Herman Bavinck Quotes

The resurrection is the fundamental restoration of all culture.

Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

The Gospel is temporary, but the law is eternal and is restored precisely through the Gospel. Freedom from the law consists, then, not in the fact that the Christian has nothing more to do with the law, but lies in the fact that the law demands nothing more from the Christian as a condition of salvation. The law can no longer judge and condemn him. Instead he delights in the law of God according to the inner man and yearns for it day and night.

In Illinois there is a group of men who call themselves The University of Illinois and who, for a couple of dollars, will award a degree in a particular science.

Without revelation religion sinks back into a pernicious superstition.

And these two things, the love of God and Christ's satisfaction, had to and could go hand in hand because we were simultaneously the object of his love as his creatures and the object of his wrath as sinners.

Scientific information about the universe does not displace God. Some have said that they searched the heavens and did not see God. The universe with its measureless spaces remains a vast mystery to us, and those who do not find God in their immediate presence, in their heart and conscience, in the Word and the Christian community, will not find him in the universe either, even though they are equipped with the best telescopes that money can buy.

Conversion is not the source of truth, but the source of certainty with regard to the truth.

The cross is the divine settlement with the divine condemnation of sin.

Christ is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian. But he is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfillment, and consummation

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place.

conversion is a necessary and moral duty for every man.

The highest ideal for the Christian is not to make peace with the world, with science, with culture at any price, but to keep himself from the evil one.

The greatest thinkers of Greece — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus — derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

The cross of Christ divides history into two parts — the preparation for and the accomplishment of reconciliation;

Beneath the head lies the heart, out of which are the issues of life.

it is highly doubtful that with the words, “washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,” Paul was referring to baptism.

Where God’s Word is, there is God Himself, there God’s Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.

The task of dogmatics is precisely to rationally reproduce the content of revelation that relates to the knowledge of God.

To separate between religion and metaphysics, however often it may have been attempted, is impossible

Theology is about God and should reflect a doxological tone that glorifies him.

Viewed properly, there is only one duty, that of love, which is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). And there actually is only one object of that law- namely, God. Everything else- people, angels, nature, art, and so forth-may and must be only in God and for God. The sole end of all things, ourselves, our neighbors, the state, and the like- is God's glory. Pg. 101

In the doctrine of the Trinity,” wrote Herman Bavinck, “beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity.” As the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, “our God is above us, before us, and within us.” The doctrine of the Trinity — God as one in essence and three in person — shapes and structures Christian faith and practice in every way, distinguishing it from all world religions.

Religion is inconceivable apart from revelation, and revelation cannot occur apart from the existence of a spiritual world above and behind this visible world, a spiritual world in communion with the visible world.

The Gospel is sheer good tidings, not demand but promise, not duty but gift. But in order that as promise and gift it may be realized in us, it takes on the character of moral admonishment in accordance with our nature. It does not want to force us, but it wants nothing other than that we freely and willingly accept in faith what God wants to give us. The will of God realizes itself in no other way than through our reason and will. That is why it is rightly said that a person, by the grace He receives, himself believes and himself turns from sin to God.

God is above the world, and is also above sin and all evil. He allowed it because he could expiate it. So he maintained through all centuries and among all men the longing and the capacity for redemption, and wrought that redemption himself in the fulness of time, in the midst of history, in the crucified Christ.

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him. In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water ( Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8). Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

It is, moreover, of the greatest importance for every believer, particularly for the dogmatician, to know which Scriptural truths, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have been brought to universal recognition in the church of Christ. By this process, after all, the church is kept from immediately mistaking a private opinion for the truth of God.

Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.

For it is not we who call God by these names. We do not invent them. On the contrary, if it depended on us, we would be silent about him, try to forget him, and disown all his names. We take no delight in the knowledge of his ways. We tend continually to oppose his names: his independence, sovereignty, righteousness, and love, and resist him in all his perfections. But it is God himself who reveals all his perfections and puts his names on our lips. It is he who gives himself these names and who, despite our opposition, maintains them. It is of little use to us to deny his righteousness: every day he demonstrates this quality in history. And so it is with all his attributes. He brings them out despite us. The final goal of all his ways is that his name will shine out in all his works and be written on everyone’s forehead (Rev. 22:4). For that reason we have no choice but to name him with the many names his revelation furnishes us.

