BOOK REVIEW:
Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, Vol. 1. By Herman Bavinck. Edited by John Bolt and translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003. 688 pp. ISBN 0801026326. 

In the narratives about the Dutch “neo-Calvinist” movement of the 19th and early 20th century, Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) is often assigned the role of understudy to Abraham Kuyper. James Hutton Mackay, for example, once described Bavinck as “Dr. Kuyper’s loyal and learned henchman.” In a sense this is understandable, since Kuyper was the consummate public theologian who dominated the movement, moving easily between the theological classroom and the broader regions of Dutch society, even serving a term as the country’s Prime Minister. But Bavinck was not only a highly productive original thinker; he also followed a theological path that diverged in significant ways from Kuyper’s on some key issues. 

While both Kuyper and Bavinck studied at the University of Leiden—known in their day for its theological enthusiasm for “modern” thought—the experience impacted them in differently. Kuyper, the son of a national church minister, initially embraced the Leiden theology, until he experienced an evangelical conversion during his first pastorate. He was thereafter fairly harsh in his treatments of theological positions that deviated from the traditonal brand of Reformed thought that he came to defend. Bavinck, on the other hand, was raised in the secessionist (Afscheiding) congregations where he was shaped by a Calvinsit orthodoxy that also drew heavily on a Puritan-type “experiential” (bevindelijk) piety. While he remained loyal to that tradition throughout his life, he chose to do advanced study at Leiden in order to expose himself to the best of the modernist thought. His Leiden experience instilled in him a more irenic spirit toward theological opponents than Kuyper was ever able to cultivate. 

A few of Bavinck’s works have been available in English for a long time, but now the Dutch Reformed Translation Society is making available for the first time the whole of his four-volume Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. Previously two half-volumes have appeared, one on creation and the other on eschatology. But now we have the first full-volume, setting forth Bavinck’s theological prolegomena, which for the first time gives an English-speaking readership an extensive display of his overall theological approach to basic questions of the nature of religion, general and special revelation, the character of faith, and theological method. 

In the twentieth century, the Amsterdam philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd and his followers made much of the need to purge the thought of Kuyper and Bavinck of lingering “scholastic” elements in their theological formulations. This meant, among other things, exposing traces of a “nature-grace dualism” in various Reformed writers. Bavinck is quite up front in his endorsement of such a “dualism.” Echoing medieval thinkers, he makes much of the ways in which “grace restores nature.” 

His insistence on the ways in which the natural contains much that is capable of being restored—rather than simply replaced—by God’s gracious activity leads him to find continuities where many conservative Calvinists today see only “antithesis.” And in his probings he says much that seems even more directly addressed to our own context than to the environment in which he wrote. He observes, for example, that “in the past the [Christian] study of religions was pursued exclusively in the interest of dogmatics and apologetics.” This meant, he says, that Mohammed and others “were simply considered imposters, enemies of God, accomplices of the devil.” Now that these perspectives are becoming “more precisely known,” however, “this interpretation has proven to be untenable”—we do well to search for the ways in which such perspectives display “an illumination by the Logos, a working of God’s Spirit.” 

Bavinck’s probings on subjects of this sort are now accessible to theological communities where his name is revered, but where little has been known about the details of his thought. This is a cause for rejoicing. But it is to be hoped that the larger English-speaking theological world will also accept the challenge of seriously engaging his considerable contribution to Reformed thought. In our increasingly fractured world—or perhaps more accurately, in a climate where the fractures are more apparent than they have been in the past—the continuities between nature and grace are more difficult to discern that they were when Bavinck was writing. But if they are still there—as many of us are convinced they are—Bavinck comes across as a remarkably gifted and creative guide to the contemporary landscape.

Richard J. Mouw
President and Professor of Christian Philosophy
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, FALL 2006, VOL. 6, #2.