Geerhardus Vos: Reformed Biblical Theologian, Confessional Presbyterian

“He was probably the best exegete Princeton ever had,” Benjamin B. Warfield once told Louis Berkhof about their mutual friend Geerhardus Vos. Abraham Kuyper was so impressed with Vos’s academic ability that Kuyper offered him a faculty position at the Free University of Amsterdam when Vos was only twenty-four years old. Before Vos was thirty, both William H. Green and Herman Bavinck urged him to come teach at their respective institutions. J. Gresham Machen said that if he knew as much as Vos, he would be writing all the time. John Murray believed that Vos was the most incisive exegete in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. Cornelius Van Til considered Vos the most erudite man he had ever known. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. proclaimed Vos “the father of Reformed biblical theology.” Notwithstanding such acclaim among these and other leading Reformed theologians, and his teaching at Princeton Seminary from 1893 to 1932, Vos was increasingly marginalized during his own lifetime. In Geerhardus Vos: Reformed Biblical Theologian, Confessional Presbyterian, Danny Olinger tells the story of Vos’s life and analyzes the theological contributions of Vos’s writings. Olinger further details Vos’s significant influence upon the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Theological Seminary, despite not joining either one.