Charles Hodge: Presbyterian Gnostic?

Charles Hodge was the living embodiment of the cerebral Presbyterianism who easily absorbed the rationalism of the reformers yet considered their high sacramentalism to be an anomaly; who eagerly embraced the Puritan hostility to form without the benefit of their spiritual dynamism; who embraced the Westminster Assembly’s doctrine of infant baptism but had lost their ecclesiological theology in the shuffle; who absorbed Jonathan Edwards discomfort with the material world without the advantage of Edwards’ poetic outlook; who rejected the popular revivalism of his day while importing the same individualism into his systematics. Above all, Charles Hodge was a man whose life was dedicated to the proposition that all would be right if only theology were done like a science - or better yet, like Euclidian geometry.

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