Quotes from Herman Bavinck

conversion is a necessary and moral duty for every man.

Conversion means a religious and moral change in man, by which he gives up his sinful ways and learns to know, love, and serve with his whole heart the true God who has revealed himself in Christ;

God does not say that He will be our God if we do this or that thing. But He says that He will put enmity, that He will be our God, and that in Christ He will grant us all things. The covenant of grace can throughout the centuries remain the same because it depends entirely upon God and because God is the Immutable One and the Faithful One.

In infant baptism it was confessed that conversion and regeneration differ, and conversion is ordinarily a coming to consciousness of that new life which has long before been planted in the heart.

As the pure knowledge of God disappears, nature too in its true character is disowned, and either exalted into the sphere of the Godhead or degraded to the sphere of a demoniacal power.

The Gospel is so rich, and the salvation purchased by Christ contains so many and diverse benefits, that the most varied needs of men are satisfied by it, and the richest powers of human nature are brought to development.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.

Thus the true, the good and the beautiful which ethical culture seeks can only come to perfection when the absolute good is at the same time the almighty, divine will, which not only prescribes the good in the moral law, but also works it effectually in man himself. The heteronomy of law and the autonomy of man are reconciled only by this theonomy.

Everything we value in this life is inseparably connected with the future.

Religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth

All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.