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Theology and History in the Methodology
of Herman Bavinck
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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N H I S T O R IC A L T H E O L O G Y
Series Editor
Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary
Founding Editor
David C. Steinmetz †
Editorial Board
Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University
George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame
Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University
Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-​Wilhelms-​Universität Bonn
Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago
John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame
Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia
THE REGENSBURG ARTICLE 5 ON
JUSTIFICATION
Inconsistent Patchwork or Substance of
True Doctrine?
Anthony N. S. Lane
AUGUSTINE ON THE WILL
A Theological Account
Han-​luen Kantzer Komline
THE SYNOD OF PISTORIA AND
VATICAN II
Jansenism and the Struggle for
Catholic Reform
Shaun Blanchard
CATHOLICITY AND THE
COVENANT OF WORKS
James Ussher and the Reformed
Tradition
Harrison Perkins
THE COVENANT OF WORKS
The Origins, Development, and Reception
of the Doctrine
J. V. Fesko
RINGLEADERS OF REDEMPTION
How Medieval Dance Became Sacred
Kathryn Dickason
REFUSING TO KISS THE SLIPPER
Opposition to Calvinism in the
Francophone Reformation
Michael W. Bruening
FONT OF PARDON AND NEW LIFE
John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism
Lyle D. Bierma
THE FLESH OF THE WORD
The extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to
Early Orthodoxy
K. J. Drake
JOHN DAVENANT’S
HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM
A Defense of Catholic and Reformed
Orthodoxy
Michael J. Lynch
RHETORICAL ECONOMY IN
AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY
Brian Gronewoller
GRACE AND CONFORMITY
The Reformed Conformist Tradition and
the Early Stuart Church of England
Stephen Hampton
MAKING ITALY ANGLICAN
Why the Book of Common Prayer Was
Translated into Italian
Stefano Villani
AUGUSINE ON MEMORY
Kevin G. Grove
UNITY AND CATHOLICITY
IN CHRIST
The Ecclesiology of Francisco Suarez, S.J.
Eric J. DeMeuse
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CALVINIST CONFORMITY IN
POST-​REFORMATION ENGLAND
The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley
Gregory A. Salazar
BISSCHOP’S BENCH
Contours of Arminian Conformity in the
Church of England, c.1674–​1742
Samuel Fornecker
RETAINING THE OLD EPISCOPAL
DIVINITY
John Edwards of Cambridge and
Reformed Orthodoxy in the Later
Stuart Church
Jake Griesel
JOHN LOCKE’S THEOLOGY
An Ecumenical, Irenic, and Controversial
Project
Jonathan S. Marko
BEARDS, AZYMES, AND PURGATORY
The Other Issues that Divided East and
West
A. Edward Siecienski
THEOLOGY AND HISTORY IN THE
METHODOLOGY OF HERMAN
BAVINCK
Revelation, Confession, and Christian
Consciousness
Cameron D. Clausing
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Theology and History
in the Methodology
of Herman Bavinck
Revelation, Confession, and Christian
Consciousness
C A M E R O N D. C L AU SI N G
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Contents
Acknowledgements Abbreviations for Herman Bavinck’s works Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian xi
xiii
1
1.Bavinck: The Intellectual Context 16
2.Theological Method 59
3.Trinity and Retrieval: Revelation 97
4.Trinity and Retrieval: Confession 132
5.Trinity and Retrieval: Christian Consciousness 172
Conclusion 212
Appendix Bibliography Index 217
219
239
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Abbreviations for Herman Bavinck’s works
GD1
GD2
GD3
GD4
RD1
RD2
RD3
RD4
Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. vol. 1, ed. 4. Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1928.
Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. vol. 2, ed. 4. Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1928.
Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. vol. 3, ed. 4. Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1929.
Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. vol. 4, ed. 4. Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1930.
Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena. Edited by John Bolt.
Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.
Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Two: God and Creation. Edited by John Bolt.
Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.
Reformed Dogamtics, Volume Three: Sin and Salvation in Christ. Edited by
John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.
Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Four: Holy Spirit, Church and New Creation.
Edited by John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2008.
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Herman Bavinck
The Development of a Theologian
In 1869, when Herman Bavinck was fourteen years old his father, the
Christian Reformed pastor Jan Bavinck, penned an editorial in the first edition of De Getuigenis, a monthly youth magazine, which focused on theological engagement that was faithful to orthodox Reformed theology in the
late modern Dutch context.1 In this column he wrote, ‘In the present time,
the intellectual climate is universal. Even our church feels the influence of
the time in which she finds herself. In particular, our young people can no
more withdraw from the influence of the Zeitgeist than they can protect
themselves from it’.2 Dutch church culture in the nineteenth century felt the
all-​pervasive influence of late modern thought. Herman Bavinck would recognize this in 1911 when reflecting on the experience of puberty. Echoing his
father’s insight, he acknowledged that all adolescents, regardless of time or
culture, experience tensions around how to relate to everything their parents
and ancestors give them, and the future they want to create for themselves.
Herman thought that many modern Dutch teens experienced the struggle
between faith and unbelief more intensely in the late modern context.3
Instead of fighting a battle to hermetically seal his son off from the Zeitgeist,
Jan sought a better way to engage the cultural influences. Aside from editing
a youth magazine, in his family life, Jan worked to make his children conscious of the Zeitgeist.
The educational path of Herman, the subject of our current study, provides
a paradigmatic example of Jan’s desire to raise children who were both
1 Eglinton argues that the ‘Spring of Nations’ in 1848 functions as the marker between early
modern and late modern. As to Jan Bavinck’s undertaking of the editorial duties of this magazine,
Eglinton argues it was out of fatherly concern. See: James Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), xix.
2 Jan Bavinck and Helenius de Cock, ‘Inleiding’ in De Getuigenis. Maandschrift in het belang van
Waarheid en Godzaligheid, Eerste Jaargang (Kampen, 1869), 3–​4. ‘Ook onze kerk ondervindt den
invloed van den tijd waarin zij zich bevindt. Onze jongelingen vooral zijn het, die aan den invloed
van den tijdgeest zoo min onttrokken kunnen worden, als dat zij er zich van kunnen vrijwaren’.
3 Herman Bavinck, De opvoeding der rijpere jeugd (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1916), 75–​79.
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2
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
orthodox and modern. Herman was given an education which both engaged in his church’s tradition (he studied in the Reformed and orthodox
Theological School in Kampen) and the thoroughly modern Zeitgeist of the
academy (he finished a doctorate at the University of Leiden). It was this sentiment of his father’s that Herman would develop over the years in his own
work and some forty years later would himself echo, stating: ‘all trends and
factions are in greater or lesser measure busy in reconstruction (Neubau),
and they are exerting themselves in this work in order to reconcile ancient
Christianity with modern culture’.4 The question of how one relates historic
Christianity to modern culture was a pressing question for Jan Bavinck as
he raised his son, Herman, and late into Herman’s career it continued to be
a driving question in his own theological reflection.5 Undeniably this topic
was not new to the Bavincks; it is a perennial concern for Christians. We
need only look at the church father Tertullian’s famous dictum, ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the
Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?’6 For
Bavinck, the question that might be asked is, ‘What indeed has Berlin to do
with Kampen?’, taking ‘Berlin’ as a cipher for the ‘Academy’ and ‘Kampen’ as
a cipher for the ‘Church’.
This question dominated much of Herman Bavinck’s life and work. Before
this project continues it would be helpful to offer a brief overview of the life
and work of Herman Bavinck and demonstrate how this tension played out
in some of the educational and career decisions he made.7 Bavinck was born
at a moment in intellectual history when questions surrounding the relationship between the church and the academy were most pronounced. Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768–​1834) had worked in the first part of that century to
4 Bruce Pass, ‘Herman Bavinck’s Modernisme en Orthodoxie: A Translation’, The Bavinck Review
7 (2016), 80; Herman Bavinck, Modernisme en Orthodoxie: rede gehouden bij de overdacht van het
Rectoraat aan de Vrije Universiteit op 20 October 1911 (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1911), 15.
5 This reading of the relationship between the Bavincks breaks with what has been the received
narrative wherein Jan longed to maintain a pietistic orthodoxy in his son, sealing him off from the
modern world, and Herman was accepting of modern thought. See: Valentijn Hepp, Dr Herman
Bavinck (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 1921). My reading follows the one presented by Eglinton in
Bavinck: A Critical Biography, 17–​55.
6 Tertullian, ‘The Prescription Against Heretics’, 7 in ANF 3.246. Bavinck cites Tertullian when
discussing classical education and the place of it in Christian education. See: Herman Bavinck,
‘Klassieke opleiding’ in Verzamelde opstellen op het gebied van godsdienst en wetenschap (Kampen: J.H.
Kok, 1921), 222; ‘Classical Education’ in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, ed. John Bolt, trans.
Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 211.
7 For a timeline of Bavinck’s life see the Appendix. What follows is dependent on the work of James
Eglinton and his critical biography of Herman Bavinck, see: Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography.
My biographical account of Bavinck’s life throughout this book follows Eglinton closely.
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
3
bring the two together in Berlin. In his Brief Outline of Theology as a Field
of Study, Schleiermacher put forth a proposal which called for theology to
be an academic discipline with a rightful place in the academy, for it was, as
Schleiermacher viewed it, a ‘positive science’.8 He also saw its role as being
principally for the development of healthy piety.9 Born in 1854, Bavinck grew
up in the aftermath of Schleiermacher’s grand project.
Jan Bavinck understood the context in which he was both ministering as
a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands and raising
a family. It was a decidedly modern society; one influenced by thinkers like
Kant and Lessing wherein one would not be persecuted for not adhering
to the state-​approved church. The Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlands
Hervormde Kerk), the mainline Reformed church in the Netherlands, theologically drew upon the historic reformed creeds and confessions.10 However,
during this period in Dutch church history it began to lean heavily on the
theological developments coming out of Germany, most notably influenced
by Schleiermacher and Hegel.11 At this point, one needs to exercise caution.
Neither Jan Bavinck nor the church in which he was a minister was completely cut off from the philosophical and theological influences coming
out of Germany.12 In fact, inside the Seceder movement (the group of clergy
and churches which broke from the mainline Dutch Reformed Church in
1834) there could be found both a pietist streak and another which was more
open to ‘modern culture’.13
For Bavinck’s education, Jan enrolled him in a pre-​gymnasium, Hasselman
Institute, which was run by a Seceder and supportive of his faith. Following
this Herman was enrolled at the prestigious Gymnasium in Zwolle, a place
that produced politicians, doctors, pastors, professors, and the only Dutch
Pope (Pope Adrian IV). It was here that Herman received an education
which grounded him in the classics.14 The school would set Bavinck on a trajectory that would take him anywhere he would want to go. However, upon
8 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, 3rd ed., trans. Terrence
Tice (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), §1.
9 Ibid., §21, 55–​57.
10 The historic doctrinal standards for the Dutch Reformed are known as The Three Forms of
Unity. It is comprised of the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort.
11 For a more comprehensive reading of the movement of German theological and philosophical
thought into the Dutch context during the nineteenth century, see: George Harinck and Lodewijk
Winkeler ‘The Nineteenth Century’ in Handbook of Dutch Church History, ed. Herman Selderhuis
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 435–​517.
12 Jan himself had come from Germany to the Netherlands as a minister.
13 Eglinton, Bavinck, 84.
14 Ibid., 48–​50.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
graduating from Zwolle Gymnasium, Herman took a different academic path
from his peers, enrolling in the Theological School in Kampen in 1873. Since
1854 the Theological School had attempted to be ‘scientific’ in its approach to
theology. Nevertheless, the school’s attempt was not always successful, and
Herman would quickly become dissatisfied with the school staying as a full-​
time student just one year.15 In 1874 he began his studies at the University
of Leiden, the Netherlands’ oldest and most prodigious university. He became a student of Johannes Scholten (1811–​1885), a Dutch theologian
known for his intensely modernist theological project. Even though Bavinck
was Scholten’s student, the Leiden Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen
(1828–​1891) proved to be more influential in Bavinck’s studies. Kuenen had
taught Herman how to go about the task of historical theology. He had an
irenic approach to those with whom he disagreed, and he was a theological
polymath (teaching ethics, historical theology, as well as in his discipline of
the Old Testament). Given these factors and the fact that Scholten’s prime
was well into the past, Kuenen functioned as Bavinck’s de facto doctoral supervisor.16 By 1880, Bavinck finished his doctoral work, producing a thesis
on the ethics of Ulrich Zwingli.17 That same year he passed his theological
exams at Kampen.
Before the completion of his doctorate Herman was approached by
Abraham Kuyper (1837–​1920), a national figure in the church, politics
and a person whom Bavinck admired, to come and teach at Kuyper’s newly
founded Free University of Amsterdam. While tempted with this offer,
Bavinck turned Kuyper down, and instead he took a call to a parish church
in Franeker in 1881. This would not be the last time Kuyper approached him
nor would it be the last time Bavinck turned him down.18 That same year
Bavinck agreed to edit a new edition of the Synopsis purioris theologiae, an
early modern Reformed document which explicates the theology affirmed
at the Synod of Dort.19 This was Bavinck’s first academic project after his
doctoral work. Bavinck would stay in Franeker for just over one year before he was appointed by the Christian Reformed Church as a lecturer at the
Theological School in Kampen.
15 Ibid., 35–​37; 60–​63; George Harinck and Wim Berkelaar, Domineesfabriek: Geschiedenis van de
Theologische Universiteit Kampen (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2018).
16 Eglinton, Bavinck, 96–​99.
17 Herman Bavinck, De ethiek van Ulrich Zwingli (Kampen: G.Ph. Zalsman, 1880).
18 Eglinton, Bavinck, 101–​104.
19 Herman Bavinck, Synopsis purioris theologiae (Leiden: Donner, 1881).
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
5
Bavinck lectured and wrote in Kampen from 1882 to 1902. During this
period, he was prolific. His work primarily focused on theological construction,20 reviews of contemporary scholarship,21 and works trying to find
a path between the academy and the church.22 However, the most important project that Bavinck developed in this time was the first edition of his
Reformed Dogmatics (1895–​1902). This was a four-​volume work of dogmatic theology that walked through many of the loci of theology starting
with prolegomena and finishing with eschatology. In 1902, after three failed
attempts to lure Bavinck to the Free University, Kuyper finally got him to
come to Amsterdam, and Bavinck took up a post teaching theology there. He
would edit his Reformed Dogmatics in the following years; culminating in a
significantly revised second edition completed in 1911. His work also shifted
focus to questions surrounding Christian engagement in society considering
everything from Christian worldview23 to evolution24 to pedagogy.25 In 1911
Bavinck was elected to the second chamber of the Dutch parliament—​a part-​
time political role held alongside his work at the Free University. On 29 July
1921, Bavinck died in Amsterdam.
Throughout his life, Bavinck’s educational and career choices demonstrated
the constant tension he felt between the academy and the church, between
orthodoxy and modernity. As has already been noted, after one year at
Kampen he went to the University of Leiden. After Leiden instead of a job in
academic theology, Bavinck took a pastorate to make himself available to get
a job in Kampen. A year into the pastorate, he went to a job at the Theological
School in Kampen, a position that was not going to give him the most stimulating engagement with ‘scientific’ theology available in the Netherlands. Yet,
20 E.g., Herman Bavinck, ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper’, trans. Nelson Kloosterman, Mid-​
America Journal of Theology 19 (2008), 127–​142; ‘Calvijn’s leer over het Avondmaal’, De Vrije Kerk
13:10 (October 1887), 459–​486.
21 E.g., De theologie van Prof. Dr. Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye: bijdrage tot de kennis der ethische
theologie (Leiden: Donner, 1884).
22 E.g., ‘The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’, trans. John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal
27 (1992), 220–​251; cf. Herman Bavinck, De katholiciteit van christendom en kerk: rede gehouden bij
de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theol. School te Kampen op 18 December 1888 (Kampen: G. Ph.
Zalsman, 1888)
23 Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, eds. and trans. Cory C. Brock, James Eglinton, and
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019); Christelijke wereldbeschouwing: rede bij de
overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam op 20 October 1904 (Kampen: J.H.
Bos, 1904).
24 Herman Bavinck, ‘Evolution’ in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, ed. John Bolt, trans.
Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 105–​118; ‘Evolutie’ in
Verzamelde opstellen op het gebied van godsdienst en wetenschap (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1921), 1921.
25 Herman Bavinck, Paedagogische beginselen (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1904).
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6
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
there was, for Bavinck, a deep commitment to his church and to the academy
in all of this. By the end of his life, he had spent almost two decades at the Free
University of Amsterdam. In Amsterdam he was both a theologian and a politician. Even while Bavinck’s life and work brought to fruition much of what
his father, Jan, had hoped for, by the end of his life Bavinck knew World War
I had closed off the era of Jan Bavinck forever. A new course would need to be
charted into the future.
Needless to say, Bavinck’s thought is complex. Due to this complexity and
his thoroughgoing engagement with a variety of sources across the theological spectrum various readings of his work have been produced. The question persists in Bavinck scholarship: ‘What indeed has Berlin to do with
Kampen?’ This relationship between modernity and orthodoxy in Bavinck’s
writings is not original to this thesis. John Bolt’s examination of Bavinck’s use
of the Imitaitio Christi theme is subtitled ‘Between Pietism and Modernism’.26
Jan Veenhof ’s Revelatie en inspiratie, as well as Adam Eitel’s essay on Bavinck
and Hegel highlight the distinctly post-​Enlightenment thought present in
Bavinck’s project.27 Others have seen in Bavinck’s thought a pronounced
pre-​modern stream with what some have called a Thomist flavour.28 These
two readings have answered the question ‘What does Berlin have to do with
Kampen?’ with a decidedly negative even antagonistic ‘nothing’, either seeing
Bavinck as primarily interested in the project of Vermittlungstheologie (i.e.,
the real Bavinck lives in Berlin) or as an attempt to return to Reformed orthodoxy (i.e., the real Bavinck lives in Kampen). In both cases Bavinck is deemed
to have been altogether unsuccessful in his project, in that he was neither
modern nor orthodox. Ultimately this bifurcation in Bavinck’s thought has
led to a divide in Bavinck scholarship that historically has been termed as
the ‘two Bavincks hypothesis’,29 in which particular authors see two distinctly
26 E.g., John Bolt, A Theological Analysis of Herman Bavinck’s Two Essays on the Imitatio
Christi: Between Pietism and Modernism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013).
27 Jan Veenhof, Revelatie en inspiratie. De openbarings—​
en schriftbeschouwing van Herman
Bavinck in vergelijking met die van de ethische theologie (Amsterdam: Buijten and Schipperheijn,
1968); Adam Eitel, ‘Trinity and History: Bavinck, Hegel, and Nineteenth-​Century Doctrines of God’
in Five Studies in the Thought of Herman Bavinck: A Creator of Modern Dutch Theology, ed. John Bolt
(Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen, 2011), 101–​128.
28 See: David Sytsma, ‘Herman Bavinck’s Thomistic Epistemology: The Argument and Sources of
his Principia of Science’ in Five Studies in the Thought of Herman Bavinck: A Creator of Modern Dutch
Theology, ed. John Bolt (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen, 2011), 1–​56; Arvin Vos, ‘Knowledge According
to Bavinck and Aquinas’ (Part I), The Bavinck Review 6 (2015), 9–​36; ‘Knowledge According to
Bavinck and Aquinas’ (Part II), The Bavinck Review 7 (2016), 8–​62.
29 Henk van den Belt has noted that this debate is a particularly Anglophone discussion. He
has demonstrated that in the Netherlands it has always been understood that Bavinck is a man
who has various tensions without necessarily being bifurcated. (Henk van den Belt, “Herman
Bavinck’s Appropriation of Reformed Sources,” paper presented at Bavinck Centenary Conference,
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
7
different Bavincks; one a son of the Dutch Reformed orthodox tradition with
a decidedly pietistic streak, and the other a thoroughly post-​Kantian thinker.
Both readings produce an inconsistent Bavinck who is never able to connect these two poles in his thinking adequately. What follows from this is
a split in Bavinck scholarship which has left the field relatively fallow in the
Anglophone world.
However, in recent years, Anglophone scholars have begun the work of
plowing the field making it potentially more fruitful for the years to come
from a reading of Bavinck that allows for a unified account of his thought.
Most importantly James Eglinton has argued for a path forward that sees
the use of the ‘organic’ motif in Bavinck’s project as a unifying tool in which
Bavinck could hold together both unity and diversity, modernity and orthodoxy. Eglinton contends ‘that Bavinck’s theology of Creator as Trinity
necessitates the conceptualization of creation as organism. Trinity ad intra
leads to organism ad extra’.30 Building on and critiquing Eglinton’s work,
Cory Brock, Nathaniel Sutanto, and Bruce Pass have argued for a Bavinck
who, while appreciative of and utilizing late modern philosophical and theological sources and categories, still maintained a deep commitment to his
orthodox Reformed heritage.31 Each of these projects sees Bavinck’s utilization of the organic motif as more or less successful in maintaining a unified,
if not always satisfying, engagement with both modernity and orthodoxy.
Eglinton and others have done admirable work in plowing straight lines in
Brisbane, Australia, December 2021). The debate has taken place and can be seen in various forums.
See: Hepp, Dr Herman Bavinck; Eugene Heideman, The Relationship of Revelation and Reason
in E. Brunner and H. Bavinck (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1959); Rolf H. Bremmer, Herman Bavinck
als dogmaticus (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1961); Jan Veenhof, Revelatie en inspiratie; Henk Vroom,
‘Scripture Read and Interpreted: The Development of the Doctrine of Scripture and Hermeneutics
in Gereformeerde Theology in the Netherlands’, Calvin Theological Journal 28:2 (1993); John Bolt,
‘Grand Rapids Between Kampen and Amsterdam: Herman Bavinck’s Reception and Influence
in North America’, Calvin Theological Journal 38:2 (2003); Malcolm Yarnell, The Formation of
Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Boosey and Hawkes, 2007); David van Drunen, ‘ “The Kingship of
Christ is Twofold”: Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms in the Thought of Herman Bavinck’, Calvin
Theological Journal 45:1 (2010).
30 James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic
Motif (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 81.
31 Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, ‘Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Eclecticism: On catholicity, consciousness and theological epistemology’, Scottish Jounral of Theology 70:3 (2017);
Cory Brock, Orthodox yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Schleiermacher (Bellingham: Lexham
Academic, 2020); Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, God and Knowledge: Herman Bavinck’s Theological
Epistemology (London: T&T Clark, 2020); Bruce Pass, The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and
Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
the field of Bavinck studies.32 Nevertheless, there is more that can be done to
explore some of the tensions that endure in Bavinck’s project, granting that
any simple solution is far from ideal or even possible. As the current study
will show, Bavinck was a multifaceted thinker with many nuanced views.
To claim a solution that resolves every tension in his thought would most
likely produce an artificial reading of Bavinck. Therefore, I will show in this
book that contemporary Anglophone scholarship which assumes a reading
of Bavinck that both acknowledges the tension in his thought but denies a
reading that produces large portions of Bavinck’s corpus which are incompatible with each other is the most accurate reading.
This study aims to contribute to this movement in Bavinck scholarship by
examining his theological method in the light of the nineteenth-​century ‘historical turn’. The ‘historical turn’ (or ‘historicism’) was a movement in which
history became a science in its own right. I will argue throughout this project
that while not embracing all of the relativizing implications of that movement, the role of history as a force which both shapes the present and allows
for development into the future has a demonstrable influence on the theological methodology of Herman Bavinck. While it would be an overstatement
to say that the rise of history as a science was determinative for all theological thinking in the nineteenth century, it is not too much to say that it was
one of the most important movements in both theological and philosophical
thought in the nineteenth century.33 No study has yet taken up the influence
of historicism on Bavinck and Bavinck’s theological project. Thus, a careful
examination of Bavinck’s theological method in light of the nineteenth-​
century turn to history might provide a few seeds which when planted in the
freshly tilled field of Bavinck studies could produce fruit, which in turn could
nourish reflection on the topic of Bavinck as a constructive dogmatician and
the relationship his late modern sources have to his pre-​modern and confessional sources and Scripture.
The current project intends to fill this gap. Through a careful study of
Bavinck’s theological methodology, as applied to his Trinitarian theology,
32 Along a similar line of thought, but not looking to the organic motif, various other authors have
offered a unified reading of Bavinck. See: George Harinck, ‘ “Something that must remain, if the truth
is to be sweet and precious to us”: The Reformed Spirituality of Herman Bavinck’, Calvin Theological
Journal 38 (2003); Henk van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and
Trust (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 229–​300; Brian Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny: Eschatology and the
Image of God in Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
33 Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 9–​28.
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
9
I will show the way in which Bavinck attempted to walk the line between
modernity and orthodoxy specifically with respect to the historical turn.
Of particular importance for the current study will be the role of historical
creeds and confessions. Creeds and confessions are especially interesting
as they bring the nineteenth-​century historicist project into the purview of
this project. For Protestants, and particularly Reformed theology, the place
of church tradition, creeds, and confessions, requires extended reflection.
The reason for this is that the so-​called formal principle of the Reformation,
sola Scriptura, not only produces church reform, but it also lends itself to the
possibility of dissolving the catholicity of the church, in that sola Scriptura
can easily devolve into solo Scriptura, and the interpretative equivalent to
the book of Judges ensues: ‘everyone doing what seems right in their own
eyes’. Thus, we are left not with one universal catholic church but many small
churches.34 Bavinck was aware of this possibility throughout his life and the
nineteenth-​century turn to history only highlighted this difficulty for him.
This study will show that Bavinck’s work is a constructive attempt to grapple
both with the history of the church while seeing the theological development which flows out of sola Scriptura as a necessary part of being ecclesia
reformata semper reformanda.35 Applying these thoughts to his Trinitarian
theology in particular, in what could be understood to be an attempt to ‘reverse engineer’ his thought in this area, will provide a helpful litmus test for
his theological methodology and the influence of historicism.
In historical context Trinitarian theology in the nineteenth century
provides a useful map on which to plot Bavinck’s constructive project.
While in the early nineteenth century G.W.F. Hegel (1770–​
1831) had
incited something of a revival in speculative Trinitarian thought, the late
nineteenth century–​with thinkers such as Albrecht Ritschl (1822–​1889),
Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–​1922), Adolf von Harnack (1851–​1930), and
Ernst Troeltsch (1865–​1923)—​saw the evaporation of interest in Protestant
Trinitarian reflection. That being said, as Samuel Powell has noted, ‘conservative Protestants remained steadfastly loyal’ to Trinitarian theology.36 This
stood in contrast to liberal theology where ‘the doctrine was not so much
expressly denied as displaced from a position of importance’.37 Given what
34 This charge is leveled against the Reformation and it will be explored in Chapter 4.
35 Bavinck, ‘Modernisme en Orthodoxie’, 36; Pass, ‘Herman Bavinck’s Modernisme en
Orthodoxie: A Translation’, 82.
36 Samuel Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 142.
37 Ibid., 171.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
Powell has observed as a rather significant divergence regarding the place
of Trinitarian theology in the theological projects in the nineteenth century,
examining how Bavinck envisioned the Trinity in his context will shed more
light on the interplay between late modern theology and Reformed orthodoxy in Bavinck’s project. The pressing question will be the extent to which
the nineteenth-​century turn to history in philosophical and theological reflection affected Bavinck’s theological method.
Bavinck understood that attempting to ‘repristinate’ one’s theological tradition from an older supposedly pure form was a fool’s errand. Speaking of
the task of a Reformed theologian, Bavinck said:
They do not wish to repristinate, and have no desire for the old conditions
to return. . . . As children of their time they do not scorn the good things
which God in this age also has given them; forgetting the things that are behind, they stretch forward to the things that are before. They strive to make
progress to escape from the deadly embrace of dead conservatism.38
Bavinck believed that theological development was a vital part of a constructive project, going so far as to declare in 1881, ‘a Christian Dogmatic does
not yet exist’.39 The reason for this being that, for Bavinck, dogma is not the
source of a single theologian or church but the confession of the ‘Christian
Church as a whole’.40 There is no ideal theology on earth, all theological reflection is mixed with both pure and impure elements. Therefore, theological
development is necessary.41
Yet, as has been shown above there are some who would maintain that
Bavinck’s theology is a mere recapitulation of Reformed orthodox theology. Thus, the question remains to what extent Bavinck is faithful to his
38 Herman Bavinck, ‘The Future of Calvinism’, trans. Geerhardus Vos, The Presbyterian and
Reformed Review 5 (1894), 13; ‘Het calvinisme in Nederland en zijne toekomst’, Tijdschrift voor
Gereformeerde Theologie 3 (1896), 146.
39 Herman Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System’, trans. Nelson Kloosterman,
The Bavinck Review 5 (2014), 94; ‘Het voor en tegen van een dogmatisch systeem’ in Kennis en
leven: opstellen en artikelen uit vroegere jaren, verzalmeld door Ds C.B. Bavinck (Kampen: J.H. Kok,
1922), 60. In this way Bavinck’s thought is similar to that of John Webster who argued that his goal
in retrieval is not a return to an apparently pristine version of theological reasoning, believing that
this will provide a purer form of doctrine. Theological retrieval has an eye toward theological development. See: John Webster, ‘Theologies of Retrieval’ in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,
eds. Kathryn Tanner, John Webster, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
40 Bavinck, ‘Pros and Cons’, 94; ‘Het voor en tegen’, 60.
41 Herman Bavinck, Godsdienst en godgeleerdheid: Rede gehouden bij de aanvaarding van het
Hoogleeraarsambt in de Theologie aan de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam op Woensdag 17 December
1902 (Wageningen: Vada, 1902), 59.
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
11
expressed desire to move theological reflection forward. Did Bavinck maintain a distance from modern Protestantism’s revisionist program in the area
of Trinitarian theology? Or did Bavinck do something, even in the area of
Trinitarian theology, that betrays a context in which the turn to history is a
major factor?
To answer the questions posed, this thesis will consider Bavinck’s theological methodology in its historical context. The opening chapter will look
carefully at the nineteenth-​century turn to history. That chapter will situate
the historical turn in the broader discussion of the rise of history as an independent science in its own right. This will necessarily lead to some reflection
on the mid-​eighteenth century when history began to become a discipline in
the German academy and was working to find its place. Bergjan has noted
that up until this point the theological faculties in the university understood
history to be little more than a rhetorical tool for illustrating the truth of a
dogmatic assertion.42 This can be observed in the theological encyclopaedia
of Gottlieb Jakob Planck, whose attitude functions as paradigmatic for the
German academy at that time.
If that time is over among us, if a freer spirit now leads our doctrinal
investigations, if, among us it is possible now to say loudly that no dogmatic idea is true merely because old Athanasius or the Council of Nicaea
declared it to be true, let alone false merely because St Augustine and few
African councils view it as heretical—​then whom have we to thank for this
but church history, which alone revealed, and could reveal, the concerns
that all too often motivated the good Church Fathers in their statements,
and the Councils in their decisions.43
The theologian no longer accepted a doctrinal position solely because a particular figure in history asserted that it was the truth. Church fathers ceased
42 Silke-​Petra Bergjan, ‘Die Beschäftigung mit der Alten Kirche an deutschen Universitäten in
den Umbrüchen der Auklärung’ in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie. Zur Relevanz
der Patristik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds. Christoph Marschies and Johannes van Oort
(Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 31–​32.
43 G.J. Planck, Einleitung in die theologische Wissenschaften, vol. 1 of 2 (Leipzig: 1974), 109.
German: Wenn jetzt diese Zeit bey uns vorüber ist, wenn uns jetz ein frenere Geist bey unseren
dogmatischen Untersuchungen leitet, wenn man es jetzt laut unter uns sagen darf, dass keine
dogmatische Idee schon deswegen wahr ist, weil sie der alte Athanas‘ und die Nicaische Synode
für wahr erklärte, und noch weniger schon deswegen falsch ist, weil der heilige Augustin und
einge Afrikanische Concilien ein ketzeren darinn sahen—​wem haben wir es zu danken, als
der kirschengeschichte, die uns allein aufdeckte, und allein audeckten konnte, was den guten
kirchenvätern nur alzuoft ihre Aussprüche, und den Concilien ihre Entscheidungen eingab.
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12
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
being used as proof texts but as, Johannes Zachhuber has noted, a ‘systematic
coherence’ was necessary so as to present the material ‘in such a way that
the relationship between individual event becomes plausible to the reader
and its reconstruction accountable to the community of historians’.44 The
implications of this are that an intimate relationship developed between
the disciplines of history, philosophy, and theology. Locating Bavinck in
the midst of this turn to history which flourished in the nineteenth century
allows us to evaluate the extent to which the historical turn influenced his
theological methodology.
After having laid out the historical and philosophical context with regard
to the rise of historicism in the nineteenth century, Chapter 2 will consider
Bavinck’s theological method in light of this historical turn. This chapter
begins to answer the question of the extent to which the historical turn
influenced Bavinck’s theological methodology. Before breaking the method
down into its various parts, this chapter will allow us to see the method in its
entirety. Bavinck argues that revelation, confession, and Christian consciousness are all principia in his theological methodology. Prior to examining each
of these on their own terms, we need to understand how Bavinck saw them
fitting together as a whole. In a sense, this instinct flows out of Bavinck’s own
theological proclivity in understanding theological method as an organism,
for ‘just as in every organism the whole precedes the parts’.45 This chapter
links the exploration of historicism to the final three chapters and functions
to set up the rest of the thesis in which each of the three distinct prongs of
Bavinck’s theological methodology is looked at individually and applied to
his Trinitarian theology. This is done to break down Bavinck’s theological
methodology as applied to his Trinitarian theology in order to help us better
determine the influence of historicism on his theological methodology.
The third chapter acts as a turning point for the entire thesis. There, I begin
the test case of Bavinck’s Trinitarian theology. In this chapter, I will move
from the general to the specific. To what extent can one see the influence
of the historical turn on Bavinck’s theological method when one looks at
the Trinity? Chapter 3 considers Bavinck’s engagement with revelation.
For Bavinck, the starting place of theological reasoning is Deus dixit. God
has spoken and in that he has revealed himself. This conviction functions
to ground all of Bavinck’s theological project. As it relates to the Trinity, for
44 Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-​Century Germany: From F.C. Baur to
Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.
