From the Inside Flap
Praise for Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics
"Like Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards, Bavinck was a man of giant mind, vast learning, ageless wisdom, and great expository skill, and to have these volumes now in full English is a wonderful enrichment. Solid but lucid, demanding but satisfying, broad and deep and sharp and stabilizing, Bavinck's magisterial Reformed Dogmatics remains after a century the supreme achievement of its kind."--J. I. Packer, Regent College
"Finally Bavinck becomes available to the English-speaking world. The Dutch version has shaped generations of theologians and helped them to preach, think, and act on a fresh, Reformed basis. The strength of Bavinck's dogmatics is that it's neither conservative nor progressive, but its biblical character makes it constantly up-to-date. Baker Academic and the Dutch Reformed Translation Society deserve praise for this project, from which without doubt church and theology will profit for years to come."--Herman Selderhuis, Theologische Universiteit Appeldoorn
"Pastors and theologians will welcome the historic first complete translation of Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics. . . . This masterful theological work is now available to passionate students of theology."--R. Albert Mohler Jr.,
Preaching
"Arguably the most important systematic theology ever produced in the Reformed tradition. I have found it to be the most valuable. English-speaking theology throughout the twentieth century until now has been singularly impoverished by not having at its disposal a translation of Bavinck's Dogmatiek in its entirety. This will be an incomparable boon for generations of students, pastors, teachers, and others, serving to deepen understanding and enrich reflection in both historical and systematic theology."--Richard B. Gaffin Jr., Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
"To read [these volumes] is to take a large step back from the theological currents that swirl around and through the theological academy. . . . While the content . . . is identical with the original, the layout in the translation renders the material far more accessible. . . . Most helpful of all are the splendid chapter synopses that have been crafted with obvious care by the editor and inserted before each chapter. . . . The translation is eloquent, lucid, and faithful to the original."--George Vandervelde,
Calvin Theological Journal
From the Back Cover
Herman Bavinck, the premier theologian of the Kuyper-inspired, neo-Calvinistic revival in the late nineteenth-century Netherlands, is an important voice in the development of Protestant theology.
Essays on Religion, Science, and Society offers an outworking of Bavinck's systematic theology as presented in his acclaimed
Reformed Dogmatics and engages enduring issues from a biblical and theological perspective. The work presents his mature reflections on issues relating to ethics, education, politics, psychology, natural science and evolution, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. This capstone of Bavinck's distinguished career, and his most significant remaining untranslated work, is now available in English for the first time.
"I have long admired Bavinck as a major systematic theologian, but in these essays I discovered a Bavinck I never knew. He moves easily--and brilliantly--through adolescent psychology, conceptions of the unconscious, Islam, social contract theory, evolutionary thought, philology, and aesthetics, to name only a few of a broad set of topics. Here an amazing nineteenth-century Calvinist mind addresses with much wisdom a twenty-first-century intellectual agenda!"--Richard J. Mouw, Fuller Theological Seminary
"This volume of essays demonstrates that good theology is not restricted to private matters of personal piety and faith but has an essential public dimension. The Triune God, who saves us through the work of Christ and incorporates us into the body of Christ, the new people of God, by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit, is the same God who is Creator of heaven and earth. . . . It is the insistence on taking creation seriously as God's revelation without in any way diminishing the necessity of biblical revelation as the key to understanding it that is the hallmark of Bavinck's writing on matters of religion, education, science, and society."--John Bolt, from the editor's introduction
"Bavinck had a thoroughly disciplined mind, yet with the heart of a child. . . . All his teaching, all his preaching, all his writing was shot through and through with the richness of divine grace as revealed in Christ. . . . His mentality was marvelous. Few men have a mind as adaptable as his. He might have excelled in almost any branch of study. A wonderful linguist, a leading star in the field of dogmatics, great as a philosopher, an authority in pedagogy, wonderfully human in his contact with everyday life, and tenderly moving when he touched the Christian experience--he was indeed gifted above ten thousands."--Henry Elias Dosker, from "Herman Bavinck: A Eulogy"
