Justified True Belief

(●) The Dutch theologian who argued that grace does not replace the world God made but heals it. + There is a sentence that follows Herman Bavinck around, usually in some shortened form: grace restores nature. It sounds mild until you notice what it rules out. It rules out the idea that becoming a Christian means leaving ordinary life behind, and it rules out the opposite idea that ordinary life is fine as it is and the gospel is a private comfort laid on top. Bavinck spent his working life arguing that God does not scrap the world He made, and that redemption is repair rather than replacement. He came from a small, embattled Dutch church that had walked out of the state church twenty years before he was born, and he is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is that he went straight into the strongest liberal theology faculty in the Netherlands, learned it thoroughly, and came out with his convictions intact and his arguments sharper. The second is what he did with his learning: four volumes of Reformed Dogmatics that take the objections of nineteenth-century critics seriously, one by one, in the middle of the doctrine being stated rather than in a defensive appendix. The signature fact about him is a delay. The Gereformeerde Dogmatiek was finished in 1901 and went through four Dutch editions, yet it did not appear complete in English until 2008, a hundred and seven years later. For most of the twentieth century the English-speaking church knew him, if at all, by his Princeton lectures and a one-volume summary of the dogmatics.

(●) 1854 AD: Born in a parsonage belonging to a church that had left the national church in protest. + Herman Bavinck was born on 13 December 1854 at Hoogeveen, a peat-digging town in the province of Drenthe, where his father was the minister. Jan Bavinck (1826 to 1909) had been born across the German border and had come to the Netherlands to serve the seceded church, called in those years the Christelijke Afgescheidene Gereformeerde Kerk and from 1869 the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerk, the Christian Reformed Church, which was not the country’s old established church but a breakaway from it. The break had a name. In 1834 a group of ministers and congregations left the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk, the state-supported national church, because they judged that it no longer held its own confession. The Dutch call it the Afscheiding, the Secession. Leaving cost money and standing: the seceders walked away from the church buildings, were fined for holding services, sometimes had soldiers billeted in their houses, which meant housing and feeding men they had not invited and could not turn out, and for years had to meet in barns and front rooms. By the time Herman was born the worst harassment was over, but the habit of mind was not. These were people for whom church membership was a decision with a price attached, and who were used to being looked down on by the educated. That is the household he grew up in, and it matters for everything that follows. His father was a preacher of unusual warmth and no scholarly pretension. His son would spend his life trying to give that piety a theology that could hold its own in any university in Europe.

(●) 1874 AD: He left his own church’s seminary for Leiden, and the people who loved him thought they were losing him. + In 1873 he finished the gymnasium at Zwolle, the Dutch academic secondary school where a boy took Latin and Greek and was made ready for a university, and he had done its four-year course in three. Then he entered the Theological School at Kampen, his church’s own training college, which is where a Seceder minister’s son who wanted to preach was supposed to go. He lasted a year. What he wanted was Leiden. The University of Leiden was the oldest and most distinguished in the country and, in the eyes of his church, the most dangerous. Its theology faculty was the headquarters of Dutch modernism, the movement that meant to keep Christianity as a moral and religious force while quietly setting aside whatever a modern mind could no longer swallow, the miracles above all. Two of its professors had done the setting aside particularly well. Johannes Henricus Scholten had rebuilt Reformed theology as a philosophical system with the supernatural removed, and Abraham Kuenen’s Old Testament criticism had dismantled the traditional account of how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be written, putting much of the law of Moses on paper centuries after Moses. Sending a Seceder minister’s son to sit at their feet was, to many in his circle, like sending a lamb to school with the wolves. His parents and others tried to talk him out of it, and he went anyway, in 1874, to study theology and the Semitic languages, the family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic, for six years. He was not glib about what it did to him. He later wrote that the years at Leiden had cost him something he never entirely got back, a certain freshness and immediacy in his faith, and that is a strange thing for a man to admit about the training he chose against everyone’s advice. He also never pretended the cost had been wasted. He had learned the case against his own position from the people who made it best, and for the rest of his life he was unable to answer an objection with a slogan.

