Meeting Vague Truths in Love: J. H. Bavinck’s Theology of Religions and Its Application to the Context of Chinese Christianity

Abstract

The Neo-Calvinist Johan Herman Bavinck was one of the most significant missionaries of the mid-twentieth century in the Reformed tradition. Bavinck considered the question of the status of non-Christian religion and religious consciousness the most pressing issue for missionary thought and practice. This article offers a text-driven account of Johan Herman Bavinck’s theology of religions. It argues that Bavinck treated non-Christian religion as a culpable yet always partial suppression of God’s universal self-disclosure, in which religious systems cohere around what he calls vague truths while lacking the determinate knowledge of God given in special revelation. Attention to his distinction between systems and persons clarifies how he believed missionary encounter could combine judgement with humility, as the Christian confronts unbelief while recognising the church’s own tendency toward pseudo-religion. The article situates Bavinck’s account within Reformed Augustinianism and eclecticism, such as in the use of Freudian psychology in exegesis. It then provides a preliminary application of Bavinck’s thought to select issues in Chinese Christianity as part of recent scholarly attention to the prospects of Sino-Reformed theology.

1. Introduction

The relationship between general revelation and non-Christian religions is an issue Christian thought has “wrestled with throughout history” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 95). The theology of religions asks whether and how humanity knows God, and what that means for the status of non-Christian worship. Johan Herman Bavinck (1895–1964), the first chair of missiology at the Free University of Amsterdam (1939–1964), called this issue of religious consciousness “the ruling problem for missiology” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 81; van den Berg 1983). He described the status of non-Christian religions as a “most embarrassing” question for “every missionary who takes his work seriously … sooner or later his hearers will ask him what he thinks about their gods and their religious belief” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 82). The theme of the relation between religious experience and God’s self-revelation was therefore critical for Bavinck’s missionary thought, because he believed the missionary “sorely needs a well-grounded and settled conviction concerning the intrinsic value of the [sic] non-Christian belief” (Visser 2013, p. 42; J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 82).

Although J. H. Bavinck is invoked in neo-Calvinist and missiological retrievals, current treatments of his theology of religions are dispersed across material which is introductory by design, or of a broad topical scope in relation to his life and thought (Visser 2013; Strange 2024; Massad 2024; Visser 2003). While valuable, the most substantial discussion of Bavinck’s theology of religions to date has as its primary aim a broader constructive theology of religions, rather than a sustained reconstruction of Bavinck’s own argument (Strange 2014). This article is therefore reconstructive, offering an extended text-driven exegesis of Bavinck’s account of general revelation and the non-Christian religions. What follows is a close reading of Bavinck’s theology of religions by tracing its main concepts and their relationships. His account of religions began by affirming the epistemic primacy of biblical revelation and a theological rather than descriptive approach to the study of religious ideas and practices. Through these foundations, and particularly through his exegesis of the language of suppression and exchange in Romans 1:18–25, he saw non-Christian religious consciousness as a rebellious response that suppresses general revelation. Yet such consciousness still depends on the knowledge of God as immanent in every human being. Suppression therefore does not mean the absence of divine self-disclosure, but its culpable distortion and redirection. Bavinck believed this response to God’s revelation results in the building of totalizing religious systems that are at once a response to and a fleeing from God. Yet this suppression takes place to varying degrees within individuals and the systems that individuals collectively build. For Bavinck, Christianity derived from the special revelation of God, making it unique in relation to non-Christian religion. He thus saw the Christian message as a replacement which was also a type of fulfilment of non-Christian religion. But he believed Christianity must also recognise its own vulnerability to the suppression of truth and the pursuit of “pseudo-religion” (Visser 2013, p. 34). This meant that for Bavinck Christianity interacts with non-Christian religion as a confrontation coupled with humility. For when the Christian confronts unbelief, they are always confronting themselves. This encounter involves willingness to listen and understand the diverse ways in which other systems respond to God’s general revelation, while remaining convinced that only through special revelation can there be true knowledge of God. The article traces the interrelations between Bavinck’s prolegomena, his reading of Romans 1:18–25, his account of suppression, his distinction between vague and specific truth, and his ethic of “meeting in love.” It argues that his theology of religions belongs within an Augustinian account of disordered love and truth (Augustine 2019, 10.18, 27; 2018, 14.28; 1995, 2.40.60), while also displaying the Reformed eclecticism of his more famous relative, Herman Bavinck (Brock and Sutanto 2017). It thereby clarifies the thought of a prominent twentieth-century missionary and theologian who had notable institutional and personal impact on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century evangelicalism as a globally influential religious phenomenon (Strange 2024, p. 264). Constructive or comparative work which draws on Bavinck will benefit from a presentation of Bavinck’s thought in these areas based on a broad range of his translated texts. In this vein, the latter part of the article offers a preliminary and selective application of Bavinck’s theology of religions to the Chinese context. It does so in light of increasing scholarly attention to the reception and possible uses of Dutch Neo-Calvinism within Sino-Reformed theology and Chinese Christianity more broadly.