Creatures, because they are creatures, are subject to time and space, though not all of them are this in the same way. Time makes it possible for a thing to continue existing in a succession of moments, for one thing to be after another. Space makes it possible for a thing to spread out to all sides, for one thing to exist next to another. Time and space therefore began to exist at the same time as the creatures, and as their inevitable mode of existence. They did not exist beforehand as empty forms to be filled in by the creatures; for when there is nothing there is no time nor space either. They were not made independently, alongside of creatures, as accompaniments, so to speak, and appended from the outside. Rather, they were created in and with the creatures as the forms in which those creatures must necessarily exist as limited, finite creatures. Augustine was right when he said that God did not make the world in time, as if it were created into a previously existing form or condition, but that He made it together with time and time together with the world.

In Christianity the heavens do open, and God descends to the earth. In the other religions it is man whom we always see at work, trying by the achievement of knowledge, by keeping all kinds of rules, or by withdrawal from the world into the secrecy of his own inner life to obtain redemption from evil and communion with God. In the Christian religion the work of men is nothing, and it is God Himself who acts, intervenes in history, opens the way of redemption in Christ and by the power of His grace brings man into that redemption and causes him to walk in it.

The family is not of man's making; it is a gift of God and full of life. Upbringing in the family bears a quite special character. No school or educational institution can replace or compensate for the family. "Everything educates in the family, the handshake of the father, the voice of the mother, the older brother, the younger sister, the baby in the cradle, the sick loved one, the grandparents and the grandchildren, the uncles and the aunts, the guests and friends, prosperity and adversity, the feast day and the day of mourning, Sundays and workdays, the prayer and the thanksgiving at the table and the reading of God's Word, the morning and evening prayer. Everything is engaged to educate one another, from day to day, from hour to hour, unintentionally, without previously devised plan, method or system. From everything proceeds an educative influence though it can neither be analyzed nor calculated. A thousand insignificant things, a thousand trifles, a thousand details, all have their effect. It is life itself that here educates, life in its greatness, the rich, inexhaustible, universal life. The family is the school of life, because there is its spring and its hearth.' In A.B.W.M. Kok, Herman Bavinck, Amsterdam, 1945, pp. 1819.]

All men are really seeking after God... but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15)... They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him... In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of the moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature.

In this, Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa 29:8). Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him. In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8). Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

All the doctrines treated in dogmatics—whether they concern the universe, humanity, Christ, and so forth—are but the explication of the one central dogma of the knowledge of God. All things are considered in light of God, subsumed under him, traced back to him as the starting point. Dogmatics is always called upon to ponder and describe God and God alone, whose glory is in creation and re-creation, in nature and grace, in the world and in the church. It is the knowledge of him alone that dogmatics must put on display.

From the start of its labors dogmatic theology is shrouded in mystery; it stands before God the incomprehensible One.

science, which can make known only the interrelations of things, but never their origin, essence and end, will never be able to satisfy the needs of the human heart.

The whole man is taken into fellowship with that one true God; not only his feelings, but also his mind and will, his heart and all his affections, his soul and his body.

Christian religion cannot abandon this supernaturalism without annihilating itself.

He accepted the social and political conditions as they were, made no endeavor to reform them, and confined himself exclusively to setting the value which they possessed for the kingdom of heaven.

The superhuman task of transforming present society into a state of peace and joy requires more than ordinary human power; if God himself does not work the change, hope can be cherished only when human power is divinized.

The doctrine of evolution thus takes the place of the old religion in the modern man.320It is no science; it does not rest on undeniable facts; it has often in the past and in the present been contradicted by the facts. But that does not matter; miracle is the dearest child of faith.

reason was cast down from this exalted pedestal by the philosophy of Kant, by the theology of Schleiermacher and with the rise of the Romantic school.

