Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)
Herman Bavinck was perhaps the most significant Dutch Reformed theologian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with Abraham Kuyper and his almost exact contemporary, the American Presbyterdian, B. B. Warfield. He was deeply influential among future generations of both Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian theologians, preachers and believers.
Bavinck was born in the small town of Hoogeveen on 13th December 1854. His father was from Germany and was a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a conservative and separatist denomination in the Netherlands.
He studied at Kampen and Leiden and wrote his dissertation on the ethics of the Swiss Reformed, Ulrich Zwingli. He was ordained as a minister and appointed as Professor of Theology at Kampen and then later at the Free University of Amsterdam, working alongside Abraham Kuyper. Bavinck died on 29th July 1921, aged 66.
His major theological work is a massive, four-volume Reformed Dogmatics published between 1895 and 1901. Known for its thoroughness in dealing with all areas of theology and engaging with other theological positions and traditions as they existed in Bavinck's time, it remains a high point of Reformed scholarship.
Bavinck took a classic Dutch Reformed stance on many issues, but was not afraid to make his own contributions. For example, Bavinck rejected both supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism in the area of predestination, and insisted that all God's decrees are inseparable, even logically. Bavinck was also a major theologian of the doctrine of common grace, realising that any good in this world among sinful humanity can only be as a result of God's kindness and love in operation. In 1909, he also published a one-volume condensed and simplified version of his dogmatics designed to tbe read by ordinary Reformed believers. Originally entitled Our Reasonable Faith it was later published as The Wonderful Works of God.
Bavinck's work on Reformed Ethics are still being translated into English and being published in various volumnes now.
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