Quotes from Herman Bavinck

One human nature is common to all the descendants of Adam, and it is, for all men, guilty and polluted

God the Father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit.

God saves by causing himself to be known and enjoyed in Christ.

The Gospel is temporary, but the law is eternal and is restored precisely through the Gospel. Freedom from the law consists, then, not in the fact that the Christian has nothing more to do with the law, but lies in the fact that the law demands nothing more from the Christian as a condition of salvation. The law can no longer judge and condemn him. Instead he delights in the law of God according to the inner man and yearns for it day and night.

The resurrection is the fundamental restoration of all culture.

Scientific information about the universe does not displace God. Some have said that they searched the heavens and did not see God. The universe with its measureless spaces remains a vast mystery to us, and those who do not find God in their immediate presence, in their heart and conscience, in the Word and the Christian community, will not find him in the universe either, even though they are equipped with the best telescopes that money can buy.

Without revelation religion sinks back into a pernicious superstition.

Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

And these two things, the love of God and Christ's satisfaction, had to and could go hand in hand because we were simultaneously the object of his love as his creatures and the object of his wrath as sinners.

Conversion is not the source of truth, but the source of certainty with regard to the truth.

The cross is the divine settlement with the divine condemnation of sin.

Christ is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian. But he is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfillment, and consummation

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father's heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place.

God is above the world, and is also above sin and all evil. He allowed it because he could expiate it. So he maintained through all centuries and among all men the longing and the capacity for redemption, and wrought that redemption himself in the fulness of time, in the midst of history, in the crucified Christ.

The cross of Christ divides history into two parts — the preparation for and the accomplishment of reconciliation;

The highest ideal for the Christian is not to make peace with the world, with science, with culture at any price, but to keep himself from the evil one.

The task of dogmatics is precisely to rationally reproduce the content of revelation that relates to the knowledge of God.

The greatest thinkers of Greece — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus — derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

Religion is inconceivable apart from revelation, and revelation cannot occur apart from the existence of a spiritual world above and behind this visible world, a spiritual world in communion with the visible world.

Where God's Word is, there is God Himself, there God's Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.

It is, moreover, of the greatest importance for every believer, particularly for the dogmatician, to know which Scriptural truths, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have been brought to universal recognition in the church of Christ. By this process, after all, the church is kept from immediately mistaking a private opinion for the truth of God.

Viewed properly, there is only one duty, that of love, which is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). And there actually is only one object of that law- namely, God. Everything else- people, angels, nature, art, and so forth-may and must be only in God and for God. The sole end of all things, ourselves, our neighbors, the state, and the like- is God's glory. Pg. 101

Beneath the head lies the heart, out of which are the issues of life.

To separate between religion and metaphysics, however often it may have been attempted, is impossible