This study concludes that Warfield’s position is best understood as a principled openness to scientific inquiry governed by his commitment to the harmony of general and special revelation, coupled with a sustained critique of evolution’s scientific and theological adequacy.
… According to Noll and Livingstone, Warfield’s thought fluctuated throughout his life. During his student days at Princeton, he was a Darwinian of the purest water. By the time he arrived at Princeton as a professor he was doubtful of the theory of evolution. But according to Noll and Livingstone, by 1915 he had come full circle and embraced the seeds of a newer Darwinism that would come to bloom in the 1930s, almost a decade after Warfield passed into glory. But regarding the validity of Noll and Livingstone’s conclusion, Luther’s question on the scala sancta is appropriate here: who knows if it’s true?
… It is hard to look at this general survey and still think that Warfield was an evolutionist, as Noll and Livingstone contend. Did Warfield believe in his early days that evolution could be a viable theory so long as it was under the sovereign providence of God? Yes, he did. Those quotes are not hard to find. However, with the passage of time one increasingly finds a Warfield who was highly critical of evolutionary theory. Warfield simply did not believe that evolution is able to explain the evidence. This is not to say that evolution does not try; it certainly does. However, Warfield did not find its repeated attempts convincing. Consequently, it is hard to find the Noll and Livingstone thesis convincing.
Jeffrey A. Stivason, “He Made Me, He Made Me Not: Warfield and the Evolution Question,” Westminster Theological Journal 88 (2026), 117, 124, 129.
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