“My father wanted to serve.”
Hannie Bavinck, Herman Bavinck’s Daughter (235)
Change happens. During pandemics we shift from in-person to digital instruction, make our home our office, buy more books because libraries are closed, or find that maybe meetings – with people, around a table – were not so bad after all. We could learn a thing or two from Herman Bavinck, “An orthodox Calvinist trying to find his feet in the modern world” (287). Bavinck navigated internecine denominational battles, Nietzschean atheism, scientific progress, feminism, World War I, and the onset of modernism. Judging from James Eglinton’s Bavinck: A Critical Biography, his subject piloted well the cultural, political, worldview shoals of his day. Why should it be that one must find shifts difficult within life? We have need to acquire the trinitarian, adjectival strength of nimble, agile, and flexible. And Bavinck did pivot well in both his vocations and his writings. To his contemporaries, Bavinck was known not only as a brilliant theologian but a pioneer in psychology, a pedagogical reformer, a champion for girls’ education, an advocate of women’s voting rights, a parliamentarian, and a journalist (xvii). 
Eglinton’s introduction should be read and reread as the “prolegomena” he calls it (xvii-xxii). Essential ideas lay a cinder block foundation. The “equipoise” (i.e. counterbalance) between “orthodoxy” and “modernity” created “tensions” structuring “nuances” toward “articulation,” Bavinck saw it all through the lens “of the historic Christian faith.” Bavinck’s commitment to “science” as the “higher forms of reflective knowledge” titles him a “polymath” who taught the Christian “intellectual tradition” as “distinctive,” the gateway through which the “creative thinker” became a “participant” in “culture.” Eglinton’s purpose statement summarizes “the story of a man whose theologically laced personal narrative explored the possibility of an orthodox life in a changing world.” A phrase pockmarked through the book, “the path from separation to integration” (16), is necessary to fully comprehend the continued work “to reconcile” one’s “orthodox tradition” within “the scientifically oriented academy” continually committed to working within “modern culture” (37). 
Opening etchings catch the spirit of each chapter. For instance, “The modern youth has come under the influence of the modern society” (41) not only marks educational impacts on Bavinck but on anyone in any day, anywhere. Much could be said about the positive nature of a father’s influence in Eglinton’s part one. One wonders, reading the whole biography, if such an influence was manifest in Bavinck’s continued interest in what most refer to as “psychology.” Perhaps, better, we Christians should say the wholeness of the person. To that point, one cannot underestimate the impact of family. Part Two focuses on Bavinck’s schooling, its influences, paths, and trajectories. It was while he was in tutelage that Bavinck first encountered the virulent atheism, “dechristianization” that was sweeping Europe (79). Part Three, the shortest section, reveals Bavinck’s pastoral heartbeat within his professorial heart (Parts Four and Five). “Theology must be theologized” (original emphasis, 137) is the constant search for Professor Bavinck, for any biblical thinker who is given to theology as an “avenue of inquiry” in the same way “natural scientists depend on nature itself” (139). 
Chapter nine is the epicenter of Eglinton’s book rightly introduced with Bavinck’s quote, “In reality there are only two worldviews” (219, 226). From Bavinck’s perspective, science should be thought about and taught by a decidedly Christian point of view. Nietzsche’s influence, however, “would shun Christianity entirely” (224-25). Bavinck’s commitment to scientific study is essential to understand his commitment to the world and The Word. Bavinck traversed cultural shifts (241), navigating rifts that were birthing gifts to a world in need of the God’s organizing order. Bavinck committed responses to Nietzschean atheism as well as those in The Church who had ventured into “uncharted, dechristianized waters” (226). Nietzsche’s worldview was in direct contradiction to Scriptural teaching necessitating “defenders of Christianity” (227). Gathering what Eglington calls a “theistic coalition” the author issues a clarion call for those of us in our own day. We need to demonstrate when a viewpoint has “rejected both the roots and fruits of Christianity.” Our “call on common history, texts, concepts, and moral values” necessitates a reinvestigation of our Christian beginnings, mining the veins of gold found early Christian apologetics.