(●) 1880 AD: He took his doctorate under the leading modernist in the country, with honors. + On 10 June 1880 Bavinck defended his dissertation at Leiden and was awarded the doctorate cum laude, with honors. The subject was De ethiek van Ulrich Zwingli, the ethics of Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer of Zurich, and the supervisor was Scholten himself. Consider the arrangement for a moment. A young man from a church of a few tens of thousands, in a movement the universities regarded as rural and obscurantist, spent six years being examined by the men whose life work was to show that his church’s theology could not survive modern scholarship. He worked under them, took their marks, earned their respect, and left holding his own confession. Scholten thought well enough of him to supervise him; Bavinck thought well enough of Scholten to keep reading him for the rest of his life, and to answer him at length in print rather than dismiss him. (A confession, in this world, is not a mood or a private conviction but a document: the written statement of faith a church binds itself and its ministers to, which for the Dutch Reformed meant the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort.) The choice of Zwingli is itself a small clue. Of the reformers, Zwingli is the one most interested in how Christian faith reshapes a whole city, its schools, its trade, its politics. Bavinck would return to that question again and again.

(●) 1881 AD: He spent about nineteen months in a country pulpit at Franeker, the only parish he ever served. + On 13 March 1881 he was installed as minister of the Christelijke Gereformeerde congregation at Franeker, a small town in Friesland in the north. It was the whole of his pastoral career, and he was never sentimental about it. By his own account he found preaching hard and the work of a village minister harder than the academy had led him to expect. He was already being courted. Abraham Kuyper, the journalist, politician and theologian who had founded the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, wanted him, and Bavinck declined. What he took instead, in 1882, was an appointment from his own church’s synod, the assembly where delegates from all the congregations decide such matters together, to the chair of dogmatics at Kampen. Dogmatics is simply the orderly statement of what the church believes and why, doctrine by doctrine, with the reasons and the objections laid out, and it is the discipline his great book belongs to. He preached his farewell at Franeker on 8 October that year. The nineteen months in Franeker left a mark that is visible on every page he later wrote. He knew what it was to have to say a hard doctrine out loud to people who were tired on a Sunday morning, and he wrote dogmatics for pastors rather than for specialists.

(●) 1883 AD: At twenty-eight he took the chair of dogmatics at Kampen, and in his twenty years there wrote the four volumes of his Reformed Dogmatics. + He began on 10 January 1883 with an inaugural address, De wetenschap der heilige godgeleerdheid, on theology as a genuine science with its own object and its own method. He was twenty-eight years old, and the men in front of him were not much younger than he was. He taught them dogmatics, ethics, philosophy, and the encyclopedia of theology, which despite the name is not a reference book but a course: a map of how the theological disciplines fit together, and why the study of Hebrew and the study of preaching both belong on it. Two Kampen addresses from those years still get read. Both were rectoral addresses, the speech a Dutch professor gives at the end of his year as rector, the head of the school. On 18 December 1888 he delivered De katholiciteit van christendom en kerk, on the catholicity of Christianity and the church, arguing that a church which withdraws into its own circle has denied something about the truth it claims to hold (T3). On 6 December 1894 he gave another, De algemeene genade, on common grace: the goodness God shows to everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, in rain and harvest, in law and art and skill, which is why a pagan can build a beautiful bridge and a hostile scholar can get a date right. His private life settled in the same years. On 2 July 1891 he married Johanna Adriana Schippers, and their only child, Johanna Geziena, was born at Kampen on 25 November 1894. And through the whole of the decade, in the hours around all of that, he was writing the book. The four volumes of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek came out one at a time, in 1895, 1897, 1898 and 1901: thousands of pages of church history, of exegesis (the close reading of a biblical passage to draw out what it actually says, word by word and in its setting), and of argument with critics who were still alive and could answer back. It is the sort of project a man is usually given a quiet chair and a light load to finish. Bavinck wrote it while carrying a full teaching load and a good deal of church politics.

