Systematic Theology: The Complete Three Volumes

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God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself' is (Hodge would say), a fact, a true proposition, a truth. On the evangelical left John Franke, in Beyond Foundationalism, speaks pejoratively of Hodge’s scholasticism and rationalistic foundationalism. This can only mean that he takes induction as a method of pursuing a resolutely a posteriori approach in gathering and understanding the biblical data, and not as denoting the entirety of theological method. To this head must be referred all those systems which are founded on any a priori philosophical assumptions' .

But we know that Jonathan Edwards considered it superior to Turretin and the best book on divinity besides the Bible. Whether asserting such things 'runs the risk of neglecting the larger canonical context and literary form of the biblical “facts”, perhaps the inevitable result of biblical empiricism', as Vanhoozer claims, is hard to tell. It must be remembered that Hodge’s remarks about the nature of theological method have to do in particular with systematic theology.During 1826-28, he travelled to Europe to study with the leading European biblical and theological scholars. In other words, unlike pebbles on a beach, the facts of Scripture, expressed in the sentences and clauses of the Bible, have semantic and syntactic meaning.

Thirdly, that in virtue of the first and second of these practices Hodge focuses on revealed content of the Bible and is predisposed to construe that content as propositional teaching. Nevertheless it leaves the reader with a seriously misleading and even unintelligible account of the Princeton theologian's method.

During his tenure at Princeton Theological Seminary, and later through his Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge has contributed to the training of many thousands of theology students. Secondly, Vanhoozer charges that in Hodge's approach there is a dichotomy between fact and theory, for Hodge (it is said) does not take any account of the 'theory-ladenness' of data. It matters whether or not the observer is a speculator, or a dogmatist, or a mystic, or some of each. It’s hard to overstate the influence Turretin has had on the development and transmission of Reformed theology.