifices and took in boarders in order to put the boys through school. She, with the help of the family's minister Ashbel Green, also provided the customary Presbyterian religious education using the Westminster Shorter Catechism. They moved to Somerville, New Jersey in 1810 in order to attend a classical academy, and again to Princeton in 1812 in order to enter Princeton College, a school originally organized to train Presbyterian ministers. As Charles prepared to enter the college, Princeton Theological Seminary was being established by the Presbyterian Church as a separate institution for training ministers in response to a perceived inadequacy in the training ministers were receiving at the university as well as the perception that the college was drifting from orthodoxy. Also in 1812, Ashbel Green, the Hodge's old minister, became president of the college. At Princeton, the first president of the new seminary, Archibald Alexander, took a special interest in Hodge, assisting him in Greek and taking him with him on itinerant preaching trips. Hodge would name his first son after Alexander. Hodge became close friends with future Episcopalian bishops John Johns and Charles McIlvaine, and future Princeton College president John Mclean. In 1815, during a time of intense religious fervor among the students encouraged by Green and Alexander, Hodge joined the local Presbyterian church and decided to enter the ministry. Shortly after completing his undergraduate studies he entered the seminary in 1816. The course of study was very rigorous, requiring students to recite scripture in the original languages and to use the dogmatics written in Latin in the 17th century by Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin as a theological textbook. Professors Alexander and Samuel Miller also inculcated an intense piety in their students. Following graduation from Princeton Seminary in 1819, Hodge received additional instruction privately from the Rev. Joseph Bates, a Hebrew scholar in Philadelphia. He was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Philadelphia in 1820, and he preached regularly as a missionary in vacant pulpits in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia, the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, and Woodbury, New Jersey over the subsequent months. In 1820 he accepted a one-year appointment as assistant professor at Princeton Seminary to teach biblical languages. In October of that year he traveled throughout New England to speak with professors and ministers including Moses Stuart at Andover Seminary and Nathaniel W. Taylor at Yale Divinity School. In 1821 he was ordained a minister by the Presbytery of New Brunswick, and in 1822 he published his first pamphlet, which allowed Alexander to convince the General Assembly to appoint him full Professor of Oriental and Biblical Literature. Financially stable, Hodge married Sarah Bache, Benjamin Franklin's great-granddaughter in the same year. In 1824, Hodge helped to found the Chi Phi Society along with Robert Baird and Archibald Alexander. He founded the quarterly Biblical Repertory in 1825 to translate the current scholarly literature on the Bible from Europe. Hodge's study of European scholarship led him to question the adequacy of his training. The seminary agreed to continue to pay him for two years while he traveled in Europe to "round out" his education. He supplied a substitute, John Nevin on his own expense. From 1826 to 1828 he traveled to Paris, where he studied French, Arabic, and Syriac; Halle, where he studied German with George Müller and made the acquaintance of August Tholuck; and Berlin where he attended the lectures of Silvestre de Sacy, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, and August Neander. There he also became personally acquainted with Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading modern theologian. He admired the deep scholarship he witnessed in Germany, but thought that the attention given to idealist philosophy clouded common sense, and led to speculative and subjective theology. Unlike other American theologians who spent time in Europe, Hodge's experience did not cause any change in his commitment to the principles of the faith he had learned from childhood. Starting in the 1830s Hodge suffered from an immobilizing pain in his leg, and was forced to conduct his classes from his study from 1833 to 1836. He continued to write articles for Biblical Repertory, now renamed the Princeton Review. During the 1830s he wrote a major commentary on Romans and a history of the Presbyterian church in America. He supported the Old School in the Old School–New School Controversy, which resulted in a split in 1837. In 1840 he became Professor of Didactic Theology, retaining, however, the department of New Testament exegesis, the duties of which he continued to discharge until his death. He was moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Old School) in 1846. Hodge's wife died in 1849, shortly followed by Samuel Miller and Archibald Alexander, leaving him the senior professor of the seminary. He was recognized as the leading proponent of the Princeton theology. On his death in 1878 he was recognized by both friends and opponents as one of the greatest polemicists of his time. Of his children who survived him, three were ministers; and two of these succeeded him in the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, C. W. Hodge, in the department of exegetical theology, and A. A. Hodge, in that of dogmatics. A grandson, C. W. Hodge, Jr., also taught for many years at Princeton Seminary. Literary and teaching activities Hodge wrote many bi.... Discover the Charles Hodge popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charles Hodge books.