Bavinck on Presumptive Regeneration (and Other Things)

In Saved By Grace just out from RHB. With the Bavinck conference and blog and new volumes coming out, there’s a veritable Bavinck Blizzard! This volume, like anything from Bavinck, is worth having and reading. I read part of it in a pre-publication . . . Continue reading →

New Bavinck Institute Website

Thanks to Laurence O’Donnell (Calvin Seminary PhD student in systematics) for the heads up regarding the new Bavinck Institute website. They are featuring Ron Gleason’s to-be-released bio of Bavinck himself and an online journal, The Bavinck Review. Well done!

Bavinck On Gospel In The Narrow Sense

And indeed, strictly speaking, there are no demands and conditions in the gospel but only promises and gifts. Faith and repentance are as much benefits of the covenant of grace as justification (and so forth). Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4.454 (HT: James . . . Continue reading →

Bavinck On Eternal Generation

[226] The special qualification of the second person in the Trinity is filiation. In Scripture he bears several names that denote his relation to the Father, such as word, wisdom, logos, son, the firstborn, only-begotten and only son, the image of God, . . . Continue reading →

Christ Condignly Merited His Glorification

[399] But a great many Reformed theologians believed otherwise and answered the above question in the affirmative. In their opinion, the answer to Christ’s prayer (John 11:42; Heb. 5:7) and especially the entire state of exaltation from the resurrection to his coming . . . Continue reading →

Bavinck: The Image Is Not In Man But Is Man

Now this splendid view of the image of God and of original righteousness has come more clearly into its own in the Reformed church and Reformed theology than in the Lutheran. In Lutheran theology the image of God is restricted to original . . . Continue reading →

Bavinck’s Critique Of Pietism

Like so many other efforts at reforming life in Protestant churches, Pietism and Methodism were right in their opposition to dead orthodoxy. Originally their intention was only to arouse a sleeping Christianity; they wished not to bring about a change in the . . . Continue reading →

Bavinck Contra The Donum Super Additum

It was called a “covenant of nature,” not because it was deemed to flow automatically and naturally from the nature of God or the nature of man, but because the foundation on which the covenant rested, that is, the moral law, was known . . . Continue reading →

Bavinck On The Old And New Man

True, we speak of an old and a new man in the believer, and so we give expression to the fact that in the new life the whole man has in principle been changed, and that nevertheless the power of sin continues . . . Continue reading →