2. Prolegomena: The Role of Special Revelation in the Study of Religions

The normative principle for Bavinck’s explanation of religion was the absolute truthfulness of Christian scripture as God’s special revelation. He saw special revelation as the only source for the ultimate answer on whether religious consciousness is “born out of our humanity” or “a reply to what God has first spoken” (J. H. Bavinck 1981, p. 18). He agreed here with his uncle Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), both on the priority of biblical revelation in theological prolegomena, and on the need to challenge rival approaches within the science of religion (H. Bavinck 2003, pp. 313–52). He considered Christian prolegomena an equally legitimate starting point compared to the commitments of the historical or Freudian schools that claimed scientific status. Other schools had their own pre-theoretical commitments, thereby justifying the Christian’s own a priori foundations (J. H. Bavinck 1981, p. 18). Bavinck’s insistence that theological starting points are not epistemically disqualified parallels wider twentieth-century arguments about the theory-dependence of inquiry and pre-theoretical commitments. His argument here converged with critiques in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Yet without further work on Bavinck’s reading habits, the most likely source of his view remains his Dutch Neo-Calvinist inheritance, especially Kuyper and Herman Bavinck’s arguments about worldview, system, and knowledge acquisition (Kuyper 1898, pp. 131–36).

This prolegomenal commitment to special revelation meant that Bavinck saw theological reflection as subordinate to scripture as an objective norm. Theological construction could not ultimately be bottom-up speculation on human experience. Neither could it be justification for ultimately utilitarian aims, providing a religious framework around discerning God’s will in the world to facilitate socio-political causes. Bavinck sought to make biblical exegesis the self-conscious foundation for constructing a theology of religions. This contrasts with his general criticism of the approach of twentieth-century Protestant missions, particularly what he thought were the shortcomings of Edinburgh 1910 and Jerusalem 1928. He commented that “for many missionaries the personal experience of interacting with adherents of other religions affected their assessment of these religions” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 100). Bavinck was perhaps referring here to Nicol Macnicol’s explanation of Christianity and Hinduism at Jerusalem 1928. Macnicol highlighted a movement among missionaries to focus less on ideas derived from religious texts as the meaning of non-Christian religion, and instead to focus on defining religion through the contemporary experiences of adherents (Macnicol 1928, pp. 18, 24). In his conference address he argued that the way to judge the question of continuity and discontinuity between Christianity and Hinduism was to observe the difference in the experience of a convert compared with their former life (Macnicol 1928, p. 51). Bavinck believed that this approach depended too much on the context in which missionaries served, whether one of “moral perversion”, or “refined […] ethical system”, and was therefore unstable (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, pp. 100–1). In his historiography of missionary thought these conferences produced an opposite movement to the one described by Macnicol. Bavinck thought that the unsatisfactory nature of analysing the relationship between Christianity and other religions through personal anecdotes had become a widespread belief after the Edinburgh and Jerusalem conferences, thereby producing “renewed biblical reflection on other religions and general revelation” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 103).

This development suited Bavinck’s conviction that scripture is the norm of human religious experience. ‘All human speculations are useless; we should only listen to what God Himself reveals to us about His work among the Gentiles” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 102). This view was itself connected with the theological idea that Christian interaction with other religions was part of mission as God’s activity, which carried its own prolegomenal implications:

“the work of missions is the work of God; it is not lawful for us to improvise … although it will not always be easy to find the right course, our search must surely be led by what God has said in his word”.

(J. H. Bavinck 1960, p. 6; 2013b, p. 271)

These remarks display the role of theological prolegomena as a crux in Bavinck’s theology of religions. Because mission is seen as God’s own work, reflection upon “other religions” cannot depend on contingencies such as the missionary’s local experience. For Bavinck mission has a norm that precedes and judges the field. Scripture was for him the criterion of objectivity. Not in the sense of a neutral vantage-point, but as the stable revelation by which Christian thought is obliged to test itself and to assess rival religious claims. Bavinck’s method could make use of empirical description of religion, such as historical or psychological analyses, without allowing phenomena to become decisive. Religious consciousness is taken seriously as an empirical reality. But its theological meaning is not self-interpreting and so empirical description of religion alone does not suffice to evaluate a belief or practice. On Bavinck’s account, the question of continuity and discontinuity between Christianity and other faiths cannot be settled by contrasting experiences. The question requires judgement under revelation, pursued with the patience and restraint demanded by an inquiry that claims to be bound to what God has said, as speech accessible to situated human interpreters.

