Herman Bavinck was born on December 13, 1854, in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, the son of a pastor in a separatist, orthodox Reformed church. He grew up amid the Calvinist piety of his home and a curiosity to understand the modern world opening up around him.
After a year at the Theological School in Kampen, tied to his own ecclesiastical tradition, he surprised everyone by transferring to the University of Leiden, then the leading center of liberal theology in the Netherlands. There he studied under professors who questioned the traditional authorship and historicity of Scripture.
This choice bred suspicion on both sides: leaders in his church feared he would lose his orthodox faith, while liberal professors saw him as a gifted young man still bound to old dogmas. Bavinck earned his doctorate in 1880 with a thesis on the ethics of the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, refusing to choose between scholarship and faith.
In 1881 he was ordained pastor of a Christian Reformed church in Franeker, where he served for about two years and turned down two invitations to teach at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1882 he accepted the synod’s call to the chair of dogmatics at the Theological School in Kampen and began teaching on January 10, 1883, at age 28, launching two decades of work that would give rise to his greatest achievement, the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics. The book set out classic Calvinist faith in direct dialogue with the philosophy, science, and psychology of his day.
In 1902 he succeeded Abraham Kuyper in the chair of dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam, when Kuyper devoted himself fully to politics. In 1908 and 1909, he was invited by Princeton Seminary to deliver the prestigious Stone Lectures, published as The Philosophy of Revelation.
Bavinck was also active outside academia: he was elected senator for the Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1911 and took part in debates on Christian education and religious psychology. As a parliamentarian, he criticized the economic exploitation of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, though, like many of his contemporaries, he held a paternalistic view of Western Christian culture as a model to be exported to colonized peoples. In 1911 he also published Modernism and Orthodoxy, a public response to those who saw him as a fundamentalist in disguise or as someone who had given in to the age.
In August 1920, days after speaking at the synod of the Reformed churches in Leeuwarden, he suffered a heart attack from which he never fully recovered. He died in Amsterdam on July 29, 1921, at age 66, after months of illness. He left behind the conviction that Christian truth need not fear the honest scrutiny of reason, science, or culture, because all of it belongs to God.
His Reformed Dogmatics is still read in Reformed seminaries around the world, forming generations of pastors and theologians. Bavinck showed that orthodoxy and openness to the modern world can, indeed, go hand in hand.
