Neo-Calvinism

A Reformed Reader’s Guide

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“You can’t like Herman Bavinck and hate Neo-Calvinism.”

 

N. Gray Sutanto

Neo-Calvinism is the Dutch Reformed renewal associated with Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. It retrieves confessional Reformed theology for the questions of modern life, including the church, culture, science, and public life.

I came to the movement through Bavinck while weighing the cautions raised by Two Kingdoms theologians. This guide can’t settle the debate for the reader; it presents the founders and their doctrines before turning to confessional critics and primary sources.

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1. What Neo-Calvinism Is, and What It Isn’t

Neo-Calvinism and New Calvinism are different movements. New Calvinism is a recent American revival centered on Calvinist soteriology. Neo-Calvinism arose earlier in the Dutch Reformed tradition and applies its confession across the whole of life.

The name itself began as an outsider’s label. It first shows up in the 1880s, coined by a reviewer trying to describe what was gathering around Kuyper: the new university, the newspaper, the party, and soon the dogmatics.¹

It is not Kuyperianism shrunk to activism, and it is not Christian Reconstruction. Reconstructionism, the theonomic program associated with a later American circle, is a distinct movement frequently confused with Kuyperian cultural engagement; I am setting it aside here rather than profiling it.² Nor is neo-Calvinism baptized politics. As I noted in reviewing Brock and Sutanto, the tradition “is not synonymous with Transformationalism, Theonomy, or Christian Nationalism.” It is a theological vision that joins confessional orthodoxy to a comprehensive view of life.

Gray Sutanto, who has done as much as anyone to define the movement for English readers, puts it plainly. “Neo-Calvinism,” he says, “refers to the tradition birthed out of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck in the Netherlands in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And they were a retrieval movement.”³ Hold onto that word, retrieval. The founders were not inventing a new theology; they were reaching back to confess the old one in a modern world that had stopped listening.

The formal version of that claim is the first of the sixteen theses Brock and Sutanto use to summarize the movement: “Neo-Calvinism is a critical reception of Reformed orthodoxy, contextualized to address the questions of modernity.”⁴ The danger the movement’s own scholars now warn against is the opposite of retrieval: neo-Calvinism reduced to a posture, the fruits without the roots, cultural confidence with the Reformed confessions quietly drained out. This guide keeps the roots in view the whole way down, because that is where the fruit comes from.

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3. Forerunners: Groen van Prinsterer and the Réveil

Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801 to 1876), a Dutch historian and statesman shaped by the Réveil, prepared the way for Kuyper. His Unbelief and Revolution (1847) argued that the French Revolution’s political upheaval grew from unbelief and the autonomy of human reason.

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4. Abraham Kuyper: The Architect

Abraham Kuyper (1837 to 1920) joined Reformed theology to institution building. He founded a newspaper, a political party, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the Doleantie church movement, later serving as Dutch prime minister. His Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology and Lectures on Calvinism gave the movement much of its public shape.

There Kuyper grounded the breadth of the movement in the lordship of Christ, in the sentence every reader of this tradition eventually meets: “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”⁵ It is a sentence about ownership, not conquest, and the difference will matter when we reach the critics.

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5. Herman Bavinck: The Theological Heart

Herman Bavinck (1854 to 1921) supplied the movement’s theological center. His four-volume Reformed Dogmatics joins confessional orthodoxy to the conviction that grace restores nature.

Grace restores nature, a religious life is woven into the very fabric of ordinary human experience.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 1.302

The covenant of grace differs from the covenant of works in method, not in its ultimate goal… Grace restores nature and takes it to its highest pinnacle.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 3.577

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6. Orthodox Yet Modern: Catholicity and the Holistic Challenge

Kuyper and Bavinck received the Reformed confessions and older scholastic theology while addressing the modern world. Bavinck developed this catholicity in an 1888 address: Christianity belongs to every age because the gospel addresses the whole of God’s creation.

The Gospel is a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person, but also for humanity, for the family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.

