“Broad and Wide and Far”: Herman Bavinck’s Catholic Vantage Point
George Harinck
University Professor
Theologische Universiteit Utrecht
Here we are, on a November night in 2023, at a seminary in Washington D.C., gathered together to reflect on a person who died more than hundred years ago in a country far away – Herman Bavinck. It seems there is not much that is more unlikely to do in this time and place. But this is what we do tonight: talk about a Dutchman who died more than a century ago. So maybe my task tonight is to provide you with a reasonable answer, when your colleague tomorrow morning at the coffee machine in your office asks: what did you do last night?
In order to help you answering this question, I’d like to start here, in the United States, and not take you right back to that small and swampy country at the borders of the North Sea. The thesis I want to defend tonight is that this place, the United States, is not an odd time and not an outlandish location to talk about Herman Bavinck. This is an apt vantagepoint that helps us to understand why it is relevant to talk about him, here and now.
Tonight, I want to talk about the life and work of Herman Bavinck, not from a Dutch perspective, but from the outside, or, better from a global perspective. If we want to understand Bavinck well, we need to take his catholicity into account. There is some reason for this change of perspective. Bavinck has often been written about from his own biotope. Starting with the biography in Dutch by his successor as professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Valentijn Hepp’s 1921 biography,[1] Bavinck has mostly been described from an inner perspective, such as that of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands he belonged to, or that of the Theological School in Kampen, where he taught the first twenty years of his professorship. As you will understand this inner perspective easily leads to an over-attention to minor differences and petty conflicts, and to small focuses. For example, to the idea, that Bavinck’s move from the School in Kampen to the university in Amsterdam in 1902 implied a major shift to his intellectual horizon, or to underestimating Bavinck’s role outside of theology, for example in politics, in the Antirevolutionary Party. The biography by Scotsman James Eglinton by nature overcame some of these deficiencies, but he too focused on his Dutch context, without reflecting on the limitations this had for Bavinck.[2]
I will not focus on his biography tonight. My main aim is to introduce him to you via the notion he preferred to call catholicity, or, in other words, his habit to think from the outside in. Those who wish to reflect on Bavinck and his work and international influence do best to look at it from a certain distance, from an outer perspective. This is the position I take tonight. Bavinck is the man who stressed: “In the 19th century our circle of vision was extraordinarily extended.”[3] As one of his Amsterdam students put it: “Bavinck was at the center of the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was at the same time a Seceder minister. This gave all the tensions of his life as a man, Christian and scholar.”[4] He cannot be understood from his national or ecclesial surroundings only; the key to his thought lies neither in Amsterdam nor in Kampen. The key to understanding his life and work lies outside his own biotope, far away in the past, in other times, in other countries and among other peoples. Those who want to understand Bavinck must forget limiting borders, and factor in catholicity, as he himself testified: “God is great, also in America.”[5]
He himself repeatedly wrote that his Christian faith and worldview were not so much Dutch and specifically Reformed, as they were global and general. The ninth article in the Apostolic Creed (“I believe the holy, catholic church, the communion of saints”) had special significance for him. “This catholicity of the church,” he said in 1888 in a lecture on this topic, “presupposes the catholicity of the Christian religion.”[6] This extension on the notion of catholicity is not found in the Apostolic Creed, but it is typical for Bavinck. The Christian religion, he adds emphatically in that same lecture, “is based on the conviction that Christianity is a world religion that should govern all people and sanctify all creatures irrespective of geography, nationality, place, and time.”[7] Please pay attention to each word in this quote: every nationality, he says, every man, every creature; and: any nation, any time, any place: there seems to be no limit to Bavinck’s understanding of Christianity. In this spirit he taught his students “with the conviction that nothing human is foreign to the Christian,” as he wrote in 1884 in a letter to a friend. “Not simply to put up with . . . but to value – that has become my word and I hope to apply it wherever and whenever [I can]. May principle remain pure and unadulterated, but I wish to apply this to the whole of human life, in all the breadth it allows.”[8] Again, the limitless in his formulation stands out: nothing foreign, wherever and whenever.
Christianity corresponds with the hopes and aspirations of all peoples. As a Reformed Christian, he therefore was concerned not merely on tolerating this world and its phenomena, but to appreciate it to the full.