(●) 1902 AD: He left the church’s own school for Abraham Kuyper’s Free University in Amsterdam, and the parting was bitter. + In 1892 the church of the 1834 Secession merged with the churches that had followed Kuyper out of the national church in 1886, forming the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland. Two families of congregations, one household. That left one question unsettled, and it poisoned the next decade: where would their ministers be trained? You might think a quarrel about the address of a classroom is a small thing to spend ten years on. It was not a quarrel about the address. Kampen was a church school, owned and governed by the churches, which chose its teachers and could remove them. Amsterdam was a university, free of both church and state, which is what the word Free in its name meant: it took no money and no orders from either, and it had a theology faculty sitting inside it alongside law and letters and medicine. Behind the two buildings stood two answers to the question of who is finally responsible for a preacher’s learning. Bavinck wanted the two joined, and said so for years, in print. His 1899 proposal even carried the plan in its subtitle, Theologische School en Vrije Universiteit: een voorstel tot vereeniging, a proposal for union. It failed. His Kampen colleague Lucas Lindeboom led the opposition and held that theological training belonged to the churches and to nobody else, and after repeated attempts the union was dead. In 1902 Bavinck accepted the Amsterdam chair, succeeding Kuyper, who had just become prime minister. He gave his Amsterdam inaugural, Godsdienst en godgeleerdheid, on 17 December 1902. He went alone, and the leaving was ugly enough that he published a pamphlet about it the same year with a title that says everything: Blijven of heengaan?, to stay or to go, a question and an answer. The men who had taught him and the students he had taught for twenty years watched him walk to the institution they had refused to join.

(●) 1908 AD: He crossed the Atlantic to lecture at Princeton, and came home disturbed by what he had seen of American race relations. + In 1906 he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. For a theologian out of a seceder church, whose people had been holding their services in barns within living memory, that was a considerable thing. Two years later he was at Princeton Theological Seminary giving the Stone Lectures, the seminary’s annual series, which Kuyper had given a decade before him. He and his wife sailed to America in 1908, which still meant a week or more at sea. Six of the lectures were delivered at Princeton and printed as The Philosophy of Revelation the following year; Geerhardus Vos and B. B. Warfield saw the English text through the press. The Bavincks were received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. What he wrote down about America was not all admiring, and the part that was not is the part worth sitting with. James Eglinton, who worked through the travel notes and the Dutch lectures for his 2020 biography, records that white Americans told Bavinck that black Americans were not human beings, that he read Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to understand what he was seeing, and that he judged America a disaster on account of its racism. Lecturing at Rotterdam in 1909 he warned that a heated struggle between black and white would surely come, fanned by the strong antipathy on both sides, and that only the way of religion could prevent it. The ground for that is the one the New Testament gives: God "made from one man every nation of mankind" (Acts 17:26). Back home he was made a senator. From 1911 until his death he sat in the Eerste Kamer, the upper house of the Dutch parliament, for the Anti-Revolutionary Party, which took its odd name from the revolution it was against: the French one of 1789, and with it the claim that authority rises up from the sovereign people rather than coming down from God. And in his last decade the subjects changed. He wrote less dogmatics and more on education, psychology, the family, the place of women in modern society, and the moral wreckage of the First World War, which is roughly the list of things a man writes about when he has stopped explaining the faith to scholars and started worrying about the people he has to live among.