45 Bavinck, RD4, 332; GD4, 313.
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
13
Bavinck the climax of the revelation of God is seen in the incarnation of the
Son and the outpouring of the Spirit.46 Because of this understanding of revelation, Bavinck sees all of revelation as bearing a Trinitarian shape. Thus,
for Bavinck revelation is never less than words, but also more than words;
the missions of the Son and the Spirit are the communicative actions of the
Triune God that interpret all other communicative action of the Triune
God. Therefore, what Chapter 3 ultimately points to is that the missions ad
extra flow out of the processions ad intra. Chapter 3 thus demonstrates how
Bavinck’s Trinitarian theology finds its principal grounding in Scripture, the
written, objective revelation of God. The chapter will illustrate how Bavinck
understood Scripture in light of the historical turn.
Chapter 4 moves from revelation to church confession. Bavinck believed
it was impossible to develop a dogmatic system solely from Scripture.47 To
some extent the application of this belief in Bavinck’s project betrays the influence that the turn to history had on Bavinck. For there to be a dogmatic
system, development is necessary, the church’s participation in organizing
the parts of Scripture and its extended reflection on the data allows for a dogmatic system to form. The chapter considers Bavinck’s own understanding
of the role of creeds and confessions in his Trinitarian theology. Specifically,
it looks at how Bavinck understood the authoritative role of creeds and
confessions in his theological project. While never attaining confessional
status in the Dutch Reformed church, Bavinck’s work on the Synopsis
purioris theologiae—​a seventeenth-​century work of four theology faculty
members at the University of Leiden explicating the theology expounded in
the Canons of Dort—​serves as an illustrative example of Bavinck’s thoughts
surrounding church historical texts. The chapter demonstrates that in many
ways Bavinck’s engagement with historical sources is not wholly unique.
Accordingly, the chapter engages with Bavinck’s interaction with historical
texts (namely, the Synopsis) and definitions when developing his Trinitarian
theology.
Chapter 5 closes out the analysis of Bavinck’s theological method in light of
the historical turn, by considering his last principium, Christian consciousness. For Bavinck, Christian consciousness was an acknowledgement of the
subjective nature of theological reflection. Theology is done by people who
live, move, and breathe in a particular time and place with all of the cultural,
46 Bavinck, RD2, 269; GD2, 235.
47 Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons’, 98; ‘Het voor en tegen’, 63.
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14
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
philosophical, and theological questions and concerns associated with that
temporality. Theology is paradoxical. It looks to eternity while being inherently temporal. As Bavinck understood it, this was a necessary part of theological reflection. Bavinck argued that a dogmatic system is an organism.48
If a dogmatic system is organic, that system must constantly be growing and
developing toward a definite teleological end.49 For there to be a ‘Christian
dogmatic’ the entire church, inclusive of all ethnicity, generation, nationality,
etc., must speak to it.50 Thus, this chapter shows that as Bavinck understood
it, theological reasoning necessarily continues to develop and grow. Bavinck
believed that arrogance was shown in maintaining that the church arrived
at all truth at some point in the past.51 Thus, this chapter considers how
Bavinck connected both a faithfulness to confessional and creedal standards
to the concept of theological development. In applying the idea of Christian
consciousness to his Trinitarian theology I will demonstrate how Bavinck
borrowed from and utilized nineteenth-​century concepts surrounding ‘personality’ to help develop his Trinitarian theology. What will be shown is
that while Chapters 3 and 4 consider Bavinck’s retrieval of both Scripture
and tradition in Trinitarian theology, Chapter 5 notes how retrieval is not
repristination but that it ‘opens up new vistas for today’.52
In a sense the thrust of Bavinck’s project throughout his entire career was
one of trying to mediate between the reformed and orthodox wing of his theological tradition and the Zeitgeist in which he found himself. This book is an
attempt to explore the extent to which he was successful with regard to one
particular area of that Zeitgeist, namely, the historical turn. Just as Bavinck
was finishing his time in Kampen and moving to the Free University of
Amsterdam he delivered an address in which he stated:
In that time the idea was alive in the church that we must leave the world
to its own fate, and precisely because I came out of the circle which I come
from, I felt compelled to seek my education at a University. For that church
was in great danger of losing sight of the catholicity of the church for the
48 Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons’, 96; ‘Het voor en tegen’, 62.
49 Bavinck, Christian Worldview, 70–​72; Christelijke Wereldbeschouwing, 65.
50 Herman Bavinck, Der wetenschap der H. Godgeleerheid: rede ter aanvaarding van het
leeraarsambt aan de Theologische School te Kampen, uitgesproken den 10 Jan. 1883 (Kampen: G.Ph.
Zalsman, 1883), 12.
51 Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons’, 99; ‘Het voor en tegen’, 65.
52 Darren Sarisky, ‘Introduction’ in Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal, ed.
Darren Sarisky (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 2.
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Herman Bavinck: The Development of a Theologian
15
stake of holiness of life. And then the thought arose in me, ‘Is it possible to
reconcile both of these?’. . . My goal is to hold tightly to both, and not to let
go of either.53
In what follows, I will explore how he tried to hang on tightly both to the historical turn of the nineteenth century and his church’s theological tradition
with regard to his Trinitarian theology. Acknowledging what he believed to
be true, namely that ‘a Christian Dogmatic does not yet exist’.
53 Eglinton, Bavinck, 216; cf. C. Veenhof, ‘Uit het leven van de Theologische Hogeschool 6’, De
Reformatie 30 (1955), 124. Dutch: In der tijd leefde in die kerk de gedachte, we moeten de wereld
maar overlaten aan haar eigen lot, en juist omdat ik gekomen ben uit den kring, waaruit ik gekomen
ben, gevoelde ik mij genoopt om aan eene Universiteit mijne opleiding te zoeken. Want die kerk liep
groot gevaar om terwille der heiligheid des levens de catholiciteit der kerk uit het oog te verliezen. En
toen rees de gedachte bij mij, is het mogelijk, die beide te verzoenen?
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1
Bavinck
The Intellectual Context
In studying the history of ideas, context matters a great deal. Warning against
the common tendency to ignore historical context and thus render ideas
‘timeless’ or ‘universal’, Quentin Skinner remarked:
The relevance of this dilemma to the history of ideas—​and especially to the
claim that the historian should concentrate simply on the text in itself—​is
of course that it will never in fact be possible simply to study what any given
classic writer has said (especially in an alien culture) without bringing to
bear some of one’s own expectations about what he must have been saying.1
What Skinner pointed to in the study of history of ideas translates well into
the study of theology and is particularly poignant in the study of the thought
of historical figures in theology. Timothy Tennent has made a similar observation, arguing that there is a tendency in theology to universalize a particular cultural expression as an unchangeable truth. Tennent utilizes the
categories of ‘pilgrim’ principle and ‘indigenizing’ principle from the field
of World Christianity and developed by missiologist Andrew Walls where
the ‘pilgrim’ principle is the universalizing principle of the Gospel, and the
‘indigenizing’ principle is the particularlizing principle which locates a theologian in her time and place.2 Tennent explains, ‘An undue emphasis on the
pilgrim principle assumes that all the issues we face in our culture are the
same faced by every culture’.3 At the outset of this project, I want to guard
against universalizing aspects of Bavinck’s theological methodology which
1 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’ in Meaning &
Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988), 31. Emphasis original.
2 Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of
Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 3–​15.
3 Timothy Tennent, Theology in the Context of World Christianity: How the Global Church Is
Influencing the Way We Think about and Discuss Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 12.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
17
belong to his particular Zeitgeist. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to understand where and when Bavinck was located. Placing Bavinck within his
larger philosophical, cultural, and theological context, particularly as regards
the nineteenth-​century ‘turn to history’ allows for engagement with his theological methodology in light of this turn to history while not universalizing
those features which are particular to Bavinck’s time and place. Thus, this
chapter provides one piece of Bavinck’s philosophical context coming out of
the nineteenth century: that era’s turn to history.4
The nineteenth century was marked by revolution, bookended on either
side by the French Revolution (1789) and the outbreak of WWI (1914). Not
only was it a revolutionary period militarily, but also intellectually with the
likes of Kant (1724–​1804), Hegel (1770–​1831), Schleiermacher (1768–​1834),
and Nietzsche (1844–​1900) setting the trajectory of philosophical and theological reasoning. This revolution of thought occurred, as well, in the realm
of history with the rise of historicism. Friedrich Meinecke stated, ‘[T]‌he advent of historicism was. . . one of the greatest intellectual revolutions which
Western thought has experienced’.5 While arguments concerning historicism have moved beyond Meinecke, few scholars would dispute his estimation of the impact of the movement. Before the nineteenth-​century turn to
history, historical thinking tended to be ahistorical, opting to universalize
and absolutize the objects of historical inquiry such as morality, humanity,
and reason. The rise of historicism was an attempt to find the historical cause
behind many of these objects which had been universalized in the past.6 Thus
what can be seen is that the turn to history in the nineteenth century was a
watershed moment in historical studies, for it is at this point that for the first
4 Various works have recently added texture to the theological and philosophical context in which
Bavinck wrote and worked. Brian Mattson offers a general contextual overview in Restored to Our
Destiny: Eschatology and the Image of God in Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (Leiden: Brill,
2012), 1–​18. James Eglinton asks the question ‘Where was Herman Bavinck?’ in an attempt to locate Bavinck in general theological and philosophical trajectories in Trinity and Organism: Towards
a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 1–​
26. Recently a series of doctoral theses have been completed at the University of Edinburgh providing still more background. See: Cory Brock, Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use
of Schleiermacher (Bellingham: Lexham Academic, 2020); Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, God and
Knowledge: Herman Bavinck’s Theological Epistemology (London: T&T Clark, 2020); Bruce Pass, The
Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2020).
5 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus in Werk, eds. Hans Herzfeld, Carl Hinrich,
and Walther Hofer, vol. III (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1965), 1. German: Und das Aufkommen des
Historismus war, was in diesem Buche gezeigt werden soll, eine der größten geistigen Revolutionen,
die das abendländische Denken erlebt hat.
6 Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
time history is seen as a legitimate science [Wissenschaft] in its own right.7
This new attitude toward history in which values and beliefs were relativized,
changing, and particular was epitomized in the ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ of
Leopold von Ranke.8 The days of focusing on the universal, general, and absolute were gone and, for many, so was the embarrassment of those days.9
History was now a document-​driven discipline that focused on the individual, the particular.
Yet while monumental, Frederick Beiser has noted that defining this
movement known as historicism is notoriously difficult.10 Nevertheless,
a definition is necessary to move forward. Ernst Troeltsch, who brought
the word ‘historicism’ into popular parlance, developed a definition that
rested less on how the word was used and more on what the word ought to
mean. Troeltsch’s concern was that the word ‘historicism’ had been used in a
plethora of ways without any uniform agreement on a descriptive definition
of what it was. Thus, he worked to strip the word of what he saw as its defective
meaning and understanding and asserted that at its core, historicism was ‘the
sense of a fundamental historicization of all our thinking about humanity,
its culture and values’.11 Troeltsch, however, remained unclear about what he
meant by the ‘historicization of all our thinking’. Thus, supplying a meaning
for him, I argue that for Troeltsch to historicize our thinking means to see all
aspects of human life as contingent on history. In Troeltsch’s construction of
historicism there is no permanence to an essence, everything in the world
is the product of the process of history. Everything is in flux because there
is no eternal or timeless essence on which to build stability.12 Building on
Troeltsch, I contend that to historicize is to take the temporal locatedness of a
subject seriously not attempting to universalize any one aspect of the subject
7 Ibid., 6. It should be noted that in the category of ‘historist’ there is a variety of thinkers, such as,
Herder, Humboldt, Ranke, Dilthey, Windelband, whose goals and agendas varied greatly. The one
piece that each of this people held in common was the quest to legitimate history as an independent
science.
8 Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514,
3rd ed. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt, 1885), vii.
9 Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 22–​29.
10 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 1–​2.
11 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Der Historismus und seine Probleme’ in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hans Baron
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1912), 102. German: Es ist das Problem der Bedeutung und des Wesens des
Historismus überhaupt, wobei dieses Wort von seinem schlechten Nebensinn völlig zu lösen und
in dem Sinne der grundsätzlichen Historisierung alles unseres Denkens über den Menschen, seine
Kultur, und seine Werte zu verstehen ist.
12 Georg G. Iggers, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term’, Journal of the History of
Ideas 56 (1995), 129–​152; F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 123–​148.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
19
but seeing all subjects as engaged in the act of continually becoming. If this is
indeed how historicism should be understood, it makes sense that this vision
of history would fundamentally change how one might approach biblical and
theological studies. Because historicism introduced the idea that identity
or essence is not fixed, but historically determined, the study of dogmatics
collapsed into a historical study of religion bringing historical criticism into
biblical studies and the retrieval of early modern theological texts into theological studies as the subdiscipline of historical theology.13 Dogmatics was
no more a quest for universal truths about God, the world, or humanity, but
the exploration of what a person or group believed at a particular time and
place.14
While care needs to be taken in proclaiming that everything and everyone
was changed by historicism, we can note that historicism had a wide-​ranging
effect. It was not solely a German intellectual pursuit, but, pertinent for the
present project, Dutch theology was altered as a result of historicism. While
we can see the rise of biblical historical criticism in the Dutch Ethical school
and the Dutch modernists coming out of Leiden, in Bavinck’s own Kuyperian
circles, there was also a renewed interest in early modern theological texts.15
One such example can be seen in an advertisement in Kuyper’s newspaper,
De Heraut, on 15 May 1881. It was a short message from the Society of
Reformed Ministers where they announced the retrieval of a series of early
modern Dutch Reformed texts.16
In De Heraut one finds the announcement of the appearance of Bibliotheca
Theologica Reformata. Already at the Society of Reformed Ministers
13 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology (1898)’ in Religion in History,
trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 11–​32; ‘The
Dogmatics of the “Religionsgeschichtliches Schule” ’, American Journal of Theology 17:1 (1913),
2–​3; Hartmut Ruddies, ‘ “Wesensbestimmung ist Wesensgestaltung”: Der Beitrag Ernst Troeltsch
zur Wesensbestimmung des Christentums’ in Das Christentum der Theologen in 20. Jahrhundert,
ed. Mariano Delgado (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000), 23–​26; Ulrich Schmiedel, ‘Performative
Practice: Ernst Troeltsch’s Concept(s) of Christianity’ in The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch,
ed. Christopher Adair-​Toteff (London: Anthem Press, 2017), 83–​103.
14 Bavinck says something similar about his own Reformed Dogmatics when it was first published
calling it ‘the theology needed by our age’. See: Bavinck, “Dogmatiek”, De Bazuin, 26 April 1901.
Dutch: Dan is zij meteen de theologie, die onze tijd behoeft.
15 George Harinck and Lodewijk Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’ in Handbook of Dutch
Church History, ed. Herman Selderhuis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 464–​466; 480–​
481. I will further discuss the Dutch ethical school and Modern theology coming out of Leiden below.
16 De Heraut was a weekly ecclesiastical newspaper in the Netherlands. It was in publication from
1850 to 1945 (known as De Heraut van de Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland for a period).
A question outside the scope of this project, but worthy of research is the time in Dutch
Reformed theological thought that the move from ‘writers’ to ‘old writers’ took place.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
founded in Amsterdam in October 1881, the publication of old classics of
the Reformed Church primarily in the Netherlands was approved.17
It went on to note:
It is a good evidence for the growth of the historical, confessional party that
a sufficient number of readers could count the works of old teachers. . . .
‘Ask your ancestors and they will bless you’, that is also a statement from
Scripture. The arrogance of the children, who think that they can overlook
their ancestors, resembles that of the dwarf who thinks he is taller than the
giant on whose shoulders he stands.18
The works of Junius (1545–​1602) and Zanchius (1516–​1590), the Loci of
Trelcatius (1542–​1602), The Marrow of Theology by Ames (1576–​1633), and
the Exegesis Symboli by Maresius (1599–​1673) were a few of the projects
being produced at this point.19 Each author had been a major figure in the
development of early modern Reformed orthodox theology and more specifically Dutch Reformed theology.20 Thus, even though it may be an overstatement to claim historicism affected everyone and everything, Bavinck was
not exaggerating when he called the nineteenth century ‘the age of historic
sense’.21 It is this turn to history that this chapter will investigate.
17 De Heraut 15 May 1881. Dutch: ‘In de Heraut vindt men de aankondiging van het verschijnen
eener Bibliotheca Theologica Reformata. Reeds op de in October 1880 te Amsterdam gestichte
Vereeniging van Gereformeerde predikanten werd tot de uitgave van de oude classici der
Gereformeerde Kerk voornamelijk in Nederland besloten’.
18 De Heraut 15 May 1881. Dutch: ‘Het is een goed teeken voor de werken der oude leeraars
rekenen mocht. . . . “Vraag uwen ouden en zij zullen het u zegen”, dat is ook eene uitspraak der Schrift.
De hoogmoed der nakomelingen, die meenen, dat zij de ouden over het hoofd kunnen zien, gelijkt
op dien van den dwerg, die grooter meent te zijn dan de reus, op wiens schouders hij staat’.
19 De Heraut 24 April 1881.
20 The new-​found enthusiasm in producing new editions of early modern Reformed texts mirrors
a similar phenomenon in German. While the retrieval of Reformation and early modern era texts
in German differed from that in the Netherlands in that it was sponsored by the Prussian government and bore many political concerns, there were many analogous impulses in the Netherlands.