Herman BavinckThe Catholicity of Christianity and the Church

Engaged, or incorporated? How Bavinck used the moderns

A word on how Bavinck did this, since it is the question careful readers always raise: did he incorporate the moderns, or only engage them? The older caricature, which James Eglinton has named the “two Bavincks,” pictured an orthodox Bavinck and a modern Bavinck uneasy in one skin.⁶ Cory Brock, who devoted a book to the question, gives the better answer. Bavinck’s task, in Brock’s words, was “neither repristination nor abandonment of one’s confessionalist tradition,” but appropriating catholic dogma “to the grammars of modern conceptual frameworks.”⁷

Take Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of liberal theology and, on Brock’s reading, Bavinck’s most significant modern opponent. Bavinck did not import Schleiermacher’s system, and he was equally unwilling to wave him off; he regarded him as “deeply misunderstood,” borrowed specific tools, the grammar of feeling, absolute dependence, and immediate self-consciousness, and re-set them inside a Reformed frame. Brock calls this “appropriation by way of negation,” a qualified yes that re-grounds the borrowed idea rather than a flat refusal.⁸

Brock and Sutanto give the method its name, a “Reformed eclecticism” in which Bavinck uses classical and modern thinkers “in an eclectic yet theologically principled manner,” always subjecting modern theology to Reformed guardrails and never the reverse.⁹ Gayle Doornbos finds the same move in his doctrine of God, where “absolute, divine personality” turns out to be a creative appropriation of modern grammar from within the classical Reformed tradition.¹⁰

So the common instinct, that Bavinck engaged these men without incorporating them, is close, and worth sharpening. He did more than engage Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard; he genuinely used them, while never letting their systems set the terms. Barth is the exception, and a chronological trap: Bavinck died in 1921, before Barth’s influence had spread, so he could not have incorporated Barth at all. If anything the traffic ran the other way, with the young Barth later drawing on Bavinck’s Dogmatiek.¹¹ The rule across the board is the one Brock’s title states: orthodox, yet modern, with orthodox always the governing word.

Even the tradition’s favorite slogan carries their fingerprints. Semper reformanda, always reforming, was not the watchword of the sixteenth or seventeenth century; on Sutanto’s account it was Kuyper and Bavinck who popularized the term, and for them the way to be Reformed was to be catholic.¹²

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7. Revelation, Scripture, and the Organic Motif

Neo-Calvinism begins with God’s revelation in creation and Scripture.

The holiness of God is revealed in the moral law, implanted in man’s heart, and speaking through the conscience, and more particularly in God’s special revelation.

Louis BerkhofSystematic Theology, 74

Its organic motif describes Scripture, the church, and creation as living wholes whose unity and diversity reflect their divine Author.

On the best reading, the organic motif grows from the doctrine of the Trinity, the original unity in diversity.¹³ The Bible interpreter follows revelation’s growth rather than freezing it into a system, and the church receives Scripture the way Bavinck describes it: as a treasure to be mined and coined for use.

Scripture is a gold mine; it is the church that extracts the gold, puts its stamp on it, and converts it to general currency.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics, abridged, 29

A theologian’s confidence comes from the conviction: God has spoken. Thus, a theologian takes his or her place within the community of faith and acknowledges what a rich privilege and honor it is to work with God’s revelation in submission to Holy Scripture.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics, abridged, 10

God still speaks today; while special revelation in a sense belongs to the past, from day to day God continues in a special way to reveal himself to all who live under the gospel.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics, abridged, 81

In every moment of time beats the pulse of eternity; every point in space is filled with the omnipresence of God; the finite is supported by the infinite, all becoming is rooted in being.

Herman BavinckThe Philosophy of Revelation, 27

Those who are born of God increasingly become the children of God and bear his image and likeness, because in principle they already are his children. The rule of organic life applies to them: Become what you are!

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 4.255

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8. Grace Restores Nature: Creation and Re-creation

“Grace restores nature” means that redemption renews God’s creation instead of replacing it. The doctrine joins salvation to re-creation while keeping the kingdom of God distinct from human cultural work.

The aim of revelation is to re-create humanity after the image of God, to establish the kingdom of God on earth, to redeem the world from the power of sin, and thus to glorify the name of the Lord in all his creatures.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics, abridged, 80

That sentence is the hinge of nearly everything the critics in section sixteen will contest.¹⁴ If grace restores nature, the Christian has real business in the world, not because the world is the kingdom of God, but because the world is God’s and is being made new in Christ.

And it cuts in two directions at once. Against the older picture of grace as a second story added on top of nature, Bavinck denies that grace is a superadded gift; against the Anabaptist picture of grace as flight from a corrupt world, he denies that nature must be abandoned. Grace heals creation from the inside and lifts it higher.¹⁵

According to Scripture there will be a resurrection of the body, that is, not an entirely new creation, but a body that will be in a fundamental sense identical with the present body.

Louis BerkhofSystematic Theology, 722

The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 1.112

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9. The Image, the Fall, and the Antithesis

Humanity bears God’s image in body and soul. Sin corrupts that good creation rather than making the body or material world evil.

The entrance of sin into the world affected the whole man and made it impossible for him to function properly in his threefold capacity as prophet, priest, and king… Christ came as the ideal man and for the purpose of restoring man to his original condition.

Louis BerkhofManual of Christian Doctrine, 200

The antithesis names the spiritual division between belief and unbelief. Common grace keeps that division from becoming a denial of the unbeliever’s dignity or genuine gifts.

The normal and the abnormal are two absolutely differing starting-points, which have nothing in common in their origin. Parallel lines never intersect.

Abraham KuyperLectures on Calvinism, 177

Kuyper drew the practical conclusion that runs through all his thought: there are finally two kinds of people, the regenerate and the unregenerate, and therefore two kinds of science, each proceeding from its own first principles.¹⁶

That doctrine met its hardest historical test in the twentieth century, and the record deserves to be told straight. Kuyper wrote lines about race that no reader should defend, and Richard Mouw and Vincent Bacote have called Kuyperians to own that inheritance honestly rather than explain it away.¹⁷

Bavinck saw the danger earlier than almost anyone. In the 1908 Stone Lectures he warned of an “exaggerated, dangerous, and belligerent” chauvinism fed by the new race consciousness, and he named where it was heading: “Deutschtum, for example, is placed on a level with Christendom, and Jesus is naturalized into an Aryan in race.”¹⁸

And when pillarization was later bent toward apartheid in South Africa, the bend did not come from the theology. Some Free University doctoral students defended the system with neo-Calvinist vocabulary; it was Bavinck’s own student, B. B. Keet of Stellenbosch, who became one of apartheid’s earliest Afrikaner critics, answering its theological defenses, as George Harinck has shown, with arguments drawn almost line for line from Bavinck.¹⁹

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10. Common Grace and the Gospel

Common grace is God’s non-saving goodness to the fallen world. It restrains sin and preserves creation while leaving salvation entirely to special grace in Christ.

They define the era and the gift in one stroke: common grace marks the time between the curse and Christ’s return, during which God gives “moral, epistemic, and natural goods,” and they gloss it with Bavinck’s own words, that grace does not remain outside or above or beside nature but rather permeates and wholly renews it.²⁰

Two errors crouch on either side of the doctrine. Press the antithesis until common grace disappears, and the Christian retreats from a world God still upholds. Press common grace until the antithesis disappears, and the church forgets that it has a gospel to preach. Bavinck holds both, claiming that the Reformed have been “second to none in their appreciation of everything good and beautiful that God has given to sinful men,”²¹ without softening the absolute claim of Christ for a moment. This is the doctrine the first critics in section sixteen reject outright, and the doctrine the rest of the tradition has tried hard to keep in balance.

The doctrine got its fullest development from Kuyper, whose three-volume De Gemeene Gratie (Common Grace, 1902 to 1905) began, as much of his work did, as a long run of articles in his weekly church paper De Heraut before it became a book.²²

Its engine is a distinction Bavinck states crisply. Common grace and special grace are not two strengths of one substance; saving faith is the fruit of the second alone.

The Reformation was unanimous in confessing that saving faith is a gift of God. It was not the product of natural human powers, nor of common grace, but of the special grace of the Holy Spirit; it was an activity of the new born-again person and therefore also sufficient for salvation.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 1.572

Kuyper gave common grace a threefold work, and the structure is worth keeping straight. It restrains sin from running to its full destructive length, it preserves the creation and its ordinances, and it positively enables fallen humanity to draw out the latent goods of the created world in science, art, and craft. The first two operations are conserving; the third is productive, and it is the one that makes a shared human culture possible at all.²³

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11. Sphere Sovereignty and the Cultural Mandate

Sphere sovereignty teaches that the family, church, state, school, and other callings receive their proper authority from Christ. Joined to the cultural mandate, it limits human power and directs cultural work toward God’s creational purposes.

Brock and Sutanto state it cleanly, and they put the doctrine’s point where Kuyper put it, on the limiting of human power: “God has granted an aspect of authority and a relative freedom to each domain of life, particularly the family, state, church, and culture… The division of the spheres and the separation of authorities is God’s work of preventing any human from possessing absolute power.”²⁴

And Neo-Calvinism has its own brakes against triumphalism. Bavinck, of all people, warns that the New Testament does not recommend virtues that lead believers to conquer the world but rather patiently to endure its enmity.²⁵ Cultural calling and cruciform patience are meant to be held together; whether neo-Calvinism has always managed it is exactly the question section sixteen takes up.

Before all else, Christ came to earth to seek and to save the lost. He did not act as a social reformer, as a political leader of the people, as an artist or a philosopher. But Savior was his name and his office.

Herman BavinckThe Sacrifice of Praise, 9

Kuyper did not merely theorize sphere sovereignty; he built a monument to it. The Free University of Amsterdam, founded in 1880, was “free” by design, free from control by both church and state, and was funded largely by ordinary Reformed believers, the kleine luyden, so that Christian scholarship could answer to Christ within its own sphere.²⁶

Nowhere in the New Testament is there a ray of hope that the church of Christ will again come to power and dominion on earth. The most it may look for is that, under kings and all who are in high positions, it may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 4.674

Bavinck did not keep this at the level of theory. He entered public life himself, taking a seat in the Dutch Senate from 1911, a working dogmatician who practiced the engaged yet patient citizenship he commended.²⁷

Kuyper’s Christian state, in other words, was not a church with an army. Under pillarization it meant a freer society than the secular alternative: a Hindu school beside a Muslim school beside a Christian school, every one of them publicly funded, because a state that calls the secular public and faith private has already picked a worldview and established it.²⁸

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12. The Church as Organism and Institute

Bavinck distinguished the church as institute from the church as organism. The institute carries out the ministry of Word, sacrament, and discipline; the organism describes believers serving Christ throughout ordinary life.

From the very beginning, the church appears on the scene in a dual form. It is a gathering of the people of God in a passive as well as an active sense; it is simultaneously a gathered community and the mother of believers or, in other words, an organism and an institution.

Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics 4.330

The Word of God is in very fact, to use the expression of Calvin, the soul of the church.

Herman BavinckThe Wonderful Works of God, 522

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13. The Geesink Question and the Unpublished Reformed Ethics

Bavinck wrote an extensive Reformed Ethics but never published it. The manuscript was rediscovered by Dirk van Keulen in 2008. Willem Geesink held the ethics chair at the Free University, which may help explain Bavinck’s decision, but the evidence doesn’t settle the question.

Why Bavinck did not publish a Reformed ethics after his move to Amsterdam is a question I cannot answer. We can only guess. One reason could be that Geesink was responsible for ethics at the Free University.

Dirk van KeulenThe Bavinck Review 1 (2010): 55

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14. The Translation Story

English readers received Bavinck’s complete Reformed Dogmatics only between 2003 and 2008, followed later by Christian Worldview and Christianity and Science. Kuyper’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology fared worse: only its middle volume appeared in English. This delayed access shaped the movement’s Anglophone reception.

The story is not finished. Asked at the 2026 Kuyper Conference what remains untranslated, Sutanto ran down the list: the essay “Christian or Neutral Statecraft”; seventy pages of synodical advice on revising Belgic Confession Article 36; the 250-page Pedagogical Principles, which a team from Reformed Theological Seminary has in hand; and most of Women in Contemporary Society, of which only the chapter arguing for women’s suffrage has appeared in English, in The Essential Herman Bavinck.²⁹

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15. The Amsterdam School and Its Critics

The generation after Kuyper and Bavinck developed the movement in new directions. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven built reformational philosophy, while Berkouwer revised parts of the older synthesis and later taught R. C. Sproul. The dispute between Dooyeweerd and Cornelius Van Til exposed lasting differences between the Amsterdam and Westminster streams.

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16. The Confessional Critique, Fairly Weighed

Confessional Reformed critics have challenged neo-Calvinism from within the tradition. The disputes center on common grace and the relation of cultural work to Christ’s kingdom, especially in Two Kingdoms theology.

The common-grace objection

Herman Hoeksema and the Protestant Reformed churches rejected common grace, fearing that divine favor toward the reprobate weakens total depravity and the antithesis. The 1924 Synod of Kalamazoo adopted the Three Points of Common Grace, and the resulting conflict produced a new denomination.

The Two Kingdoms challenge

David VanDrunen offers the leading contemporary Two Kingdoms critique. He argues that older Reformed theology distinguishes Christ’s providential rule of the common kingdom from His redemptive rule of the church.

First, historically. VanDrunen contends the two kingdoms doctrine is no Lutheran import but standard Reformed fare, explicit in Calvin and in Turretin. To cast Kuyper as its great opponent is, he says, a significant historical error,³⁰ because Kuyper’s own common grace rests on the familiar distinction between Christ as mediator of creation and Christ as mediator of redemption.

Calvin’s distinction between two governments provides part of VanDrunen’s historical case.

Whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct.

John CalvinInstitutes 4.20.1 (Battles)

Second, biblically. VanDrunen grounds the common kingdom in the Noahic covenant of Genesis 9, a covenant of preservation rather than redemption, and the redemptive kingdom in the Abrahamic covenant fulfilled in Christ. “There is one king, the Lord Jesus Christ, but his kingship is twofold,”³¹ and so the Christian carries a twofold citizenship, a member of Christ’s church and a sojourner laboring in the common realm. Third, practically, he credits neo-Calvinism with inspiring “a great many Reformed Christians… to take interest in the whole of God’s created world,” while warning that it risks an overemphasis on cultural accomplishment at the expense of remembering that this world is passing away.

Klaas Schilder had pressed a related worry a century earlier, doubting that what merely enables culture should be called grace at all. He broke with Kuyper by refusing to ground culture in common grace, making Christ, rather than common grace, “the key and clue to culture.” In Christ and Culture he drew the difference in a memorable picture: believer and unbeliever quarry the same marble, the one to build a cathedral, the other a dance hall.³²

An in-house argument, not a war

Look at who is doing the arguing. VanDrunen wrote for a Kuyperian journal, and a Dordt theologian, Jason Lief, answered him in the same pages, conceding more than the heat of the debate would lead you to expect. VanDrunen, he allows, makes a strong argument,³³ and Calvin explicitly and Kuyper implicitly use two-kingdoms language. Where Lief finally parts ways is over method, not a single text: he reads VanDrunen’s covenant theology as resting on a too-literal account of Genesis and a natural law that hardens contingent arrangements into fixed norms. The fault line is hermeneutical before it is political.

A related charge: did neo-Calvinism breed Reconstruction?

I have also heard some Two Kingdoms advocates press a sharper, genealogical charge: that the transformationist impulse, once it blurs the line between the common and the redemptive kingdom, slides toward dominion theology, so that neo-Calvinism, Bavinck included, planted the seeds of Christian Reconstruction and theonomy.³⁴ It deserves a straight answer rather than a flinch, and on the evidence it overreaches.

Two things keep it from sticking, and I want to be careful not to claim more than the record allows. There is a real line from Dutch Reformed thought to R. J. Rushdoony’s Reconstruction; it just doesn’t run through Bavinck. It runs through Kuyper’s “all of life” cultural vision and the later American presuppositionalists, who are the actual conduit, and Bavinck is not a meaningful source for that movement.³⁵ And theonomy proper, the claim that the civil law of Moses binds the modern state, is a departure from the neo-Calvinist position rather than its fruit. Kuyper himself called taking Scripture as a complete legal code for the state “the epitome of absurdity.”³⁶ Shared vocabulary, Christ’s lordship over all of life and the cultural mandate, is not the same as a shared program; the Reconstructionists added a biblical-law claim the Dutch founders did not hold. The charge lands on a caricature, not on Bavinck.

Weighing it

The confessional record supports a non-saving divine goodness while leaving real questions about its formulation. The Two Kingdoms dispute remains open among serious Reformed theologians. Both sides confess Christ’s lordship and distinguish church from state. Neither believes cultural labor brings the age to come.

Lief ends his own reply hoping the two camps can, in the spirit of Luther, one day sit down to drink beer together.³⁷ That is the right spirit for an argument among brothers.

One more dispute deserves its own paragraph, because you will meet it in the wild. Two Kingdoms critics sometimes cite Richard Mouw as proof that neo-Calvinism teaches our cultural achievements will build the new creation. That is not what Mouw wrote. In When the Kings Come Marching In, his little book on Isaiah 60, the Holy City descends from heaven as God’s gift, and the wealth of the nations enters it only through a purifying final judgment; nobody’s coffee shop constructs the eschaton.³⁸

The serious question David VanDrunen presses is narrower and better: whether “redeeming culture” language overreaches, and whether Isaiah’s tribute imagery really means our artifacts carry over.³⁹

Here the reader should know what Bavinck himself taught. His amillennialism rules out any gradual kingdom-building; the kingdom arrives cataclysmically at the return of Christ. But annihilation is another matter. Redemption, Bavinck wrote, “is never a second, brand-new creation but a re-creation of the existing world. God’s honor consists precisely in the fact that he redeems and renews the same humanity, the same world, the same heaven, and the same earth that have been corrupted and polluted by sin.” Of the fire of the last day he said what Mouw says of the judgment on culture: it “burns, cleanses, purifies, but does not destroy.” Continuity of a renewed creation is not transformationalism, and confusing the two is how both sides end up quoting Bavinck against Bavinck.⁴⁰

There is a name for the posture that makes such a discussion possible, and the Grace in Common hosts use it often. They describe their table as a place of “intellectual hospitality, where we can discuss each other’s ideas with clarity and charity,” and they make a point of welcoming guests who are not “card-carrying neo-Calvinists” and need not agree with them.⁴¹ I have come to love that outlook, and I try to practice it in my own small corner. Call it theological hospitality: it does not pretend the differences are small, and it does not trim a conviction to keep the peace; it simply treats the person across the table as a brother to be understood before he is an opponent to be answered.

