The outline of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics

View Bavinck’s original outline for the Gereformeerde dogmatiek (PDF; 89 KB) A reader of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume recently asked me how to correlate the text of the abridgement with the unabridged translation. After mulling it over, I concluded that combining the subparagraph numbers and Bavinck’s original outline for the Gereformeerde dogmatiek (PDF; 89 KB) provided both a good answer to this practical question and a boon to understanding the Dogmatics as a whole. The outline itself is refreshingly simple: three main points, traditional loci, traditional order. I share it here with the simple hope that it might provide a useful tool for enjoying the abridged or unabridged Dogmatics as an organic whole, a body of divinity.1


  1. For more on Bavinck’s view of dogmatics as a synthetic whole, see his “The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System,” translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman, Bavinck Review 5 (2014): 90–103. 

One Reply to “The outline of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics

  1. Hallo,

    I have found some kind of biografie from Herman Bavinck written by Landwehr. Perhaps you are interested. It is written in Dutch.

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