(For more on the Prussian retrieval see: Zachary Purvis, Theology and the University in Nineteenth-​
Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10.) For instance, in Prussia a driving
force was the legitimising of the union between the Lutheran and Reformed churches, one can see
a similar instinct in the Netherlands with a concern to lend credibility to the theological positions
of churches that had broken from the national church by connecting them to the historic Dutch
Reformed faith. (See: Herman Bavinck, ‘The Future of Calvinism’, trans. Geerhardus Vos, The
Presbyterian and Reformed Review 5 (1894), 1–​2.)
21 Herman Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation: A New Annotated Edition, eds. Cory Brock and
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2018), 100.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
21
Paying heed to Skinner’s warning, this chapter will consider the rise of historicism and this phenomenon’s effect on Bavinck’s theological project. It will
examine how the rise of history as a science played a formative role in the
theological reflection of the nineteenth century. The chapter sets the philosophical context for understanding much of Bavinck’s theological project
including, but not limited to, his editing of the sixth edition of the Synopsis
purioris theologiae, a seventeenth century text important to the articulation
of early modern Reformed orthodoxy. It is here that the groundwork is laid
for the rest of this project. In this chapter I will argue that the rise of historicism and basic philosophical commitments connected to this intellectual
revolution shaped key aspects of Bavinck’s theological methodology; namely,
his use of historical theology and his attitude toward theological development. Thus, what follows frames the argument that will be made in the rest
of this project; principally, that while not embracing all of the relativizing
implications of the movement, the role of history as a force that both shapes
the present and allows for development into the future has a demonstrable
influence on the theological methodology of Herman Bavinck.
To accomplish this goal of laying the philosophical groundwork around
historicism, the chapter will make three distinct steps. First, it will examine
how historicism grew out of a desire to secure a place for history as a science
[Wissenschaft] in the academy. Second, the chapter will consider how this
desire to see history established as a scientific discipline affected its relationship to theology, thus changing the way in which much theological reflection proceeded in the nineteenth century. Third, and finally, I will tie all of
this together in Bavinck, demonstrating how these philosophical and theological currents pressed down on him, forming not only the context of his
work but also his theological methodology. These three steps will support
the argument that the rise of historicism fundamentally shaped key aspects
of Bavinck’s theological methodology. Therefore, this chapter provides the
context for the subsequent chapters which will examine Bavinck’s theological
methodology.
Bavinck’s Intellectual Context: History as a Science
As Bavinck understood it, the history of Western philosophy is the quest to
find the transcendent. Bavinck argued that, ‘[Philosophy and religion] endeavor to penetrate beneath the appearance of things to the essence, beneath
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22
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
conscious to the unconscious, beneath the outward forms to the inner mystery of infinite life, of silent power, of hidden will’.22 Bavinck’s contention was
that Western philosophy has an impulse in it to develop a justification for the
way things are.23 With the rise of the Enlightenment and Descarte’s cogito
ergo sum, human reason took its place as the supreme authority in all matters.
That authority extended to the quest to find a singular reasoned essence for
all things. Rising out of the German Enlightenment, historicism adopted
and extended this Enlightenment ideal to the realm of history. It embraced
the unwavering authority of reason in the realm of history.24 Nevertheless,
in doing so, it undermined the Enlightenment project of attempting to find
a single universally reasoned justification for all things (law, morality, purpose, etc.). ‘All these considerations show that history presents a character
far too involved and complicated to be reduced to one common formula
or to be explained from one cause’.25 The revolutionary vision of historicism was to make a break with this dominant aspect of eighteenth-​century
Enlightenment thought.
In making this break, historicism exposed the Enlightenment to the criticism that it was constructed and depended too much on medieval Christian
theological assumptions which it had attempted to throw off.26 The theology
of history found in the church before the Enlightenment was dominated by
two lines of thought, one succeeding the other. First, an Augustinian view,
which saw history as pointing to and finding its culmination in the incarnation of the Logos.27 That view set up Christ as the conclusion of history.
Following this, in the medieval era, the view popularized by Joachim of Fiore
saw Christ as the middle point, rather than the end of history—​the start of
a new era, the beginning of a new beginning.28 Augustine read history as
pointed to and finding its culmination in the incarnation of the Logos in
whom the eschaton had reached its fulfilment. History is thus summarized in
a tale of two cities or two bodies: civitas Dei and civitas terrena; corpus Christi
and corpus Diaboli.29 The history of the corpus Christi is the history of the
22 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 27.
23 Ibid., 92–​95.
24 Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1.
25 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 99.
26 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 11.
27 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), v.
28 Ibid., 17.
29 Ibid., 9–​10.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
23
continuous incarnation of Christ through the unio mystica.30 The alternate
reading which gained prevalence in the medieval church and overtook the
Augustinian view in dominance was that of Joachim of Fiore.31 ‘What can
be found in Joachim is. . . non-​eschatological apocalypticism’.32 History was
a providential march with different epochs coinciding with each member of
the Trinity respectively.33 For Joachim, the age of the Father corresponded
to the Old Testament followed by the age of the Son which lasted from the
first advent of Christ to 1200CE, and the age of the Holy Spirit lasting until
the second advent of Christ.34 The common assumption in both of these
views was a universalizing essence of history focused on Christ. Historicism
asserted that there could be no such universalizing of history, and, therefore, the Enlightenment project of searching for a transcendent cause behind all things needed to be abandoned. Historicism, by extending reason
to the realm of history, challenged this universalizing tendency which was
still prevalent in the Enlightenment. It was this critique that marked a major
break between historicism and the Enlightenment.
While it is apparent that there is a break with the Enlightenment in the
historicist tradition, care must be taken not to set the two in antagonistic opposition to one another. The aim here is solely to make the observation of
discontinuity.35 Historicism arose out of the Enlightenment and it bears the
marks of the Enlightenment not the least of which is the quest to be validated
as a science [Wissenschaft], that is as a systematic process by which one
gains knowledge.36 This desire falls in line with the Enlightenment aspiration to reduce all disciplines to a science.37 Yet even in this, historicism was
30 Ibid., 75.
31 Ibid., 80–​83.
32 Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit,
trans. Stephen Donovan (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 37; cf. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the
Prophetic Future: A Study in Medieval Millennialism, 2nd ed. (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 59.
33 Matthias Riedl, Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2004), 259–​270; cf. Herman Bavinck, RD1, 467; GD1, 436.
34 Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-​
en-​Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan spirituals, Savonarola (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), xvi.
35 For positions that see a strong continuity between the Enlightenment and historicism
see: Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1951), 197–​233; Hans Peter Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 2–​3; Friedrich Jaeger and Jörn Rüsen, Geschichte des
Historismus (Munich: Beck, 1992), 10–​11; Herbert Schnädelbach, Geschichtsphilosophie nach Hegel
(Freiburg: Abler, 1974), 27–​28. For many Friedrich Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus is the
paradigmatic case of an antagonistic relationship between historicism and the Enlightenment.
36 Johannes
Hoffmeister, ‘Wissenschaft’ in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1955), 673–​674.
37 The desire to see everything as a science could be read anachronistically at this point. Science
here should not be read in a positivist sense. While there may have been a tendency in that direction,
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24
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
breaking with the Enlightenment. The conception of history as a science was
transforming to the idea of how Wissenschaft had been historically defined.
Under Aristotle, a science needed ‘demonstrable knowledge’ (meaning
‘an inference from necessary premises’) and the logical conclusion of
syllogisms.38 Even though there was a generally negative reaction against
and disregard for scholasticism in the Enlightenment, Aristotle’s idea of science continued and indeed grew stronger among Enlightenment rationalists.
While one can look at a number of Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes
to Hobbes to Leibniz, focus must be placed on Christian Wolff (1679–​1754).
The reason to focus on Wolff follows from the rise and spread of Wolffianism
in German Protestant thought, which functions as the milieu in which
the first seeds of historicism are planted. Therefore, Wolff will provide a
lens through which we can better see how there is both a definitive break
produced by historicism and also continuity with the Enlightenment.
Wolff represented a generation that lived on Cartesian assumptions.
Bavinck described Wolff ’s system as ‘The world is a connection of finite
things, a whole, a complex thing’.39 Born in 1679 into humble beginnings, by
the end of his life Wolff had become a Baron of the Empire, Freiherr von Wolff,
a member of the British Royal Society and Parisian Academy of Sciences,
and chancellor of the University of Halle.40 He was trained as a mathematician and taught mathematics in Halle. Bavinck was aware of this, and viewed
Wolff as a thoroughly committed rationalist who believed that reason would
be the way in which humanity would realise its potential.41 One of the goals
of his philosophical project, betraying his training as a mathematician, was
to develop a language that was universal and composed of symbols whose
end was to replace normal discourse.42 It was these rationalist philosophical
assumptions which caused his career in Halle to be marked by controversy.
what is clear from the historicist tradition is that positivism was not a necessary component of
Wissenschaft. The historicist tradition had a strong tradition of perspectivalism with thinkers such
as J.M. Chladenius arguing for historical investigation that can be both valid and done from a
perspective.
38 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), Book 1, ch. 3, 73a.
39 Bavinck, ‘Manuscript “Geschiedenis der nieuwe philosophie” ’. Delen I en ‘II. Van Kant tot dezen
tijd’ Box 346, Folder 199 (Archive of Herman Bavinck, Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam: Amsterdam,
Netherlands), §8. [Hereafter: no. 199, Archive of Herman Bavinck] Dutch: Wereld is een samenhang
van eindige dingen, één geheel, één saamgesteld ding.
40 Werner Schneider (ed.), Christian Wolff 1679–​1754. Interpretationen zu seiner Philosophie und
deren Wirkung (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983); Charles A. Corr, ‘Christian Wolff and Leibniz’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 36 (1975): 241–​262.
41 Bavinck, RD1, 162–​163; GD1, 137.
42 Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 32–​33.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
25
Part of the reason for the controversy was fellow faculty member, August
Hermann Franke. Wolff ’s extreme rationalism was the equal and opposite
pole to the German pietism represented by Franke.43 Wolff ’s rationalist commitment played itself out not only in metaphysics, but also in an optimism
concerning future progress. John Holloran states: ‘He imagined the optimism and moral certainty he derived from his method would have an equally
profound effect on students—​if only they could be led to understand it’.44 It
was his commitment to rationalism which led him to also have intellectualist tendencies in his metaphysics.45 Bavinck also observed this tendency
in Wolff and commented on it in an undated manuscript on the ‘new philosophy’, stating of Wolff, ‘The human has two capabilities of the soul, knowing
and willing. Wolff divides philosophy in two: theoretical philosophy, which
he calls metaphysics, and practical philosophy. Logic precedes both of
them’.46
This strong propensity to rationalism was not unique to Wolff and it affected the way history was conceptualized. The Enlightenment attempt to remove the religious significance of history had thrown historical studies into
crisis.47 The old reading of history from a universal or providential perspective was no longer in vogue and, thus, historical studies had descended into
little more than exemplar form.48 Many of the new studies in history were
political histories with nothing more than a model to follow or avoid.49 Thus,
for many historians their jobs had been reduced to moving as quickly as possible from the historical to the present day. Descartes’ assessment of the situation reflects the general attitude of the time: ‘If one is too curious about the
43 John Robert Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment at the University of Halle’ (PhD dissertation, The University of Virginia, 2000), 30–​89. Herman Bavinck makes this same observation.
See: RD1, 164; GD1, 139.
44 Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment at the University of Halle’, 204.
45 Intellectualistic here is placed in contrast to a voluntaristic commitment. Voluntarism holds
that God’s will determines what is reasonable. Therefore, discerning the will of God is paramount
for a philosophical system. Intellectualism, on the other hand, holds that God’s acts are reasonable.
Therefore, to determine God’s will, one need only consider what is reasonable.
46 Bavinck, no. 199, Archive of Herman Bavinck, §8. Dutch: ‘De mensch heeft 2 ziels vermogens,
kennen en willen. Wolff verdeelt door om de philos. in 2: theoretische philos. die hij metaphysica
noemt en practische philos. Aan beide gaat vooraf de logica’.
47 Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189–​254.
48 Reill notes that this is seen particularly in the way that the biblical book of Daniel is used as a
lens through which to read God’s providence. See: Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of
Historicism, 9.
49 Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung (Göttingen:
Musterschmidt, 1960), 127–​128; Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 9–​11.
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26
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
things that happened in past ages, one usually remains very ignorant about
what is currently taking place’.50 Thus, one can note that despite the importance of history in the works of thinkers such as Hobbes, Leibniz, and Wolff,
history was nonetheless a second-​tier science when considered alongside an
unquestionably scientific discipline like mathematics. History, by comparison, was a ‘lesser science’.
On a surface reading of this situation it would be easy to see historicism
as an antagonistic movement coming out of the Enlightenment. Yet, what
we find upon a closer examination is that the relationship is more complicated with the Enlightenment and thinkers like Wolff casting a long shadow
over historicism.51 According to Wolff, history was beset by a unique
problem: it dealt with particulars, whereas a true ‘higher science’ dealt with
the very universals that allowed for the articulation of laws that guaranteed
certitude. An historical method that dealt with particulars could offer probability, but was not well placed to offer certainty.52 This lack of certainty,
caused by a focus on particulars, led Wolff to call history a ‘lesser science’,
stating that history ‘consisted in the bare knowledge of facts’.53
50 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke
(London: Penguin Books, 1999), 8.
51 Klaus P. Fischer, ‘John Locke in the German Enlightenment: An Interpretation’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 36:4 (1975): 431–​446; Charles A. Corr, ‘Cartesian Themes in Wolff ’s German
Metaphysics’ in Christian Wolff: 1679–​1754, ed. Werner Schneiders (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983),
113–​120.
52 Christian Wolff, ‘Deutsche Logik’ §2, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Hans Werner Arndt
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), I/​1, p. 115.
53 Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, trans. Richard J. Blackwell
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1963), 7. One can see the parallel between Wolff and Lessing’s ‘garstiger
Graben’ in this formulation.
Before moving on, it is important to note that Wolff ’s philosophy proved to be of great interest
to the Dutch. Between 1738 and 1745, all of Wolff ’s German textbooks on mathematics and philosophy were translated into Dutch. (See: Michiel R. Wielema, ‘Leibniz and Wolff in the Netherlands.
The Eighteenth-​Century Dutch Tranlsations of Their Writings’, Studia Leibnitiana 25:1 (1993),
57.) This is significant when one considers that prior to the 1760 the stream of translations moved
from the Netherlands to the Germany and was primarily focused on theological texts. (See: Joris
van Eijnatten, ‘History, Reform, and Aufklärung: German Theological Writing and Dutch Literary
Publicity in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology/​Zeitschrift für Neuere
Theologiegeschichte 7:2 (2000), 177.) While this seems to be the general trend, there is no comprehensive research on German texts translated into Dutch before 1760. However, post 1760, the
stream of intellectual resources reversed and the Netherlands became a large market for the translation of Germany philosophical, religious, and literary thought. Nevertheless, due to the Dutch religious context at the time (one dominated by Reformed theology but with a proto-​understanding
of religious toleration) it was commonplace in reviews in the Netherlands for an editor to both note
the excellencies of a particular German text and that it would have been better left untranslated.
(See: Maandelyksche uittreksels of boekzaal der geleerde waereld 150 (Amsterdam: Dirk onder de
Linden en Zoon, 1790), VI–​XIII.) The most popular philosophical texts to have been translated in the
Netherlands during the second half of the eighteenth century were Wolff and Wolffian philosophers.
(See: Eijnatten, ‘History, Reform, and Aufklärung’, 203. Eijnatten mentions Mosheim, Michaelis,
Schubert, Lavater, Heß, Cramer and Sturm as just a few of the most popular German authors in the
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
27
Nevertheless, even while Enlightenment thinkers like Wolff critiqued
history and its place as a science, there were currents under the surface that
were slowly moving the sands and working to establish history’s place among
the other Wissenschaften. The first such current was J.M. Chladenius (1710–​
1759). Chladenius’ publication of Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft in 1752
marked the momentous shift that was occurring as early as the eighteenth
century. This work has been widely recognized as the first systematic exploration of history in German.54 One scholar called him ‘the founder of the new
historical studies’.55 Although he taught at both Leipzig and Erlangen, his
name fell into near obscurity after his death. He would not be recognized as a
formative thinker in the historicist tradition until 1889 when Ernst Bernheim
(1850–​1942) stated of him: ‘To my knowledge, J.M. Chlandenius is the first
to attempt to determine the relation of the historical method to the general
theory of knowledge and logic in his Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft and
after him no one for a long time.’56 More recently, Beiser has asserted that,
‘With Chladenius, a new historiographic tradition begins, one that stresses
the legitimate role of the historian’s values and historical standpoint in the
construction of history’.57 Chaldenius’ work marked a decisive turning point
for the establishment of history as a science, helping to shape the conceptions
surrounding it and historical methodology.58
Netherlands in the late eighteenth century.) While it would be an overstatement to say that Wolffian
rationalism controlled the Dutch intellectual and ecclesiastical landscape in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century, it was definitely some of the most popular literature translated and a force
in the background pushing philosophical and theological thought forward.
54 J.M. Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, worinnen der Grund zu einer neuen Einsicht
in allen Arten der Gelahrtheit gelegt wird (Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1752).
55 Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19.
Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1933), 21–​22. German: gründer der neueren Historik.
56 Ernest Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1914), 183. German: Meines Wissens ist der erste, der das Verhältnis der historischen Methode
zur allgemeinen Erkenntnistheories und zur Logik eingehender zu bestimmen versucht hat, J.M.
