The Philosophy of Revelation
Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (1908–09 Stone Lectures, Princeton)
Herman Bavinck, professor at the Free University of Amsterdam
Unhurried, comprehensive, and willing to grant an opponent everything true in his position before showing what he built on top of it.
- Catch rate
- 62 / 255
- Base research
- 270
- Stat total
- 354
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Delivered as six lectures at Princeton and printed the same year — dense, but built to be heard in an evening apiece.
Meets the whole nineteenth century by name — Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, evolutionary science — rather than retreating from any of it.
Answers the move to feeling without dismissing feeling itself, which is a harder position to knock over than a flat denial would be.
Bavinck taught systematic theology and wrote for an audience that already knew the debate; not a book for a first encounter with the questions it answers.
Cited for this book
Princeton Theological Seminary invited Bavinck to deliver the Stone Lectures for 1908–09, and he used them to answer the century that had just relocated religion’s foundation to feeling, to reason, or to evolutionary development. His own claim is unfashionable and plainly stated: revelation is not a truth every mind already carries and merely uncovers by looking inward, but God disclosing Himself — through creation and conscience everywhere, and then, from one particular call onward, through a word given to particular people at a particular time.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Fruitless Endeavor | Biblical Theology | Argument | 96 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 34 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 40 | Kant’s Own Admission | Biblical Theology | Argument | 84 | 100% | 10 |
| 44 | General and Special Revelation | Biblical Theology | Argument | 88 | 100% | 15 |
Read it: Not a Truth the Mind Already Carries
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in English.
“Under the influence of Schleiermacher they strive to set religion free from all knowledge and assent, and conceive it as only trust in the heart. But this endeavor is a fruitless one.”
Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (1908–09 Stone Lectures), public domain.
“Kant himself set limits to knowledge in order to make a place for faith, and to find room, by reasoning on the nature and content of practical reason, for the reality of a moral government of the world.”
Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (1908–09 Stone Lectures), public domain.
“The distinction between what has come to be called general and special revelation does not begin until the call of Abraham.”
Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (1908–09 Stone Lectures), public domain.
Princeton invited Bavinck to deliver the Stone Lectures for 1908–09, and he used them to answer the century that had just relocated religion’s foundation to feeling, to reason, or to evolutionary development.
His own claim is unfashionable and plainly stated: revelation is not a truth every mind already carries and merely uncovers by looking inward, but God disclosing Himself — and general and special revelation part ways at one particular call.