Robert Lewis Dabney

Setting: Old School Southern Presbyterian and Westminster confessional.

Robert Lewis Dabney was a Presbyterian pastor, Confederate chaplain and staff officer, professor at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and later at the University of Texas, and a wide-ranging theologian and polemicist. His Discussions and Systematic Theology include important treatments of inspiration, infallibility, textual criticism, and the English revision controversy.

Dabney is a major nineteenth-century Reformed witness, but a responsible biography must also state his defence of American slavery and white supremacy. Those grave moral errors cannot be hidden by agreement with his bibliology, nor do they relieve the Research Center from assessing his textual arguments accurately.

Bibliological positions

Scripture is an infallible divine rule received by the church; textual criticism is legitimate as a servant but becomes destructive when conjectural or narrow critical judgments overturn the text publicly possessed and used.

Qualifications and disputes

Dabney did not reject all textual criticism or every possible correction to a printed edition. His moral and political writings include serious errors and must not be sanitized.

His exact relation to plenary verbal inspiration terminology, the scope of his revision objections, and the use of his broader epistemology in bibliology require fuller study.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Virginia — R. L. Dabney — Biographical orientation including public career
• Internet Archive creator search — Public-domain works catalogue

Principal works

• Discussions: Evangelical and Theological (1890–1897); legacy WRK-0039; WRK; Ready after permanent-ID allocation and duplicate scan
• Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology (1871; revised editions); legacy WRK-0040; WRK; Ready after permanent-ID allocation and duplicate scan