Quotes from Herman Bavinck

In case a dogma is not based on divine authority, it is wrong to call it by that name, and it should not have a place in the faith of the church.

Life often mocks every system; it is richer and fuller than the deepest thinker in all his wisdom can imagine.

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.

He accepted the social and political conditions as they were, made no endeavor to reform them, and confined himself exclusively to setting the value which they possessed for the kingdom of heaven.

The peculiarity of the Christian religion as has been so often shown and acknowledged even by opponents, lies in the person of Christ.

The truth and value of Christianity do not depend on the fruits which it has borne for civilization and culture: it has its own independent value; it is the realization of the kingdom of God on earth;

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.

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

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.

The segregation and the election of Israel served the sole purpose of maintaining, unmixed and unadulterated, continuing and perfecting, the original revelation, which threatened to be lost so that it might again in the fullness of time be made the property of the whole of mankind.

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.