Herman Bavinck
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Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was born in the town of Hoogeveen in the Netherlands. He first went to theological school at Kampen, but then moved on to Leiden for further training. He graduated in 1880 from Leiden having completed a dissertation on Ulrich Zwingli. A year later, Bavinck was appointed Professor of Dogmatics at Kampen Theological Seminary. While serving there, he also assisted his denomination that had formed out of the withdrawal of orthodox Calvinists earlier from the state Hervormd Kerk, a withdrawal movement called "the Afscheiding" (the Off-breaking) in its merger with a second and subsequent larger breakaway movement that also left the Hervormd Kerke, this time under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper, a movement called "the Doleantie" (the Weeping). The now-united Church combined the Afscheidingen and Doleantien into the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKiN). As a result of the merger, GKiN inherited the denominational seminary of the Afscheiding churches and that seminary became the denominational seminary of the GKiN, where Bavinck stayed put, so as to ease the transition of his colleagues and people within the much larger new Church. Already, when the Afscheidingen (the Off-breakers) merged with the Doleantien, there was a minority of the Off-breakers who stayed out of the union; they formed their new denomination as the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken (CGK), and they established their own theological seminary in the town of Apeldoorn. Amidst all these developments, Bavinck stayed put and pursued his class lectures, research, writing, and publication - making his distinctive mark as an orthodox Calvinist theologian and churchman.
The recently founded Free University in Amsterdam (VU), under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper, was meant to be a bastion of Reformed learning in all fields of thought. The Free University including its Theology Faculty for training clergy, unlike Kampen Seminary, was independent of both the state and all church denominations. But, of course, theology was the VU's initial leading concern for some decades. So, Bavinck, when he was first invited to join the VU Faculty, had to weigh the merits of teaching what concerned him in his theological research, in such a seemingly independent environment. With Kuyper in the same faculty, he might have come to feel quite crowded. After refusing the invitation of Abraham Kuyper several times to come to Amsterdam, finally Bavinck accepted Kuyper's plea. In 1902 he succeeded Abraham Kuyper as Professor of Theology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Kuyper himself had developed other workloads, and simply wanted the best man available to replace himself. Thus, Bavinck moved to the big city, with his first edition of multi-volume Gereformeerde Dogmatiek already in publication. He arrived well-credentialed and well-respected. He remained at VU for the remainder of his teaching career. At some point, he was named to the Senate of the Netherlands Parliament. He assisted in the encouragement of the Gereformeerde volk to build their own Christian schools, without state financial help, until such a time as the 80-years "School War" was brought to an end by the granting of government assistance to all schools. In 1908 he visited the States and gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton University and Theological Seminary. Inevitably he has been compared with his contemporary Abraham Kuyper. J. H. Landwehr, Bavinck's first biographer, had this to say of the two: "Bavinck was an Aristotelian, Kuyper had a Platonic spirit. Bavinck was the man of clear concept, Kuyper the man of the fecund idea. Bavinck worked with the historically given; Kuyper proceeded speculatively by way of intuition. Bavinck's was primarily an inductive mind; Kuyper's primarily deductive." One major difference in ideas between Bavinck and Kuyper is formulated largely in theological terms contrasting a doctrine called "Common Grace" with a doctrine called "the Antithesis." Bavinck emphasized Common Grace, while Kuyper emphasized (sometimes severely) the Antithesis. A comparison of the two positions, which came to designate two interwoven and contentious traditions in the GKiN and the Christian social movements that flowed from its membership, is presented in Jacob Klapwijk's important work of Reformational philosophy, entitled Bringing into Captivity Every Thought (English, 1986).
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[edit] Publications
- The Doctrine of God (transl. 1951).
- Gereformeerde Dogmatiek [1] (4 vols, many editions in Dutch, now being translated into English as Reformed Dogmatics)
- Our Reasonable Faith (1909; the English translation of this originally Dutch text was produced much later).
- Philosophy of Revelation (The Stone Lectures, Princeton, USA) (1909).
- The Last Things (transl 1996).
