Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was a Dutch Calvinist theologian and churchman. He was a significant scholar in the Calvinist tradition, alongside Abraham Kuyper, B. B. Warfield, and Geerhardus Vos. [Українська] [Русский]
Herman Bavinck Quotes
Time is not a separate substance, a real something, but a mode of existence. If there were no creatures, there would be no time.
—Herman Bavinck
Gratitude and joy drove them to do good works before the thought that they had to do them even crossed their mind.
—Herman Bavinck
God is never portrayed or presented as being feminine.
—Herman Bavinck
A knowledge of God is available to man only when, and in so far as, God freely chooses to reveal Himself.
—Herman Bavinck
The faith in providence stands in the most intimate of relationships with the faith in redemption.
—Herman Bavinck
At the creation the morning stars sang, and all the children of God shouted with joy. At the birth of Christ a multitude of heavenly hosts raised a song of jubilation to God’s good pleasure.
—Herman Bavinck
For when the sense of religion diminishes, the notion of good and evil is erased, the sense of responsibility and guilt is suppressed, so that passion and lust have free rein and the wickedness of the heart breaks forth openly in the form of shameless evil acts.
—Herman Bavinck
There is so much narrow-mindedness, so much pettiness among us, and the worst thing is that this is regarded as piety.
—Herman Bavinck
Not law but gospel, not demand but promise is the center of revelation, even in the days of the old covenant, to which man’s part is to respond in faith and in the walk of faith (Gen. 17:1), just as Paul in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 understood the revelation of God to Abraham.
—Herman Bavinck
Everything depends on the physical resurrection of Christ.
—Herman Bavinck
To acquire knowledge, Scripture refers man not to his own reason but to God’s revelation in all his works. Lift up your eyes, and see the one who has created all things; [lift them up] to the teaching and the testimony; otherwise, they shall perish.
—Herman Bavinck
Christianity, according to its own confession, does not exist through the strength and fidelity of its confessors, but the life and will of its Mediator.
—Herman Bavinck
God pervades time and every moment of time with his eternity; he maintains a definite relation to time, entering into it with his eternity. Between eternity and time there is a distinction not only in quantity and degree but also in quality and essence.
—Herman Bavinck
Just as faith is the fruit of regeneration on the side of the mind, so repentance is the expression of new life on the side of the will.
—Herman Bavinck
The gospel is simply a joyful message; not an obligation but a promise; not a duty but a gift.
—Herman Bavinck
From eternity to eternity he is who he is. There is in him no variation or shadow due to change (James 1:17). God is not a process of becoming but an eternal being. He is without beginning and end, but also knows no earlier and later.
—Herman Bavinck
Grace is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the entire work of salvation; it is totally devoid of human merit.
—Herman Bavinck
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.
—Herman Bavinck
Knowing God in Christ brings with it eternal life, imperturbable joy, and heavenly blessedness. These are not merely effects, but the knowing of God is itself immediately a new, eternal, and blessed life.
—Herman Bavinck
Scripture causes us to become aware of God where we would otherwise not see him; through its light, we behold God’s attributes, spread out in all of the works of his hands.
—Herman Bavinck