I agree with the commentator who referred to Bavinck. I do not think Dr. Dennison has an ally in him (see Renewal of Creation, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4, 715-730). It seems Dr. Dennison is unwilling to highlight any continuity between this world and the world to come. The first thing in a parade of thoughts is the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the sown seed raised imperishable. As Doug Kelly says, there are atoms in this world that make it to the world that comes . . . and all of this soli Deo gloria.

I also wonder how Greg Beale would interact with him.

Thank you, Eddie

Here is a link to a PDF copy of Heavenly Mindedness (https://www.scribd.com/mobile/document/234125336/Heavenly-Mindedness)

There are minor typos, by the way. If you want to read more, this sermon comes from Vos’s Grace and Glory, a series of sermons from his time at Princeton.

Camden,

I want to make it clear that I appreciate a lot of what you guys do and regularly listen to all the podcasts. This episode was just especially disappointing to me. As a guy is currently working on a PhD interacting Bavinck and Dutch neo-Calvinism, I thought it was a rather uncharitable reading of the entire movement. That being said, depending on how one is defining transformationalism, I can see some of the same issues of which Dr. Dennison spoke.

Thanks for all your work, Camden. I appreciate what you guys are doing. I would highly recommend getting someone like James Eglinton on your program in the near future to discuss Dutch neo-Calvinism. I think it would be a good balance to what was put out this week.

Cameron,

Thanks for the thoughtful remarks. For additional critical interaction, I would encourage people to listen to the twelve-part series of debates I linked to in the description above. That being said, I’d love to interact with current scholarship in future episodes.

Van Prinsterer, Unbelief & Revolution:
http://www.reformationalpublishingproject.com/pdf_books/Scanned_Books_PDF/UnbeliefinReligionandPoliticsUnbeliefandRevolutionLectures_VIII_IX.pdf

I also see parallels to neo-K in the development and influence of cultural Marxism’s ‘Long march’ across the institutions (Fabianism, the Frankfurt school, i.e. Marcuse, Gramchi, etc.) For example,
https://youtu.be/G8pPbrbJJQs, https://youtu.be/gIdBuK7_g3M
Id love to hear more on this subject.

First, I wonder if words like ‘neo-Calvinism’ and ‘Transformationalism’ ever were fully defined. Throughout the podcast they seemed to be used interchangeable as if they are synonymous. I am not convinced that they are. I see some of the concerns Dr. Dennison has with transformationalism (whatever that is). Nevertheless, I am not convinced that ‘transformationalism’ and ‘neo-Calvinism’ are the same thing. At the very least, it could be argued that neo-Calvinism could be defined as a particular period of time that ends in the 1920 with the deaths of Bavinck and Kuyper? If this is the case, then there are people who can have neo-Calvinistic sympathies, but they themselves are not neo-Calvinists. If they are not neo-Calvinists, then neo-Calvinism and transformationalism are not synonymous. Terms need to be defined better when dealing with slippery language like ‘neo-Calvinism’ and ‘transformationalism’. The failure to better define terms caused the flattening of the entire conversation.

Second, the podcast is discussing Dutch neo-Calvinism, yet there did not seem to be any substantial interaction with Bavinck or Kuyper. At the very least the question of an exclusively or even primarily ‘horizontal eschatology’ in neo-Calvinism seems questionable at best and patently false at worst. A cursory glance at Bavinck’s last volume of Reformed Dogmatics clearly lays that out. He does not see his eschatology as solely a repristination of the Edenic state. In fact, he makes the point that Eden was never supposed to be a terminal state for Adam, but it was a probationary period. Upon perfect obedience Adam would obtain his final reward which would be better than Eden. Reviewing current at the current Bavinck scholarship (i.e. Brian Mattson’s – Restore to Our Destiny) lays this out pretty clearly.

Third, I am unsure who exactly these ‘neo-Calvinists’ are that Dr. Dennison was discussing. He repeated talks about things that the ‘neo-Calvinists’ are saying, yet he does not tell us who they are. If I am curious about the accuracy of the view that is being described, how can I do my own research on this? What if I disagree with the label ‘neo-Calvinist’ for a certain source, how would I know? It seems like a strawman is being built only to knock it down. If this teaching is so dangerous (possibly the heresy of the 21st century?), why not tell the listener who the people are that are being cited? It seems disingenuous to do it any other way.

Fourth, so much current scholarship is being done on Dutch neo-Calvinism. Why pick up an article that was writing 18 years ago? It seems that you could have talked to any number of neo-Calvinist scholars as guests. Some of which you have already had on at least once. I think of Gray Sutanto or Cory Brock. James Eglinton has a forthcoming book on the topic of neo-Calvinism that will be published with Brill. There are any number of neo-Calvinist scholars readily available, many of whom are sympathetic to Reformed Forum’s particular doctrinal perspective, why not bring them on? At the very least, you could have had someone on that would critically engage with Dr. Dennison in this conversation. It seems like an opportunity missed.

In the end, I appreciate a lot of what Reformed Forum has done and is doing. I think this conversation is needed, but I wonder how helpful it actually was. Hopefully in the future Reformed Forum will pick up this conversation again, and address some of the issues that have been raised.

I have one major concern, though. I don’t know if Dennison intends this, but he seems to imply that Kuyper rejected a transcendental view of heaven, and falls on the side of Plantinga (or Mouw, for that matter), with their emphasis on a “mended creation”, with a post-millennial kind of optimism. Perhaps one could find some passages in Kuyper that seem to confirm this, but overall I don’t think it reflects Kuyper’s spirituality. One must make a distinction between
– Kuyper and his later heirs
– Dutch Kuyperians and American Kuyperians
– Kuyper the theologian and Kuyper the social “prophet”.

This is not to deny that Kuyper (especially in his later period) had an excessive optimism about cultural development, about “Calvinism” as the new socio-cultural paradigm, and at times about the extent of common grace. On this point he was criticized by the next generation theologians, such as Hoeksema and Schilder (each, in their own way, very much Kuyperian in many respects).