Abstract
Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) has never really found a place in the modern Protestant imagination. Too Dutch? Too Reformed? Lacking in distinctive ideas? None of these hesitations seem well-founded. Nevertheless, overshadowed by the better known, and deeply problematic, Abraham Kuyper, Bavinck has had a low profile among leading twentieth century religious figures. The Dutch pastor and professor was in many respects a man of his time: middle-class and classically educated, with a traditional sense of European cultural superiority. He accepted colonialism in the service of Christianity while decrying economic exploitation. But he was much more. Bavinck was a visionary, a man in the tradition of Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin who pursued reformation, not revolution. Like the sixteenth century reformers he admired, he understood religious change not as an upending of political and social structures, but rather as spiritual renewal through God’s Word. The world was to be transformed by the gospel, the essential foundation for modern culture. He held a deep sense that Christianity inhered in the Dutch and that godlessness, whether in politics and academics or in the colonial project, was an alien affliction. No doubt his obscurity stemmed in part from his perception of a special place for the Dutch, an enduring legacy of the Calvinism into which he had been born. Bavinck was deeply disappointed by the forms of Christianity he encountered in America, where Calvinism, he believed, had fallen on stony ground.
James Eglinton has provided an engaging life of Bavinck, attentive to changing ecclesiastical, social and political contexts and his subject’s evolving thought. He achieves that to which biography should aspire – to render the distant alive. His detailed research does not overwhelm but casts in relief the world that moulded a man of both remarkable imagination and striking limitations. While a person of his age, Bavinck was also a prophet of a changed world, although he would not have claimed that mantle. He looked to history to find a future in which Christianity would redeem modernity. A scholar churchman and gifted pastor and preacher Bavinck, like John Calvin, believed that theology was not an abstract science but the lifeblood of the lived faith. Like most charismatic religious figures, he was a person of contrasts that found an inner logic. The Dutchman in Eglinton’s sympathetic portrait managed to draw together diffidence and ambition, evident in a desire to serve the tradition from which he came while entering into the liberal and even secular worlds that offered status and esteem. His biographer eschews earlier interpretations of a divided soul to explore how in a very human way competing impulses thrived.
History and progress loom large in Bavinck’s story. Nineteenth century Christianity struggled with and was transformed by history, which for Protestants took the shape of the fraught inheritance of the Reformation. From the study of the Bible as a historical document to the evolution of church history as a discipline in its own right, awareness was growing that the faith was profoundly shaped by its evolution. The implications of temporality were various interpreted, with liberals and conservatives finding both liberation and threat. The roots of the historical force for the Reformed lay with the sixteenth century reformers, who as children of the Renaissance harnessed the power of the past to church reform, looking to an imagined early church to defend radical changes in doctrine and ecclesiology.
The world of Bavinck’s intellectual and religious formation emerged from Enlightenment skepticism in creedal Christianity, which in part arose from natural science and from historical research into religion that placed a premium on factual accuracy. Even Calvin’s Geneva in the eighteenth century had dropped its subscription to basic tenets of the faith. Bavinck’s sense of the past, including the Reformation, was shaped by accommodation. Reform could never be a return to the early Christians or the sixteenth century; rather, Eglinton reveals, Bavinck passionately believed that theology had to speak to the present, an ever-evolving vernacular. The Reformed tradition was neither static nor trapped in the past. In this respect Bavinck’s legacy is a tonic for modern adherents of the Reformed tradition who apply seventeenth century confessions as absolute standards. Orthodoxy was not a museum piece displayed behind glass or, worse, an object of idolatrous veneration. Certainly, there were unchanging truths, but Bavinck made the enormous contribution of setting orthodox Christianity in the context of a world far removed from early modern culture. There could be none of the flight into the past evident in the inclinations of the Oxford Movement or Vatican I. The established church in the Netherlands had ossified and was unable to meet the challenges posed by the age. Bavinck well understood that state of affairs, but he never relinquished the conviction that Christianity was the only source of renewal. In particular, he looked to Calvinism as the most adaptable and reasonable manifestation of the faith. The Dutch nation was to recover its true nature in the Reformed faith: its past was its future. From our vantage point where anything resembling cultural Christianity has died, Bavinck’s aspirations appear somewhat naïve, but Eglinton does an admirable job, without any trace of condescension, of placing the Dutchman in a world in which his attachment to the possibility of a Christian nation can be understood. We find Bavinck at times a hapless politician and at others a prophetic voice to the nation. He belonged to an age of cultural despair epitomized by Spengler’s Decline of the West, and in response moved from an idealistic conception of Calvinism towards a regeneration of European culture through a broader view of Christianity, of which his tradition was a part.
