Welcome to the Academics Corner! CPJ’s ongoing series sharing the good work that Christian academics are doing to promote public justice from their research to the lecture hall.
EC: How were you initially connected to CPJ?
JJ: I was connected to CPJ in 2013. I had just started my PhD. at Fuller Seminary and got to know Gideon Strauss, who was a former executive director [of CPJ] through our shared neo-Calvinist circle. He had a great fondness for CPJ and introduced me to it.
That year, CPJ was doing one of their annual lectures out in California, so I was invited to a dinner with CPJ and Stephanie Summers was there. I got to know her and a couple of the other board members and some of the academics and became enfolded in that circle. Gideon thought perhaps I would be interested in being involved with CPJ, and he was indeed correct. Here was this organization that was applying these exciting theological ideas in the public square! It was a really wonderful way to see the theological questions I was exploring as a student enacted and lived out in the public square.
EC: I’m also curious to hear more about how you first became interested in studying theology?
JJ: Yeah, that’s a great question. I went to Calvin University to study biology with the intention of becoming a medical doctor — but that did not happen. Spoiler alert, I became a very different kind of doctor. At that point in my life, theology was not on my radar as something to study. I had grown up thinking about these kinds of things. I went to church and Sunday school and got a Christian education. Faith was a very lively part of my home and my community, but the idea of studying theology as a discipline wasn’t on my radar.
At Calvin, the road to theology for me was two-fold. One part of the journey was really dynamic and inspiring professors and mentors who showed me a new way of thinking and asking questions. The other side of that was these fascinating and complex questions that I just couldn’t shake.
One of those key questions – at later, also a mentor for me – was unpacked for me when I read Richard Mouw’s, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, which is his little book on Isaiah 60. That book changed my life. I hadn’t encountered that way of thinking about the world now and Christ’s coming kingdom before in such concrete ways.
In that book, Mouw gives a wonderful exposition of Isaiah 60, where he talks about the earthliness of what God is doing and how God will restore the earth. He brings in this beautiful meditation on the ships of Tarshish in Isaiah 60, and asks this question, “What are the ships of Tarshish doing here?” Isaiah is having this beautiful apocalyptic vision of what God will do and there’s this very earthy, recognizable thing right in the center of it. So what’s going on? In the middle of this beautiful song of praise, there’s a ship of Tarshish. Why is that here?
That book helped me understand why the things of this earth matter. I had known that the things of this earth mattered through witness and testimony. My dad is a psychologist and my mom is a teacher. They were doing this kind of earthy stuff and I knew it mattered to them, and I knew it mattered to them because they were Christian. I saw that kind of witness all over the place, but I didn’t have the concrete language and theological tools to make it click.
Mouw’s book was one of those puzzle pieces that made something click in a new way for me. I was able to say, “The God who is God over my life and my faith, and the God who has saved me is the God in the business of saving and redeeming and reclaiming this whole world.” That got me really excited about what God was doing in a new way. Then I took that back into the biology classroom. In that, another key mentor for me was Dave Warners, a professor at Calvin University. He’s a wonderful biologist, and I learned a lot about biology from him, but I also heard him thinking about the theological questions behind some of the biology we were doing. I realized slowly, almost to my deep chagrin, that the questions that really got me excited were those foundational questions that we got to explore a little bit in the biology classroom at Calvin because Calvin’s wonderful at faith and scholarship integration. I wanted to sit in some of those kinds of theological and philosophical assumptions and claims that were being made and explore them more. Ever so slowly, I began to understand that these were the questions that set my mind ablaze. These were the questions I couldn’t shake and wanted to keep asking.
EC: Thank you for sharing that. My next question is, what would you say about why creation matters to how we live our lives as Christians today?
JJ: First and foremost, it matters because God is Creator and because one of the things we see over and over again is that our God, who is a covenant-keeping God, does not abandon the work of His hands. In fact, He’s the one who continues to say, “This is mine.” Even when we mess up time and time again He continues to say, “This is mine. This world is mine, and I will uphold it. What I have done you cannot undo.” One of the things we talk about all the time at Redeemer University and CPJ is the creation, fall, redemption, restoration, structure of the Bible. Often, when we think about faith, Christians have a tendency to zero in on redemption. Redemption is wonderful and, without redemption, where would we be? But it’s one part of the story and we can see an even fuller sense of redemption if we see what God has done and what God is doing in light of that fourfold structure. It makes sense that our entryway into that way of thinking is to ask what Christ has done for us. Who am I? I am a sinner saved by God. That idea can lead us to ask “Who this God is and what is He doing?” Yes, He is the one that has claimed us and has made us His own, saying my blood will cover you, but He is also the one that says “I am sovereign over all of it.”
