Dr. James Eglinton speaks about the life and thought of Herman Bavinck. Eglinton has written a superb biography of Bavinck that has been published by Baker Academic. Bavinck and other Dutch people of his era were accustomed to chronicling their lives. Herman Bavinck’s father wrote an autobiography. Herman wrote in journals. These became primary sources for James Eglinton as he wrote a critical biography of Bavinck.

The Bavinck family faced questions about their place in society. Where does an orthodox Calvinist fit in modern society? These questions animated their lives—particularly as they related to monarchical rule and the relationship of the church to the state. In sum, Eglinton describes Herman Bavinck’s life as characterized by two things: conservative Calvinist orthodoxy and active participation in modern society. For Bavinck, these two were not mutually exclusive. He was a Calvinist who was simultaneously a man of his own day.

Participants: Camden Bucey, James Eglinton, Jim Cassidy

James Eglinton, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, and Cory Brock speak about Herman Bavinck’s book, Christian Worldview. Sutanto, Eglinton, and Brock together have translated and edited this work and Crossway has brought it to print for the first time in English.

In the book, Herman Bavinck deals with pastoral concerns that arose within a culture that exchanged modernistic certainty for an appreciation of the unrecognizable and unknowable. Apart from the triune God revealed in Scripture, the culture was grasping for meaning.

Christian Worldview marks a new phase in his theological development. He spent the 1880s and 90s in Kampen wherein his main dialogue partners were liberal Protestants or materialist atheists. In 1900, two years before Bavinck moved to the Free University in Amsterdam, Friedrich Nietzsche died and something of a cult of his ideas developed in the Netherlands. Bavinck sought to address these new theological concerns. He developed a wholistic vision of all things and a wholistic way of living. He situated science and wisdom under a broader category of “worldview.”

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is a teaching elder at Covenant City Church in Jakarta, Indonesia, and an adjunct faculty member at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of God and Knowledge: Herman Bavinck’s Theological Epistemology.

James Eglinton is the Meldrum Lecturer in Reformed Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Trinity and Organism, Herman Bavinck on Preaching and Preachers and Bavinck: A Critical Biography (forthcoming from Baker Academic).

Cory C. Brock serves as minister of young adults and college at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and is an adjunct professor of theology at Belhaven University.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Cory Brock, James Eglinton, Jim Cassidy, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto