"Orthodox yet Modern": Herman Bavinck and Hegel's Speculative Philosophy

Herman Bavinck's use of German idealist vocabularies has been a debated topic in the secondary literature. An older Dutch paradigm from around the 1970s, under the influence of Jan Veenhof's study on the German idealist origins of Bavinck's organicism, tends to describe the dogmatician's use of idealist categories as fundamentally at odds with his commitment to confessional Reformed theology. Recent Anglophone interpreters have tended to emphasize the orthodoxy of Bavinck's Reformed faith, and see his employment of idealist terms as primarily polemical in purpose. This article adopts the "orthodox yet modern" and "Reformed eclecticism" trajectories set forth respectively by Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, in order to examine the role of G. W. F. Hegel's speculative logic in Bavinck's thought. The thesis is that while Bavinck disagrees fundamentally with Hegel's panlogistic starting-point in human consciousness, he is in fact appreciative of important aspects of Hegel's speculative philosophy, and thus uses them to correct the substantialist tendencies in traditional Reformed theology.