(●) 1921 AD: A heart attack at a synod ended his work, and he died saying his dogmatics could not help him. + In 1920 the Gereformeerde Kerken held their general synod at Leeuwarden. Bavinck was there in the thick of it, as he always was, and after delivering a report he suffered a heart attack. He seemed at first to rally and then had a second. He never really recovered, and after months of illness he died in Amsterdam on 29 July 1921, at sixty-six. The story that comes down from those who sat with him is the one everyone repeats, and it is worth repeating carefully. Asked whether he was afraid to die, he is reported to have answered that his dogmatics availed him nothing, nor his learning, but that he had his faith, and in that he had everything. Valentijn Hepp, who knew him and whose life of him came out in December of the same year, reports it in a slightly different form: that his scholarship availed him nothing, nor his dogmatics, and only his faith could save him. The report reaches us through those who were in the room and through Hepp rather than in Bavinck’s own handwriting, and the wording shifts from one telling to the next, so the exact words are secondhand. The sense of it is entirely in character. He had spent forty years insisting that theology is knowledge of God and not a substitute for Him. He left his Gereformeerde ethiek, the companion volume of ethics to the dogmatics, sitting in manuscript, written in the Kampen years and never sent to a printer. It stayed in the archives for more than a century, and has been coming out in English, volume by volume, since 2019.

What He Taught

(T1) Grace does not replace the world God made; it heals it. + Think about what happens when a good doctor sets a broken arm. She does not amputate it and fit a better one, and she does not leave it as it is and offer the patient a distraction. She puts the bone back where it belongs, because the arm was well made to begin with and the break is the problem. That analogy is doing the work of a whole theology. Bavinck kept describing three answers to the question of how the gospel relates to ordinary created life, and rejecting two of them. The first says grace is an extra storey built on top: the natural world is fine as far as it goes, and religion is a supernatural addition supplied by the church. The second says the natural world is so far gone that grace must sweep it away and start over, which is why some Christian movements have withdrawn from art, politics, and science as if those were the enemy’s ground. Bavinck’s answer was the third: creation is God’s own work and good, sin has genuinely ruined it, and redemption is the repair of the thing that was made rather than the supply of a replacement. He got the principle from Scripture rather than from the reformers, though he credited them with recovering it. "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Timothy 4:4). The creation groans, and is not discarded (Romans 8:22). What God reconciles in Christ is "all things, whether on earth or in heaven" (Colossians 1:20). The reach of this is what makes it worth learning. If grace restores nature, then a Christian pursuing chemistry or carpentry or the raising of children is not doing something spiritually second-rate while waiting for the real thing. Bavinck said it in so many words in 1894: the father of a family, the mother of her children, the servant girl in the kitchen and the laborer behind the plough are as truly servants of God as the missionary and the minister, provided they do their work faithfully and for the Lord’s sake. And it cuts the other way too. If the world is God’s and broken, then nothing in it is beyond criticism either.

(Q) "In the powerful mind of the French Reformer, re-creation is not a system that supplements Creation, as in Catholicism, not a religious reformation that leaves Creation intact, as in Luther, much less a radically new creation as in Anabaptism, but a joyful tiding of the renewal of all creatures." + Source: Bavinck, The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church (1888), Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992), p. 238 (John Bolt translation). The French Reformer is John Calvin. Bavinck is setting four answers side by side, and the three he sets aside are named without malice: Rome adds a second storey, Luther renews worship and preaching and leaves the rest of life standing as it was, and the Anabaptists start again from nothing. Anabaptist means rebaptizer, the nickname given to the radical wing of the Reformation who held that baptism belongs to a believer old enough to confess the faith, and who commonly withdrew from the oaths, the courts and the armies of the surrounding society. "Re-creation" is Bavinck’s usual word for redemption, chosen precisely because it contains the word creation (T1).

