Book Review: The Essential Herman Bavinck

I am happy to announce that the Bavinck revival shows no sign of slowing. In the last two decades we’ve been blessed with James Eglinton’s landmark critical biography (2020), a fresh translation of the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics (2003-2008), and a steady stream of secondary studies (I reviewed one of them, Brock and Sutanto’s Neo-Calvinism (2022), here at Reformed Dogmatika).

Thankfully, access to Bavinck is no longer a problem. But there is now so much available that a newcomer can hardly tell where to begin.

Gayle E. Doornbos and N. Gray Sutanto’s The Essential Herman Bavinck: A Reader and Commentary (Baker Academic, 2026) is built to solve exactly that problem. It is the perfect gateway into the world of Herman Bavinck.

What the Book Is

The editors state their aim plainly. The volume “collects, presents, and introduces some of the most important texts from the theologian Herman Bavinck.”¹

N. Gray Sutanto teaches systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary and co-wrote the fine Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction; Gayle E. Doornbos is associate professor of theology at Dordt University and a serious scholar of Bavinck and the neo-Calvinist tradition. Sutanto also co-hosts the popular Grace in Common podcast with James Eglinton, Cory Brock, and Marinus de Jong, so this reader arrives straight from the engine room of the current neo-Calvinism revival. Together they have produced something more than an anthology.

The format is a reader married to a commentary: “Each selection is preceded by an editorial introduction that sketches the overall sense of the reading and includes light explanatory annotations.”²

The architecture is simple and well organized. Part 1 gathers the early writings, Part 2 draws from the Reformed Dogmatics, and Part 3 collects the mature Amsterdam writings.

You can read it straight through as a guided tour of Bavinck’s development, or pull one essay off the shelf when you’re in the mood for it. Either way will work.

Part 1: The Early Writings

The centerpiece of the early material is Bavinck’s 1888 outgoing rectorial address at Kampen, “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,” one of my favorite essays by the Dutch theologian. Here Bavinck declares that “the catholicity of the church has become the confession of all Christendom,”³ and from there he presents a vision in which the gospel lays claim to the whole of life.

The editors put their finger on the central theme of the work: in the address “Bavinck casts a broad and capacious vision of the Christian faith rooted in the neo-Calvinist insight that grace is opposed not to nature but to sin.”⁴ That single sentence is worth the price of the book. It is the DNA of everything Kuyper and Bavinck would later build, and it remains the cleanest antidote to the world-fleeing instinct that still haunts so much of evangelical piety.

Part 2: The Reformed Dogmatics

Part 2 is the heart of the book, a generous run of selections drawn across all four volumes of the Dogmatics. The editors are candid about their method: when drawing from the Reformed Dogmatics, they “picked mainly those sections that display Bavinck’s own contributions and judgments, rather than those that offer mere historical narration.”⁵

On the person of Christ, Bavinck writes, “The doctrine of Christ is not the starting point, but it certainly is the central point of the whole system of dogmatics.”⁶ For confessional readers, that sentence lands with the weight of the Heidelberg’s opening question. It reorders the entire map of theology around Christ.

You also get Bavinck on organic inspiration, on the divine simplicity, and on the inadequacy of both supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism, which is to say you get the load-bearing moves of his whole system in his own words.

Part 3: The Amsterdam Writings

Part 3 turns to the mature Amsterdam period, where Bavinck brings his theology to bear on worldview, science, and ordinary life. “The Christian Family” (1908) opens with one of the finest sentences he ever wrote: “The history of the human race begins with a wedding.”⁷ From that line he builds a theology of marriage and household that any pastor preparing a wedding homily will want to draw from.

This is Bavinck at his most pastoral, and the reader is far richer for pressing on beyond the Dogmatics. The volume even includes the first English translation of his 1918 essay on women and society, which alone is a good reason for scholars to purchase this book.

That last essay rewards a closer look, especially for readers following the complementarian debates. Bavinck did change his mind on women’s suffrage: he came to support the vote and the broader social and political emancipation of women, breaking with Kuyper and the party line to do it. What he did not change was his reading of Scripture on the home and the church.

As George Harinck observes in his introduction to the chapter, Bavinck “defended on biblical grounds the distinction of men and women in marriage and excluded women from church offices, but he assessed the cultural, political, and social emancipation of women on biblical grounds as positive and criticized opposition to it.”⁸ That is a useful word for anyone who assumes that openness to women in public life must carry women in church office along with it. Bavinck changed his mind about the ballot box but not about the pulpit, a distinction his admirers on both sides tend to forget.

Does the “Commentary” Earn Its Place?

So does the second half of the title, the commentary, earn its keep? For the most part, yes, and more than the modest phrase “light explanatory annotations”⁹ suggests. The chapter introductions are excellent.

The one prefacing the Catholicity address, for instance, sets the 1888 occasion, names the intramural Kampen disputes Bavinck was getting into, and frames the whole thing around what the editors call “the affirmation that grace restores nature.”¹⁰ A reader who worked through nothing but the editorial introductions would still come away with a good map of neo-Calvinism.

A Fair Word of Caution

My one reservation is built into the genre, and the editors are honest about it. These are selections, not complete works. By their own note, the Catholicity chapter omits Bavinck’s historical survey of the doctrine, and the Dogmatics excerpts are curated rather than continuous.

It left me wanting more. A reader hoping to follow a sustained argument from first premise to final conclusion will still need the full four volumes.

The Essential Herman Bavinck is a superb on-ramp and a genuinely useful reference, but it is a companion to Bavinck’s corpus, not a substitute for it.

Who Should Read It

This is a book for the newcomer who has heard the Bavinck buzz and wants a trustworthy place to start, for the pastor or elder who wants Bavinck’s best lines collected in one place, and for the student trying to understand neo-Calvinism better.

If you have already read the four-volume Dogmatics cover to cover, you will find less here that is new, though the early and Amsterdam writings may still pleasantly surprise you. For everyone else, this is now the book I’ll hand to anyone who asks, “Where do I start with Bavinck?”

It is available from Baker Academic ($59.99, hardcover) and at Amazon. If this review whets your appetite, our Herman Bavinck: A Reformed Reader’s Guide will help you map the wider territory.

Footnotes

1. Gayle E. Doornbos and N. Gray Sutanto, eds., The Essential Herman Bavinck: A Reader and Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2026), 1.
2. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 8-9.
3. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 54.
4. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 52.
5. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 9.
6. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 337.
7. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 483.
8. George Harinck, introduction to “The Woman in Contemporary Society,” in Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 523.
9. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 8-9.
10. Doornbos and Sutanto, Essential Herman Bavinck, 52-53.

✠ ✠ ✠

ReformedDogmatika.com