In dealing with arguments against the Christian faith in his book The Philosophy of Religion, Bavinck uses a series of argumentative strategies. One of these strategies is the apologetics of despair. This study tries to figure out whether this strategy tends to be observed in most essays of the book or its use is only circumstantial.
Bavinck does not reject at once and for all the ideas that may be detrimental to the faith, but instead, he engages with them in order to discover if they can offer some truth worth noting. In this respect, in the three essays discussed in this paper one observes Bavinck contending against some positions on different topics, and in some of them, one may note a certain apologetic nature, especially when he discards the contrary position in favor of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, it might be too much to expect Bavinck to employ an apologetic-of-despair strategy in every essay on every topic. The fact that he does employ it in some instances, as de Wit suggests it, shows Bavinck has some sympathy for this strategy.
In my view, Bavinck’s arguments in The Philosophy of Revelation does tend to display an apologetic nature. Nonetheless, the use of an apologetic-of-despair strategy in this work is incidental and limited insofar that Bavinck employed other strategies such as appropriation and the inference to best explanation when dealing with some of the challenges to the Christian faith.
*This is a summary of the paper published as “Should We Read Herman Bavinck’s The Philosophy of Revelation as an Apologetics of Despair, Revista Teologica, Seminario Presbiteriano do Sul 72, no. 2 (October 2019): 95-109. If you’d like to read this paper in full, please click here. All rights reserved by the publisher. Used by permission.
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