Inspirational Quotes by Herman Bavinck
“it is highly doubtful that with the words, “washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,” Paul was referring to baptism.”
“Where God’s Word is, there is God Himself, there God’s Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.”
“Conversion is not the source of truth, but the source of certainty with regard to the truth.”
“The task of dogmatics is precisely to rationally reproduce the content of revelation that relates to the knowledge of God.”
“It is, moreover, of the greatest importance for every believer, particularly for the dogmatician, to know which Scriptural truths, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have been brought to universal recognition in the church of Christ. By this process, after all, the church is kept from immediately mistaking a private opinion for the truth of God.”
“Religion is inconceivable apart from revelation, and revelation cannot occur apart from the existence of a spiritual world above and behind this visible world, a spiritual world in communion with the visible world.”
“The law, which was added to the promise, did not render the promise of no effect or obliterate it, but rather took the promise up into itself in order to be of service to the development and fulfillment of it. The promise is the main thing; the law is subordinate. The first is the goal; the second is the means. It is not in the law, but in the promise, that the core of the Revelation of God and the heart of Israel's religion lies. And because the promise is a promise of God, it is not a hollow sound, but a word full of power, which is the expression of a will bent on doing all that pleases God (Ps. 33:9 and Isa. 55:11). Therefore, this promise is the propelling force of Israel's history until it gets its fulfillment in Christ.”
“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless,, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite human consciousness.”
“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite human consciousness.”
“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite, human consciousness.”
“God is so good that in His electing and in the dispensing of His grace, He follows the line of generations and receives into His covenant both parents and their seed together. So the children of believers are to be viewed as holy, not by nature but through the benefit of the covenant of grace, in which they together with their parents are included according to God’s arrangement. Given this position, therefore, baptism is not administered to children of the church in order to make them holy, in order to make them partakers of sanctifying grace, but because they are sanctified in Christ and therefore as members of His church ought to be baptized. Baptism is no conduit through which grace flows to the baptized person, but a sign and seal of received grace, of the covenant, in which the child is included together with his parents.”
“The condition in which the pagan world dwells outside of the special revelation is portrayed in Holy Scripture as darkness, ignorance, self-invented wisdom, and great unrighteousness. The preaching that addresses them is thus a calling to come out of darkness into the light; it is an invitation to be converted from idols and to serve the living and true God.”
“The covenant is rooted in eternity. At that point it consisted not simply in the decree, like everything else can in that sense be said to have existed in eternity. Rather, the covenant existed at that point also in truth and in reality between the Father and the Son, and therefore immediately after the Fall the covenant could be made known to man and be established with man.”
“Therefore it is completely erroneous to place the church as organism and the church as institution in opposition to each other, to put the former high above the latter, and to play the former against the latter. The institution is particularly that organization, that one, necessary, indispensable organization undergirding the so-called church as organism. This latter has no other specific address than precisely that address of the institution. It comes to manifestation in no humanly invented society or corporation, but in its God-given institution.”
“The doctrine of the divine authority of Holy Scripture constitutes an important component in the words of God that Jesus preached, and if he was mistaken on this point he was wrong at a point that is most closely tied in with the religious life and he can no longer be recognized as our highest prophet. We cannot take Jesus seriously as a teacher and reject his own teaching concerning Holy Scripture.”
― Herman Bavinck ,
from Reformed Dogmatics
topics: bible , biblical-authority , christianity , inerrancy , infallibility , inspiration , jesus , scripture
“The heaven that he won for us by his atoning death presupposes a hell from which he delivered us. The eternal life he imparted to us presupposes an eternal death from which he saved us.”
“Wanting to hold on to some form of scriptural value, [modern] theologians modified their view of inspiration. One approach reduced its inspired character to religious-ethical matters only and allowed for all kinds of historical, geographical, and other error. The Word of God was to be distinguished from Scripture. Only doctrine is immediately inspired; in the rest error was easily possible. A split was created between “that which is needed for salvation” and “the incidentally historical.” This distinction is impossible; in Scripture, doctrine and history are completely intertwined.”
― Herman Bavinck ,
from Reformed Dogmatics
“There is enough light for those who only desire to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. There is enough clarity to illumine the elect and enough darkness to humble them. There is enough darkness to render the reprobate sightless and enough clarity to condemn them and to render them inexcusable.”
“Like all knowledge, knowledge of God is mediated to us through our senses, through speech and symbol, mediated to us by parents and others. If this were not the case, we would be unable to account for the great diversity of representations of God. If knowledge of God, of the moral order, of the beautiful—if these were all innate, they would be universally identical and acknowledged as such.”
“The parallel, rather, is with human language. It is human to have the ability to speak, an essential part of the image of God in us. Nonetheless, concrete language, which exists in countless forms, is not native but acquired; it is learned.”
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Born on December 13, 1854, in Hoogeveen, Drenthe, Holland, Herman Bavinck was the son of the Reverend Jan Bavinck, a leading figure in the secession from the State Church of the Netherlands in 1834. After theological study in Kampen, and at the University of Leiden, he graduated in 1880, and served as the minister of the congregation at Franeker, Friesland, for a year. According to his biographers, large crowds gathered to hear his outstanding exposition of the Scriptures.
In 1882, he was appointed a Professor of theology at Kampen, and taught there from 1883 until his appointment, in 1902, to the chair of systematic Theology in the Free University of Amsterdam, where he succeeded the great Abraham Kuyper, then recently appointed Prime Minister of the Netherlands. In this capacity -- an appointment he had twice before declined -- Bavinck served until his death in 1921.