Chladenius in seinem Buch Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft und nach ihm lange keiner. Cf. Hans
Müller, Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–​59) (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1917); Meta Scheele, Wissen
und Glaube in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Studien zum historischen Pyrrhonismus in Frankreich und
Deutschland (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930); Wach, Das Verstehen (1926–​33).
57 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 29.
58 See: Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit. Ein Beitrag zur historiographischen
Erschließung der geschichtlichen Welt’ in Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft,
eds. Reinhart Koselleck, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Deutscher-​Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1977), 17–​46. In this article Koselleck argues that in addition to epistemology of history
which Chladenius helped to establish, he also acknowledged, for the first time, the historian’s role
in the construction of history. That is, that the historian brings a certain set of values and a distinct
perspective when evaluating and constructing a history. This acknowledgement functions as a sea
change for historical studies which classically had conceived of the task as one of objectivity.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
The critique of Enlightenment thinkers against history as a science was
that it did not allow for certitude and, therefore, could not provide any
universals. Chladenius’ approach to history and historical methodology took
these accusations seriously. Due to its focus on particulars, history was susceptible to the claim of relativism which ultimately led to a form of historical scepticism. While in his Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft Chladenius
countered the arguments against historical scepticism, it was in his Einleitung
zur richtigen Auslegung vernünftiger Reden und Schriften, a text on hermeneutics, in which his solution was formulated most clearly.59 In both of these
works, Chladenius argued for a form of ‘perspectivalism’, believing that history could be done from a particular perspective while still being a science.
This position held that something could be valid only from the ‘view point’
(Sehe-​Punckt) of the historian.60 This knowledge may be ‘relative’ with regard
to this perspective but it could still be valid provided it was not made into a
universal or absolute truth claim.61
The overarching concern that can be seen in Chladenius’ works is a question of how we can possess historical knowledge. It was an issue of epistemology. While difficulties surrounding a philosophy of history would
permeate the nineteenth century, the problems posed by epistemology were
present from the very early stages of the historicist project.62 This focus on
epistemology demonstrates the importance of Chladenius’ hermeneutically focused Einleitung. It illustrated that while the historicist movement
was often engaged in historical research, it nonetheless bore a markedly
This section functions as a longue durée reading of the circumstances that led to Bavinck’s own
understanding and situating of himself within history. For more on longue durée history see: Ignacio
Olabarri ‘ “New” New History: a Longue Durée Structure’, History and Theory, 34 (1995), 1–​29;
Barbara Weinstein, ‘History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial
Dilemma’, International Review of Social History, 50 (2005), 71–​93; David Armitage ‘What’s the Big
Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée’, History of European Ideas, 38:4, 493–​507; David
Armitage and Jo Guldi, ‘The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-​American Perspective’, Annales
(English ed.), 70:2, 219–​247.
59 J.M. Chladenius, Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernünfftiger Reden und Schriften
(Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1742).
60 Ibid., §310.
61 Ibid., §421. Herman Bavinck would make this same observation: ‘In history we are not disinterested observers but live the lives of other men, are attracted or repelled by them, feel sympathy or
antipathy toward them’. Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 94.
62 Later thinkers in the historicist tradition would react negatively to the ‘philosophy of history’
or metaphysical approach to historicism. One example would be Wilhelm Dilthey who thought
it to be a danger to the autonomy of the human sciences. See: Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Einleitung in die
Geisteswissenschaften’ in Gesamelte Schriften, vol. 1, eds. Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 92.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
29
philosophical character. The attempt to establish history as a science relied
on philosophical reasoning and, as stated earlier, was an attempt to apply
Enlightenment rationalism even to the realm of history. In Einleitung, we can
observe this phenomenon with Wolffian rationalism functioning as the philosophical undergirding of the entire text. It is here that Chladenius argued
for hermeneutics to be established as a sui generis discipline, possessing its
own rules for explaining and systematizing itself.63 In establishing these
rules, hermeneutics could both systematize and justify itself as a science.64
Beiser notes the irony in Chladenius’ project here: ‘though he aspires to make
hermeneutics independent from logic, Chladenius still clings to the model of
logic in his attempt to justify its scientific status’.65
Without making the mistake of collapsing the historicist movement into
a hermeneutic movement, a parallel can be noted between the hermeneutic
and epistemological concerns of Chladenius’ Einleitung, and his more famous
Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft.66 Both works seek to establish a new science: Einleitung, hermeneutics, and Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, history. In the introduction to Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, Chladenius
observed that the prevailing logic of his day was too enamoured with the
universal and abstract.67 In this, one can hear an implicit critique of the
Enlightenment. Herein lies the historicist’s criticism of the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment thinkers had never given up the universalizing of history
which they had received from medieval Christian theology. They may have
removed the religious dimensions, but they had not removed the necessity
for a universalizing tendency. While history only dealt with the particulars
it could be a science so long as it did not require those particulars to become
universal laws. This required the historicists, starting with Chladenius, to
work to establish rules by which to study history.
However, establishing these rules for historical investigation was not
Chladenius’ only concern. Two other priorities lie behind his project in
Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft. First, he saw a need to construct historical
63 Chladenius, Einleitung, a3. Interestingly this assertion could be read as an indirect rebuttal
of Wolff ’s claim that hermeneutics is the application of logic. See: Christian Wolff, ‘Vernünftige
Gedanke von den Kräften des menschlichen Verstandes’ ch. 11–​12 in Gesammelte Werke I/​1, ed.
Hans Werner Arndt (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965).
64 This emphasis on rules is a hallmark of Wolff ’s and indeed much of Enlightenment rationalism.
65 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 33.
66 Hans-​Georg Gadamer makes the mistake of collapsing the two in his Wahrheit und Methode.
See: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr
Paul Siebeck, 1972).
67 Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, ix–​xiii.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
narratives.68 Chladenius believed that the ability to teach history required
the ability to tell the story of history. Therefore, a major motivation of his
project was pedagogical. Part of historical studies is knowing how to construct the narrative. Second, Chladenius had a religious motivation. He was
a confessional Lutheran and understood his faith to have a guiding role in
his historical study. He viewed his work as a historian as a divine calling.69
Chladenius considered the rise of ‘naturalists’ (i.e., those who attack the revealed religion) as a threat to orthodox faith. Scripture is an account of action
in the past, and if one could have no certainty about what happened in the
past, there could be no epistemic certitude on which to base one’s faith.70 On
this point years later Bavinck would argue, ‘Christianity is itself history; it
makes history, is one of the principal factors of history, and is itself precisely
what lifts history high above nature and natural processes’.71
While the first consideration—​that of giving historical investigation the
in-​house rules necessary to make it a legitimate science—​gave Chladenius
a prominent place in the development of historicism, it is this second consideration that ties him to his time and the past. Chladenius wanted history
to be understood as an independent science (ein Stück der Vernunfftlehre),
yet he still saw it as the handmaiden to theology. While history could have
its own independent rules, Chladenius believed it did not have its own independent ends. He confessed that the telos of all his work was the explication
and defence of revealed truths.72 However, he did not think that the historical truths of Scripture transcend rational analysis. If they did, one would
not possess the ability to write history at all. Chladenius’ vision of historical
investigation straddled two lines. It was at once both a science and the handmaiden to theology, both independent and closely tied to theology. It had its
own rules but not its own ends.
Whether or not Chladenius was successful in developing a historical method that avoided scepticism is an open question. However, the
68 Ibid., xix.
69 Ibid., xi.
70 Ibid., xxiv. Bavinck made a similar comment, stating: ‘Nature remains the same, and its phenomena can be studied independently and anew by every natural scientist; but the practitioners of
the science of history, because they are not present at the events themselves, depend for their knowledge on testimonies. Such historians would act very foolishly if they reasoned thus: all the events that
have occurred are constituents of reality and still, to the degree that they were important, affect the
present. If necessary, I can dispense with the testimonies, for from the data in the present I can reason
back to this or that event in the past’. Bavinck, RD3, 38; GD3, 12.
71 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 115.
72 Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, xxvii.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
31
importance of his quest and his work in seeking to develop a historical
method that was free of scepticism allowed history to be established as a science alongside the other sciences. Chladenius had attempted to provide rules
that could allow for systematic historical investigation even if in the end no
definitive conclusions could be reached in that investigation. In developing
these rules he had provided the process for gaining knowledge. History could
be Wissenschaft. At the same time, these conversations surrounding history
as Wissenschaft were occurring, questions around theology as Wissenschaft
were being asked. Theology too was locked in a struggle over its scientific
status. In the Netherlands there was serious debate surrounding the status
of theology as wetenschappelijk, and Bavinck was actively engaged in that
conversation.73 While history was being developed as a science in its own
right, theology too was pondering the same question and its place among the
sciences.
Bavinck’s Intellectual Context:
Historical Consciousness and Scientific Theology
While historical studies attempted to establish itself as a science, theologians
were doing the same in theology. This development inevitably produced a
cross-​pollination in ideas. Nevertheless, as we have seen above, even Bavinck
thought of this time as primarily marked by the study of history, calling the
nineteenth century ‘the age of historic sense’.74 History’s quest to be a science,
culminating ultimately in its recognition as a science, proved to be influential
on theological studies in the nineteenth century. While it would be an overstatement to say that the rise of historicism and the ‘historical turn’ in nineteenth century German theology is the key for understanding all nineteenth
century German theology, it is one of the important factors for grasping the
theological development in that era.75 Bringing together these two streams
(theology and history) will give a clearer vision of Bavinck’s intellectual
context which will allow for the subsequent section to turn to the different
ways in which Bavinck was influenced by his intellectual context. All three
73 For more on the development of theology as a science in Bavinck’s thought see: Ximian Xu,
Theology as the Science of God: Herman Bavinck’s Wetenschappelijke Theology for the Modern World
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022).
74 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 100.
75 Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-​Century Germany: From F.C. Baur to
Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4–​5.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
sections of this chapter will come together to make my argument that the rise
of historicism and basic philosophical commitments connected to this intellectual revolution shaped key aspects of Bavinck’s theological methodology.
As the nineteenth century began, a driving concern in theological inquiry
was how theology, as an emerging science, interacted with history, which had
also laid claim to the title of science. Similar to many disciplines, a divide had
developed between the object of study and the past.76 The place of history
in theological inquiry continued to be questioned throughout the century
while at the same time there was a renewed interest in the retrieval of early
modern texts in Protestant circles.77 This rise in historical consciousness
caused nineteenth-​century theological thought in Germany to have a unique
character.78 As nineteenth-​century theologians encountered these historical
texts they found that they were in a world very similar to their own and, yet,
dissimilar in many ways. For many in nineteenth-​century German Protestant
theological faculties, the goal was neither an unthinking acceptance of theological positions of their forebears nor the outright rejection of orthodoxy.
A great number viewed themselves as faithful sons of the Reformation.
This phenomenon was not unique to Germany; in the Netherlands many
both in the neo-​Calvinist and the Ethical schools considered themselves,
in a nuanced sense, faithfully carrying on the older tradition.79 This was
placed in contradistinction to the Modern school at Leiden which saw
their work as a decided break from the historic Reformed tradition.80 This
meant that for thinkers like Schleiermacher, who proposed that there was
76 Joseph Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the
Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolution, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1–​9; Pierre Manent, The City of
Man, trans. Marc A. Lepain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 11–​49; and Leo Stauss,
Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9–​34.
77 Heinrich Friedrich Ferdinand Schmid, Die Dogmatik der evangelisch-​
lutherischen
Kirche: dargestellt und aus den Quellen belegt (Frankfurt: Heyder & Zimmer, 1863); Heinrich
Heppe, Die Dogmatik der evangelisch-​reformirten Kirche: dargestellt und aus den Quellen belegt
(Elberfeld: R.L. Friedrichs, 1861); Heinrich Schmid, Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church, eds. and trans. Charles Hays and Henry Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1899); Heinrich
Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: Set out and Illustrated from the Sources, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G.T.
Thomson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950).
78 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 134ff.
79 The theologian considered to be the ‘fathers’ of the ‘Dutch Ethical school’ were Daniel Chantepie
de la Saussaye (1818–​1874) and J.H. Gunning Jr. (1829–​1905). See: J.H. Gunning and Daniel
Chantepie de la Saussaye, Het Ethische Beginsel der Theologie (Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1877).
80 See the discussion between Bavinck and Gunning Jr. in De Vrije Kerk. J.H. Gunning Jr., ‘Aan Prof.
Dr. H. Bavinck’, De Vrije Kerk 10 (1884), 212–​220; Herman Bavinck, ‘Antwoord aan Prof. Dr. J.H.
Gunning Jr.’, De Vrije Kerk 10:5 (1884), 221; J.H. Gunning Jr., ‘Aan Prof. Dr. H. Bavinck’, De Vrije Kerk
10 (1884), 277–​286; Herman Bavinck, ‘Antwoord aan Prof. Dr. J.H. Gunning Jr.’, De Vrije Kerk 10:6
(1884), 287–​292; J.H. Gunning Jr., ‘Aan Prof. Dr. H. Bavinck’, De Vrije Kerk 10 (1884), 314–​319.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
33
an ‘eternal covenant between the living Christian faith, and completely free
independent, scientific inquiry’,81 and W.M.L. de Wette (1780–​1849), who
argued that historical criticism has always been a part of genuine faith for
Protestantism,82 there was a critical acceptance of dogma handed-​down
while at the same time a stringent adherence to a conception of sola Scriptura
that required independent inquiry into the Bible.83 Yet the burning question
many asked themselves was: what role do these newly retrieved texts play in
constructive theological inquiry?
While we could point to various thinkers, both philosophers and
theologians, who asked this question, perhaps none is more significant for
setting the trajectory of nineteenth-​century theology than the so-​called
Father of Modern Theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher.84 For the purpose of narrowing the focus of this section, we will centre our study on
Schleiermacher’s response to the rise of historicism and the turn to history.
Looking to the broader German theological context will aid in understanding
Bavinck’s theological context. Narrowing the focus to Schleiermacher is appropriate for two reasons. First, Bavinck considered Schleiermacher one of
the most important theologians to have lived, stating:
With these three ideas—​the immediate consciousness of the self as the
source of religion, the community as the necessary form of its existence,
and the person of Christ as the center of Christianity—​Schleiermacher has
exerted incalculable influence. All subsequent theology is dependent on
him. Though no one took over his dogmatics, he has made his influence felt
on all theological orientations—​liberal, mediating, and confessional—​and
in all churches—​Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed.85
81 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, trans. James Duke and
Francis Fiorenza (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), 64.
82 W.M.L. de Wette, Über Religion und Theologie (Berlin, 1815), 108.
83 Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt,
and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-​Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 17–​18.
84 Dawn DeVries, ‘Schleiermacher’ in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 311. For more on Schleiermacher see: Karl Barth, Protestant Thought in
the Nineteenth Century, trans. Brian Cozan and John Bowden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002),
411–​459; Brian Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher
and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); H.R. Mackintosh, Types
of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth (London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1952); The Cambridge
Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
85 Bavinck, RD1, 166; GD1, 140. It is clear from Bavinck’s own thought and citations that he had
read Troeltsch which makes the assertion that no one took over Schleiermacher’s dogmatic system
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34
Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
Second, as will be seen in the next section, Bavinck was heavily indebted to
German Romanticism (which was the philosophical milieu that produced
Schleiermacher) for his own theological and philosophical resources.86
Beiser notes that whereas the eighteenth century was called the ‘age of
reason’, the nineteenth century could be called the ‘age of history’.87 By the
end of the nineteenth century ‘history had become a science in its own
right’.88 This change had implications for theological reflection. In the field of
theology, it would be simplistic when considering this to reduce the reading
of this historical turn as the triumph of biblical criticism and the rejection of
classical orthodoxy. Johannes Zachhuber argues that:
[T]‌he historical turn was more than simply the discovery of history as a
strange and fascinating space inviting exploration. It was equally conditional on the postulation (or invention) of ‘history’ itself—​a temporal continuum extending in principle from the dawn of humanity to the present.89
The application of this historical thinking within theology could be
considered obvious. Not only was history as a science on the rise, but
Christianity is a religion whose theological self-​understanding is based on
its historical situatedness. The nineteenth-​century turn to history would
necessarily have a major impact on the theological projects of that century.
Theologians could no longer think of themselves as near contemporaries with
the theologians of the past. Their job was to translate the thoughts of the past
into the categories and concepts for the modern age. Where the eighteenth
century had produced a chasm between the past and the present, nineteenth
century theologians attempted to look back to the past and reappropriate it
for the contemporary context.
Zachhuber sets out four ways in which historicization impacted theological
reflection. First, the historical turn placed the key texts on which Christianity
a curiosity. Ernst Troeltsch considered the work he was doing as fully adopting and developing
Schleiermacher’s system.
86 For more on the influence of German Romanticism on Bavinck see: Brock, Orthodox Yet
Modern, 131–​161; Sutanto, God and Knowing, 133–​137; Pass, The Heart of Dogmatics, 13–​26.
87 Frederick Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–​1900 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2014), 133.
88 Ibid., 134.
89 Johannes Zachhuber, ‘The Historical Turn’ in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-​
Century
Christian Thought, eds. Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 54.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
35
was founded—​at least historically speaking—​on shaky ground. Scholars
encountered increasing difficulties in the reconstruction of Christian history especially surrounding textual composition. Second, there could be
no certainty with regard to historical investigation. The very best one could
hope for were probable conclusions. Third, the location of authority shifted.
