The Three Central Facts of History

The central facts of the incarnation, satisfaction, and resurrection are the fulfilment of the three great thoughts of the Old Covenant, the content of the New Testament, the κήρυγμα of the Apostles, the foundation of the Christian Church, the marrow of its history of dogma and the centre of the history of the world. Without these facts history breaks into fragments. Through them there is brought into it unity and variety, thought and plan, progress and development. From the protevangel to the consummation of all things one thread runs through the history of mankind, namely, the operation of the sovereign, merciful, and almighty will of God, to save and to glorify the world notwithstanding its subjection to corruption.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 201. (Read online at Google Books or Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

Faith and Science: The Principal Question

In the conflict which nowadays rages on all sides, and  which is frequently represented as a conflict between science and faith, physics and theology, the principal difference, therefore, does not concern the question, What is nature? but rather this other one, What is God? If possible, this will be still more clearly seen if we call attention finally to the problem of motion. Nothing proves more clearly that this problem cannot be solved than the fact that philosophy throughout the ages and among all nations and down to the present day divides itself into two tendencies. With Zeno, “becoming” is sacrificed to “being,” or with Heraclitus, “being” to “becoming.” In point of fact, we can spare neither, for “becoming” presupposes “being.” There can be no question of change if there is no identity and continuity of the subject. But monism cannot accept this differentiation, endeavors to reduce motion to rest or rest to motion, and thus once again sacrifices the facts of reality to a play of ideas. And by this endeavor it gets, at every subordinate point which is raised by the problem of motion, in an impasse which has no outlet.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 96-97. (Read online at Google Books or Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

Monism and Metaphysics

Monism does not exist here, and if it nevertheless be sought here, it can bring us nothing but confusion. Eternity and time, immensity and space, do not differ quantitatively but qualitatively. And since the words “absolute,” “eternal,” “immense,” “infinite,” are predicates, and, when substantivized, form only empty abstractions, they presuppose a transcendent subject, differentiated from the world, to whom they belong. That is to say, physical science, which thinks through its own conceptions, and fathoms its own nature, issues in metaphysics and rises straight to God.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 90. (Read online at Google Books or Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

Atheism Controverts Nature; Nature Controverts Atheism

Atheism is not proper to man by nature, but develops at a later stage of life, on the ground of philosophic reflection; like scepticism, it is an intellectual and ethical abnormality, which only confirms the rule. By nature, in virtue of his nature, every man believes in God. And this is due in the last analysis to the fact that God, the creator of all nature, has not left himself without witness, but through all nature, both that of man himself and that of the outside world, speaks to him. Not evolution, but revelation alone accounts for this impressive and incontrovertible fact of the worship of God. In self-consciousness God makes known to us man, the world, and himself.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 79. (Read online at Google Books and Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

The Secret of Revelation

Precisely because Christianity rests on revelation, it has a content which, while not in conflict with reason, yet greatly transcends reason; even a divine wisdom, which appears to the world foolishness. If revelation did not furnish such a content, and comprised nothing but what reason itself could sooner or later have discovered, it; would not be worthy of its name. Revelation is a disclosure of the μυστήριον τοῦ θεοῦ. What neither nature nor history, neither mind nor heart, neither science nor art can teach us, it makes known to us,—the fixed, unalterable will of God to rescue the world and save sinners, a will at variance with well-nigh the whole appearance of things. This will is the secret of revelation. In creation God manifests the power of his mind; in revelation, which has redemption for its centre, he discloses to us the greatness of his heart.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 25-26. (Read online at Google Books and Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

Divine Revelation Is the Mother of Theology

Belief in such a special revelation is the starting-point and the foundation-stone of Christian theology. As science never precedes life, but always follows it and flows from it, so the science of the knowledge of God rests on the reality of his revelation. If God does not exist, or if he has not revealed himself, and hence is unknowable, then all religion is an illusion and all theology a phantasm. But, built on the basis of revelation, theology undertakes a glorious task,—the task of unfolding the science of the revelation of God and of our knowledge concerning him. It engages in this task when seeking to ascertain by means of exegesis the content of revelation, when endeavoring to reduce to unity of thought this ascertained content, when striving to maintain its truth whether by way of aggression or defence, or to commend it to the consciences of men.

– Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 23-24. (Read online at Google Books and Internet Archive.)

Bavinck Books

Holy Scripture and Theoretic Starting Points

It would be pure illusion if one should imagine he could convince his opponents in a purely theoretic way that a starting point in itself is true or false. For in that question are concerned the thinker’s religious convictions, which as sure are not capable of theoretic discussion. Here can avail only an absolute standard of truth, offered in Revelation. And the convincing power of the Word of God is not that of theoretic demonstration.

– Herman Dooyeweerd, Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought: An inquiry into the transcendental conditions of philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948), viii.

Passing Or Bumbling the Baton?

It is a concern, not that the teachers and pastors produced by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church have completely forgotten this rich apologetical tradition of Machen and Van Til, but rather that they have failed to understand and live up to it. What is taken for granted is often lost.

[...] One cannot help but observe, with disappointment, the way so few candidates for the OPC ministry actually grasp and can intelligently put into practice the presuppositional method in philosophical apologetics (as expounded for so many years by Van Til), as well as the sparse number of masterful publications of empirical scholarship produced by our ministers in answer to modern challenges (on the order of Machen’s contributions).

– Greg L. Bahnsen, “Machen, Van Til, and the Apologetical Tradition of the OPC,” In Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, 259-294 (Philadelphia, PA: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986) 286 and 294n129, respectively.

Books by Bahnsen

Augustine the Patron of Peace

Augustine is often cited as the patron of “just war” theories, a role that fits him awkwardly. Good men bewail every war, even the just ones, he thinks. And the bloodthirstiness of the Hebrew patriarchs was often carried out at divine behest, so there must be some good wars. Such texts offer a grudging form of patronage, and he is far more eloquent on the theme of peace, even if he lived in hard times and accepted the support of a brutal imperial regime.

– James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 259.

Books by Augustine

Van Til the Neo-Calvinist

And have I, following such a method, departed radically from the tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck? On the contrary I have learned all this primarily from them. It is Kuyper’s Encyclopedie that has, more than any other work in modern times, brought out the fact of the difference between the approach of the believer and of the unbeliever. It is Bavinck’s monumental work which set a “natural theology” frankly oriented to Scripture squarely over against that of Romanism which is based on neutral reason. It is Bavinck who taught me that the proofs for God as usually formulated on the traditional method prove a finite god. I have indeed had the temerity to maintain that these great Reformed theologians have in some points not been quite true to their own principles. But when I have done so I have tried to point out that when they did so they had departed from Calvin.

– Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969), 301.

Books by Van Til