I am a Calvinist theologian, doing Calvinist theology, and for some, that’s not an obvious tradition to engage for this question. When people think about Calvinists, they often think about tulip (not the flower!). That is, the Canons of Dort, total depravity, and limited atonement. Calvinists certainly claim the Canons of Dort as our own, we confess them, but sometimes that gets confused as the sum total of what Calvinists think. Kuyper says in his lectures on Calvinism, the dominating principle is not about salvation. That doesn’t mean salvation’s not important. Salvation is absolutely important, but the dominating principle, he says, is the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole creation. The dominating principle, Kuyper says, is cosmological and if we understand faith in that way, we can’t not think about creation, because God is the God who is sovereign over all of our lives but also the one who is sovereign cosmologically.
EC: Thank you for providing that. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about what drew you to focus on Herman Bavinck and his unique contributions to the Calvinist worldview?
JJ: Herman Bavinck is becoming much more well-known. There’s kind of a Bavinck renaissance right now, which is very exciting. Bavinck is Kuyper’s colleague, the other pillar of this early neo-Calvinist resurgence in the Netherlands, and he’s primarily known as a dogmatician. He held public office and talked about education and psychology but he’s primarily known for his work as a theologian. His magnum opus Reformed Dogmatics has been translated into many languages. I had encountered Bavinck’s ideas before but encountered him by name when I was in seminary. I remember my first introduction to him fondly: it was one of my first weeks in seminary. I was a little clueless and I was talking to a professor who asked me, “Who is your favorite theologian?” I said something about Abraham Kuyper because I knew him and I liked what he’d done. The professor said, “Just wait until you get to know Bavinck.” It turned out the professor I was talking to was a world-renowned Bavinck scholar named John Bolt, who became a dear mentor and now a colleague. We’ve worked together on some of Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics. Bolt took me under his wing and introduced me to the work that he was doing, which looked at Bavinck on the Imitation of Christ.
My interest in Bavinck is also deeply autobiographical. I was raised again in the Dutch Reformed community. I grew up in a Christian Reformed Church, a Christian school with Dutch Reformed roots, and a Dutch Reformed family. My own family was part of the post-War Dutch immigration wave, which helped bring many of these Kuyperian, neo-Calvinist ideas to North America. So, I learned – at least in some ways – some of these neo-Calvinist concepts at the knees of my parents and my grandparents. I didn’t know the technical language, or the names of the famous theologians, but I was very familiar with key accents like common grace and God’s sovereignty. All of those ideas were in the water at Calvin College, in my Christian high school, and in my church. What I didn’t realize at that point was that these ideas that could seriously change your life if you understood what they were.
I also grew up in nineties America. In the nineties, everyone was wearing WWJD [What Would Jesus Do] bracelets. I have pictures of me as a kid wearing these bracelets. I even showed one on the day of my dissertation defense, which was on the Imitation of Christ. So as a Christian kid in the nineties, I was asking question: what would Jesus do? I didn’t really know why I was asking it, but it seemed like a good question. But even then, I had a kind of dissonate sense that this wasn’t the kind of question everyone was asking, especially in my circles. We weren’t talking about what Jesus would do. When we talked about how we should live, we talked about the 10 Commandments. We talked about what God asks of us. When you think of John Calvin you often think of the law but there’s much more to Calvin. But that’s a caricature for a reason. Calvinists certainly talk about the law quite a lot – and not a lot about the imitation of Christ. But I was this nineties American Christian kid, wearing my WWJD bracelet, and in some ways that \ loop was never closed: how did the two connect? I wore the bracelet, and then at some point, I took the bracelet off, as many of us did, but that question was always in the back of my mind; what would Jesus do?
This is where it comes full circle again for me. When John Bolt introduced me to Herman Bavinck by name when I was in Seminary, he also introduced me to Bavinck’s work on the Imitation of Christ, and this is one of the places where Bavinck really shines and where he deviates from some of his contemporaries on questions of ethics. Bavinck talks about the imitation of Christ as the heart of the spiritual life. This way of framing imitation was striking to me in when I was in seminary, and it continues to strike me as a really profound thing. In this, Bavinck continues to take the law seriously. He has a wonderful way of bringing together the imitation of Christ and the law: we have a living law, and that living law is Jesus Christ. So, when we want to know what it looks like to faithfully apply the law in our own context, we look to Jesus.