Bavinck visited the United States twice in his life, in 1892 and in 1908. The first time he was 37 years old, married for just a year. What man leaves his young wife? Moreover, at that time Bavinck had already been working diligently on his Reformed dogmatics for ten years; foreign vacations were rare in his bachelor days. But now that he was nearing his final goal, the completion of his dogmatics, he decided on such a three-month trip to the new world. What motivated Bavinck?
I think Bavinck needed space, air, leeway. I do not mean that the pettiness of Kampen drove him out to sea, although he complained to a friend about living in this “unhappy little city”: “How often I long for the Leiden library! And how gladly I would immediately move from Kampen to Leiden or Amsterdam. Here, we live so far away and are becoming so provincial!”[9] But when Bavinck lived in Amsterdam in 1908, he still longed for space. Kampen was not the problem, it was Bavinck. He was in want of a distant horizon, permanently. Thus was his nature, so are his publications.
As a man who, in the confines of his study, spent a decade consecutively conversing in spirit with all of Christianity and half of paganism included at all times and in all places, he sometimes had to leave hearth and home in person. His mental traveling was a necessary means of preserving himself from Spielerei and an uncritical attitude in his work. With regard to the ethical theologians, he spoke with a strong word about the “enchantment” of their world of thought, from which he could only escape by “a deep immersion in history. Nothing sobers one up as much.”[10] The here and now was not enough for Bavinck. He needed history to live well. Bavinck could easily sink into a self-spun little world and for that reason he intellectually and sometimes physically had to leave the house. He needed history, but geography as well. Relating over time and space prevented him from worrying. One of his biographers pointed out that Bavinck needed optimists in his physical surroundings. He found this among friends, but he also found that optimism in America. He could not immerse in history among this people: “The American people does not yet have a past.”[11] Yet it refreshed him: “It is young, fiery, brave, full of verve, full of enthusiasm and vivacity, full of optimism and enterprise. It knows no concerns or limitations.”[12] Such contrasts needed the pensive Bavinck, and he drew on them: no concerns or limitations! Kampen need not feel guilty, his wife did not have to lower her eyes, but Bavinck’s meridian simply ran further than from east to West in the Netherlands.
In his work, the longing for a breadth and a depth and a height that transcended the measures of his surroundings is visible every time, for example, in his speech on “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church” of 1888, but also in his life-long friendship with the liberal Islam scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje,[13] or in his interest in the Oriental world.
The most moving pages in his works are those where he succeeded in capturing in words the wobble of his wide-eyed mind. It is evident in Bavinck’s texts: he does not deliver himself personally to his readers, but he always reverses their perspective: they were used to look outward from the inside, but read with him how he looks inward from the outside. He makes a connection between the specifically Reformed and the Christian, and between the Christian and the general human, shuttling back and forth between the two poles.[14] They seem to be at a long distance from each other, but not for Bavinck. For him, life was bearable only in such a wide-ranging connection.
Bavinck gave lectures on America after his trips to this country, and in them the aspect of the reverse perspective returns. He stressed that traveling is an art: it involves moving and looking around with an open eye – the same thing, in short, that he did in his mind all day in his study. Noticing he calls better than judging. It is very easy to reject the new world, and he lists the cons: Americans are naive, religion there is entertainment, and American religion has no depth. His biographer Hepp, in describing Bavinck’s second trip, shed much light on these negative aspects, as if Bavinck was gloomy about America. But protest arose from his American friends: Bavinck had seen the shady sides, yes, but precisely because of this, he had also noted the bright sides. His wife Johanna Bavinck-Schippers, wrote Henry Beets, director of missions for the Christian Reformed Church, on the negative section on America in Hepp’s biography: yes, he had his critical remarks, but “I assure you, there was great appreciation in return, both in terms of persons and situations.”[15]
He wanted to adopt the good from America, just as he wanted to retain the good from liberal and ethical theology and the good from traditional Reformed religion, and from humanity in general. Just hear how he evaluated America:
The American is too aware of himself, he is too much conscious of his power, his will is too strong, to be a Calvinist. In addition to this, he has been too successful. He succeeds at whatever he does. He sees no limit to his might. Calvinism finds acceptance among a people who have been saved by [God’s] council and action, that, despairing in itself, can only be saved by God’s grace. But the Americans know no suffering. . . . In America there is a strong longing to improve the [individual] human, humanity, the world and destiny. . . . Arminianism and Methodism are no less committed in this regard. There is much twaddle in this. But we would do better to carry over the good found therein and to imitate it, than simply to judge everything. . . . May American Christianity develop according to its own law. God has entrusted America with its own high and great calling. [May America] strive for it, in its own way.[16]
And as if to underscore his own need for space, he ended one of his lectures on his 1892 trip with the conclusion, “Surely Calvinism is not the only truth!”[17] Again and again, Bavinck imbalanced his audience, or as we say in Dutch, put his audience on the wrong foot, as an inside man taking the outside perspective.