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17. The Renaissance and the Global Movement

The present recovery has produced new biographies, translations, handbooks, and the Grace in Common podcast. Its center is increasingly international, with conferences and readers far beyond Europe and North America.

The movement has also gone worldwide. The annual Abraham Kuyper Conference meets at Calvin University; the Kuyper Prize went to George Harinck in 2026; and the first Global Gathering in Neo-Calvinism met in São Paulo in 2025, with further gatherings planned for Asia and Africa. There are Kuyper readers now in Buenos Aires, Seoul, and beyond. You can even listen in: this spring The Westminster Podcast recorded live from the conference floor, where Sutanto put it as plainly as it can be put: neo-Calvinism “is not synonymous with transformationalism, nor is it synonymous with theonomy.”⁴²

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18. Key Figures at a Glance

These figures mark the movement’s principal lines of development.

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19. A Reader’s Path: Where to Start

If you are new to all of this, do not start with the three-volume Dutch encyclopedia. Start here. For an accessible on-ramp, read Brock and Sutanto’s Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction. For Kuyper in his own voice, read Lectures on Calvinism, now available in full in our Reformed Dogmatika reading edition; it is short and free online. Then climb toward Bavinck himself: The Wonderful Works of God or the one-volume abridged Reformed Dogmatics before the full four volumes, and the Doornbos and Sutanto reader, The Essential Herman Bavinck, alongside them.

Bavinck’s own 1894 verdict on the movement, The Future of Calvinism, is on the site as well. Read the critics too. David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms will sharpen you whether or not it persuades you, and the Pro Rege exchange with Jason Lief shows the argument conducted as it should be. If you want the founders unmediated, the Neo-Calvinism Research Institute has put the Dutch sources online for free, and Steve Bishop’s “On Kuyper” bibliography will keep you busy for years.

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20. A Closing Word

Neo-Calvinism is a confessional Reformed retrieval associated with Kuyper and Bavinck. Its claims should be tested by Scripture and the Reformed confessions, with the primary sources gathered in this guide close at hand.

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A Reading Ladder

A reading ladder, from the on-ramp to the founders to the loyal opposition. Items marked free are open access online.

• Start here: Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham, 2022).
• Kuyper in his own voice: Lectures on Calvinism, now in a new Reformed Dogmatika reading edition (also Eerdmans in print; free at CCEL).
• A primary-source reader: Gayle Doornbos and N. Gray Sutanto, The Essential Herman Bavinck (Baker Academic).
• The heart of it: Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Baker Academic, 2003 to 2008).
• The lives: James Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic, 2020); and James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Eerdmans, 2013).
• On-ramps to Kuyper: Richard Mouw, Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Eerdmans, 2011); and Craig Bartholomew, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition (IVP, 2017).
• The loyal opposition: David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Crossway, 2010).
• The Liberated voice: Klaas Schilder in The Klaas Schilder Reader (Lexham, 2022), an annotated anthology; and, on his ecclesiology, Marinus de Jong, A Church for a Secular World (Brill, 2025).
• Free and excellent: Gayle Doornbos, “Bavinck’s Doctrine of God: Absolute, Divine Personality,” Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies 6.2 (2021).
• The Kuyper gold mine: Steve Bishop’s “On Kuyper: A Bibliography” and the All of Life Redeemed archive (allofliferedeemed.co.uk).
• The Dutch originals, free: the Neo-Calvinism Research Institute Sources project (sources.neocalvinism.org) and the open-access journal Neocalviniana.
• Listen in: “Confessional Theology and the Neo-Calvinist Vision,” Sutanto on The Westminster Podcast, recorded live at the 2026 Kuyper Conference (free, 33 minutes).

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Appendix: The Sixteen Theses

Reproduced verbatim from N. Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock, adapted from Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham, 2022).

