Herman Bavinck and the Mission of Calvin Seminary: Theology That Glorifies God
from the Summer 2025 issue of The Forum Magazine
by Jessica Joustra, Associate Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University and 2013 Master of Divinity Alumna
Herman Bavinck was born in 1854 in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, the son of a conservative clergyman. Herman’s father Jan Bavinck was a minister in the Secession Christian Reformed Church (Christelijk Gereformeerd Kerk). Perhaps the denominational name offers us a clue to the shared roots of Calvin Theological Seminary and theologian Herman Bavinck. Shared theological and ecclesial roots run deep, but it is not just these ties that make Bavinck an important voice within the Reformed tradition, and to the mission of Calvin Seminary.
Bavinck, as his English biographer James Eglinton describes, was a “dogmatician, an ethicist, an educational reformer, a pioneer in Christian psychology, a politician, a biographer, a journalist, a Bible translator, a campaigner for women’s education, and eventually, the father, father-in-law, and grandfather of heroes and martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance movement”; a “household name [and] the finest Dutch theological mind of his generation.” In our own time, too, it is safe to say that Bavinck is having a moment. As a recent Christianity Today piece proclaimed, “Everybody Loves Bavinck.” But why?
There are many ways to answer this question, but at least one is the nature and posture of his theology. Bavinck’s theology is robustly Reformed and deeply catholic; in other words, his theology is biblical, confessional, catholic, and doxological.
Bavinck was insistent that theology be biblical, that is, have Scripture as its source and norm; God is both the source and content of theology. Bavinck also affirmed that theology is confessional; we stand in a living tradition – the Reformed tradition – that has faithfully articulated what scripture teaches within the Reformed confessions. The “root principle” of these confessions, he contended, is “God’s absolute sovereignty.” But all too often, the church doesn’t fully comprehend this, and thus fails to understand the scope of the creedal claim that the church is catholic. In Bavinck’s view, not only does this mean that the church is one universal church, bound together in all times and all places, it also means that the gospel “embraces the whole of human existence”; it touches all of life as a “joyful tiding . . . for the entire cosmos.” God, in his glory and goodness, is sovereign over all. Because of this, theology must be doxological; we ought “not rest satisfied [until we have] traced back everything to the sovereign good pleasure of God as its ultimate and deepest cause.”
Bavinck’s theology exemplifies a love of scripture, the confessions, the world that God has made, the time in which God has placed us, and – most importantly – our sovereign God. Each of these aspects of his work is no doubt important. But one of the aspects of his work that might be drawing us to Bavinck right now is the third aspect of his theology: his catholicity. Many use the phrase “modern and orthodox” to describe Bavinck. In other words, Bavinck remained true to the theological and ecclesial claims that had been affirmed by centuries and centuries of Christians and strove to articulate them in his particular – modern – moment in history. He did this in a unique, and instructive way, on account of his understanding of God’s comprehensive work, the catholicity of the church. God’s work, he wrote, “never opposes nature and culture in themselves but only their degeneration.” Grace isn’t antithetical to culture, it is antithetical to sin. Thus, we can – and should! – engage the social, political, ecclesial, and ethical challenges of our day in the light and truth of the gospel. The gospel, as Bavinck puts it, is not only a pearl, but it is a leaven that “permeates the whole of the meal.”
For Calvin Seminary’s work of training ministry leaders for service in God’s kingdom, Bavinck is an important voice. His theology and witness exemplify a scripturally bound, confessionally rooted, and culturally engaged Christianity, giving us tools for how we, too, can seek to follow Jesus in the particular time and place God has called us, in service to his kingdom and his glory. For theology, writes Bavinck, is nothing other than a “doxology to all God’s virtues and perfections, a hymn of adoration and thanksgiving, a ‘glory to God in the highest.’”