(T2) The world itself rests on revelation, so no part of knowledge lies outside God’s reach. + A student sits through a biology lecture on Thursday morning and a sermon on Sunday, and somewhere along the way she has quietly worked out that the two never need to meet. The lecture is about how things work. The sermon is about how she ought to live and what she may hope. Each stays on its own side, neither interrupts the other, and the arrangement holds beautifully right up until somebody asks a question in the wrong room. That arrangement was not invented by tired students. By the time Bavinck stood up at Princeton in 1908 it had been struck all over Europe as a formal bargain, and a good many theologians had signed it gratefully. The bargain was this: science takes the world, and religion keeps the inner life. Nature, history, the human mind and its workings all go to the laboratory and the seminar room; what is left for God is the private heart, or the figure of Jesus, or the sense of dependence a person feels on a still evening. It looked like peace. Bavinck called it a retreat that betrayed weakness. His counter-argument turns on what the word revelation is allowed to mean. Most people hear it and think of the Bible, and the Bible is certainly the centre of it. But Bavinck used the word for everything God makes known of Himself, and creation is the first and widest instance: the world exists because God spoke, it holds together because He upholds it, and every fact in it is therefore already a disclosure. Theology has long had a pair of names for the two halves of this. General revelation is what God shows to everyone through the world He made, what Paul says leaves people without excuse (Romans 1:20); special revelation is what He said and did in Israel and in Christ, and the Scriptures that carry it. Bavinck’s point is that the second is not a foreign object dropped into a universe that was doing fine without it. He has a line for the picture he is rejecting: it does not resemble an island in the ocean, nor a drop of oil upon water. Notice what this does to the old question of whether faith and science can get along. On Bavinck’s account the question is badly framed from the start, because a researcher watching a cell divide under a lens is watching something that exists by revelation whether or not she would ever use the word. And she is borrowing more than she knows. That nature hangs together as one thing, that its laws held yesterday and will hold tomorrow, that a world out there turns out to be intelligible to minds in here: Bavinck treats each of those as a debt the sciences run up every morning and cannot pay out of their own pockets, since no experiment can establish the assumptions the experiment had to make before it could begin. That the world is no chaos, he wrote in his last Princeton lecture, "but a cosmos, a universe, is the silent postulate of all science and art" (Philosophy of Revelation, p. 307). A postulate is something you have to take as given before you can get anywhere, and the silent part is that hardly anybody says it out loud. Whether the argument finally works is a separate and much larger question. What is striking about Bavinck is how much territory he refused to hand over, and the moment at which he refused it. Nearly every theologian he respected was signing the treaty.

(Q) "The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation, the secret of all that exists in all its forms." + Source: Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation, Lecture I, p. 27 (Longmans, Green, 1909; translated for him by Geerhardus Vos, Nicholas Steffens and Henry Dosker). The sentence comes at the close of his first Stone Lecture, immediately after he has denied that revelation is an island in the ocean. A presupposition is the same idea in a different word: something you must already be assuming in order to get started at all. Bavinck’s claim is that every one of the sciences is standing on this particular one, and that none of them says so (T2).

(T3) No church and no confession holds the whole of Christian truth. + In December 1888 Bavinck had just turned thirty-four, and he stood up in front of a theological school belonging to a church of fewer than two hundred thousand people, in a country of four and a half million, and told them that they were not allowed to be a sect. He was using an old word with care. Catholic, with a small c, does not mean Roman; it is the word the ancient creeds use, from the Greek katholikos, meaning whole or universal. To confess a catholic church is to say that the church is not the property of one nation, one century, or one party, and that a truth which is true is true everywhere. Bavinck’s argument runs straight from that word to a duty. If what your church holds is the truth, then it is the truth for the whole of life and the whole world, and retreating into your own circle amounts to admitting that you do not really believe it. He puts the point with some edge: the world would be delighted if Christians withdrew quietly and left it alone, and Christians may not give the world that satisfaction. Then he turns the same blade on his own side. The confessions of the churches, including his own, are attempts to state the one Christian truth, and every one of them is partial. There is no universal Christianity floating somewhere above the divided churches, available to the person who refuses to belong anywhere; there is only the one truth coming to expression, more purely here and less purely there, inside actual confessing communities. The unity is a thing promised rather than possessed: "until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God" (Ephesians 4:13). You might think, well, that is easy for a man to say who is quite sure his own tradition is the best one. Bavinck does say that; he thought the Reformed confession the richest statement available. The interesting thing is what he refused to say next. Being the richest is not the same as being the whole, and a group that claims to be the whole, he warned, will dry up like a branch cut from the vine.

