Who Was Herman Bavinck, and Why Is He Worth Reading Today?

An Important Thinker

Herman Bavinck was a Dutch Christian. He was born in the middle of the nineteenth century in 1854, and he died in 1921. He’s someone that people have become really interested in and aware of outside of the Netherlands in recent years through the translations of some of his theological works. He was a really important thinker.

He was a brilliant theologian. He was someone who was able to think with great clarity about Scripture, but also someone who was able to articulate theology well in his own day, thinking about the challenges that he faced in the world that he was born into, which was a world in flux with lots of new questions about society, science, secularization, and so many questions like that.

I think that he’s worth engaging with and worth reading today for a couple of reasons. One is just that he was, as I said, a great theologian who was capable of talking about very complex ideas with considerable clarity. And people like that are always worth reading and learning from anyway.

Another reason is that Bavinck wasn’t a golden age thinker. He didn’t think that there was some particular period in the past when the conditions for being a Christian were ideal and therefore we should just try and live in a bubble as though that moment never ended. You can root yourself in the past, and you don’t face up to the challenges of the world that you live in.

He had a particular view of Christian orthodoxy that meant that you always have to follow Jesus in the world in which you find it—in the world into which you’re born, where you live in your own day and age. So rather than being a golden age thinker, he was someone who thought that the Christian faith is a faith for all of life—a catholic faith in the sense of being universal for people in all times and in all places.

The Christian faith, for him, is something that is always capable of expanding to address new questions as new questions arise. That was what drove him to be the kind of theologian that he was—someone whose theology was relevant and up to date and engaged with the big questions of his age.

He sets a great example for Christians a century on as well in helping us avoid the trap of golden age thinking. He helps us think about what it means to be Christians a century on in a world that’s changing all the time. So he’s a great example in that regard as well.

James Eglinton is one of the editors of Christian Worldview by Herman Bavinck.

Related Articles

Everyone Has a Worldview, and Almost No One Has a Worldview

James Eglinton

April 24, 2023

J. H. Bavinck makes the paradoxical claim that worldview is both everywhere (“Everyone has a worldview”) and nowhere (“Almost no one has a worldview”). How can both these statements be true?

Herman Bavinck: The Man and the Mind

John Bolt

September 24, 2015

Bavinck wrote theology with the church in mind; he prized evangelical piety; he did not disparage modern learning; he took a genuine interest in the world’s non-Christian religious traditions as important data for Christian theology.

The Necessity of Faith in Science

Cory C. Brock, James Eglinton, N. Gray Sutanto

August 31, 2023

The temptation of Christians throughout history, according to Bavinck, has always been to separate faith from reason or to synthesize them in a syncretistic manner.

Herman Bavinck for the 21st Century

Cory C. Brock, James Eglinton, N. Gray Sutanto

October 25, 2019

When Bavinck lived in the early twentieth century, he believed there was “a disharmony between our thinking and feeling, between our willing and acting” and “a discord between religion and culture, between science and life.”