In the Netherlands of his days, this led to irritations with Bavinck. The complaint was: you never know exactly where he stands. There was a certain distrust in regard to Bavinck. That sentiment was particularly played on at the end of Hepp’s Bavinck biography, with remarks about Bavinck who, nota bene, had sold his most important dogmatic works and the theologian Bavinck who seemed to have traded his profession for pedagogy and psychology.
But the impression that he relativized his own Reformed position is wrong. He was staunch Calvinist, but in an open, catholic or ecumenical way, as he explained in a lecture in Toronto in 1892:
Calvinism is the only consistent theological view of the world and of humanity. And therefore, apparently, it is particular, but in reality it is most universal and catholic. From the high, spiritual, theological standpoint which the Calvinist occupies, he looks over the whole world. He sees everything sub specie aeternitatis, — broad and wide and far. In his system all depends, not on any creature but only on God Almighty. There is no limit to His grace and mercy but that which He Himself, in His unsearchable and adorable good pleasure may have established. The love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, have no limitation or condition, outside of themselves, in any quality of the creature. Neither country nor people, neither error nor sin, neither sex nor age bind them. From Him and through Him and to Him are all things.[18]
How did this universal theological viewpoint play out in his reflection on societal issues? Let me give two examples. The first is on politics. In 1899 he gave his first public address as a politician. He started with objections made by fellow orthodox-Protestants who distanced themselves from the Antirevolutionary Party, and from politics in general. Bavinck stressed that “politics as such is not a sinful business, in which confessors of the Lord should not be involved. Those who believe in God Almighty and in Jesus Christ, who has come, not to judge but to convert the world, and possesses all authority in heaven and on earth, cannot hate politics as Satan’s business.”[19] But there was more. It was not about not-hating politics, it was positive: how to contribute to modern society. To Bavinck the Antirevolutionary Party met the demands of the new times, like the withdrawal of public institutions like church and state in favor of society. In 1905, in a speech as president of the Antirevolutionary Party, he called his party a party of radical progress. Christians are always progressive, he said, if they understand their confession in the right way. And then followed some raging sentences in his speech that are characteristic for Bavinck:
They go in the new situations in state and society, of philosophy and science, of literature and art, of profession and business; they investigate everything and preserve the good. They are no praise-singers of the past times and do not wail idly about the miseries of the present, but they intervene and reform according to the ideal they face. Even though they know that on earth things will never be set right before the second coming of Christ, and though this protects them from superficial optimism, they still work and do not get tired and never despair. No repristination, no maintaining of the status quo, but reformation is their motto.[20]
Politics, or whatever sphere in society, should not be excluded but accepted as part of God’s creation that should not be abstained from but that should be reformed.
The second example of Bavinck’s catholic stance is a topic that speaks to issues in our present society: his thoughts on race. In his Reformed Dogmatics he wrote on the unity of mankind: “While the existence of races and peoples is a fact, the determination of their boundaries is nevertheless so difficult that it generates immense disputes.”[21] He stressed the unity of mankind as an explicit Christian idea, a distinctive aspect, compared to other religions. Even though “the origination of distinct peoples … speaks of intellectual and spiritual decline … still, in all that division and brokenness unity has been preserved.”[22] This unity was evidenced by physiological, intellectual, religious, moral, social and political aspects that are common across humanity.
To Bavinck, the unity of the human race was “not a matter of indifference, … but on the contrary of the utmost importance: it is the presupposition of religion and morality. The solidarity of the human race, original sin, the atonement in Christ, the universality of the kingdom of God, the catholicity of the church, and the love of neighbor—these all are grounded in the unity of mankind.”[23] Given the stress on catholicity and universality in Bavinck’s theology, it is clear how important the unity of mankind was to him. His theology is not Dutch, or white, it is global, meant for mankind.
