James Eglinton has written a very timely biography of Herman Bavinck, 100 years after his death.

An outstanding teacher of theology in Holland, Bavinck (1854–1921) is overshadowed by the older and more famous Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Kuyper was a journalist, pastor, theologian, prime minister, Christian political party pioneer, and founder of the Free University of Amsterdam. He had a big shadow.

However, Bavinck deserves the equal time he is receiving in the United States. He taught theology, served in the Holland Senate, won journalistic awards, and was Kuyper’s vital teammate in the reformation of Holland in all areas of life.

For North American Christians, the Kuyper-Bavinck teamwork is challenging to grasp. Imagine Tim Keller and Al Mohler as U.S. senators and Wall Street Journal columnists, in addition to their other responsibilities.

For Americans, Kuyper and Bavinck are pioneers in developing a Christian worldview and becoming like the children of Issachar to understand the times. Kuyper and Bavinck built a strong Calvinist movement in Holland under the assumption that Jesus Christ is Lord of all areas of life, both the spiritual and the physical. Their life stories offer examples of how to be in the world but not of it and how to bring salt and light to a larger, secular culture.

Eglinton’s biography is timely because more American students of theology are reading Bavinck’s books. Some appreciate his shorter systematic theology, published in English as Our Reasonable Faith, which is a mere 568 pages. It also has come out more recently as Wonderful Works of God. Others have read all four volumes of his Reformed Dogmatics. Bavinck offers a devotional emphasis missing from some other systematics, yet his approach is as thorough as Charles Hodge, Louis Berkhof, or A.H. Strong.

As a biographer, Eglinton did his homework very well, digging deep into Dutch history and using Bavinck’s personal journals. He sets Bavinck in a context of big cultural and social shifts in Holland and Europe. He challenges earlier biographies and contends that Bavinck did not grow up as a separatist in the Christian Reformed Church, which broke from the state church in 1834 in protest of the modernistic bent of the national church—20 years before Bavinck’s birth. The Bavincks, father Jon and son Herman, were integrationist. In Reformed Presbyterian terms, they believed in the application of the doctrine of Christ’s kingship over all of life. No matter how modern we become, regardless of advances in science and technology, the Bible is still the rule for all of the questions and challenges we face.

Dutch society opened up for believers in the Seceder or Christian Reformed Church in 1848. A new king, William II, agreed to a constitutional monarchy, providing expanded voting rights and a gradual lessening of discrimination for the believers who dissented from the government church. Before that, Bavinck’s father and other dissenters attended churches illegally, and some came to the United States for greater religious freedom and economic opportunity.

A key question for faithful dissenters was how much to engage in this new Dutch society, with its gradual expansion of what we would think of as freedom of religion. Should their children pursue academic excellence in higher education that might challenge their faith? How would they bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in an open society with a new kind of upward social and economic mobility? How should they exercise their new opportunities as citizens in a political system governed more by voters than by the monarchy? Should they be ambitious to exercise their gifts for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom now that they had more freedom to do so? Who should run for the legislature to try to apply the Scriptures to public life?

The Bavincks, father and son, were confident that the Scriptures would have answers to the new modern challenges of voting rights, the women’s movement, the industrial revolution, and labor issues. Their church was growing, from 40,000 in 1849 to 189,000 in 1889. They had not been “enlightened” by the European Enlightenment thinkers to believe the Bible had gone out of date and ought to be replaced by rationalism and other secular options.

Eglinton’s good work in setting context for Bavinck helps him avoid a contemporary danger for a historian—chronological snobbery. The Bible offers a permanent standard, but the application varies from era to era and culture to culture. When we have truly progressed beyond our ancestors, we are standing on the shoulders of others before us in growing in Christ. Eglinton goes well out of his way to help readers grasp a different time and culture and avoids imposing current assumptions about how we could have lived better than Bavinck did.

Bavinck’s story is not an easy one for Americans to understand. Holland had more of a social hierarchy than America. Yet the Reformation influence toward freedom and representative government ran deep from the 1500s through the 1800s, even stronger in some ways than in England. William of Orange, for example, was never king of Holland, just the leader. He didn’t claim any divine rights and became king of England as the alternative to King James through his marriage to James’ daughter, Mary. Holland only got a king in 1815, and William I later abdicated to William II, who agreed to the new constitution and the 1848 settlement.