Bavinck’s convictions were not his own creation, but inherited from his father and the Secession and, later, from Kuyper, but never uncritically. Indeed, we learn of the crucial role played by his father, Jan Bavinck, a man of formidable talents, not least in guiding his church and family through the turbulent social and political effects of industrialization. Eglinton makes fruitful and judicious use of the older Bavinck’s writings, including a fascinating autobiography. There would have been value in placing the father’s account of his life against the flourishing literature of Reformed clergy, not least in Scotland, in which they wrote their lives in terms of self-examination and spiritual torments. The Protestant tradition of self-writing was inherited by the son and expressed, although in a less dramatic form, in his Dagboek and letters. Eglinton has uncovered a rich seam of correspondence, not least to Bavinck’s dear and adventurous friend Snouck Hurgronje, in which his subject charted his early religious formation. Their curious friendship, at once intimate and distanced by theological differences, emerges as one of the most intriguing of the book. The exchange of letters offers insight on Bavinck’s inner-self. At one point, Bavinck wrote to Snouck regretting that they had grown apart and offering his sincere friendship. Bavinck connected this intimate declaration of friendship with an account of how in his time at Leiden he had robustly engaged with modern liberal theology, writing of having ‘learned a great deal in Leiden but also unlearned much.’ The ambiguity of these words tells us much about the man. This reflection on a relationship that meant so much to him was inflected by his troubled encounter with ways of thought he found deeply unsettling and eventually insufficient, yet he was willing to recognize with charity his friend’s attachment to a different religious outlook.
One of the most attractive aspects of Eglinton’s Bavinck is that the Dutchman was no dogmatist or confessional prig. We find repeatedly an expansive and deeply humane character prepared to learn from those with whom he disagreed and debate their beliefs vigorously, but with a disposition of fairmindedness and understanding. He could reject their accommodations to contemporary culture as inimical to the ways in which he believed the Reformed faith had to come to terms with modernity, while seeking their company and even, at times, counsel. In another letter, Bavinck reflected on how his teachings had demonstrated the nefarious nature of liberal theology yet he expressed gratitude for his training in scholarship at Leiden. His teachers had moved him from a childlike attachment to his faith towards an informed, nuanced and – crucially – learned articulation of his convictions. Nevertheless, the biography leaves the reader wanting a somewhat fuller account of the mental and spiritual worlds of Bavinck’s more liberal contemporaries. There is tendency to present them as somewhat benighted opponents rather than as persons who had found their own way to modernity; Bavinck’s story would have only been enhanced by greater attention to their perspective on orthodoxy and Calvinism in particular, in order that they might not appear only as collaborators in the abandonment of traditional Christianity.
One of the challenges of biography is to move beyond the wealth of material and the demands of a flowing narrative to uncovering the person. Here Eglinton guides us, although unevenly. We find Bavinck as intellectually and spiritually bored at Kampen, demonstrating the limitations of his own tradition for such an inquisitive mind and soul; as desperately lonely in pastoral ministry; as desirous of a scholarly and public profile that found acceptance in the wider, secular world; and as husband and father. Yet, he remains a somewhat distant figure. The letters offer a richer stream of insights than Eglinton is willing to give them. Exploration of Bavinck’s piety and devotion is curiously muted. We learn well enough that he was deeply faithful, but what about prayer, sacraments, and scripture? In his impressive research, Eglinton has provided a highly-detailed profile of Bavinck, but his hand is steadier with the theological character and historical contexts than with the biographical task of illuminating, as far as possible, the inner person.
Part of the issue is in the manner in which material is presented. Long quotations are provided, but often with little comment. A stronger authorial hand would have served to exegete Bavinck’s willingness to reveal himself, such as in his reflection on attending the Lord’s Supper or in writing of the death of his brother and his eternal fate. The extracts provided are a treasure trove to be mined. Several of the subsections end with lengthy quotations, leaving the reader with little sense of what to make of them. Ambiguity is also fed by the author’s penchant for putting crucial and illuminating information in parentheses – sometimes half a paragraph. Their excessive use interrupts the narrative with material of uncertain status. Further, a professed ‘critical biography’ (I’m not sure what that means) needs to engage with the vexed relationship between biographer and subject. We need not dissolve into postmodern discourses to establish how in his diary, letters and public addresses Bavinck was a complicated or possibly even unreliable narrator. The Dutchman drew a curtain on aspects of his family life, yet the rich material provided by Eglinton could tell us more than the author allows.
The gifts of this biography are many. Eglinton provides a nuanced interpretation of what Calvinism, Reformed and Neo-Calvinism meant for Bavinck and how his thought was neither derivative nor rigid. The author has done us a great service in elucidating the fraught relationship with Abraham Kuyper, enabling Bavinck to stand on his own feet and revealing him as the much superior mind and theologian, if much less a self-promoter. The accounts of the Dutchman’s relationship with America bring to light dimensions of transatlantic culture as well as Bavinck’s sense of culture and his own place in it. What would have happened if he like others had followed a call to the United States? We are left to wonder, however, how his hosts viewed this very European figure. What was the reaction to his Stone Lectures in Princeton?
One of the blurbs for this book calls Bavinck the ‘greatest theologian of the twentieth century.’ Was he? And how? Eglinton provides a moving account of the often tragic lives of the next generation, but it would have been enlightening to have a broader vision of how Bavinck after his early death shaped what was to come. Then all roads would not so readily lead to Karl Barth. Bavinck passionately believed in the ability of Christianity to adapt to change – what then is his own legacy for us a hundred years after his death? Nevertheless, we have been judiciously guided through the life and thought of a person who transformed Reformed Christianity for the modern world. As James Eglinton demonstrates, a successful biography not only teaches us that of which we were not aware but presses upon us the urgency of that knowledge.