Having stressed this aspect in Bavinck’s thought, it is no longer a surprise that his theology has been received so well in many places of the world. The structure and the focus of his theology was such that it could be applied easily anywhere, broad, and wide, and far. This being the case, one question remains: Why had the world-wide reception of Bavinck’s theology to wait till the 21st century?
I think there are reasons for this: the situation in Reformed circles in the Netherlands and the history of 20th century theology. You might also think of translation issues. To start with the latter, since Bavinck’s theology was not meant for the Netherlands only, he was keen to have some publications translated in German and English, like his 1908 Stone-lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation. His co-founder of neo-Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper, had done the same with his 1898 Stone lectures on Calvinism. In the case of Kuyper this publication was the finest example of his thought seen from an international perspective: accessible, and comprehensive. In Bavinck’s case, the Stone lectures never became popular, not in the Netherlands and not abroad. The topic was too academic to be digested by a wider audience. And the book by Bavinck that became his best-known work in the Netherlands, his Reformed Dogmatics, with a fourth edition in 1928, was not translated during his lifetime. In 1930, attempts by American publishers W.B. Eerdmans and Smitter Book Company, both located in the Dutch-American enclave of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to publish a translation of Bavinck’s Reformed dogmatics failed.[24] So, Bavinck’s translation strategy was poor or unsuccessful.
The situation in the Netherlands was not very helpful either. When Kuyper died in 1920 and Bavinck in 1921, the distrust that already existed about Bavinck, mounted. Until the 1950’s Bavinck’s theology stood in the shadow of Kuyper’s. Kuyper was the towering figure, and his theology was celebrated as the definitive version of Reformed theology, or was the topic of deep controversy, as in the case of Klaas Schilder’s critique of Kuyper’s view on common grace, the church and presumptive regeneration. Bavinck’s theology was not discussed at all. This changed in the 1950s, thirty years after he died, when Reformed people turned to Bavinck’s theology as a milder and more ecumenical alternative of Kuyper’s, that had caused lot of ecclesial troubles and rifts. Especially Gerrit C. Berkouwer and Jan Veenhof were instrumental in this reorientation.[25] This change did not lead to a renewed study of Bavinck’s Reformed dogmatics. Instead, Berkouwer’s theology was seen as the modern version of Bavinck’s, and it were his books that were translated into English, not Bavinck’s.
Bavinck’s international outreach was handicapped by these circumstances. The situation for Bavinck changed thanks to the initiatives of John Bolt and John Vriend, two theologians educated at Calvin Theological Seminary, who had a Dutch background. They valued Bavinck’s theology and in the 1990s they started a translation project. The edition of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics published in the new millennium, was received very well and ignited a worldwide interest in Bavinck’s theology.[26] This was the proof of the eating of the pudding: Bavinck’s non-located Reformed theology turned out to be adaptable in any place of the world. The sympathy for his Dogmatics was not restricted to the Reformed world. Pentecostal seminaries in South America use it as a textbook, not because they adopted a Reformed viewpoint, but because Bavinck’s outside-in theology makes it easy to use his work, also if you don’t agree with him. His Reformed viewpoint is presented as a Christian viewpoint, and is presented mildly, and embedded so strongly in Scripture and tradition, that even opponents of a Reformed theology like to use his Dogmatics as a scholarly introduction to the main themes of the Christian faith.
And finally, the reason for Bavinck’s late reception in the world outside of the Netherlands also lies in the 20th century international history of theology. The shadow of Karl Barth looms large over this history. His Church Dogmatics have been influential from the start of the publication of this multivolume book in 1930. In the Netherlands Bavinck’s influence was thwarted by the introduction of Karl Barth. The appreciation his Reformed Dogmatics had received in Dutch circles outside the neo-Calvinist tradition evaporated when Barth came in. At around 1950 the vast majority of Dutch theologians had turned Barthian, partially because his stature was the first successful instrument to oppose the Kuyperian influence, the dominant flavor of neo-Calvinism at that time.