(Q) "No one church, no matter how pure, is identical with the universal church. In the same way no confession, no matter how refined by the Word of God, is identical with the whole of Christian truth." + Source: Bavinck, The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church (1888), Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992), p. 250 (John Bolt translation). These are almost his closing words, and the sentence that follows them is the warning about the severed branch. He had said the same thing more bluntly six years later in an essay for an American journal: Calvinism, he wrote, is a specific and the richest and most beautiful form of Christianity, but it is not coextensive with Christianity (T3).

(T4) A Christianity trimmed down to morality has already given away the thing people came for. + A woman sits down in a church pew after the worst year of her life. What is she there for? On one account she is there to be equipped: to be encouraged in her duties, given a sense of purpose, sent back out to make the world a little better. On another she is there because she needs to hear that God has done something about her, and that the something is finished. Bavinck’s contemporaries had, he thought, quietly swapped the second answer for the first, and in 1894 he set the two side by side in an essay written for American readers. It was written as a description of a trend rather than as an attack on individuals, and it is all the sharper for that. Christianity used to be religion, he said, and had become chiefly morality. The gospel used to be a means of saving people and giving them comfort in life and death; now it was an instrument for equipping a person for a task on earth. Heaven used to be the goal; now it was earth. Religion used to be communion with God; now it was moral idealism, a life in the service of humanity. The names behind this were not obscure. Albrecht Ritschl in Germany had rebuilt theology around moral community and the kingdom of God as an ethical task, and Leo Tolstoy in Russia was preaching the Sermon on the Mount without the resurrection. Bavinck named both, along with Auguste Sabatier and others, and he was careful to concede what they had right. He himself had no patience whatever with a Christianity that sits still, and he said so in the same breath as the complaint. He was writing early, too, before the most famous version of the trend arrived: Adolf von Harnack’s reduction of the essence of Christianity to the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul was still six years off. So the objection is not that these men wanted Christians to be good. It is that the trade does not pay. Take out the doctrine, and what is left cannot carry the weight that was being put on it. Good works have never yet given rest to a troubled conscience, and a religion whose business is making people useful has nothing to say at all to the person who has run out of usefulness: the woman in the pew after the worst year of her life, for one, who came in needing to hear what God had done and gets handed a task.

(Q) "Of old religion was essentially mystical, a life in communion with God; to-day it is mostly moral idealism, a life in the service of humanity. Then, the question was: What has God done for man? At present people ask: What is man doing for God? In a word, formerly man existed for the sake of God, of late God is held to exist for the sake of man." + Source: Bavinck, The Future of Calvinism, Presbyterian and Reformed Review 5 (1894), p. 19 (translated by Geerhardus Vos). Bavinck wrote the essay at the request of the Princeton journal, two years after the Dutch church union, and Vos translated it. The printed text of 1894 sets a space before some of its punctuation, which is the compositor’s habit rather than anything Bavinck or Vos intended; the wording is theirs and is given without alteration (T4).

(Q) "Christianity is as religion much more than a matter of feeling or temperament; it embraces the whole man, all humanity, and the totality of the world. It is a work of God, a revelation from the beginning to the end of the ages, in word and in deed, for mind and heart, for the individual and the community. And it has its heart and centre in the person and the work of Christ." + Source: Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation, Lecture X, p. 308 (Longmans, Green, 1909). The last lecture of the Princeton series, looking forward. Everything he taught is folded into these three sentences: the whole man against a religion of the feelings (T4), all humanity and the totality of the world against a religion pushed into a corner (T2, T3), and creation and redemption held together as one work of one God (T1).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His own churches got a theology that could hold its head up anywhere. + The immediate effect was on a few thousand Dutch pastors, and through them on a great many ordinary people. For twenty years at Kampen and nineteen at Amsterdam, a large share of the ministers of the Gereformeerde Kerken passed through his lecture room, and the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek sat on their shelves afterwards. Four Dutch editions had appeared by 1930, nine years after his death. What the book gave them was a particular habit. Bavinck almost never states a doctrine and then defends it; he states the biblical material, walks through how the church has understood it from the fathers to his own day, and lets the objection arrive in the middle of the exposition where it belongs. A pastor trained that way does not panic when a congregant brings him a hard question, because he has already met it inside the doctrine rather than outside. He also worked alongside Abraham Kuyper for thirty years without ever becoming his echo, which was not easy. Kuyper was the larger public figure by far, a newspaper editor and a prime minister, and the two names are still spoken in one breath. Where Kuyper was a founder and a fighter, Bavinck was the one who checked the arguments. Between them the two temperaments built the institutions of Dutch Reformed life, and there were a great many: a university, a daily paper, a political party, a whole parallel system of schools, so that a Reformed family could be taught, informed and represented inside the circle without much occasion to step outside it. That is the part Bavinck grew uneasy about. He spent his last decade worrying at how separate from the nation the institutions he had helped to build had become, which is exactly the worry you would expect from the man who had told his own students in 1888 that a church may not withdraw into its own circle (T3).

