---
title: 'B.B. Warfield on Calvin’s Contribution to the Doctrine of the Work of the Holy Spirit'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2022-07-23
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2022-b-b-warfield-on-calvins-contribution-to-the-doctrine-of-the-work-of-the-holy-spirit
---

# B.B. Warfield on Calvin’s Contribution to the Doctrine of the Work of the Holy Spirit

“The doctrine of the work of the Holy spirit is a gift from John Calvin to the Church of Christ. He did not, of course, invent it. The whole of it lay spread out on the pages of Scripture with a clearness and fulness of utterance which one would think would secure that even he who ran should read it; and doubtless he who ran did read it, and it has fed the soul of the true believer in all ages. Accordingly hints of its apprehension are found widely scattered in all Christian literature, and in particular the germs of the doctrine are spread broadcast over the pages of Augustine. Luther did not fail to lay hold upon them; Zwingli shows time and again that he had them richly in his mind; they constituted, in very fact, one of foundations of the Reformation movement, or rather they provided its vital breath. But it was Calvin who first gave them anything like systematic or adequate expression; and it is through him and from him that they have come to be the assured possession of the Church of Christ. There is no phenomenon in doctrinal history more astonishing than the commonly entertained views as to the contribution made by John Calvin to the development of Christian doctrine. He is thought of currently as the father of doctrines, such as that of predestination and reprobation, of which he was the mere heir, — taking them as wholes over from the hands of his great master Augustine. Meanwhile his real personal contributions to Christian doctrine are utterly forgotten. These are of the richest kind and can not be enumerated here. But it is germane to our present topic to note that at their head stand three gifts of the first value to the Church’s thought and life, which we should by no means allow to pass from our grateful memory. It is to John Calvin that we owe that broad conception of the work of Christ which is expressed in the doctrine of his threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King; he was the first who presented the work of Christ under this schema, and from him it was that it has passed into a Christian commonplace. It is to John Calvin that we owe the whole conception of a science of “Christian Ethics”; he was the first to outline its idea and develop its principles and contents, and it remained a peculium of his followers for a century. And it is to John Calvin that we owe the first formulation of the doctrine of the work of the Holy Ghost; he himself gave it a very rich statement, developing it especially in the broad departments of “Common Grace,” “Regeneration,” and “the Witness of the Spirit”; and it is, we have seen, among his spiritual descendants only that it has to this day received any adequate attention in the churches. We must guard ourselves, of course, from exaggeration in such a matter; the bare facts, when put forth without pausing to allow for the unimportant shadings, sound of themselves sufficiently like an exaggeration. But it is simply true that these great topics received their first formulation at the hands of John Calvin; and it is from him that the Church has derived them, and to him that it owes its thanks for them.” — [B.B. Warfield](/authors/b-b-warfield), Introductory Note to Abraham Kuyper’s *The Work of the Holy Spirit* (1900), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.