Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born on November 5, 1851, on an estate near Lexington, Kentucky, into an influential family connected to the Presbyterian Church. From an early age he showed unusual talent for study, which would take him to Princeton while still a teenager.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1871, at only nineteen years old and with the highest honors of his class. He studied at Princeton Seminary between 1873 and 1876 and, shortly after graduating, spent about two years studying under theological masters in Leipzig, Germany, where he had direct contact with the biblical criticism he would later oppose.
He married Annie Kinkead on August 3, 1876, in Lexington, Kentucky, and soon after traveled with his wife to Germany, where he would continue his studies. During a walk in the Harz mountains, the couple was caught in a violent storm that left Annie with lasting nervous damage. She lived much of her adult life as an invalid, and Warfield cared for her until her death in 1915.
Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1879, he taught New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he had already served as an instructor since 1878. In 1887 he assumed the Charles Hodge Chair at Princeton, dedicated to didactic and polemic theology, a position he held until the end of his life.
In 1881 he published, together with A. A. Hodge, the article Inspiration, which helped formulate the modern doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Throughout his career, he insisted that Scripture is theopneustos, literally God-breathed, and therefore trustworthy in everything it affirms.
He was also a fervent polemicist: he became one of the leading theological opponents of professor Charles Briggs, a declared target of his criticism regarding biblical inspiration. Briggs was eventually condemned for heresy by the General Assembly in 1893, an episode that reveals Warfield’s more combative side, willing to endure harsh institutional confrontations in defense of his convictions.
He wrote against racial segregation within American Presbyterian churches, defending the dignity of Black brothers and sisters in the faith. Even so, his writings on race carried the paternalism common among white southern men of his generation, a limitation acknowledged by historians today.
He died in Princeton on February 16, 1921, eight years before the reorganization of the seminary that would lead to the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary. His books on inspiration, miracles, and salvation remain in print and continue to shape pastors and missionaries today.