Theologians were only authoritative in so far as they were historians and/​
or philologists. This phenomenon was seen not only in Germany, but in the
Netherlands where it was most fully embodied by the Leiden school. Fourth,
the place of history and the historian was inverted. Whereas in the past history functioned as the teacher, the historical turn made history itself the witness that was required to answer the question posed of it by the historian.90
Yet, historicisation did not halt rich theological reflection. As the most influential German theologian of his century, Schleiermacher’s work reflected
both deep theological thinking and rich engagement with the historical turn.
His most famous works, Über die Religion (On Religion) and the Glaubenslehre
(Christian Faith) display this character. However, these texts were meant to
be read alongside his Kurze Darstellung (Brief Outline).91 Brief Outline arose
from Schleiermacher’s desire to set the theological course of the modern
German university. Not only did it do this, but importantly for the present
argument, Brief Outline also functioned to solidify theology as Wissenschaft
and embraced a thoroughgoing modernism.92 In the Speeches, he argued that
religion is the immediate intuition of the universe.93 This understanding of
religion took a decidedly historical flavour when Schleiermacher asserted
that in history, religion ‘at last finds everything in itself that otherwise was
gathered from most distant regions’.94 Religion can do this because in history the person gains the sense of the universal unity of humanity. In making
that assertion, Schleiermacher was able to make a bold claim concerning the
place of history in religious thought: ‘History, in the most proper sense, is the
highest object of religion’.95 For Schleiermacher, then, rather than being the
end of religion, history played a significant role in his theological project.
90 Ibid., 55–​57.
91 Terrence Tice, ‘Preface’ in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study,
3rd ed., trans. Terrence Tice (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), ix.
92 Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, xix; cf. Purvis, Theology and University, 139–​141.
93 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, ed. and trans. Richard
Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–​38.
94 Ibid., 41.
95 Ibid., 42.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
Schleiermacher used this conception of the relationship between history
and religion to formulate his defence of ‘positive religions’ against ‘natural
religion’. The term ‘natural religion’ was prevalent in the eighteenth century.
This ‘natural religion’ was a religion that could be comprehended regardless
of ‘time, place, or historical tradition’.96 ‘Positive religions’, on the other hand,
are those which find their bearings in historical traditions. Schleiermacher
defended ‘positive religion’ which he regarded as the religions of history, and
he treated the ‘natural religion’ of the eighteenth century with antipathy.97 He
contends:
So-​called natural religion is usually so refined and has such philosophical
and moral manners that it allows little of the unique character of religion to
shine through; it knows how to live so politely, to restrain and accommodate itself so well, that it is tolerated.98
The turn to history, for Schleiermacher, was not a negative for religion. In this
turn, Schleiermacher, envisioned the ability to reassert the primacy of positive religions yet once more.
[E]‌very positive religion has exceedingly strong features and a very marked
physiognomy, so that it unfailingly reminds one of what it really is with
every movement it makes and with every glance one casts upon it.99
History provides the material used in positive religion for contemplation and
discernment. For Schleiermacher, the Reformation claimed that there is an
eternal covenantal relationship between the Christian faith and independent
scientific research.100 Therefore, Schleiermacher could say that history and
religion moved in the same trajectory.101 They are both heading toward the
explanation of humanity and its relationship to the world.
It is because Schleiermacher connected religion and history so closely that
he was able then to turn toward ‘experiential religion’ which proved to be
96 Garrett Green, ‘Modernity’ in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth Jones
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 167.
97 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 98.
98 Ibid., 98.
99 Ibid., 98.
100 Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 18.
101 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, eds. Catherine Kelsey and Terrence Tice, trans.
Terrence Tice, Catherine Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2016), §7.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
37
an important development for him. This ‘experiential religion’ is summed
up in Schleiermacher’s famous definition of religion as an immediate (pre-​
reflective) intuition. It is ‘that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent’.102 Bavinck noted that this was a unique development in the history
of Christianity:
A change in this came through Schleiermacher. In accordance with
his thought that religion is seated not in the mind and the will but in
the emotions and in a feeling of complete dependence, he taught that
Christianity was not knowledge or action but that its distinguishing mark
was to be found in a singular relationship with Christ as Redeemer.103
While this intuition is available to all of humanity, in contrast to ‘natural religion’, it is located in the affections and not the intellect or will.104 It also
cannot be equated with a particular ‘positive religion’. ‘Experiential religion’
is the root of all historical religions.
Here Schleiermacher betrayed some of his historicist influence. ‘Natural
religion’ is abstract and deals with universals. Because revelation is historical,
natural religion does not have revelation. Revelation is something only accessible through historical documents, be it Scripture or church tradition.105
Schleiermacher thus connected revelation and ‘positive religion’, in that
‘positive religion’ stands ‘for the total domain of religious communities that
have a continuing existence in history’.106 This positive religion, however, is
not a particular religion but is only found in other religions. To find positive
102 Ibid., §4.
103 Herman Bavinck, ‘The Essence of Christianity’ in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, ed.
John Bolt, trans. Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 33–​34;
‘Het Wezen des Christendoms’ in Almanak van het studentencorps a/​d Vrije Universiteit, eds. J.F. van
Beeck Calkoen, J.H. Broeks Roelofs, H.C. Rutgers, et al. (Amsterdam: Herdes, 1906), 251–​252.
104 It is helpful here to understand the neo-​
Platonic renaissance that was taking place in late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-​century Germany. Plato had been almost completely forgotten
in eighteenth-​century German thought. Aristotelian scholasticism was the substance of intellectual scene at the time. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Plato was
being revitalized through the growing influence of Frühromantik and philosophers such as Schlegel,
Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Novalis. Schleiermacher was primarily responsible for this revival.
Schleiermacher endeavoured on a program of translating Plato. His translations are still used
in Germany to this day. The growth of Platonism explains some of the language surrounding intuition and emotions in Frühromatik literature. See: Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative
(London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 56–​72.
105 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §10, postscript.
106 Ibid., §10, postscript, 78.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
religion one needs to turn to the historical religions.107 Through exploring
these historical religions one is able to see
the basic intuition of a religion can be nothing other than some intuition
of the infinite in the finite, some universal element of religion that may
also occur in all other religions—​and, should they be complete, must be
present—​but not placed in the center of them.108
With this, Schleiermacher coupled his formative concept of ‘experiential religion’ to ‘positive religion’ and rooted this combination in history; rejecting
the universal of ‘natural religion’ while embracing the particular of ‘positive
religion’.109
Schleiermacher’s Speeches were his first attempt to place a flag in the
ground asserting a close connection between dogmatics and history. In the
Speeches Schleiermacher contended that history is not a threat to religion
but is rather an integral part of religion. However, it is with his Brief Outline
that Schleiermacher definitively placed history in the centre of the dogmatic
enterprise.110 That work lays out the whole of Schleiermacher’s ‘theological effort in a cohesive manner’.111 That particular work is strongly marked
by historical criticism and an emphasis on doctrinal development, and
demonstrates his desire to engage critically with history while also insisting
that theology is a growing and developing discipline. When teaching the
principles found in the text, one of Schleiermacher’s students and his eventual successor at the University of Berlin, August Twesten (1789–​1876),
stated:
Schleiermacher places dogmatics under the historical sciences and
comprehends it under. . . the knowledge of the present doctrinal condition
of Christianity. At first this seems strange, but it is correct, because suppose
someone wanted to stick solely with the Bible and construct a system from
107 Ibid., 111.
108 Ibid., 112.
109 Interestingly, while Schleiermacher is known for ‘experiential religion’, he rarely used the word
‘experience’ in his work.
110 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studium zum Behuf Einleitender
Vorlesungen, ed. Heinrich Scholz (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1811).
111 Tice, ‘Preface’, ix.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
39
it; but wouldn’t this system also be a product of his current education, and
thus of the time in which he lived?112
History played a central role in Schleiermacher’s notion of Christian dogmatics. To navigate this post-​revolutionary, post-​enlightenment academic
environment, Brief Outline functioned as map forward in theological studies.
Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline conceives of theology as organized in
three parts: philosophical, historical, and practical theology. In philosophical theology the theologian takes on a philosophy of religions approach,
which is both empirical and historical, in order to understand how a specific expression of Christianity may be connected to an ‘ideal’ Christianity.113
Historical theology includes exegesis, church history, and dogmatics. It
is the recognition that the church is situated in a particular time and yet is
connected to a community that precedes it, therefore, ‘its present condition can be adequately grasped only when it is viewed as a product of the
past’.114 Practical theology, then, brings together the disparate branches of
theology and builds on them ‘both in a comprehensive as well as in a concentrated way’.115 It ensures that theology is connected to the religious needs
of the community.116 Practical theology is the ‘prescription for various practical procedures’ in the life of the church.117 With these three overlapping and
interpenetrating divisions, Schleiermacher believed he had represented the
whole of Christian theology.
Many interesting things could be said about all three divisions of theology, however, what is pertinent here is the place and conception of historical theology. Schleiermacher’s aim is to give theology a legitimate place in
the academy as a scientific discipline. In locating dogmatics under historical
theology, he situated it within the realm of scientific historical research. In
the truly empiricist sense of the word, theology can be conceived of as a scientific discipline with a systematic process for investigating its object. Thus,
for Schleiermacher dogmatics in a proper sense was not the study of eternal
truths, but the study of what the church believes at a particular time in a
particular place and how this connects to the ‘idea’ of Christianity.118 This
112 August Twesten, D. August Twesten nach Tagebüchern und Briefen, ed. C. F. Georg Heinrici
(Berlin: Hertz, 1889), 118. Cited in Purvis, Theology and University, 157–​158.
113 Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, §24.
114 Ibid., §26.
115 Ibid., §24.
116 Ibid., §31.
117 Ibid., §260.
118 Ibid., §27.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
definition makes dogmatics a historical study. Through the harnessing of history, Schleiermacher was able to carve out a legitimate place for theology as
a science alongside historical studies. This move would wed theology to history, setting the trajectory of theology into the future and open wide the discipline of historical theology.
In the succeeding generations, Brief Outline was the road map for the
theological faculty in Berlin. His text was formative for the study of theology in Berlin which took on a distinctly historicist character.119 Albrecht
Ritschl would call Schleiermacher the theological ‘lawgiver’ (Gesetzgeber),
with Brief Outline as his legal code.120 One of Schleiermacher’s students,
Alexander Schweizer (1808–​1888), provides a helpful example of the influence of Schleiermacher’s emphasis on history in dogmatics. While
Schweizer’s conception of history was not unique, his position in historical literature as ‘Schleiermacher’s most faithful pupil’ makes him an interesting case study.121 In considering Schweizer’s works Die Glaubenslehre
der evangelische reformirten Kirche and Die protestantischen Centraldogmen
in ihrer Entwicklung innerhalb der reformierten Kirche, the influence of
Schleiermacher’s theory of history on subsequent German theology is immediately apparent.122 In both of his massive tomes, Schweizer provided a
thorough survey of Reformed dogmatics. He argued for a correspondence
between the concept of divine predestination and Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling
of absolute dependence’. On this basis he then argued that divine predestination is the central dogma (Centraldogma) of Protestantism.123 Schweizer’s
aim was to connect Schleiermacher to the larger Reformed tradition and
demonstrate that Schleiermacher falls into a long line of historical figures.124
To accomplish this goal, Schweizer looked back to the Reformers and early
modern texts, locating Schleiermacher among that group.
119 Purvis, Theology and the University, 159–​160.
120 Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, 3rd ed.
(Bonn: Marcus, 1888–​1889), i. 486.
121 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 571.
122 Alexander Schweizer, Die Glaubenslehere der evangelische reformirten Kirche (Zurich: Orell,
Füessli und Comp., 1844); Alexander Schweizer, Die protestantischen Centraldogmen in ihrer
Entwicklung innerhalb der reformierten Kirche (Zurich: Orell, Füessli und Comp., 1854).
123 Willem J. van Asselt and Pieter L. Rouwendal, ‘The State of Scholarship: From Discontinuity
to Continuity’ in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. Willem J. van Asselt (Grand
Rapids: Reformation Heritage Press, 2011), 10.
124 Schweizer, Die Glaubenslehere der evangelische reformirten Kirche, xxi–​xxiii.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
41
Schleiermacher, in the spirit of the Reformed school, first took up and
promoted the Reformed dogmatics in a way that allowed it to belong to the
union church without blurring the particularities of it.
Schleiermacher gave the great suggestion to modern dogmatics which
evidently comes from a Reformed tendency, this Schleiermacher understood as the most consistently Protestant doctrine and to which further development best fits. In his dogmatics, the Reformed consciousness revives
and forms its doctrine according to a theologically advanced age.125
For Schweizer, then, the nineteenth century was a century of renewal and
revival. Schweizer developed this historical background of his work for the
purpose of showing how Schleiermacher, and by implication himself, was
not outside the Reformed tradition, but rather was building on it. After
Calvin, Schleiermacher was the next great thinker in the line of Reformed
theologians. Schleiermacher’s message was both in continuity with Zwingli,
Calvin, and the Reformed orthodox schoolmen and also an expansion of it,
an ‘advance’. For Schweizer, Schleiermacher represented the virtue of both
looking to the past while moving forward. Bavinck made a similar point
while critiquing the direction of scientific theology. ‘It strikes me that also
in the present time in that area [scientific theology] a particular standstill is
perceived, and that it cannot move forward, while the path is being closed off,
neither can it move backward, where this is much more difficult’.126
Schweizer’s goal was not a repristination of the theology of the past or
even of Schleiermacher. Brian Gerrish notes, ‘Historical inquiry was intended. . . to discern the line of true progress, so that it could be protracted
further’.127 Schweizer’s historical work was not a simple reading of history.
It was looking back to understand the present better so that the work could
be propagated into the future. It was discerning ‘the line of true progress’
125 Ibid., 91–​92. German: Erst Schleiermacher, im Geist der reformirten Schule arbeitend, hat die
reformirte Dogmatik wieder aufgenommen und gefördert, wie sie ohne ihre Eigenthümlichkeit zu
verwischen, einer uniirten Kirche aungehören kann.
Die grossartige Anregung, welche Schleiermacher der neuern Dogmatik gegeben, ist offenbar
aus der reformirten Richtung her, die Schleiermacher wieder zu würdigen verstand als den
consquentest-​protestantischen Lehrbegriff, an den sich also die weitere Entwicklung am besten
anschliesse. In seiner Dogmatik lebt das reformirte Bewusstsein wieder auf und gestaltet sich den
Lehrbegriff gemäss einer theologisch weiter gebildeten Zeit.
126 Herman Bavinck to Snouck Hurgonje, Kampen, 11 February 1884, in Een Leidse vriendschap: De
Briefwisseling tussen Herman Bavinck en Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 1875–​1921, eds. J. de Bruijn
and G. Harinck (Baarn: TenHave, 1999), 117.
127 Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World, 127.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
which he considered to be Schleiermacher. This reading is not dissimilar to
Bavinck’s own reading of Schleiermacher.
Great emphasis has been placed on this Christian consciousness, more now
than formerly, ever since Schleiermacher, who declared this to be the only
source. To a certain extent, this was correct. Thereby the progressive character of the church, of its confession, and thus of dogmatics as well, was
being maintained, and the error was prevented of people thinking that at a
particular moment in the past, with this or that Synod, the Holy Spirit had
caused the full light to shine in the church upon all the truths of salvation.128
It is this ability to put everything into its place that gives Schweizer the label
of ‘mediating theologian’. His system was neither interested in promoting the
conservative theology that repristinates the past nor was his project that of
dissolving the past. This attitude gave Schweizer the label of ‘mediating theologian’ (Vermittlungstheologe).
[H]‌e is concerned to demonstrate the agreement between the orthodox
past, taken as a preliminary historical stage, and the freethinking present,
as the next stage in the total theological process. Repristination along the
lines of Hase and Frank, and dissolution, as we find in Strauss, are both
equally impossible . . . .129
As Schleiermacher’s most faithful student, Schweizer functions as a paradigmatic, but not a unique example of the influence of the historical turn in
nineteenth century German theology. The same point can be made looking
at Heppe, Tholuck, Bauer, or Troeltsch. After Hegel and Schleiermacher,
the use of history in theology changed significantly. There was a proliferation of historical theological texts, a renewal of early modern theology, and a
striving either to repristinate the past, dissolve the old orthodoxies, or drive a
middle road as a ‘mediating theologian’.
Schleiermacher set the course for nineteenth century German theology.
His theological project displays the marked influence of historicism. As
128 Herman Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System’, trans. Nelson Kloosterman,
The Bavinck Review 5 (2014), 99–​100; ‘Het voor en tegen van een dogmatisch systeem’ in Kennis en
leven: opstellen en artikelen uit vroeger Jaren, verzameld door Ds C.B. Bavinck (Kampen: J.H. Kok,
1922), 65–​66.
129 Barth, Protestant Theology, 570.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
43
theology attempted to establish itself as a science, Schleiermacher proposed
the innovative course of subsuming dogmatics under historical theology.
Thus, dogmatics was no longer about exploring timeless universals but historical particulars, what the church believed in a specific time and place.
With this ambitious proposal, Schleiermacher both established theology as
a science and demonstrated the powerful role history had come to play in
theological reasoning. The question to which this chapter now turns is how
these developments affected the theological scene in the Netherlands, and
more specifically, Herman Bavinck.
