Quotes from Herman Bavinck

conversion is a necessary and moral duty for every man.

Evolution is dismissive of the eternity of moral duty and moral laws.

conversion means a religious and moral change in man, by which he gives up his sinful ways and learns to know, love, and serve with his whole heart the true God who has revealed himself in Christ;

God does not say that He will be our God if we do this or that thing. But He says that He will put enmity, that He will be our God, and that in Christ He will grant us all things. The covenant of grace can throughout the centuries remain the same because it depends entirely upon God and because God is the Immutable One and the Faithful One.

Evolution is a great word but it turns its back on difficulties and sums up a rich and complicated reality under a vague formula.

In infant baptism it was confessed that conversion and regeneration differ, and conversion is ordinarily a coming to consciousness of that new life which has long before been planted in the heart.

as the pure knowledge of God disappears, nature too in its true character is disowned, and either exalted into the sphere of the Godhead or degraded to the sphere of a demoniacal power.

262The Gospel is so rich, and the salvation purchased by Christ contains so many and diverse benefits, that the most varied needs of men are satisfied by it, and the richest powers of human nature are brought to development.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.

Thus the true, the good and the beautiful which ethical culture seeks can only come to perfection when the absolute good is at the same time the almighty, divine will, which not only prescribes the good in the moral law, but also works it effectually in man himself. The heteronomy of law and the autonomy of man are reconciled only by this theonomy.

everything we value in this life is inseparably connected with the future.

religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth;

All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.

faith, which forms its positive side is at the same time cognitio and fiducia, a trustful knowledge and a knowing trust.

either humanity, with all its culture, is a means for the unconscious, unreasonable, and purposeless world-power, or it is a means for the glorifying of God.

Ethical culture must be a philosophy of revelation or it cannot exist.

God makes everything beautiful in His time, He makes everything happen at the right moment, at the moment He has fixed for it, so that history in its entirety and in its parts corresponds to the counsel of God and exhibits the glory of that counsel.

the subduing of the earth, that is, the whole of culture, is given to him, and can be given to him only because he is created after God's image; man can be ruler of the earth only because and in so far as he is a servant, a son of God.

Revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike.

173Augustine speaks of a Christianity which has existed since the beginning of the human race,

reason was cast down from this exalted pedestal by the philosophy of Kant, by the theology of Schleiermacher and with the rise of the Romantic school.

Culture in the broadest sense includes all the labor which human power expends on nature.

this nature is twofold; it includes not only the whole visible world of phenomena which is outside man, but also, in a wider sense, man himself; not his body alone, but his soul also.