Our American categories of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, or conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, do not fit well for 19th or 20th Century Holland. Eglington gives the reader enough history and context to grasp the significance of Bavinck, both as Kuyper’s most important ally in theology and politics, and as a theologian who stayed faithful to God’s Word in the face of the aggressive modernist attack on biblical revelation.

That part of the story is instructive for Reformed Presbyterians today and other believers, because the challenge of competing scriptural priorities is still with us, to be in the world but not of it. Bavinck lived with that challenge all his life. He pursued academic excellence in his theological training at a modernist school in Leiden, yet he maintained a strong faith in Christ and the authority of Scripture. Some fellow Christian Reformed Church colleagues didn’t like how he was trained in a modernist university, but his critics missed how Bavinck was coming up with very solid scriptural responses to modernism, with an academic excellence acknowledged by his modernist competitors and teachers.

Bavinck was strong relationally as well as intellectually and theologically. He had a lifelong friend, Christian Snouck Hurgronje, a fellow student and a modernist. They challenged each other in the spirit of Proverbs 27:17, and this part of the story offers some lessons in the value of a friendship with someone who does not see the world as we do.

Bavinck puzzled over his friend’s life direction, going to Indonesia for a few years, living as a Muslim, taking several wives, and having children. Then Snouck Hurgronje came back to Holland, left his past behind, married a Dutch woman, and taught at a university. Their friendship continued. “We can still learn a great deal from each other and be useful to each other,” Bavinck wrote him. “And precisely because I live among kindred spirits, the correction of opponents who are still friends is all the more indispensable to me.”

Bavinck also befriended Geerhardus Vos of Calvin Seminary and Princeton, whose son would become a vital contributor in the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the next generation. Bavinck had many talents, winning a journalistic award for travel writing from his time in the United States. He wrote a well-received biography of a Dutch poet, Bilderlijk, as thinker and poet, 150 years after the poet’s death. Bavinck also wrote for a journal edited by Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton.

A good biography of Bavinck is valuable in 2021 because Bavinck illustrates a healthy Psalm 112 theme found in our Reformed Presbyterian church heritage. Christ’s building of His church picks up steam when one generation after another grows faithful to Him and keeps rolling up the promises of Deuteronomy 7:9, Proverbs 11:21 and 20:7, and Isaiah 44:3 into a life such as Herman Bavinck’s. The outpouring of sanctification in his life was developing in at least two prior generations and continued in various ways with his children and grandchildren, who were part of the resistance to the Nazis in Holland in World War II.

Some RP families have a spiritual heritage going back 10 to 15 generations. Their spiritual benefits run so deep that the families don’t always appreciate how wealthy are they are, spiritually speaking. The social benefits in common grace are immense. Bavinck’s story offers wisdom about Christ’s way of extending that kind of heritage across the generations. There is no formula on how God distributes these blessings to later generations in the Deuteronomy 7:9 pattern, but we can be inspired to pray for future generations and catch some of the methods or best practices of family worship, personal Bible study, gospel preaching, church commitment, Scripture memory and meditation, and psalm singing in these family histories.

One interesting angle in the biography is how Bavinck identified Nietzsche as the big villain in modernism, the author who was really shattering the Judeo-Christian consensus. Philosophy majors will find this part of the story fascinating, as Bavinck comes to this conclusion around the time of Nietzsche’s death in 1900. Before that, he tended to think of modernism or liberal theology as the most pressing problem.

Bavinck also developed a more optimistic view of modernism, as rooted in God’s sovereignty. Why would a sovereign God allow a breakdown of Christendom, or what Francis Schaeffer called the Judeo-Christian consensus? One view is that the European Enlightenment was detrimental because of its unscriptural presupposition that we could not know God’s revelation with any certainty. So, Western culture got stuck in the mud of rationalism trying to figure out things without God’s help, and along came all the problems with pragmatism, Marxism, communism, secular humanism, and all the rest.

Bavinck’s interesting proposal is that God allowed believers to wind up in a minority position, holding to revelation from God. His big purpose was to strengthen our faith and trust in Him and to help the church to build a stronger set of answers to the world’s problems.