We have no historical testimony to the development of polytheism into pure monotheism;

205The segregation and the election of Israel served the sole purpose of maintaining, unmixed and unadulterated, continuing and perfecting, the original revelation, which threatened to be lost206so that it might again in the fullness of time be made the property of the whole of mankind.

gospel is in the Old and the New Testament alike the core of the divine revelation, the essence of religion, the sum total of the Holy Scriptures.

Man can as little make propitiation for his sin as he can forgive it himself. But God can do both, atone and forgive; he can do the one just because he can do the other.

Theology leads through soteriology to eschatology.

as the pure knowledge of God disappears, nature too in its true character is disowned, and either exalted into the sphere of the Godhead or degraded to the sphere of a demoniacal power.

The absolute, immutable, and inviolable supremacy of that will of God is the light which special revelation holds before our soul's eye at the end of time.

Theology has, since Kant's time, become a theology of consciousness and experience and thus loses itself in religious anthropology.

revelation always supposes that man is able to receive impressions or thoughts or inclinations from another than this phenomenal world, and in a way other than that usually employed.

conversion means a religious and moral change in man, by which he gives up his sinful ways and learns to know, love, and serve with his whole heart the true God who has revealed himself in Christ;

In infant baptism it was confessed that conversion and regeneration differ, and conversion is ordinarily a coming to consciousness of that new life which has long before been planted in the heart.

religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth;

faith, which forms its positive side is at the same time cognitio and fiducia, a trustful knowledge and a knowing trust.

Metaphysics, the belief in the absolute as a holy power, always forms the foundation of ethics.

If the essence of things is unknowable, the misery of man cannot be fathomed.

The notion that all peoples are on the road to progress is as incorrect as that they are continuously declining and degenerating.

primitive man has never existed; he is nothing but a poetical creation of monistic imagination

Philosophy arose out of religion,

What history gives us leaves upon us, on the contrary, the impression of decadence rather than of an advancing civilization.

The facts are that an essential difference exists between man and beast. Human nature is sui generis; it has its own character and attributes. If this be true, then the common origin of all men is a necessity;

Human nature is not an empty notion, no purely abstract conception, but a reality, a particular manner of being, which includes distinctive habits, inclinations, and attributes.

one thread runs through the history of mankind, namely, the operation of the sovereign, merciful, and almighty will of God, to save and to glorify the world notwithstanding its subjection to corruption.

All religion is supernatural, and rests upon the presupposition that God is distinct from the world and yet works in the world.

The peculiarity of the Christian religion as has been so often shown and acknowledged even by opponents,248 lies in the person of Christ.

Men may differ as to the nature and the reach of conversion, but its necessity is established beyond all doubt; the whole of humanity proclaims the truth of the fall.

Culture in the broadest sense includes all the labor which human power expends on nature.

If there ever is to be a blessed humanity it must be preceded by a radical change in human nature.

Evolution is dismissive of the eternity of moral duty and moral laws.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

everything we value in this life is inseparably connected with the future.

All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.

Revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike.

there is great danger that modern culture, progressing in its anti-supernaturalistic course, will be stirred against the steadfastness of believers and attempt to accomplish by oppression what it cannot obtain by reasoning and argument.

157Openly or secretly all turn back to an inborn disposition, to a religio insita.

Society has already become a most artificial system of complicated relations, a gigantic organism, wherein all members are closely connected. All this demands help from the allembracing state.

311eschatology lives in the heart of all.

Reason in this newer philosophy took its starting point with childish naivete in its own integrity and trustworthiness.

empirical life is rooted in an a priori datum which does not come slowly into existence by mechanical development, but is a gift of God's grace, and a fruit and result of his revelation.

this nature is twofold; it includes not only the whole visible world of phenomena which is outside man, but also, in a wider sense, man himself; not his body alone, but his soul also.

the whole of culture — may be of great value in itself, but whenever it is thrown into the balance against the kingdom of heaven, it loses all its significance.

if the moral law or the ideal good indeed exists outside of us, then it must be grounded in and be one with the Godhead.

