Herman Bavinck

Bavinck names it directly: trust with no knowledge in it cannot say what it is trusting. Feeling needs an object, and the object is not supplied by the feeling itself.

Bavinck names it directly: trust with no knowledge in it cannot say what it is trusting. Feeling needs an object, and the object is not supplied by the feeling itself.

A century of freeing the self from every outside authority, and Bavinck records the result: the self did not get quieter. It went to war with itself.

Bavinck notes that Kant limited knowledge to make room for faith, and then built faith on practical reason. Even Kant could not leave the question of God closed.

Bavinck notes that Kant limited knowledge to make room for faith, and then built faith on practical reason. Even Kant could not leave the question of God closed.

Even Kant said reason reaches its limit and stops. The book quotes him and skips that chapter.

Granted everything inside its own terrain, and asked for the edge of it — which is the one thing it will not name.

Bavinck agrees with Barth that God has to speak, and then says something Barth would not. God shows himself in creation first, to everyone, and then speaks particular words. Barth is right that nothing replaces the word. He is wrong that the world says nothing.

Kant clears room and then fills it himself, out of practical reason. Bavinck asks the question Kant never asks first: what if the room was already filled, from outside, by a word?

Kant clears room and then fills it himself, out of practical reason. Bavinck asks the question Kant never asks first: what if the room was already filled, from outside, by a word?

Bavinck: reason works on what God has already shown. A mind that cuts itself off from revelation cuts itself off from its own ground.

Reason, then feeling, now the unconscious. Three faculties, one move — and Bavinck asks the same thing every time: did anybody check whether God had come down?

Bavinck answers that religion begins with God speaking, not with a feeling. God shows himself to everyone in creation, and then speaks particular words, beginning with his call to Abraham.

Bavinck answers that religion begins with God speaking, not with a feeling. God shows himself to everyone in creation, and then speaks particular words, beginning with his call to Abraham.

Which came first — spirit or matter? The answer was given before the first verse was weighed.

You needed the society and you did not come out of it — so it cannot be the whole account of what went wrong in you.

The account explains where the tribe got its god. It has not explained where the tribe got a self to feel guilty with.

A religion kept for what it does to the one who holds it has already changed who it is about.

A religion kept for what it does to the one who holds it has already changed who it is about.

Marx says your identity is constituted by your place in an economy. Bavinck says a creature has a given place — a rightful one, not a smaller one — and it is not the market that assigns it.

Self-rule was supposed to free the creature. It cut it loose from everything it was related to.

Named in its own vocabulary: this is not an argument that the law is false. It is a refusal to be under one.

Sartre agrees with Bavinck’s fork and takes the hard side of it. If there is no God, there is no good above us, and everything is permitted. He says it plainly and says a man must face it. The reader’s question is not whether he is honest. It is who does the condemning when he calls us condemned.

Foucault’s anger at cruelty is real, and so is the cruelty he documents. But anger like that needs a standard over both the judge and the prisoner. If truth is only power, the powerless have nothing to appeal to. Bavinck names the choice: either the norms are made by history and do not bind, or they rest in God.

The cruelty charge is a moral charge, and it is a real one. But indignation needs a standard over both of you, and Russell’s world has only preferences in it. Bavinck names the fork: either the norms grew up in history and are not binding, or they rest in God.

A standard that grew up in history can be outgrown by history — and this one is being appealed to as though it could not.

A thousand rafts agreeing is not a shoreline. The question the whole sea has been avoiding is where the norms it keeps using come from. Bavinck’s two answers are the only two there are.

A wish can explain where the longing came from. It cannot explain where the OUGHT came from — an obligation that stands over the wisher is not the kind of thing a wish makes.

Bavinck saw that once mind is cut off from the world, thinking has nowhere to stand. Derrida’s endless chain of signs is that cut. His own sentences only work if a reader can reach past the words to what he means.

Kant limits knowledge to make room for faith, and Bavinck follows the cut to where it lands. Once thinking has no purchase on being, the room made for faith is a room with nothing in it that anyone could know.

Bavinck saw what happens when thinking is cut off from the world. It has nothing to stand on and nothing to check itself against. The sceptic’s bewildered ape has no reason to trust its own conclusion that it is one.

Kant limits knowledge to make room for faith, and Bavinck follows the cut to where it lands. Once thinking has no purchase on being, the room made for faith is a room with nothing in it that anyone could know.

Rorty’s grandfather in the faith, William James, said pragmatism was only a method. Bavinck saw in 1908 that a method with no theory of truth does not exist. It offers itself as a plain tool and quietly carries a whole account of what is real. That account is what you are being asked to accept.

Truth is not what a room lets you get away with. It is a match between what you say and how things are. If that were not so, no one could ever be wrong in a way that mattered, and Rorty would have nothing to correct.

Bavinck: Christianity is not a product of history to be explained away. It made the history the book is trying to explain.

Bavinck answers the man who says Christianity is a product of history: it is one of the forces that made history. A story that has shaped the world for two thousand years is not dissolved by being called one story among many.

Strauss files the gospels as myth — a community’s ideas dressed as events. Bavinck answers that Christianity is not downstream of history being explained; it arrives, acts, and makes the history that later gets explained.

Hume weighs a miracle against uniform experience and the scales are built before anything is placed on them. Bavinck asks what the experience is resting on: if revelation is what the world stands on, a closed order was never the neutral starting point it claimed to be.

Hume weighs a miracle against uniform experience and the scales are built before anything is placed on them. Bavinck asks what the experience is resting on: if revelation is what the world stands on, a closed order was never the neutral starting point it claimed to be.