Outside of the Netherlands, the same happened. At Princeton Theological Seminary, internationally the most important Presbyterian school of the 19th and 20th century, the neo-Calvinist influence was substantial since Geerhardus Vos had been appointed there in 1893. Thanks to him, in 1898 Kuyper was invited in Princeton to give his Stone lectures, in 1908 Bavinck, In 1913 Hugo Visscher (he declined), in 1918 Bavinck’s friend Henry Dosker, in 1924 Kuyper’s son H.H. Kuyper (he declined) and in 1930 Bavinck’s successor Valentijn Hepp. But from then on the influence of neo-Calvinism in Princeton has abated. The reason? In the first place the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. The Dutch neo-Calvinists sided with those who left Princeton, and vice versa.[27] In the void as a result of their departure, Karl Barth came in, to dominate Princeton ever since.
Why did Barth win the hearts and minds of the Princetonians? Part of the reason was a translation project ignited in the 1930s in Great Britain by the Scotsman Thomas F. Torrance and others, who translated Barth’s Church Dogmatics in English. Barth was available in English. Richard Muller of Calvin Theological Seminary observed that one of the main reasons for Barth’s international popularity is the translation of the Church Dogmatics into English. It is interesting to read what Muller added to this observation he made in 1988. I quote: “It is worth a moment of speculation to raise the question of the intrinsic merit of the equally prolific Abraham Kuyper and to wonder what his influence would have been had he written in German rather than in Dutch and had been blessed with a following of Scottish Kuyperians intent upon translating the Dictaten dogmatiek and the E Voto Dordraceno!).”[28] Of course, Barth’s importance did not rest on this translation work only, but it was vital to the dispersion of his theology. It is also interesting that Muller mentioned Kuyper and not Bavinck, whom we now consider to be the most influential theologian of the two, but who for a long time stood in the shadow of Kuyper.
We must come to a close. What we have seen in the last two decades is a remarkable dispersion of Bavinck’s theology. Bavinck’s theological reception has always been mitigated, first by Kuyper’s theology and then by Barth’s. The international breakthrough of Bavinck’s theology is the first full-grown reception of his theology. Even in the Netherlands he was never received as well is he is received now, in church and in academy abroad. This delay has to do with the Dutch theological and ecclesial circumstances, as I explained in the final part of my lecture, but also with the outside-in structure of his theology, that was more difficult to understand for his Dutch followers, as I explained in the first part of this lecture. I am glad Bavinck’s theology is present now internationally in its full glory and potential. I hope and pray that Reformed Theological Seminary will sustain and develop this development, and that we in the Netherlands, and you in the United States keep on promoting this theology, that is at the same time broad, wide and far.
[1] V. Hepp, Dr. Herman Bavinck (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 1921).
[2] James Eglinton, Bavinck. A critical biography (Grand Rapids: Baker, [2020]).
[3] “Rede dr. H. Bavinck [on his 1908 trip to America]”, De Haagsche bondsdag 1909. Redevoeringen en referaat gehouden op de 21ste Algemeene Vergadering van den Nederl. Bond van Jongel. Vereenigingen op Geref. Grondslag, 20 Mei 1909 (n.p.: Gereformeerde Jongelingsbond, [1909]) 46. “In de 19de eeuw is onze gezichtskring buitengewoon uitgebreid.”
[4] J.J. Buskes, Hoera voor het leven (Amsterdam: De Brug, [1959]) 34.
[5] So H. Bavinck in George Harinck and James Eglinton, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘My Journey to America,” Dutch Crossing. Journal of Low Countries Studies 41, no. 1 (2017) 4.
[6] Herman Bavinck, “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,” translated by John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992) 221.
[7] Bavinck, “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,” 221.
[8] H. Bavinck to C. Snouck Hurgronje, 23 December 1884, Een Leidse vriendschap. Herman Bavinck en Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje over christendom, islam en westerse beschaving. Herziene editie, edited by Jan de Bruijn and George Harinck (Hilversum: Verloren, 2021) 111-112: “de overtuiging te verschaffen, dat aan het christelijke niets menschelijks vreemd is. Niet maar verdragen … maar waardeeren – dat woord is nog het mijne en ik hoop het toe te passen waar en wanneer ook. Rein, onvermengd blijve het beginsel, maar dit wensch ik toe te passen op heel ’t menschelijk leven, in al de breedte die het toelaat.”
James Eglinton and I are preparing the publication of an English translation of the full Bavinck-Snouck Hurgronje correspondance.