3. General Revelation and the Dynamics of Suppression

As with his theological prolegomena, Bavinck’s account of general revelation was rooted in the broader Reformed tradition. He drew especially on Calvin’s discussion of the sensus divinitatis, the idea that there is “by natural instinct […] an awareness of divinity” (Calvin 1960, 1.3.1., 1.5.6.). He believed that Calvin’s view comprised an accurate exegesis of Romans 1:18–25, which held a crucial place in Bavinck’s construction of a theology of religions (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 262). He has been seen as critical of the specifics of Calvin’s view of the nature of the receptor within the individual which receives this revelation, with a contrast between the reformer’s “substantial” and Bavinck’s “relational” approach (Visser 2013, p. 34). However Bavinck understood Calvin as vague on the nature of the semen religionis and sensus divinitatis, and himself saw the question of mode as ‘a motley array of unsolvable questions’ (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 263, 281–83).

While he understood general revelation as universal, for Bavinck this knowledge is more an immediate confrontation with God himself working upon the individual human soul, who “stands before him every day anew” than a reasoning process from the evidence of creation (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 283). The experience of general revelation is an ongoing exposure to God’s presence which is continually renewed in ordinary life. This experience therefore resists containment within a moment of insight or a particular argument because it impacts the whole person prior to any reflection. This is why Bavinck could treat disputes over the precise mode in which general revelation is received as a “motley array of unsolvable questions”. He regards the primary datum as the fact of divine self-disclosure impinging upon human life, rather than a stable mechanism that can be described without remainder.

His critique of what he called the “older philosophy” reinforces this point (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 278–79). Bavinck objects to an epistemology that begins with a self-contained subject who derives religious knowledge from the external world by a process of inspection and inference. For in his view persons always find themselves already engaged within the world. General revelation concerns human beings as both objects and subjects. They are objects as those upon whom God acts and to whom he speaks in general revelation. They are subjects as agents whose reception of that revelation involves individual interaction and interpretation. The distinction is important for his theology of religions, because it allows him to affirm the universality and inescapability of knowledge of God while also allowing for the historical contingency of its effects in the reception of particular subjects.

Since Bavinck believed that God makes himself known to all people through general revelation, experienced in the sensus divinitatis, he needed to explain how humanity responds to this universal knowledge. Bavinck’s thought was here further indebted to his reading of Calvin. In a discussion of historical answers to the question of human response to God’s revelation, he drew extensively again on the reformer’s imagery of the fallen human heart as a factory of idols which responds to knowledge of God by consistently turning it to idolatry (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 259–62). While drawing these ideas principally from Romans 1:18–25, he also saw scripture as presenting the overall narrative that “in the human heart is unbelief only. The truth of God is turned into a lie as soon as it comes near men’s hearts” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 108). The Christian tradition had long described this response by the subject as self-deception and idolatry. Bavinck’s account was Augustinian here in its echo of disordered love, alongside his specifically Calvinian fabrica idolorum. Both accounts describe the mind’s capacity to evade the unavoidable. Bavinck’s distinctive contribution is to restate that claim by drawing on psychology as a tool in his exegetical grounding for this traditional anthropology. While his argument was founded on biblical exegesis, he demonstrated a Reformed eclecticism in explaining how humanity could have true knowledge of God through general revelation while simultaneously experiencing that knowledge in distorted form. The Freudian psychological idea of repression appeared useful to him for explaining the Pauline concept of suppression and exchange in Romans 1:18–25. Human beings know God, yet their condition is “paradoxical” because they simultaneously do not know (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 284). For the “human mind, as the fabrica idolorum (Calvin),1 makes its own ideas of God and its own myths. This is not intentional deceit—it happens without man’s knowing it. He cannot get rid of them. So he has religion; he is busy with a god; he serves his god—but he does not see that the god he serves is not God Himself” (J. H. Bavinck 1981, p. 122). When Bavinck invoked the “psychological phenomenon recently discovered” in Freud—unconsciously suppressed knowledge which reveals itself indirectly, even in involuntary acts such as verbal slips—he was not seeking an alternative ground for theology. He is indicating how a Pauline account of culpable evasion could be rendered intelligible within a modern intellectual climate already accustomed to doubt the transparency of the self. He was exercising a reformed eclecticism, wherein a concept external to scripture could be appropriated under the primary prolegomenal commitment to exegesis.