Bavinck decided to concentrate on “uniting Christians” against the “Goliath” of a contradictory worldview (227). Responding to outside opposition, Bavinck made Christian education a centerpiece response. Publishing Christian Worldview, Christian Science, and Principles of Pedagogy in 1904, Bavinck saw the power of “Christianity’s explanatory power” providing “harmonious answers” to essential questions of any day (228). Focused on the Bible as God’s interpretation of His own world, Bavinck argued “that all human knowledge is subjective and rests on a priori assumptions” (139, 229).
“Without belief in revelation, he argued, it is impossible to have concepts of philosophy, nature, history, culture, or the future” showing that “the atheist constantly relies on theism” (246).
At the same time, he claimed that Christians recognize “the intellectual virtues of unbelievers” asking the same group 
for reciprocity based on “common grace.” Central to the Christian view of education – or it should be – is the teaching of human nature. “Created in the divine image but spoiled by sin” (230) has tremendous impact on educational outcomes. So, Bavinck promoted “a holistic, organicist vision of Christian education” a “distinctive articulation of educational theory along worldview lines” that would be
“a life-affirming Christian school curriculum [educating] children in religious knowledge, in skill in the use of language, and in the natural sciences, and that these should be taught in a way the engages the head, the heart, and the hands. In all of this, he mediated cutting-age developments in psychology and pedagogy” (230).
Applications abound in Eglinton’s work. Practicing our “scientific theology” might be best used in a public institution (99). The proliferation of doctoral degrees and the scant opportunity to use them in the university (100) seems not to be a new phenomenon. We must recreate a “tent-making” posture (Acts 18:3) while we find unique opportunities to practice our craft in a public academy (141) as Paul did “in the hall of Tyrannus” (Acts 19:8-10). We are all “pastors” to some degree, shepherding those around us. If we maintain Bavinck’s pastoral ethos, we begin to take a long-term view of relationships in the academe (122, 125). But we are given to viewing our books as our “true company” (133) knowing that our kinship is not only with the living but with the dead (120). The words “simple” and “practical” meeting “the needs of the day” should be our teaching commitment (139, 144); for example, we must employ our understanding of God’s immanence as the basis for our commitment to the poor (148). Bavinck’s “desire to apply Christ’s lordship across the entirety” of a curriculum should be ours (169) as he “insisted that the catholic Christian faith necessarily addresses every aspect of life in this world” (215). As with Bavinck, so with us, we must think carefully about “the starting point” of any “careful scholarship” (181). Our writing must participate in the conversation of the day (204-05). 
All of us are bound by our times and spaces: God “having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of [our] dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). We are assigned our contexts to be the voice for a kairos moment (specific to area and age). The benefit for our world may have impact far beyond the reach of our brief lifetimes. Our trajectory may further the work of others beyond our own. Unbeknown to us, our witness in our day may take the form of our person or our personal work. If we are to be used, we must temper ourselves and our expectations. We may be given great position and prominence; or we may toil in obscurity. Both have their drawbacks. We operate within the framework of who we are, what we have been given, our opportunities under the Providences of God. Circumstances Providentially move us, even when, unbeknown to us, our life will change (176). We have been given a gift in James Eglinton’s Bavinck, far beyond what can be contained in this review. Herein we find an academician committed to the Christian worldview, writing across disciplines, serving the university, speaking to the needs of his day.
In Bavinck, we should find ourselves.
Bavinck: A critical biography. By James Eglinton. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 2020. 450 pp. $45. hardcover. Review by Mark D. Eckel, President, The Comenius Institute, Indianapolis, IN; Professor of Leadership, Education and Discipleship, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, Lancaster, PA. To be published in an upcoming issue of Christian Education Journal.