A Nerdy (Bavinckian) Edition

No.252: March 22, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Closing paragraph of an unpublished MSS, “De Mensch, Gods Evenbeeld,” Herman Bavinck (Dec.26, 1884) —photocopy obtained by me in the archives of the Historical Documentation Centre, Free University of Amsterdam

Dear Friends,

The Square Inch is a day late, due to a number of things that took precedence, combined with this nasty Spring cold virus. I’m very much on the mend now and playing catch-up.

Before I get to the main topic (which is really nerdy and may bore you, so feel free to skip if so), two things:

First, it would be great if you’d go follow this Instagram page, and subscribe to this YouTube page. And listen to the album and share it!

Second, you all may or may not be aware of a little controversy that has been ongoing for the past several years in some niche Reformed circles about the concept of “empathy.” Actually, this controversy isn’t limited to those narrow confines—it is a big topic in the broader world of psychology, too. But some pastors and theologians have put their own distinct spin on matters, and the main lightning rod has been Joe Rigney’s book, The Sin of Empathy. It is a complicated and highly nuanced topic, and I just ran across a long essay at The Dispatch by Alasdair Roberts entitled, “Is Empathy a Sin?” It is superb. It is probably paywalled, but I hope not and I hope you can read it (The Dispatch is worth the subscription, though).

In short: certain forms of “empathy” can indeed be sinful, and Rigney’s title is needlessly provocative and therefore misleading. Rather than talk of the “sin of empathy,” one ought to talk about “sinful empathy.” Those are not the same things.

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I am amazed and delighted that 104 years after his death I keep on getting “new” books from Herman Bavinck. The practitioners of Bavinck scholarship in the English-speaking world continue to impress by transcribing and translating mountains of new never-before-seen material. This month I finally received Bavinck’s The Foremost Problems of Contemporary Dogmatics, translated and edited by Bruce Pass and Gert de Kok. These are classroom lectures from around 1904 as Bavinck took up his post at the Free University of Amsterdam. They were never published and only existed in a handwritten manuscript. This made the project all the more difficult: first you have to transcribe the handwriting, and then translate, then edit, then publish. A huge amount of effort, and in this case so very much worth it. More on that later.

Then I received, Reformed Social Ethics: Perspectives on Society, Culture, State, Church, and the Kingdom of God. This is a more fragmentary work, edited (heavily), of course, by the legendary John Bolt, who more than any other person is responsible for midwifing Bavinck into the English-speaking world. It is, again, a collection of handwritten outlines and notes and miscellaneous material that didn’t quite qualify to be the “fourth” volume of Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics, so Bolt put it together as a “companion” volume to that series. There is no one more qualified for the task. I was wistful and a bit sad to read in his introduction that this volume marks his “adieu” to the world of Bavinck scholarship. He has more than earned rest and retirement. Not only did he spearhead and edit Bavinck’s massive four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, but also an abridged single-volume edition, Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, he authored Bavinck on the Christian Life, and then—when Dirk Van Keulen discovered (really, read that last link—I’m proud of that review) an 1,100 page handwritten manuscript in the Amsterdam archives, he undertook to edit that into the three-volume Reformed Ethics. And Volume 3 of that is at long last arriving next week!