Inspirational Quotes by Herman Bavinck
“there is great danger that modern culture, progressing in its anti-supernaturalistic course, will be stirred against the steadfastness of believers and attempt to accomplish by oppression what it cannot obtain by reasoning and argument.”
“Human nature is not an empty notion, no purely abstract conception, but a reality, a particular manner of being, which includes distinctive habits, inclinations, and attributes.”
“Culture, therefore, sinks into the background; man must first become a son of God before he can be, in a genuine sense, a cultured being.”
“If history is to be truly history, if it is to realize values, universally valid values, we cannot know this from the facts in themselves, but we borrow this conviction from philosophy, from our view of life and of the world — that is to say, from our faith. Just as there is no physics without metaphysics, there is no history without philosophy, without religion and ethics.”
“When we go back as far as possible to the origins we find a human nature which already contains everything which it later on produces out of itself.”
“We have no historical testimony to the development of polytheism into pure monotheism;”
“The absolute, immutable, and inviolable supremacy of that will of God is the light which special revelation holds before our soul's eye at the end of time.”
“It is supernaturalism, which in point of fact forms the point of controversy between Christianity and many panegyrists of modern culture.”
“Christian religion cannot abandon this supernaturalism without annihilating itself.”
“205The segregation and the election of Israel served the sole purpose of maintaining, unmixed and unadulterated, continuing and perfecting, the original revelation, which threatened to be lost206so that it might again in the fullness of time be made the property of the whole of mankind.”
“gospel is in the Old and the New Testament alike the core of the divine revelation, the essence of religion, the sum total of the Holy Scriptures.”
“The truth and value of Christianity do not depend on the fruits which it has borne for civilization and culture: it has its own independent value; it is the realization of the kingdom of God on earth;”
“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 a part in eternity; he becomes and he is at the same time; he passes away and yet he abides. This Christianity has made us understand.”
“He accepted the social and political conditions as they were, made no endeavor to reform them, and confined himself exclusively to setting the value which they possessed for the kingdom of heaven.”
“the whole of culture — may be of great value in itself, but whenever it is thrown into the balance against the kingdom of heaven, it loses all its significance.”
“But the electing love of God is at the same time a forgiving love. God not only elects and calls, but gives himself to his people; he joins himself to them so intimately and tenderly that he charges their guilt and transfers it, as it were, to himself.”
“if the moral law or the ideal good indeed exists outside of us, then it must be grounded in and be one with the Godhead.”
“Man can as little make propitiation for his sin as he can forgive it himself. But God can do both, atone and forgive; he can do the one just because he can do the other.”
“Theology leads through soteriology to eschatology.”
“Formerly men said that life was thought, but now we are told that life is will.”
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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.