The all-important question when it comes to imitating Jesus is how we imitate him. As imitators of Christ, must we be itinerant preachers, since Jesus was? You can see how that would lead some to think that the Imitation of Christ is not all that helpful. You can talk about it in a light and almost joking way. What would Jesus do? I’m about to go visit my parents on a lake, and we’ll ride a boat. What if they leave me behind? What would Jesus do? Well, He might walk on water. I can’t walk on water. The Imitation of Christ starts to sound really silly if you frame it that way. It also starts to sound really unattainable. What does Jesus’ life look like for me? Bavinck helps us answer the question about how we imitate Christ in a way that takes the contextual specificity of Jesus’ life and the fact that Jesus is not mere human into account. What does it mean for Jesus to be an example? It means that we follow Him in law-patterned obedience, imitating His virtues as He lives out the law. For me, that was a light bulb moment.
In Christian ethics, there’s often a caricature that you’re either a Sermon on the Mount kind of person or a 10 Commandments person. In other words, you’re either following Jesus in this kind of New Testament way or you’re a law person, and the two often get pitted against each other. Bavinck helps us understand that the Old Testament and New Testament are one story written by one God. That’s how I got interested in Bavinck. There were the questions I was asking as a young adult that I didn’t really have sufficient answers for. Bavinck helped me answer them.
EC: Thank you for sharing that. For students who have never heard about Herman Bavnick before and want to learn more about him, where would you suggest they start?
JJ: Often, when my students ask that question, I begin with neo-Calvinism as a whole and then go into Bavinck in his particularities. I usually direct them to classic works like Al Wolters Creation Regained, which is a wonderful book that helps walk through the Biblical basics for a reformed worldview. Creation Regained really drives home the central insight that Bavinck gives us: that grace restores nature. In terms of an accessible introduction to a neo-Calvinist figure, Mouw’s A Short Personal Introduction to Abraham Kuyper is wonderful.
When it comes to Bavinck’s own works, my favorite essay is his Catholicity of Christianity in the Church. This essay explains that God’s Church is one church in every time and place, and Bavinck says the Church is Catholic, in that it speaks to the whole of life. It speaks to every aspect of our life, which is to say, not just our souls, but the very physicalness of this world. Those would be the 3 places where I would start.
EC: That is a great starting point for a lot of our readers. You and Robert Joustra co-edited a book entitled Calvinism for a Secular Age, a 21st Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. Those lectures were given a long time ago. Can you talk about how these lectures are still relevant today and what we can glean from them?
JJ: Absolutely. The book is about Kuyper’s Stone Lectures, which are a prestigious lecture series given at Princeton Seminary. He gave these lectures called Lectures on Calvinism, and they’ve really retained attention in the North American landscape since they were given in North America, though I should note they were given to a very small audience, and Kuyper was quite disappointed by the original reception because he felt like what he was trying to get across wasn’t understood.
Kuyper scholar Peter Haslam argues that these lectures are important because they summarize Kuyper’s thoughts – I agree! Another person reflecting on these lectures, Herman Dooyeweerd, who’s a later generation neo-Calvinist, says these lectures are some of the best examples of Kuyper’s reformational principles. Alongside those two reasons, I think it really is important that he wrote these for a North American audience. He was writing for people that didn’t share his native tongue or his home country but shared some of the basic convictions that he had about who God was. The lectures don’t give us a systematic overview of Kuyper’s approach but, they give us a glimpse into a really important part of who Kuyper was. One of the reasons Robert and I worked on this book was because we wanted to think about what it looks like to be faithful Christians in all areas of life.
Even so, there are a number of barriers to getting at the genius of Kuyper in his Lectures. Some of those barriers are by no fault of Kuyper’s own and some of them are Kuyper’s fault. One reality is that this was written a long time ago, and the language is old. The ideas and the people that he’s referencing are people that aren’t in our common vocabulary today. So, there needs to be an introduction contextualizing what Kuyper is talking about. Part of our goal was to ask, what is Kuyper saying and how can we drill down to the central insights?
