Quotes from Herman Bavinck

The truth is of more value than empirical life: Christ sacrificed his life for it.

The heaven that he won for us by his atoning death presupposes a hell from which he delivered us. The eternal life he imparted to us presupposes an eternal death from which he saved us.

it is impossible to begin investigation without assumptions, for they all are founded on ideas and canons which have their basis in the rational and moral nature of man.

Theology is about God and should reflect a doxological tone that glorifies him.

We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite, human consciousness.

Reason in this newer philosophy took its starting point with childish naivete in its own integrity and trustworthiness.

Theology has, since Kant's time, become a theology of consciousness and experience and thus loses itself in religious anthropology.

No psychology of religion can teach us what conversion is and ought to be; the Scriptures alone can tell us that.

If there is no infallible Scripture "there can exist only a subjective and purely individual notion of what belongs to Christian faith." All ways are good, if they but lead to faith – not to what is contained in faith, for this differs endlessly.

The doctrine of the divine authority of Holy Scripture constitutes an important component in the words of God that Jesus preached, and if he was mistaken on this point he was wrong at a point that is most closely tied in with the religious life and he can no longer be recognized as our highest prophet. We cannot take Jesus seriously as a teacher and reject his own teaching concerning Holy Scripture.

empirical life is rooted in an a priori datum which does not come slowly into existence by mechanical development, but is a gift of God's grace, and a fruit and result of his revelation.

Without faith in the existence, the revelation, and the knowability of God, no religion is possible.

revelation always supposes that man is able to receive impressions or thoughts or inclinations from another than this phenomenal world, and in a way other than that usually employed.

By banishing metaphysics, materialism has no longer an ethical system, knows no longer the distinction between good and evil, possesses no moral law, no duty, no virtue, and no highest good.

The church's holiness must not be sacrificed for its catholicity, and the church's catholicity may not be surrendered in favor of its holiness. For in denying either, we lose both. Both attributes by nature characterize the one Christian church.

science, which can make known only the interrelations of things, but never their origin, essence and end, will never be able to satisfy the needs of the human heart.

whoever intentionally robs himself of self-consciousness, reason, and will, extinguishes the light which God has given to man, annihilates his human freedom and independence, and degrades himself to an instrument for an alien and unknown power.

Metaphysics, the belief in the absolute as a holy power, always forms the foundation of ethics.

Language is the soul of a nation, the custodian of the goods and treasures of humankind, the bond that unites human beings, peoples, and generations, the one great tradition that unites in consciousness the world of humankind, which is one by nature.

Darwin was led to his agnostic naturalism as much by the misery which he observed in the world as by the facts which scientific investigation brought under his notice. There was too much strife and injustice in the world for him to believe in providence and a predetermined goal. A world so full of cruelty and pain he could not reconcile with the omniscience, the omnipotence, the goodness of God.

The whole man is taken into fellowship with that one true God; not only his feelings, but also his mind and will, his heart and all his affections, his soul and his body.

The doctrine of evolution thus takes the place of the old religion in the modern man.320It is no science; it does not rest on undeniable facts; it has often in the past and in the present been contradicted by the facts. But that does not matter; miracle is the dearest child of faith.

the plan of salvation in the Christian religion determines the method of Christian theology.

If there ever is to be a blessed humanity it must be preceded by a radical change in human nature.