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.

344 pages

View a sample here.

“This thoroughly researched biography with its insightful theological focus sets a gold standard for those interested in the life and work of Vos.”

—Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Westminster Theological Seminary

“Rooted in meticulous historical research and demonstrating a penetrating theological understanding, Olinger provides an invaluable resource for those devoted to pursuing in the 21st century that ‘deeper Protestant conception’ set forth by Vos with unprecedented clarity .”

—Lane G. Tipton Charles Krahe Chair, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Westminster Theological Seminary