26 Quotes by Herman Bavinck

The doctrine of the divine authority of Holy Scripture constitutes an important component in the words of God that Jesus preached, and if he was mistaken on this point he was wrong at a point that is most closely tied in with the religious life and he can no longer be recognized as our highest prophet. We cannot take Jesus seriously as a teacher and reject his own teaching concerning Holy Scripture.

In Illinois there is a group of men who call themselves The University of Illinois and who, for a couple of dollars, will award a degree in a particular science.

A theologian is a person who makes bold to speak about God because he speaks out of God and through God. To profess theology is to do holy work. It is a priestly ministration in the house of the Lord. It is itself a service of worship, a consecration of mind and heart to the honour of His name.

The essence of Christianity consists therein: that the creation of the Father, destroyed by sin, is again restored in the death of the Son of God and recreated by the grace of the Holy Spirit to a Kingdom of God.

God the Father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit.

Where God’s Word is, there is God Himself, there God’s Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.

God is above the world, and is also above sin and all evil. He allowed it because he could expiate it. So he maintained through all centuries and among all men the longing and the capacity for redemption, and wrought that redemption himself in the fulness of time, in the midst of history, in the crucified Christ.

The greatest thinkers of Greece – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus – derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

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.