Inspirational Quotes by Herman Bavinck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“either humanity, with all its culture, is a means for the unconscious, unreasonable, and purposeless world-power, or it is a means for the glorifying of God.”

“Ethical culture must be a philosophy of revelation or it cannot exist.”

“the subduing of the earth, that is, the whole of culture, is given to him, and can be given to him only because he is created after God's image; man can be ruler of the earth only because and in so far as he is a servant, a son of God.”

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

“173Augustine speaks of a Christianity which has existed since the beginning of the human race,”

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

“Thus the true, the good and the beautiful which ethical culture seeks can only come to perfection when the absolute good is at the same time the almighty, divine will, which not only prescribes the good in the moral law, but also works it effectually in man himself. The heteronomy of law and the autonomy of man are reconciled only by this theonomy.”

“All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.”

“One arrives at metaphysics, at a philosophy of religion, only if from another source one has gained the certainty that religion is not just an interesting phenomenon—comparable to belief in witches and ghosts—but truth, the truth that God exists, reveals himself, and is knowable.”

“In case a dogma is not based on divine authority, it is wrong to call it by that name, and it should not have a place in the faith of the church.”

“The task of dogmatics, however, is always the same. It is and can, from its very nature, be nothing other than a scientific exposition of religious truth, a detailed exposition and interpretation of the Word of God. It is a laying out of the treasures of sacred Scripture, a commitment to the standard of teaching (Gr. παραδοσις εἰς τυπον διδαχης, Rom. 6:17), so that in it we possess a form and image of the heavenly doctrine (forma ac imago doctrinae coelestis). Accordingly, dogmatics is not itself the Word of God. Dogmatics is never more than a faint image and a weak likeness of the Word of God; it is a fallible human attempt, in one’s own independent way, to think and say after God what he in many and various ways spoke of old by the prophets and in these last days has spoken to us by the Son.”