(†) Princeton listened while he was alive, and the rest of the English-speaking church caught up a century later. + The Americans found him early. Geerhardus Vos, the Dutch-born biblical theologian at Princeton, translated two of his essays for American journals in the 1890s and 1900s, and B. B. Warfield, the seminary’s formidable defender of biblical inspiration, told the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1909 that the Dutch possessed in Kuyper and Bavinck "a theologian of genius and a theologian of erudition worthy of the best traditions of Holland’s great past" (Calvin Memorial Addresses, pages 224 to 225). Warfield helped see the Stone Lectures into print; the copy of The Philosophy of Revelation that was digitized for the Internet Archive came out of Warfield’s own library. Then, for most of the twentieth century, very little. Bavinck wrote in Dutch and the Dutch read him. Henry Zylstra’s 1956 translation of Magnalia Dei as Our Reasonable Faith gave English readers the short version, and that was largely that. The full Reformed Dogmatics appeared in English only between 2003 and 2008, translated by John Vriend and edited by John Bolt, and the effect was immediate: a theologian who had been a name in footnotes became a working source for Anglicans, Baptists and Presbyterians alike, and the compressed form of his principle, grace restores nature, turns up now in sermons by people who could not name the man who framed it. Readers have argued for a century about which Bavinck they were reading. One school treated him as two men stitched together, an orthodox Calvinist and a modern European thinker who never quite agreed with each other. James Eglinton’s 2020 biography argues that the seam is imaginary, and that Bavinck was one man doing one thing: an orthodox theologian meeting the modern world on its own ground on purpose. The argument is live and worth following, and the fact that it is live is the best evidence that he is being read rather than quoted.

(†) Where his own record leaves a question: he preached against isolation and then left the men who would not follow him. + The ledger on Bavinck is unusually clean. He was not a persecutor, he taught nothing the historic creeds forbid, and where Christians differ from him they differ over the Reformed confession itself, which is a disagreement about the confession rather than a fault in the man. There is one place, though, where his own conduct sits awkwardly beside his own teaching, and he left the evidence in print himself. For years he pressed his church to hand its theological training over to a university. He argued it in Opleiding en theologie in 1896 and in three publications in 1899, one of them the formal proposal for union. His opponents at Kampen were not fools: they held that a church is responsible before God for the men it puts in its pulpits, and that responsibility cannot be subcontracted to an institution the church does not govern. That is a serious argument, and Bavinck spent a decade pushing past it. When the union failed for the last time he went to Amsterdam alone, in 1902, and then published Blijven of heengaan?, to stay or to go, a question and an answer. A man does not write that pamphlet unless the charge has landed. He had told a hall full of students in 1888 that Christians may not shut themselves off from one another, and fourteen years later the school that had trained him watched him leave over a quarrel about buildings and governance. The two institutions were never joined, and the split between Kampen and Amsterdam outlasted him by the rest of the century. Two things can be held at once, and honesty requires both. His judgment that the training of ministers had to be genuinely academic work carried in the end, in a way he did not propose: the school he left kept its independence and grew into the thing he wanted, renamed a theological college in 1939 and a theological university later on. He also left, and the parting was bitter, and he knew it.