that there is much that is excellentruth. 132 t in both, and that both contain undeniableWhile some might interpret this as confusion, I perceive this as a healthy balance
within Bavinck’s piety and agree with Bolt’s assessment “about the unity of the two
streams in Bavinck” and that unlike Barth he both sought and was successful in being
“pious, orthodox, and thoroughly contemporary.”^133
Bavinck articulates his understanding of experience most lucidly in his 1908-
09 Princeton Stone Lecture “Revelation and Religious Experience.” There he
maintains the importance of revelation as the foundation for experience.^134 Further,
“[e]xperience by itself is not sufficient. Scripture is the norm also for our emotional
life and tells us what we ought to experience.”^135 Bavinck clearly asserts the essential
nature of experience, “that dogmatics, especially in the doctrine of the ordo salutis,
must become more psychological, and must reckon more fully with religious
experience.”^136 Previously he wrote, “[o]nly through experience does one first
understand the truth. Experience discovers in the words of Scripture an entirely new
spiritual meaning; it shows us a truth behind the truth, not because it wants to say
something else, but because we have then experienced and benefited from it in our
hearts.”^137 Even more forcefully he declares, “[t]hese experiences [e.g. “longing for
God, communion with God, delight in God”] do not merely exist but have a right to
exist; they are inseparable from godliness, and therefore find their classic expression
(^132) Editor’s introduction, (^) Reformed Dogmatics (^) , 1:14.
(^133) Bolt, “Between Kampen and Amsterdam,” 269. cf. Harnick, “Something that
Must Remain,” 252. 134
Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 208. This specific lecture was not delivered at
Princeton but elsewhere during his visit in the United States. 135
136 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:534.^
137 Bavinck, Bavinck, Philosophy of RevelationCertainty of Faith, 42. , 209.^