1. Neo-Calvinism is a critical reception of Reformed orthodoxy, contextualized to address the questions of modernity.
2. Christianity can challenge, subvert, and fulfill the cultures and philosophical systems of every age.
3. Neo-Calvinism rejects theological conservatism and progressivism. Instead, it applies historic creedal and confessional theology to the concerns of the contemporary world.
4. The triune God created the world and all creatures as a living unity in diversity, with a definite purpose and goal.
5. “Organism” and “organic unity” are fitting terms to describe creation’s many unities in diversities, as it analogically reflects the triune God.
6. The image of God is the pinnacle of creation’s organic shape, referring to humanity collectively, male and female, and the self as a unity.
7. The problem with the world is not ontological but ethical—sin has corrupted much (in fact, everything).
8. Out of the sinful mass of the organism of humanity under Adam, God elects to regenerate individuals into a new, sanctified organic humanity under Christ, thus asserting a covenantal antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
9. By the Spirit’s work in common grace, God restrains sin and gifts fallen humanity with moral, epistemic, and life-giving goods to enjoy, for the sake of redemption in Christ.
10. God has revealed himself to every person—both objectively and subjectively. This implanted affection and knowledge of God isn’t a human determination as the product of reason (or natural theology) but God’s general revelation by the Holy Spirit.
11. The Bible is God’s revelation of himself, as the Spirit inspires a diversity of human authors to write all that God intends to communicate. The Bible serves as the ultimate norm and agent of unity, though not the sole source, for the fields of knowledge.
12. The triune God and his revelation matter for the entire human life because every person always stands before the face of God.
13. Wisdom points us to a Christian worldview: Christian theology should discipline the insights of both philosophy and the various sciences. Christians should conform their entire selves to the lordship of Christ.
14. Re-creation happens by divine agency alone and brings creation to its original goal: that God would make his dwelling place with humankind, in a consummated and sanctified cosmos.
15. Jesus Christ’s messianic dominion as King of God’s kingdom is the aim of God’s work in history and the purpose of creaturely redemption.
16. The visible church exists as an institute and an organism: as an institute to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments and as an organism of individuals bound together by the Spirit to witness to new creation.

