Herman Bavinck

In seminary, I had a professor named Dr. Richard Gaffin, who liked to say, "If you don't know Dutch, you don't know much." It dawned on me that here at 5 Minutes in Church History, we haven't been talking a great deal about the Dutch theologians. And I certainly don't want to run counter to my wise professor's statement, so we will try to learn at least a little Dutch, or perhaps better, a little bit about one Dutchman: Herman Bavinck.

Herman Bavinck was born in 1854. His father was a minister in the secession Dutch Christian Reformed Church. This was different from the National Dutch Christian Reformed Church. When he was ready to attend university, he decided that he would go on for his seminary studies at the secession seminary at Kampen, in the Netherlands. He studied there for a year and then he went on to the University of Leiden. He distinguished himself as a scholar and received many invitations as a pastor to some of the cosmopolitan churches and also to some of the great universities in the Netherlands. But he decided he would take a church in his secession denomination. And so from 1880 to 1883, he had his first pastorate.

In 1883, he answered the call to become a professor at Kampen. He thought it would be his work to go there to the seminary and train the ministers who would be coming up in the secession Dutch Christian Reformed Church denomination. He served there from 1883 until 1902.

While at Kampen, he worked on his magnum opus, his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics. When it comes to the Reformed part, for Bavinck, it means to believe in the sovereignty of God, in humanity's need for Christ as our savior, and in the inerrancy and the infallibility of Scripture. Now what about Dogmatics? The word dogma means "teaching." And so this is the church's authoritative teaching. Sometimes we confuse this with a pejorative expression when we say someone is "dogmatic." We mean that they're sort of rigid and they won't flex, that they take a "my way or the highway" approach to things. But that's not what is meant here; dogmatics is simply a body of authoritative teachings. So this is Bavinck's gift to the church, his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics.

In 1902, Bavinck received a call from his friend Abraham Kuyper to come to the Free University of Amsterdam. He accepted and moved to Amsterdam, where he joined forces with Kuyper and took up the position as professor of systematic theology.

In 1911, he was appointed rector at the Free University of Amsterdam. And he delivered an address titled Modernism and Orthodoxy. There was actually much about modernism that Bavinck liked. He liked the great things that were happening and the great improvements for society. In fact, at one point in the lecture, he says "God is busy doing great things in our times."

But one thing deeply concerned him: the theological liberalism that was beginning to overrun the church—the church in America, in the United Kingdom, and in the Netherlands. Bavinck saw what was happening—the modernist theologians were reducing all of the great teachings of Scripture to simply symbols. And to that, this is what Bavinck had to say, "They remained realities, that is, the truths of Scripture remain realities and if I give them up I would be lost. So I reminded myself that the liberal critique of Scripture cannot be true. The biblical realities are so much more real than the conundrums of Scripture and nature. I am thus not bound by mere tradition but by what is in the deepest part of my soul, my very life, the salvation of my soul."

I guess it's true—if you don't know Dutch you don't know much. For his stand against theological liberalism and for his masterful Reformed Dogmatics, Herman Bavinck is well worth knowing.