“In the 1890s, Bavinck believed that emergence of a secularizing, post-Christian Europe was good for Christian theology,” writes Eglinton. “Christianity had never before been challenged to account positively for its ongoing existence or face a call to justify its contribution to every sphere of life. This challenge had highlighted the need for Christianity to do something new, which, in turn, had set the stage for the next great period of its progress through history: if Christianity had a future, he believed it could be as a faith made present in every domain of human life to the glory of God.” In other words, a purpose for secularism in Christ’s kingdom extension was to spur the church toward a more robust grasp of the biblical worldview over against the many other options that developed after the European Enlightenment of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

So here is a good Calvinist trying to discern God’s bigger plans, seeing well beyond a longing for the good old days of a Christian consensus in Holland, and adapting to a very new challenge.

The other side of this story is that Bavinck and Kuyper were the leaders of a movement that grew much larger in 19th Century Holland. Many Dutch were coming to salvation and growing in Christ, in what sometimes came to be labeled the neo-Calvinist movement. Their Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) had a great deal of influence in Dutch society for more than a generation. The trend came to a peak with Kuyper’s time as prime minister, as the ARP came close to a majority of the electorate and formed a coalition government under their parliamentary system.

Here again our American assumptions from a two-party system need to be adjusted to grasp the strong impact of the ARP. Bavinck, Kuyper, and their allies had to learn how to be faithful to Christ while playing on a level field with liberals and Roman Catholics and other perspectives. They were assuming kingdom responsibility for their nation. Bavinck served in the upper house of the legislature, or the equivalent of the U.S. Senate, and was chairman of the political party for a short period. He was not as skilled in the push and pull of party politics as Kuyper was, but he was renowned for his contributions to the development of educational policy in the legislature, so influential that schools were named after him. Bavinck helped establish the Dutch system of education based on parental worldview convictions, or what we might think of as a parochial school system. The schools were funded by taxes, but parents could choose a Reformed, Calvinistic, Roman Catholic, or modernist school. The assumption was that education could not be taught from a neutral perspective.

The ARP movement had important newspapers. They also had the Free University, where Bavinck taught in the later part of his life, after repeated pleas from Kuyper to join him in what became a multi-generational influence for Christ’s kingdom in Holland. (R.C. Sproul, for example, studied under G.C. Berkouwer at the university in the 1960s.) Bavinck assumed Kuyper’s theological chair as Kuyper became prime minister.

Earlier, Bavinck had taught theology at the smaller denominational seminary in a more rural part of Holland. He eventually went to the university out of a call to pursue the Lordship of Christ over all areas of life. That could be a part of seminary through the training of pastors in theology, but Kuyper had a grand vision for the Free University to see Christ capture every square inch of life. In his church background, Bavinck was pulled in two good directions, toward holiness and separation in a good scriptural sense. But he was also pulled to what the author calls catholicity, or a sense of kingdom responsibility for all areas of life. He saw some fellow believers fall into the trap of a false dilemma between these two truths. “In that time in the church, there was the idea that we need to leave the world to its own fate, but precisely because I come from the circles that I do I felt obliged to seek out an education at a university, because that church was in great danger of losing its catholicity in order to hold on to holiness of life. And then the thought arose within me: Is it possible to reconcile these?” he wrote later. “My goal is to hold tightly to both, and not to let go of either.”

To expand the earlier illustration: Imagine Tim Keller and Al Mohler having weekly columns in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Then they get elected to seats in the U.S. Senate and are granted tenured positions at major universities. We are more specialized these days, and the Kuyper-Bavinck model is unworkable in the specifics. America is different, anyway. Even in the 19th Century church, leaders such as Charles Hodge or B.B. Warfield did not contemplate a run for political office or provide regular commentary on the news.

Eglinton has a commendable impartiality and keeps himself out of Bavinck’s story. He notes that Bavinck didn’t see much of a future for Calvinism from his visits to the United States. The American spirit was too Methodist and Arminian. Kuyper also visited America, giving his popular Lectures on Calvinism at Princeton, first published by Eerdmans in 1931. Kuyper thought Calvinism had a great future in America.

The two men were allies but had plenty of differences of opinion about politics in Holland and the future of the United States. As partners, they had a remarkable track record of common and special grace, starting a university and political party, writing for newspapers, writing classic theology texts, preaching the gospel, and advancing a worldview rooted in Scripture in a modernistic society.

What we can learn from Bavinck is how to think about Christ’s kingdom in very challenging times of change and modernization. How should we live if we have a door open to get a tenured position in academics or a seat in a branch of government, federal, state, or local? The doctrine of Christ’s kingdom gives us a wonderful foundation from the Bible of how to answer these questions.