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Footnotes

1. Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham Press, 2022); “Neo-Calvinism, with Cory Brock and Gray Sutanto,” Mere Fidelity, March 30, 2023. ↩︎
2. Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Mark Vander Hart, “Abraham Kuyper and the Theonomy Debate,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 2, no. 1 (1986): 61-77. ↩
3. N. Gray Sutanto, “What is Neo-Calvinism?” (Reformed Theological Seminary, 10 May 2023). ↩
4. Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Thesis 1 of “The 16 Theses of Neo-Calvinism,” in Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022). ↩
5. Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty” (inaugural address at the Free University of Amsterdam, 1880), in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). This is the 1880 address, not Lectures on Calvinism. ↩
6. James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: T&T Clark, 2012), dismantles the “two Bavincks” dualism; Cory Brock extends that correction to Bavinck’s method. ↩
7. Cory C. Brock, Orthodox yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020); the quoted phrases are from Brock’s University of Edinburgh dissertation of the same title (2018), abstract. ↩
8. Brock, Orthodox yet Modern; the dissertation abstract notes that Bavinck “did not demonize Schleiermacher” but adopted his concepts of “feeling,” “absolute dependence,” and “immediate self-consciousness” to complete his own logic, “within the freeing confines of his orthodox, Dutch confessionalist heritage.” ↩
9. Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Eclecticism: On Catholicity, Consciousness and Theological Epistemology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 3 (2017): 310-37. ↩
10. Gayle Doornbos, “Bavinck’s Doctrine of God: Absolute, Divine Personality,” Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies 6.2 (2021), free online. ↩
11. On Barth’s later use of Bavinck, see John Vissers, “Karl Barth and Herman Bavinck” (Bavinck Institute, 2016); and Ximian Xu, “Herman Bavinck’s ‘Yes’ and Karl Barth’s ‘No,’” Modern Theology 35 (2019). Bavinck’s engagement with Kierkegaard appears among the modern interlocutors he cites across the Reformed Dogmatics. ↩
12. N. Gray Sutanto, “Confessional Theology and the Neo-Calvinist Vision,” interview on The Westminster Podcast, recorded live at the Abraham Kuyper Conference, Calvin University (Westminster Theological Seminary, April 6, 2026), 33 min. Sutanto here draws on Robert (Bob) Covolo’s research into the history of semper reformanda. ↩︎
13. James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism (T&T Clark, 2012); Gayle Doornbos, “Bavinck’s Doctrine of God: Absolute, Divine Personality,” Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies 6.2 (2021). For a competing interpretation, see Bruce Pass, “Trinity or German Idealism?,” Scottish Journal of Theology 76.1 (2023). ↩
14. Herman Bavinck, Common Grace (1888), as quoted in Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022), 183. ↩
15. On “grace restores nature” as the organizing motif of Bavinck’s thought, see Jan Veenhof, Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck (Sioux Center: Dordt College Press, 2006), and James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism (London: T&T Clark, 2012). ↩
16. Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, trans. J. Hendrik De Vries (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 154: “We speak none too emphatically, therefore, when we speak of two kinds of people… and of two kinds of science.” The theme also runs through the Stone Lectures (Lectures on Calvinism, Lecture IV). ↩
17. David Robinson and Jeff Liou, “Our Racist Inheritance: A Conversation Kuyperians Need to Have,” Comment, May 14, 2015; Vincent Bacote’s chapter in Calvinism for a Secular Age, ed. Jessica R. Joustra and Robert J. Joustra (IVP Academic, 2022). ↩︎
18. Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908-1909 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), on race-glorification placing Deutschtum on a level with Christendom, with Jesus recast as an Aryan. ↩︎
19. George Harinck, “Wipe Out Lines of Division (Not Distinctions): Bennie Keet, Neo-Calvinism and the Struggle against Apartheid,” Journal of Reformed Theology 11, no. 1-2 (2017): 81-98. ↩︎
20. Bavinck, quoted in Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham, 2022), 249. ↩
21. Herman Bavinck, Common Grace (De algemeene genade, 1894), as translated and quoted in Cornelius Van Til, “Common Grace,” Westminster Theological Journal 8, no. 1 (1945): 51-52 (Van Til citing p. 29 of Bavinck’s pamphlet). ↩
22. James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); the Common Grace volumes are now available in English in Kuyper’s Collected Works in Public Theology (Lexham). ↩
23. On the threefold structure of Kuyper’s common grace, see Kuyper, Common Grace (Lexham), and Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). ↩
24. Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham, 2022), 269, 271. ↩
25. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 664. ↩
26. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. The name Vrije Universiteit, “Free University,” signals its independence from both state and church control. ↩
27. James Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020). ↩
28. N. Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock, interview on Mere Fidelity, “Neo-Calvinism, with Cory Brock and Gray Sutanto,” March 30, 2023. The pillarization discussion, with the state-funded Hindu, Muslim, and Christian schools, comes in Sutanto’s answer on the Dutch political context. ↩︎
29. Sutanto, “Confessional Theology and the Neo-Calvinist Vision” (see note 12), on the untranslated Bavinck corpus. ↩︎
30. David VanDrunen, “Two Kingdoms and Reformed Christianity: Why Recovering an Old Paradigm is Historically Sound, Biblically Grounded, and Practically Useful,” Pro Rege 40, no. 3 (March 2012): 33. ↩
31. VanDrunen, “Two Kingdoms and Reformed Christianity,” 35. ↩
32. Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, 142, quoted in Westminster Theological Journal 23:89. For the marble-quarry image: Schilder, Christ and Culture, §20, 110 (2015 English translation), also rendered by Jochem Douma in The Outlook (1990). Source identified by Marinus de Jong. See also The Klaas Schilder Reader (2022) and de Jong, A Church for a Secular World (2025). ↩
33. Jason Lief, “Two Kingdoms Perspective and Theological Method: Why I Still Disagree with David Van Drunen,” Pro Rege 41, no. 1 (September 2012): 1-5, here at 2-3. ↩
34. This genealogical worry travels alongside the broader Two Kingdoms critique of transformationism; for that critique see David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010). I report the charge as one I have encountered in Two Kingdoms circles, not as the settled claim of any single author. ↩
35. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction (2015). ↩
36. Kuyper, Our Program, discussed in Vander Hart, “Abraham Kuyper and the Theonomy Debate,” 61-77. Compare Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics 4:664, quoted in section 11. ↩
37. Lief, “Two Kingdoms Perspective and Theological Method,” 5. ↩︎
38. Richard J. Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 30, on the ships of Tarshish: “It is not, then, the ships as such that will be destroyed; it is their former function that will perish.” The judgment purifies rather than annihilates, and the city itself comes down from God. ↩︎
39. VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (see note 34), against the idea that Christians “redeem” culture and that godly cultural products will be incorporated into the new creation. ↩︎
40. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics 4:717 (see note 25). On the honor and glory of the nations entering the renewed city (Revelation 21:24-26), see 4:715-20. ↩︎
41. Grace in Common, “The State of Neo-Calvinism in 2026,” opening remarks. The hosts describe the podcast as “a place of intellectual hospitality, where we can discuss each other’s ideas with clarity and charity.” ↩
42. Sutanto, “Confessional Theology and the Neo-Calvinist Vision” (see note 12). ↩︎