Thus, the chapter shifts its focus to the Netherlands. The way in which
history was asserting itself as a science in its own right for the first time in
Germany has already been shown. This influence and the beginning of dominance of history changed the shape and colour of theological inquiry in
Germany and exerted influence outside the borders of Germany. Historical
texts became important for the process of doing theology in Germany. I will
tie the development in Germany to Bavinck’s context and will argue that the
rise of historicism and basic philosophical commitments connected to this
intellectual revolution also shaped key aspects of Bavinck’s theological methodology; namely, his use of historical theology and his attitude toward theological development.
Bavinck’s Intellectual Context: The Netherlands,
Bavinck, and History
When Schleiermacher’s works were made available in the Netherlands in the
1830s, one of the leading Dutch theological journals of the day, Godgeleerde
Bijdragen, wrote, ‘We judge it below the office of a protestant teacher, to
translate and publish such writings without pointing out some clarifying
notes’.130 The intellectual trends in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century
tended to be dominated by their larger neighbours.131 The nineteenth century saw the import of German philosophical and theological ideas into the
Netherlands.
130 Cited in K.H. Roessingh, ‘De modern theologie in Nederland: Hare voorbereiding en eerste
periode’. (dissertation, Groningen, 1914), 24. Original Dutch: Wij schatten het beneden het ambt van
een protestantsch leeraar, om zulke geschriften te vertalen en zonder tergtwijzende aanteekeningen
in het licht te geven.
131 Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 6.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
While some in the Netherlands were apprehensive regarding the theology of Schleiermacher, others warmly welcomed it. The earliest adopters
of Schleiermacher and his theological project were found in Groningen.
Early in the nineteenth century, revival movements had occurred in the
Netherlands centred in Groningen. This grew into a distinct school of theological reflection.
The Groningen theologians spoke about repentance and the work of the
Spirit and urged personal faith. . . . Not by speaking to the intellect but
to the heart, they attracted the laity with their focus on warm, heartfelt sermons and their pedagogical sensibility. The educated classes were
attracted by their intellectual foundation of the emotional life as the core of
Christianity.132
It was this emphasis on the ‘emotional life’ that made Schleiermacher’s theology so attractive to the Groningen theologians.
However, this emphasis on the emotional life was not the only influence
that Schleiermacher exerted on the Groningen School. The ‘historical turn’
also pushed Dutch theology in a new direction. The Groningen School
attempted to develop a purely Dutch theology. They believed they had
progressed beyond the Calvinism of the past and needed to purge their theology of non-​Dutch elements. In their constructive project, therefore, they
looked to Geert Groote (1340–​1384), Wessel Gansfort (1419–​1489), and
Erasmus (1466–​1536), all Dutch theologians.133 Their goal was not to give
a pristine version of some past Dutch theology, but to build a truly Dutch
theology for their day. The irony of this was that it was the influence of
Schleiermacher, a German, that pushed them in this direction.
Nevertheless, because of the weight placed on a strictly Dutch theology,
the Groningen school considered the Dutch theologian, Phillip Willem van
Heusde (1778–​1839), their spiritual father while making widespread use of
Schleiermacher. Van Heusde introduced German Romantic idealism into
Dutch theology.134 Four students taught by van Heusde (Louis Gerlach
Pareau (1800–​
1866), Johan Frederik van Oordt (1794–​
1852), Willem
Muurling (1805–​1882), and Petrus Hofstede de Groot (1802–​1886)) would
become professors in the Netherlands. While they would differ in some areas
132 Harinck and Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, 464.
133 Harinck and Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, 464.
134 Roessingh, ‘De modern theologie in Nederland’, 35–​36.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
45
from their teacher, they brought Schleiermacher and German idealism into
Dutch theological consciousness.135
These theologians highly valued German Romantic idealism and, specifically Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the role of emotion or intuition. They
also took their cues from the historicist movement.136 Thus, Schleiermacher’s
stress on the place of history and historical theology became a major concern for them. As has already been shown, for Schleiermacher, dogmatics is
subsumed under historical theology because all dogmatics can be is an account of what the church believed at a particular time and in a particular
place. Given its new role, it is little surprise that the discipline of historical theology quickly began to yield numerous new republications of older
texts.137 German historical theology soon saw a number of these reissued
texts; a trend soon followed in the Netherlands. While the Groningen school
was attempting to construct a ‘true Dutch’ theology through the jettisoning
of all non-​Dutch theology, other projects of retrieval of Reformed Calvinistic
theology were also occurring elsewhere in the Netherlands.138
Across the nineteenth century in the Netherlands, alongside the retrieval
program in Groningen, two other important retrieval projects centred on
J.H. Scholten and Christiaan Sepp (1820–​1890).139 Scholten was a student
in Utrecht where his uncle, van Heusde, was a professor. His doctoral work
demonstrated a desire to be a ‘moderately orthodox’, neither embracing the
radical revisionist project that would mark his career in Leiden or Groningen
nor the pietistic theology of the Seceders. Nevertheless, an opposition to the
supernatural and classical formulations of theology was already evident in his
thesis.140 In Scholten’s early years, German idealism thoroughly influenced
his thought. Taking up a teaching post at the University of Leiden, Scholten’s
work found its way into the pulpit in the Netherlands through his students.
Reflecting on the impact of Scholten’s theological reconstruction for its
time, Dutch theologian Hendrickus Berkhof wrote: ‘At last an up-​to-​date
135 Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 7.
136 J.J. van Oosterzee, Christelijke Dogmatiek: Een Handboek voor Academisch Onderwijs en Eigen
Oefening, 3 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1870–​1872); Daniël Chatepie de la Saussaye, Verzameld
werk, 3 vols. (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1997–​2003).
137 See: Lowell H. Zuck, ‘Heinrich Heppe: A Melanthonian Liberal in the Nineteenth-​Century
German Reformed Church’, Church History 51:4 (1982), 419–​433.
138 Harinck and Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, 477–​479.
139 Both Sepp and Scholten are also important people in the conversation regarding Bavinck,
as they both influence his thought in various ways. Bavinck picks up on much of Sepp’s reading of
church history, and Scholten was a professor in Leiden during Bavinck’s years as a student.
140 S. van der Linde, ‘Joannes Henricus Scholten’ in Biografisch Lexicon voor de Geschiedenis van
het Nederlandse Protestantisme, vol. 1, ed. D. Nauta (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1978), 320.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
interpretation of the gospel, one for which many younger theologians and
preachers had been eagerly waiting, had arrived’.141 However, as his system
developed, Scholten shifted his methodology from idealism to empiricism.
While in his book De Leer der Hervormde Kerk (1852) he took his starting
point from the concept of God and worked to anthropology, in his book De
vrije wil (1859), Scholten demonstrated this shift toward empiricism. He
worked from anthropology to the doctrine of God.142 Even though Scholten
argued for a continuity with the Reformed tradition, his main concern was to
show how theology can be done in line with a principle of absolute material
determinism. Scholten believed he was moving the tradition forward even if
the ultimate goal was the dissolution and secularization of theology. Scholten
understood De vrije wil to be in the vein of a historical theology.143 Scholten
may not have seen a need for history as formative for his theology; he did,
however, see a need to be conversant with history for situating himself and
his project historically.
At the same time Scholten was developing this highly philosophical theology, Christiaan Sepp was working in the area of historical theology. Sepp
was an Anabaptist who ministered in Zaanstreek and Leiden. Scholten
was formative for his theological thought while he worked in Leiden. Even
though Sepp never fully embraced Modern theology, the idealist conception
of God did dominate his theological thinking.144 His main contribution to
the development of Dutch theology was his two-​volume church history of
the Netherlands.145 Bavinck considered Sepp’s treatment of Dutch church
history to be substantial, even stating in the introduction to his own reissued
edition of the early modern Leiden Synopsis, ‘The renowned Sepp has very
diligently investigated its importance and the degree of its authority in various Academies’.146 It is clear that Bavinck not only read, but also appreciated
the work that Sepp had done in writing this church history.
141 Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, 100.
142 van der Linde, ‘Joannes Henricus Scholten’, 321.
143 Ibid., 321.
144 A helpful clarification should be made at this point. The term ‘modern theology’ will be used
in two distinct ways in this book. First, there is a generic understanding of ‘modern theology’ as
network post-​Enlightenment Protestant theologies. Second, ‘Modern theology’ (with the capitalized
Modern) was a distinct theology coming out of the second half of Dutch theology which was dominate at the University of Leiden in Dutch referred to as de moderne theologie. For an overview of
Dutch Modern theology, see: Eldred Vanderlaan, Protestant Modernism in Holland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1924).
145 A. de Groot, ‘Christiaan Sepp’ in Biografich Lexicon voor de Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse
Protestantisme, vol. 4, ed. D. Nauta (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1998), 398.
146 Bavinck, ‘Introduction’, vi. Original Latin: Et quanti momenti fuerit quantaque ejus auctoritas
in variis Academiis, diligentissime persecutus est Clarissimus Sepp.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
47
While the Netherlands entered the nineteenth century following the
German philosophical and theological scene, the work of theologians
like those found in Groningen and Leiden quickly caught up with what
was being produced in Germany. By the 1850s the Netherlands was thoroughly ensconced in the broader philosophical and theological thought
of nineteenth century Europe. The effect of the education coming out of
Leiden found its way into the pulpits with Schleiermacher becoming regular reading for the people studying for ministry there.147 This modernist
education in Leiden would lead the graduates to question the distinctive
role of the church in society; eventually producing graduates who either
renounced Christianity upon graduation or quickly left Christian ministry
for a job outside the church. One such man, Allard Pierson (1831–​1896),
studied under Scholten and later became a newspaper editor and art critic.
He ‘came to the insight that the “religion of humanity”, whose mother the
church had been, must be realized not in church but in society. . . humanity
surpassed Christianity’.148 Pierson’s comment not only betrays the theology
being taught in the leading university of the Netherlands, Leiden, but also a
view of the constant movement forward of history. Christianity, for Modern
theology in Leiden, was a stop on the way to some greater ideal. Now was the
time to jettison old belief. The church and theology had served their purpose.
It was in this theological and philosophical milieu that Herman Bavinck
was educated. As a student at Leiden he interacted with various thinkers
from Schleiermacher to Hegel to Schelling. Formally, Scholten served as supervisor for his doctoral thesis, although Abraham Kuenen served as his de
facto supervisor, and was more influential on his doctoral project.149 Writing
to a friend, Bavinck indicated the significance of Kuenen for his own development as a thinker. Kuenen was an Old Testament scholar who, alongside
Scholten, help to construct Dutch Modern theology. He specialized in historical criticism of the Old Testament.150
The influence of Leiden is evident in how Bavinck appropriates the
nineteenth-​century turn to history. Bavinck did not reject this historical turn,
yet he did not uncritically embrace everything which came with it. Instead, he
brought together the historical turn and the revival of neo-​Platonic thought
which emerged from the German Romantics.151 This allowed Bavinck to
147 Harinck and Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, 464–​466.
148 Ibid., 476.
149 Eglinton, Bavinck, 96–​99.
150 Harinck and Winkeler, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, 474.
151 Eglinton, Bavinck, 84; Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 56–​72.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
retrieve an Augustinian theology of history which situated Christ as the end
of history, as well as to construct a developmental view of theology. While
the quest for the particular in the historicist movement had led to a near rejection of the universal, Bavinck still argued for an organic understanding of
history.
Every man lives in his own time, comes into being and passes away, appears
and disappears; he seems only a part of the whole, a moment of the process. But
every man also bears the ages in his heart; in his spirit-​life he stands above and
outside of history. He lives in the past and the past lives in him for, as Nietzsche
says, man cannot forget. He also lives in the future and the future lives in him,
for he bears hope imperishably in his bosom. Thus he can discover something
of the connection between the past, the present, and the future; thus he is at
the same time maker and knower of history. He belongs himself to history, yet
he stands above it; he is a child of time and yet has part of eternity; he becomes
and he is at the same time; he passes away and yet he abides.152
Bavinck believed that the organic nature of man in history allowed him to be
positioned both in relation to the particular and the universal. This permitted
Bavinck then to retrieve universal histories and particularly an Augustinian
reading of universal histories. It would be easy to miss the Augustinian influence on Bavinck’s theology of history when one considers the surface level
use of language. For Bavinck, Christ is ‘the middle of history’.153 Bavinck
never quotes directly from Joachim of Fiore, but what is noticeable is the
way in which Bavinck’s conception of history is paradigmatically related to
Joachim’s.154 A cursory consideration of his use of the metaphors he employed in his ecclesiology section of his magnum opus, Reformed Dogmatics
shows that the church as the Body of Christ is just one metaphor among
many.155 What is even more interesting is that Bavinck followed a scheme that
is similar to that of Joachim of Fiore in his breaking of the dispensations of
history. ‘When the economy of the Son, of objective revelation, is completed,
that of the Spirit begins’.156 All of this language might make one assume that
152 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 114.
153 Bavinck, RD1, 383; GD1, 355.
154 Simon Kennedy has argued that there are Hegelian echoes in Bavinck’s historical work.
See: Kennedy, “ ‘Held together by one leading thought’: Bavinck’s Philosophy of History”, paper
presented at Bavinck Centenary Conference, Brisbane, Australia, December 2021.
155 Bavinck, RD4, 298; GD4, 282–​283.
156 Bavinck, RD1, 505; GD1, 471.
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49
Bavinck’s theology of history follows Joachim.157 In this, Bavinck’s reasoning
embraces a type of ‘non-​eschatological apocalypticism’. Nevertheless, this
particular idea requires a careful reading.
Bavinck considered the role of the church as the telos or end of revelation. Objective revelation is oriented toward subjective revelation. Objective
revelation is an instrument which finds its end in the subjective revelation
disclosed to the individual consciousness. It is in the church that revelation
reaches its perfection.
The purpose of revelation is not Christ; Christ is the center and the means;
the purpose is that God will again dwell in his creatures and reveal his
glory in the cosmos: θεος τα παντα εν πασιν [‘that God may be all things
in everyone’, 1 Cor. 15:28]. In a sense this, too, is an incarnation of God
[ένανθρωπησις του θεου]. And to achieve this purpose the word of revelation passes into Scripture. Hence Scripture, too, is a means and an instrument, not a goal. It is the product of God’s incarnation in Christ and
in a sense its continuation, the way by which Christ makes his home in the
church, the preparation of the way to the full indwelling of God [praeparatio
viae ad plenam inhabitationem Dei]. But in this indwelling, accordingly,
it has its τελος, its end and goal (1 Cor. 15:28). Like the entire revelation,
Scripture, too, is a passing act [actus transiens].158
It is Bavinck’s conception of revelation and the activities of the persons of the
Trinity that prove particularly interesting for understanding his appropriation of an Augustinian theology of history. With Christ’s coming, objective
revelation reached its pinnacle. However, with the coming of the Holy Spirit,
subjective revelation begins through the internalizing of objective revelation. The Spirit, for Bavinck, not only internalizes the knowledge of God but
also of Christ. It is Christ, the pinnacle of objective revelation, indwelling the
church through the person of the Holy Spirit that allows Bavinck to make the
connection to an Augustinian concept of continuous incarnation—​a doctrinal move that influenced his theology of history.159 While this is not explicit in the ecclesiology section of Reformed Dogmatics, when dealing with
157 It is interesting to note that Jayne Svenungsson connects German Romantic theology to
Joachim of Fiore’s theology of history. See: Divining History, 64–​104.
158 Bavinck, RD1, 380–​381; cf. GD1, 352.
159 Pass makes the same connection to continuous incarnation. However, he does not see the connection to Bavinck’s theology of history. See: Pass, Heart of Dogmatics, 144–​155.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
revelation, Bavinck understood the indwelling of God through the Spirit to
be one of continuous incarnation.160
To see the outworking of Bavinck’s theology of history most clearly,
it is necessary to follow a close reading of his Stone Lectures, delivered in
1908 at Princeton Theological Seminary.161 It is here that it can be shown
how continuous incarnation and Augustine function as the foundation for
Bavinck’s theology of history. These lectures provide an overarching survey
of Bavinck’s philosophy of revelation. In his exploration of this topic he covered philosophy, nature, religion, Christianity, religious experience, culture,
the future, and history. The question of history and its place in philosophical
and theological thinking had developed over the nineteenth century and this
development was still in process. Bavinck’s Stone Lectures, later published as
Philosophy of Revelation, recognize this. Nevertheless, what Bavinck spent
extended time exploring in Philosophy of Revelation is a further development
of those thoughts on history and theological reflection.162
In the chapter on history in Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck considered
the state of historical studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The ‘historical turn’ of the nineteenth century, he noted, had given history
the pride of place in dogmatic theology. Many of Schleiermacher’s students
had picked up on this, and as a result, by the mid-​nineteenth century, history had become a dominant part of theological reasoning. As the century
went on a turn from idealism to Romanticism to a materialist, naturalist,
positivist understanding of history grabbed hold of the discipline.163 Bavinck
argued that this materialist penchant could be best seen in works like David
160 Bavinck, RD1, 213, 505; RD3, 280; GD1, 184–​185, 470–​471; GD3, 260–​261.
161 Bavinck’s inverting of the historical turn is striking. Whereas in Germany historical theology
was done historically (i.e., from the perspective of history), Bavinck reads history theologically (i.e.,
from the perspective of a Trinitarian concept of God). The natural question that arises from this is the
extent to which Bavinck took historicism seriously. I will explore this question in more detail below.