The other hurdle is, when you read these lectures, you encounter parts of Kuyper that are really troubling including some deeply problematic statements about race. Vincent Bacote has talked about this at length, including an excellent chapter in this book. When folks read this part of Kuyper, they rightly have a stumbling block. We didn’t want to simply say, “Let’s forget about that part of Kuyper and pretend it’s not there,” but we also didn’t want to say “Nobody should read anything about Kuyper, because it’s there.” We wanted to really take seriously the full scope of Kuyper’s legacy, the good and the bad, the God honoring, and the parts that needed to be corrected, because in many ways, that’s what Kuyper himself did. Kuyper has this wonderful analogy of pruning and watering a plant so that it can flourish once again. Pruning can be painful and it means taking off some of the difficult parts, but it also requires investigating them and critically thinking through these questions. Are Kuyper’s views on race so central to his thought that they infiltrate every aspect of what he’s talking about? If Kuyper was a more consistent thinker, might he have internally corrected? Are these racial prejudices central to neo-Calvinist core tenets? Or is this something that is aberrant from them, that is, against their central convinctions? When you put Kuyper and Bavinck together, I think you see that racism is not inherent to neo-Calvinism. Bavinck certainly would not have said so. He speaks forcefully against racism in particular, when he visits North America. In this, especially, Kuyper is in some ways such a perplexing thinker. We see him praising diversity in some aspects and then absolutely slamming diversity in others. Bavinck, on the other hand, has this wonderful understanding of the image of God where he says every person is the image of God, but the image of God is also collective. When people of every tribe, tongue, and nation come together, we actually see God more fully, because God can’t be contained in one single person. All of that to say, there are real and important difficulties in reading Kuyper’s work, these lectures in particular. Some of those issues are, again, simply historical. We’re reading someone from a long time ago and have to contextually situate them. Others of them are real concrete issues. In these lectures, you encounter both of those and we wanted to ask what it means to take Kuyper’s legacy seriously.
EC: I have two last questions for you. One of them is, are you currently involved in any research or writing projects that you want to talk about, and the other is, is there any question that you wish we had asked you?
JJ: In terms of research, we have our last volume of Reformed Ethics coming out soon. There’s been a team of five of us working for about a decade on Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics. Bavinck is well known for his Reformed Dogmatics but he also taught ethics at the Theological University of Kampen, which was his denominational school, before he went on to the Free University in Amsterdam. When he was there he taught ethics and dogmatics and he had all of these lecture notes that it looks like we’re intended to become a companion volume of Reformed Ethics alongside his Reformed Dogmatics. That companion volume was never published in Bavinck’s lifetime. So together, a team of 5 of us worked to bring that unpublished manuscript into English. That’s a really exciting project that’s nearly completed.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the relationship between the imitation of Christ and catholicity of the Church. I have a couple of articles coming out on that. One of the things that is really interesting me is a little line in the Catholicity of Christianity in the Church where Bavinck gently critiques Calvin and says that Calvin focuses perhaps too heavily on what he calls negative virtues of self-denial and cross-bearing, and so even he doesn’t unpack the fullness of the catholicity of the Church. Calvin rightly attends to the fact that following Christ means following Him in His cross bearing and in His self-denial. But what of the Lord, who is the risen, ascended, and glorified? What of the joy of the gospel? Bavinck pushes back there, and you can see him continue to push back in his later work on the Imitation of Christ in 1918. So there he’s writing, he’s really thinking hard about the Imitation of Christ in the modern world, and asking the question, can we still do this in the midst of everything that’s going on? In 1918 people were thinking about war and the terrible things that humanity can do to one another. He’s asking if it is still feasible that we, as Christians can imitate Christ in this crazy, messed up world, where any of the kind of hubris of the 19th century feels demolished and they were really coming to terms with the gravity of sin in our social world and our social life together. Bavinck, of course, answers with a resounding yes. Bavinck says that as we follow Christ, we follow Him in His cross bearing and self-denial but we also follow the Lord who is glorified and ascended. What does it look like to think about imitating Christ in His suffering, but also in His joy? That’s one of the things that captivated me recently. What does it look like to imitate Christ in the fullness of His life, realizing, of course, with Bavinck, and with Calvin, that there are many aspects of what Christ does that are inimitable? We cannot imitate him in being our savior. We cannot imitate Him in what He does concretely on the cross, but we can imitate Him in who He is, and how He lives out the law.
EC: That is such a relevant question right now. Thank you so much for your time today, Jess, I really appreciate it.