In the same way, any ethical system which aspires to be true ethics and to bear a normative and teleological character, not falling into merely a description of habits and customs, is forced to seek the support of metaphysics.

By banishing metaphysics, materialism has no longer an ethical system, knows no longer the distinction between good and evil, possesses no moral law, no duty, no virtue, and no highest good.

250Christianity is no mere revelation of God in the past, but it is, in connection with the past, a work in the midst of this and every time. All other religions try to obtain salvation by the works of men, but Christianity makes a strong protest against this; it is not autosoteric but heterosoteric; it does not preach self-redemption, but glories in redemption by Christ alone. Man does not save himself, and does not save God, but God alone saves man, the whole man, man for eternity.

Conversion is the sole and the absolutely peculiar way to heaven.

if sin bears an ethical character, then redemption is possible, and conversion is in principle the conquest of sin, the death of the old and the resurrection of the new man.

When we go back as far as possible to the origins we find a human nature which already contains everything which it later on produces out of itself.

God does not say that He will be our God if we do this or that thing. But He says that He will put enmity, that He will be our God, and that in Christ He will grant us all things. The covenant of grace can throughout the centuries remain the same because it depends entirely upon God and because God is the Immutable One and the Faithful One.

His entire life is summarized by the church in the word: he who suffered. Through the cross alone, he has triumphed over the principalities and powers. That was his only weapon. Alone and never in anything other than in the sign of the cross, he has achieved victory. That is the point: all things are reconciled and reunified. Just as everything turned away from God through the tree of knowledge, so everything returns to God through the cross. After having accomplished reconciliation, he now proceeds to gather all things under him as the head in the fullness of time—everything that is in heaven and on earth [Eph. 1:10]. As king he will reign until all his enemies are laid under his feet. Considering all this now, the church once again raises its eye with vivacity and declares, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord.

Language is the soul of a nation, the custodian of the goods and treasures of humankind, the bond that unites human beings, peoples, and generations, the one great tradition that unites in consciousness the world of humankind, which is one by nature.

Of the existence of self, of the world round us, of logical and moral law, ect., we are so deeply convinced because of the indelible impressions which all these things make upon our consciousness that we need no arguments or demonstration. Spontaneously, altogether involuntarily: without any constraint or coercion, we accept that existence. Now the same is true in regard to the existence of God. The so-called proofs are by no means the final grounds of our most certain conviction that God exits. This certainty is established only by faith: that is, by spontaneous testimony which forces itself upon us from every side.

Theology requires disciplined preparation in the arts more broadly. There is no admission to the temple of theology except by way of the study of the arts. Indispensable to the practitioner of the science of theology is philosophical, historical, and linguistic preparatory training. This equips one for the task of building a theological system organically from the whole of Scripture in its literary diversity. Then follows the task of intellectually mining the material gathered from Scripture and recapitulating it into a meaningful system of thought in the language of the day.

After all, when the covenant of grace is separated from election, it ceases to be a covenant of grace and becomes again a covenant of works.

We can indeed live as though there is a God or no God, as though there are norms or no norms, but ultimately we will want to know [weten] whether that great as though that we base our lives on can withstand the test of objective judgment. That is no game; it is not a hobby. It is alarming in its inevitability because otherwise, everything, our life itself, is a leap into the abyss. A certain self-denial is found in all philosophical thinking—the self-denial of a person who feels that the worldvision that his life’s practice is built on and that is connected to his nature and character could indeed be wrong. Therein lies honesty, depth, and majesty.

Christ, insists Calvin, is “not good and just, but goodness and justice,”23 and Herman Bavinck notes that Christ is most unlike other religious leaders because he “is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian.” Rather, “he is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfilment, and consummation.”24