IN the absence of Professor Kuiper the faculty has asked me to address the incoming students with a few words of welcome. I do so on the basis of what John the Apostle writes in Revelation 1:3 — "Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”
We welcome you to a fellowship in reading, a fellowship in hearing and a fellowship in keeping the things that are written in the Scriptures as the final and finished revelation of God in Christ by His Spirit.
From far and near, at great expense of time and money, you have come to us. Many of you are exempted from military service so that you may prepare yourselves for the service of God. Can we offer you anything that will justify all this? No, indeed, not if you look to us. There are no great personalities among us—we have no Schweitzers and no Barths. Yet we welcome you and are confident you will not be disappointed.
We offer you a fellowship in reading the Word of God; we want to read that Word with you in the language in which it was written. By reading it thus you will be least dependent upon the wisdom of man, including any wisdom of his own that anyone of the faculty members might presume to offer. We want to read that Word with you after the analogy of faith. We would compare Scripture with Scripture in order to sense the correct and full meaning of each section as we read. By thus reading we shall learn to submit every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Again you will thus be least dependent upon the wisdom of men, as by the supposed requirements of logic or by supposed fact they would make the Scriptures teach what they do not teach.
As we are engaged in a fellowship of reading, we shall also be engaged in a fellowship of hearing the Word of God. It is the living God whose voice is heard in the Scriptures. Of human words, when written down in books, it is true in a sense to say that the letter killeth. For no man can catch the flow of life and history and tell his fellowman in any exhaustive fashion what it means. But God who controls whatsoever comes to pass, to whom what happens in this world of passing ages is altogether subject, He and He alone can speak with living voice through a book that is a finished revelation of His will to man.
As together we read and as together we hear the voice of the great God triune, the Creator and the Judge of all mankind, we would bow before His majesty in true humility.
Yea, much more than that; we would not only read and hear but we would also together learn to keep the words that are written in this book. We would not be only hearers but also doers of the Word. We would not straightway forget what manner of men we are. On the contrary we would learn to know that we are creatures of God. We would learn to know the meaning of the word of obedience when we hear His voice; what else but adoration and obedience befits those who hear the word of their Maker and their Judge? We would be obedient to His Word when He calls us daily to repentance for our sins; we would be obedient also to His Word when He tells us who read and hear that we must call others, even all men, to repentance for their sins.
Jesus Himself has informed us how difficult this reading, this hearing, this keeping of the Word will be in the days that precede the coming of the Son of Man. Men will not read, men will not hear and least of all will men keep the words of the prophecy of this book. They have always been, but in a special sense will be in these last days, lovers of self rather than lovers of God. They will read and hear and keep only such words as proceed from the wisdom of man. If they pretend to no special wisdom of their own they will seek wisdom from some great scientist, philosopher or theologian. They will be told, Lo Here, or Lo There, is the Christ or true explication of the Christ; but all these Christs will be false Christs, made in the image of sinful man. When men obey such Christs they but obey themselves.
So we welcome you to a fellowship of suffering for the sake of reading, hearing and keeping the words of the prophecy of this book, in the midst of a world where men hear and listen only to themselves, and in the midst of a church that serves false Christs.
But you say, "Your seminary is only some twenty years of age. Where did men go before 1929 when they wanted to learn to read and hear and keep the Word of God in the way that you propose to do?" The answer is that these men then went to Princeton Seminary. For a century and more a faculty of learned and godly men at that Seminary taught generation after generation of students how to read and hear and keep the Word of God. But since 1929 the light of God has been interpreted in terms of the life of man. The life of man has in turn been interpreted by human science and human philosophy. To be sure, lip service is paid to the Word of God. But it is openly avowed, for instance, by the Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton, Dr. George S. Hendry, that nowhere in the Bible can there be any such thing as a system of truth. He would have none of the doctrine of verbal or plenary inspiration of Scripture. The unifying point of Scripture, he says, "is outside of Scripture itself.” It stands, he says, "at the vanishing point of the biblical perspectives.”
When students then read the Bible they do not hear the voice of God. They do not learn to know who God is and what He requires of man. What they hear is the voice of man, not that of God; the Bible is interpreted in accordance with the findings of science falsely so-called, and in accordance with a vain philosophy. Accordingly each man finds in the Bible the god he wants; at best it will be the god of an idealist philosophy. It is a god of whom nothing intelligible can be said; it is therefore the god nobody knows, the god who does not exist.
And as for the Christ of present day Princeton Seminary, it is not the Christ of Charles Hodge, of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield and of Geerhardus Vos. The Christ of these men I have named was delineated in the Scriptures; their students therefore knew who Christ was and what He came into the world to do, namely, to save men from their sins and from the wrath of God to come. But the Christ of modernized Princeton is not God. If -he were, no one could know anything of him for he stands at the "vanishing point of Biblical revelation." He is not even a man. If he were, nobody could know anything of him. He would then himself need salvation. He is an It, a set of ideals for human behavior that men have set up for themselves from no other resources but their own. A theology such as this, with a God nobody knows and a Christ nobody knows, with a God-man that does not exist and so makes no claims upon man and cannot come to judge men for their sins, such a theology, I say, will naturally get a ready hearing in the world today. Such a theology does not call men to repentance for their sins. It agrees with the world in denying the fall of man into sin. It agrees with the world in holding to man's essential ability to save himself, to the extent that he may be said to need salvation at all. Such a theology has no challenge at all to the natural man. It offers him no hope; it leaves men as it finds them, without God and without hope in the world.
It was therefore to perpetuate a theology such as that of the men of old Princeton that Westminster Seminary was organized in 1929. To read the words of God, and to hear His voice through the words of the Bible; and from it to learn what He requires of man, to learn of the nature of man’s sin and of the remedy that God has graciously provided through Christ the Son of God and Son of man,—to read, to hear, to keep the words of the prophecy of this book, Westminster Theological Seminary was organized at the first.
If you young men who have come to us wish to join us in this fellowship of reading and hearing and keeping the Word of God, you are most welcome indeed. With us you will seem to be with the forces that are retreating now; in reality the victory then is yours. For God is on His throne, and Christ still rules. The wisdom of man will again be made foolishness with God. Therefore, my beloved brethren, let us be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as we know that our labor is not in vain in the Lord.