Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge is doing something slyly modern here: he frames ecclesiology as a question of political power, not just doctrinal tidiness. If authority “vests in the clergy,” he warns, the laity don’t simply lose a vote; they lose the mental permission slip to think. “Passive obedience” is the loaded phrase. It’s not neutral compliance for the sake of order. It’s the posture of a subject, not a believer. Hodge makes the psychological cost of clerical monopoly visible: once you outsource judgment, you train yourself to treat faith as a managed service rather than a lived conviction.

The subtext is Protestant anxiety about Rome and high-church hierarchies, but also a broader American suspicion of concentrated authority in the 19th century. Hodge, a Princeton theologian in the thick of debates over revivalism, confessionalism, and church governance, is drawing a line around what he thinks Protestantism must protect: the believer’s right and duty to read, weigh, and assent. He doesn’t romanticize “private judgment” as freewheeling individualism; he casts it as a safeguard against spiritual despotism.

The rhetoric works because it turns an abstract institutional claim into a moral dilemma. If you deny private judgment, you don’t merely change who interprets Scripture; you redefine what a person is allowed to be. Hodge’s intent isn’t to flatten the clergy’s role, but to keep religious authority from becoming indistinguishable from coercion, where faith is measured by submission rather than understanding.