[9] Bavinck to Snouck Hurgronje, 1 January 1887, Een Leidse vriendschap, 118: “dit ongelukkige stadje … Hoe dikwerf verlang ik naar de Leidsche bibliotheek! En hoe gaarne zou ik metterwoon van Kampen naar Leiden of Amsterdam verhuizen. We wonen hier zoo achteraf en worden zoo kleinsteedsch!”
[10] Bavinck to Snouck Hurgronje, 23 December 1884, Een Leidse vriendschap, 109: “de eenige manier om aan de betoovering hunner gedachtenwereld te ontkomen is … een historisch bad; niets kan zoo ontnuchteren….”
[11] Harinck and Eglinton, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘My Journey to America’,’’ 7.
[12] Harinck and Eglinton, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘My Journey to America’,’’ 7.
[13] See: Wim van den Doel, Snouck. Het volkomen geleerdenleven van Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2021).
[14] Buskes, Hoera voor het leven, 34.
[15] J.A. Bavinck-Schippers to H. Beets, 26 March 1923. Box 4, Henry Beets Papers. Heritage Hall, Hekman Library, Calvin University, Grand Rapids. See also: H. Beets, ‘Closing Years of Dr. Bavinck’s Life’, The Banner, 22 February 1923.
[16] Harinck and Eglinton, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘My Journey to America’,” 10, 12-13.
[17] Harinck and Eglinton, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘My Journey to America’,” 13.
[18] H. Bavinck, “The Influence of the Protestant Reformation on the Moral and Religious Condition of Communities and Nations,” Proceedings of the Fifth General Council, Toronto 1892 (London: Publication Committee of the Presbyterian Church of England, 1892) 50-51.
[19] On 11 October 1900 Bavinck gave a speech on “Antirevolutionary Politics” in Middelburg. Report in De Standaard, 15 October 1900: “politiek niet is een zondige zaak, waarmee belijders dis Heeren zich niet zouden mogen inlaten. Wie gelooft in God den Almachtige en in Jezus Christus, die gekomen is, niet om de wereld te veroordeelen, maar ze te bekeeren, en dat Hij alle macht bezit in hemel en op aarde, die kan niet de politiek als een zaak van Satan haten.”
[20] H. Bavinck, Christelijke en neutrale staatkunde. Rede ter inleiding van de deputatenvergadering, gehouden te Utrecht, op 13 april 1905 (Hilversum: Witzel & Klemkerk, 1905) 30: “Zij gaan in in de nieuwe toestanden van staat en maatschappij, van wijsbegeerte en wetenschap, van litteratuur en kunst, van beroep en bedrijf; zij onderzoeken alles en behouden het goede. Zij zijn geen lofzangers van verledene tijden en staan niet werkeloos te jammeren over de ellenden van het heden, maar zij grijpen in en hervormen naar het ideaal, dat hun voor oogen staat. Zelfs al weten zij, dat het hier op aarde nooit in orde komt vóór de wederkomst van Christus en al worden zij daardoor voor een oppervlakkig optimisme behoed, zij werken toch en zitten nooit moedeloos bij de pakken ter neer. Geen repristinatie, geen handhaven van het status quo, maar reformatie is hun leus.”
[21] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 2 God and Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004) 525. See also: George Harinck, “‘Wipe out lines of Division (Not Distinctions):’ Bennie Keet, Neo-Calvinism and the Struggle against Apartheid,” Journal of Reformed Theology (special issue on neo-Calvinism and race) 11 (2017) 81-98.
[22] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics 2:525.
[23] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics 2:526.
[24] Eglinton, Bavinck, 296.
[25] See George Harinck, “Herman Bavinck,” in: George Harinck, Herman Paul and Bart Wallet (eds.), Het gereformeerde geheugen. Protestantse herinneringsculturen in Nederland 1850-2000 (Amsterdam 2009) 433-441.
[26] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. 4 vol., edited by John Bolt, translated by John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003-2008); translations in Korean (2011), Portuguese (2012), Indonesian (2012-2017), Italian (2018), Spanish (2018) and Russian (2022-2023).
[27] George Harinck, “‘Give us an American Abraham Kuyper’: Dutch Calvinist Reformed Responses to the Founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia,” Calvin Theological Journal, XXXIII (1998) 299-319.
[28] Richard Muller, “The Place and Importance of Karl Barth in the Twentieth Century,” Westminster Theological Journal 50 (1988) 152.