162 See: Bavinck, ‘The Future of Calvinism’; ‘Het calvinisme in Nederland en zijne toekomst’, in
Tijdschrift voor Gereformeerde Theologie 3 (1896), 129–​163; Christelijke wereldbeschouwing: rede bij de
overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam op 20 october 1904 (Kampen: J.H.
Bos, 1904); ‘Christianity and the Natural Science’, in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, ed.
John Bolt, trans. Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 81–​
104; ‘Christendom en natuurwetenschap’ in Verzamelde opstellen op het gebied van godsdienst en
wetenschap, ed. C.B. Bavinck (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1921), 78–​104.
163 Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 75. Marchand defines positivism as ‘the belief that
only those facts which have been produced through the strict application of scientific methods (here,
usually philological ones) constitute real knowledge, and the conviction that adding a brick to the
edifice of knowledge is a sufficiently satisfying goal of scholarly endeavor’.
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Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus Critically Examined.164 Strauss argued for mythology in the Gospel narrative. An understanding of myth had been an integral part of oriental studies in Germany in the nineteenth century. The place
of myth in questions regarding nature, humanity, the meaning of symbols,
and the relationship between East and West became more and more problematic as the nineteenth century continued, yet it never fully disappeared.165
Oswyn Murray notes, ‘The important point was to recognize that the study of
Christianity was no different from the study of any ancient belief system: all of
them began in myth’.166 As Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers conceived
of and deployed myth, the mythological origins of all religion became a point
of ‘embarrassment’ for many in the late nineteenth century.167 The quest for
the key to all mythologies, the Bible included, was an embarrassment and,
therefore, respectable scholars would be wise to avoid this. For history to be
a respectable science, it needed to conform to the methods of the natural sciences. Germany had made a turn away from idealism and Romanticism to
Positivism.
It is possible to tell the story in such a way that portrays the death of
Romantic idealism’s universalizing as having cleared the way for Positivism.
Nevertheless, there were still those who felt the influence of Romantic idealism and argued for a modified neo-​Platonic universal history. Not least
164 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. Marian Evans
(New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1860). The first edition in English was based on the fourth edition in
German. The first German edition appeared in 1835 and the fourth edition came out in 1840.
165 Colin Kidd, The World of Mr. Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–​
1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7. Oswyn Murray, ‘In Search of the Key to all
Mythologies’ in Translating Antiquity: Antikebilder im eropäschen Kultuurtransfer, ed. Stefan
Rebenich (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2010), 119–​132.
166 Ibid., 120.
167 I am indebted to Suzanne Marchand and her use of ‘embarrassment’ as a motif for understanding how late nineteenth-​century historiography conceived of that earlier Enlightenment and
Romantic period.
One vignette from Germany can display how the century had progressed in the philosophy and
theology of history. In Germany, a controversy erupted over the historiography of Friedrich Creuzer
(1771–​1858). (See: George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic
Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 137–​150;
Stephen Larsen, ‘Friedrich Creuzer and the Study of Antiquity’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton, 2008);
Michael D. Konaris, The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship: Interpretation and Belief in Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth-​Century Germany and Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 36–​45;
Josine Blok ‘Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K.O. Müller on History and Myth’,
History and Theory 33:4 (1994): 26–​52.) On the one hand, Creuzer argued for what amounted to be
a Romantic idea of history, taking the ancient witnesses to history at their word and finding in them
hints of a ‘key to religion’. On the other hand, people like Johann Voss argued vehemently against
him and his proposal. Voss and other German critics opposed Creuzer’s universalizing of mythology.
The clarion call in Germany was against the universalizing of history found in the works of men like
Creuzer and Romantic historiography. (See: Karl Otfried Müller, Geschichte hellenischer Stämme und
Städte, vol. 1: Orchomenos und die Minyer (Breslau: Josef Max, 1820), 7–​8.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
among these were Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–​1911) and Rudolf Eucken (1846–​
1926), both of whom were influences on the lives of Bavinck and Kuyper.168
Both of these men were educated under scholars who considered themselves to be Romantic idealists—​Dilthey studying with Adolf Trendelenburg
(1802–​1872) and Eucken studying with both Trendelenburg and Hermann
Lotze (1817–​1881). Neither Dilthey nor Eucken viewed their role as the
preserving of the Romantic idealist tradition in a pristine form, but one
of preservation and reform. While being inheritors of the tradition, they
conceded that the tradition must adapt to be viable in the current context.
Unlike their Romantic idealist predecessors who had argued that philosophy
should lead all the sciences, Dilthey and Eucken understood that in the current context philosophy could no longer do this. One of those sciences that
philosophy could no longer lead was history. ‘Not the assumption of a rigid a
priori faculty of knowledge, but only historical development, which proceeds
from the totality of our being, can answer the questions that we have to address to philosophy’.169
The influence of Dilthey’s thinking here is critical. However, it is also necessary to see how Bavinck modified Dilthey’s thought. In his 1867 inaugural
lecture at the University of Basel, Dilthey argued that his project grew out of
Kant’s desire to found a science of the mind which was empirically based. He
saw it as time to understand the law governing the phenomena of society, intellect, and morality.170 Dilthey’s aim was to ensure that history remained an
independent science, yet the danger in historical research, as he saw it, at the
time was succumbing to the dominance of the natural sciences.171 Dilthey
contended that the social-​historical and the natural science could be split,
with the social-​historical sciences dealing with inner experiences and the
168 Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975); Michael Ermath, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Meyrick Booth, Rudolf Eucken: His Philosophy and
Influence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913); W.R. Boyce Gibson, Rudolf Eucken’s Philosophy
of Life (London: A & C Black, Ltd., 1915); Abel J. Jones, Rudolf Eucken: A Philosophy of Life
(London: T.C. & E. C. Jack, 1913); Margaret MacSwiney, ‘Rudolf Eucken and the Spiritual Life’ (PhD
dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1915).
169 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für
das Studium der Gesellschaft und ihrer Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot), 1883, 11.
German: Nicht die Annahme eines starren a priori unseres Erkenntnisvermögens, sondern allein
Entwicklungsgeschichte, welche von der Totalität unseres Wesens ausgeht, kann die Fragen
beantworten, die wir alle an die Philosophie zu richten haben.
170 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Die dichterische und philosophische Bewegung in Deutschland 1770–​1800’
in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, eds. Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1964), 27.
171 Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 92.
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natural sciences dealing with outer experiences. As such the rules that govern
the natural sciences could not be the same as those which govern the social-​
historical sciences.172 Dilthey was insistent that this was not an ontological
but a phenomenological divide.173 From this then Dilthey would go on to
argue that these social-​historical sciences find their foundation on ‘facts of
consciousness’ (Tatsachen des Bewußtseins) the analysis of which makes up
the centre of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’.174 Thus, following from this, these
social-​historical sciences find their foundation in psychology.
Bavinck picked up on Dilthey’s critique of the positivistic nature of science and tied it to his own understanding of psychology and history. History
cannot be practised in the same way that the natural sciences were practices.
As Bavinck understood it, history as a science had descended into a purely
empirical endeavour, or to use Dilthey’s language, it had become a study of
‘outer experiences’. The historian could not make the claim that she was solely
an onlooker, but she had to make value judgements about history.
We stand over against the persons and events not only as onlookers but also
as judges; we cannot assume a neutral attitude with respect to them as we
may do in the case of nature. But where is the standard which we have to
apply to be found, and how is it to be applied? And in the closest connection
with this there is a great difference about the true contents, the moving-​
forces and the aim of history. Are these to be found in the development of
the understanding and in the advance of science as Buckle thought; or in
the idea of liberty as Kant and Hegel imagined; in the establishment of an
order of government as Breysig thinks; or in production as Marx supposes?
Are they to be found in mind or in matter, in man or in culture, in the state
or in society?175
Bavinck understood that these questions could not be answered if the historian resorts only to empirical investigation. History as a science needed
laws that would be empirically derived. However, these empirical laws had
not been found and could not be verified. An empirical positivism gave no
authoritative way of ordering or interpreting history or history’s aims. For
Bavinck, a philosophy of history is necessary.176
172 Ibid., 9.
173 Ibid., 8–​15.
174 Ibid., xviii.
175 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 103.
176 Ibid., 103.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
Throughout the nineteenth century various attempts had been made to
answer the question of history as a science. The likes of Buckle to Lamprecht
had offered solutions ranging from anthropogeography, to histories based
on economics, materialism, or social-​psychology.177 This was done to give
a surety to the study of history. It was believed that without this empirical
surety, history could not be considered a science. The growth of historical
studies and the nineteenth century’s emergent interest in Eastern and Far
Eastern history and culture brought with them new challenges.178 As has
been noted already, the old Romantic idealism with its universal ideological
view of history was shoved aside and a positivistic reading of history took its
place. ‘It was no longer permissible to construe the facts in accordance with
a preconceived idea; but, inversely, from the facts the laws must be learned
which controlled them in their development’.179
The principia of the modern view as Bavinck saw it was evolutionary
monism.180 There was an analogue between nature and history. For Bavinck,
however, evolutionary monistic ideas of history ignore some of the key
differences between nature and history.
Society is not a biological organism, but an organization, which no doubt is
not exclusively established by the will of man, but certainly not without it.
Before we can investigate the origin and development of such an organization as a family, society, or people, other factors than merely biological ones
must come into consideration; just as in an organism forces are at work
which are not found in a machine.181
This monism fails to provide what it proports to offer. The unity that was
promised is lost in infinite diversity. Trying to understand history from a monistic vantage point has only succeeded in highlighting the rich diversity of
life.182
While monism cannot provide the unity it promises, Bavinck found it
helpful in that it points to the necessity of a unity to history. Nevertheless,
177 Ibid., 92.
178 See: Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception
of Indian Thought, 1778–​1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
179 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 95.
180 Ibid., 95.
181 Ibid., 96.
182 Ibid., 99.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
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this unity can only be derived from an understanding of revelation.183 That
is, only when history itself is understood as revelation from God and of God,
that one can see the unity of history. Even though history needs its own set of
rules, those rules cannot be derived from history. Bavinck argued that they
must come from an authoritative source, and that the only source that can
provide a coherent view of history is God through revelation. As such, his
claim was that a coherent philosophy of history can only be derived from
Christian suppositions. Bavinck’s argument for this was that the only way
for a historian to see unity in history was for the historian to imagine that
there is a unity in human nature; that is that the historian’s own ‘spiritual
life’ is the key to explaining ‘the thinking and willing, the feeling and action
of historical personages’.184 For Bavinck, the ability to imagine this and find
the unity is only found in connection to Christ because Christ is the centre
of history.185 Following from this Christ, therefore, provides the stability that
history needs so as not to collapse into itself.186
Without this imagination, Bavinck argued that monism was the only
other available option. The danger with monism, he believed, is that its unity
descends into either uniformity or a chaotic diversity. With the Christian imagination, unity does not descend into uniformity. ‘In unity God loves diversity’.187 In general, Bavinck thought, Christianity allows for a unity which
promotes and embraces a diversity. In this particular case, he held that only
Christianity allows for an understanding of history that embraces both the
universal and particular. Monism, or an evolutionary understanding of history, requires a before and an after. ‘It knows no pro and contra’ because of
this monism does harm to history by not taking it seriously.188 However,
Christianity tells of history as a struggle between ‘darkness and light, sin and
grace, heaven and hell’.189 Bavinck here is alluding to Augustine’s civitas Dei
and civitas terrena. Because Christ lived, died, and has risen, he holds all of
history together as one. Christ, for Bavinck, unifies and gives stability to history. Without Christ, all of history would fall into chaos. Instead of having
a unity of history one ends up with ‘a history of races and nations, of nature
183 Ibid., 113.
184 Ibid., 113.
185 Ibid., 115.
186 Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, eds. and trans. Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton,
and Cory Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 100; Christelijke wereldbeschouwing, 66.
187 Herman Bavinck, ‘Aan de Lezer van DE BAZUIN’, De Bazuin, 5 January 1900; cf. RD4, 318;
GD4, 303. Dutch: God heeft in de eenheid de verscheidenheid lief.
188 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 115.
189 Ibid., 115.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
and culture peoples’.190 With Christ there is no beginning or end for he is the
beginning and the end.
Thus, Bavinck contended that history can only be understood from the
standpoint of Christianity. ‘But with Christianity, God himself enters history and leads hearts to the realization of his purpose. In Christianity, God
becomes the God of history [Dem Christenthum wird Gott geschichtlich]’.191
Bavinck followed Rudolf Eucken and Dilthey in their late Romantic idealism,
even agreeing when Eucken said:
Christ could not come again and yet again to be crucified; hence the countless historical cycles of the Ancient World disappeared, there was no
longer the old eternal recurrence of things. History ceased to be a uniform
rhythmic repetition and became a comprehensive whole, a single drama.
Man was now called upon to accomplish a complete transformation, and
this made his life incomparably more tense than it had been in the days
when man was merely to unfold an already existing nature. Hence in
Christianity, and nowhere else, lie the roots of a higher valuation of history
and of temporal life in general.192
Bavinck argued that this is an essentially Augustinian reading of history. God
had entered into the world in the fullness of his glory in the person of the
Logos. In his coming, Christ was the pinnacle, the apex of revelation. In his
session at the right hand of the Father, Christ sent the Spirit who indwells
the church which is Christ’s body. The church now works through the power
of the Spirit, being both those who are gathered in and those who do the
ingathering. This is both the essence and the mission of the church. That is to
say that the mission of the church is to accomplish the divine plan for creation and the end of history.193 It is only through revelation as understood in
Christian theology that Bavinck believed any of this can be known.
Bavinck’s view of history allowed him both to draw on the past and move
forward to the future in development. The influence of the turn to history is
190 Ibid., 115.
191 Bavinck, ‘Christendom en natuurwetenschap’, 97. Here Bavinck quotes Dilthey’s Einleitung in
die Geisteswissenschaften, 445. This quote is not identified or set off in quotation marks in the English
version of the text.
192 Rudolf Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought: A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual
Movements of the Present Day, trans. Meyrick Booth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 246.
193 Bavinck, ‘Christianity and the Natural Science’, 104; ‘Christendom en natuurwetenschap’,
103–​104.
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Bavinck: The Intellectual Context
57
apparent here. History is neither an object lesson nor something solely to be
universalized. There is not a rejection of the past but an appreciation of it.
The individual is valued, yet, for Bavinck, the particular is still able to be a
part of the universal. There is unity in diversity. For Bavinck, dogmatics and
dogmatic reflection did point to what the church believed at a particular time
and place. Nevertheless, this is not the sole nature of dogmatic reflection. It
also pointed to universal truths. These universal truths must be appropriated
here and now by the church.194 It is also dogmatic reflection that must be built
up; it must grow.195 The historical turn and the impulse both to retrieve from
the past and move forward to the future displayed a distinct tinge of historicism with a strong dose of German theology in the vein of Schleiermacher.
However, Bavinck was sympathetic to these modern tendencies, yet there is a
sense in which one can wonder about the extent to which the historical turn
truly changed Bavinck’s view of history. His was a history that was still thoroughly theological which borrowed from the larger Augustinian tradition’s
theological conception of history.
Conclusion
This chapter opened with the admonition from Quentin Skinner of the need
to know the context of the particular text we are examining. Skinner went on
to say, ‘To discover from the history of thought that there are in fact no such
timeless concepts, but only the various different concepts which have gone
with various different societies, is to discover a general truth not merely about
the past but about ourselves as well’.196 While Bavinck would have disagreed
with Skinner’s claim regarding universals, he would certainly deem the basic
sentiment to be correct: context is necessary for understanding historical
concepts. Thus, this chapter has endeavoured to give context for Bavinck’s
theological methodology, setting it in the era of the nineteenth century’s turn
to history. In it I have argued that the rise of historicism and basic philosophical commitments connected to this intellectual revolution shaped key
aspects of Bavinck’s theological methodology; namely, his use of historical
theology as read through the historical methodology of his Leiden professor
194 Herman Bavinck, The Sacrifice of Praise, eds. and trans. Cameron D. Clausing and Gregory
Parker Jr. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2019), 13.
195 Bavinck, ‘Pros and Cons’, 94; ‘Het voor en tegen’, 60.
196 Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding’, 67.
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Theology History in Methodology of Bavinck
Abraham Kuenen and his attitude toward theological development. The
nineteenth century was a time when history was carving out its place as a science in its own right. As history asserted itself, theology did the same. Clearly
seen in the works of many theologians, chief among them Schleiermacher, is
the extent to which the historical turn had changed how they envisioned the
theological task. Schleiermacher argued that dogmatics was subsumed under
history articulating what the church believed at one particular time and place.
Evidence of the influence of both the turn to history and Schleiermacher can
be identified in Bavinck’s project. He argued that there was a need to retrieve
past works but that, much like Schleiermacher, theological reflection needs
to move forward. Yet, unlike the historicists and Schleiermacher, Bavinck did
not value the particular over the universal. Both were necessary. Together,
they formed an organic whole.
This chapter has laid the foundation on which the following chapters will
build. Each following chapter will demonstrate the marked influence of the
turn to history on Bavinck. He was not a pristine theologian but a product of
his time. Chapter 2 grows out of Chapter 1 by giving an overview of Bavinck’s
theological methodology.
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