Bavinck introduces a further distinction, one that becomes important throughout his theology of religions, between the way suppression becomes systemic in religion and the interior history of particular persons (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 108). Religious traditions can fix the suppression and exchange of Romans 1:18–25 into patterns of thought and behaviour. They can thus be described as totalising. Yet he resists collapsing the religious experience of every individual person into the totalising logic of the systems they inhabit. This mixture of total suppression alongside the possibility of religious experience recalls the 1934 Barth–Brunner dispute, which Bavinck touched upon in his own writing, over whether grace has any “point of contact” in human nature as created and fallen (J. H. Bavinck 2013c, sct. 6). Brunner argued that the imago Dei supplied a contact point for divine address, while Barth rejected any such capacity that could be identified apart from God’s act in Christ because he saw this as introducing the possibility of natural theology. Bavinck did not expand on his discussion of the Barth-Brunner episode and its implications for natural theology, referring to the topic as something that “will be a cardinal subject in the development of both theological and philosophical thought.” He declined to infer from the experience of general revelation a capacity for response to God that could be assessed in advance. But he also refuses to treat non-Christian religious experience as a nullity. Individual religious consciousness may remain marked by tensions with their existing religious allegiance, with the universality of God’s self-disclosure leaving open the possibility that the impact of this revelation exceeds what is presently visible in a person’s religious self-description. On Bavinck’s account, the final intelligibility of an individual’s religious experience is argued by their response to Christ as a retrospective revelation of what had been happening in their prior history of religious experience. But this criterion of how non-Christian religious experience responds to Christ belonged to a longer Christian effort to describe the religious and philosophical life of non-believing peoples as not godless, but not godly independent of the cross.

4. Bavinck’s Genealogy of Approaches

Bavinck saw the history of discussion of other religions within the broader Christian tradition as a vital subject, due to its potential to furnish answers to contemporary questions about religious experience. He acknowledged the work of early church figures and the idea of philosophy being a preparation for the gospel (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 248–52). Yet he judged that this approach quietly replaced the background of New Testament language such as John’s logos, depersonalising it into a universal principle in humanity. In his view Tertullian had a more sin-conscious approach, but still had a much too positive view of the human soul compared with his own exegesis of Romans 1:18–25 by only recognising the “knowing”, but not the “suppressing” of revelation (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 252–53). He saw Augustine as experiencing a progression of thought that lasted from conversion until his retractions, in which he moved from a positive view of the Greek philosophers to finding that they “have no room for the cross because they have not seen sin in all its terrible dimensions” (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 254). Bavinck also perceived a comparable trend in contemporaneous Roman Catholic authors through analogous pressures at work in their theology. Receiving Thomas Aquinas through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criticisms of his neo-scholastic reception, Bavinck characterised Thomism as a division between what reason can know as “nature” and what depends upon an additional supernatural revelation, a reading also present in Herman Bavinck (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 258; Sutanto 2020, pp. 77–82).2 Yet he was also critical of Henri de Lubac and the Nouvelle school’s response to Neo-Scholasticism. Bavinck showed direct familiarity with de Lubac’s writing, quoting his claim that non-Christian religions remained in a childish condition and that Christianity needed only to deepen what was already present (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 258). He traced what he saw as a similar idea of religious maturing, despite its different foundation and result, through the writings of Ernst Troeltsch. Originating in the nineteenth century’s idea of the evolutionary development of religious consciousness, Bavinck saw Troeltsch as teaching religious consciousness which culminated in a form of Christian absoluteness through higher evolutionary progress. The responsibility of Christianity was to fertilise other religious ideas, rather than having a sui generis revelation to present in every culture (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 267–69). Bavinck’s criticism was consistent across these historical cases. He thought that non-Reformed accounts interpreted religious history as a process of gradual maturation. In such accounts, God’s work is a principle unfolding within history, where religions represent stages in humanity’s growing consciousness of the divine. Bavinck wanted to speak about the acts of God which judge human history, and call humanity to repentance through revealed religion. The maturation narrative supported a fulfilment model that allowed for significant continuity between Christianity and other religions. Bavinck believed that revelation must dictate the question of continuity, rather than a theory of religious ascent. This fit with his overall emphasis on prolegomena, in that choices regarding theological method would have a decisive impact upon questions of religious heritage and the indigenising of theology.

Bavinck saw the various historical approaches he identified in the history of Christian thought as having direct contemporary impact on attitudes towards the non-Christian heritage in non-western countries. Citing Gandhi’s estimation of Christ as one revelation among many, he believed historical approaches to the theology of religions largely allowed a syncretistic comparison between old beliefs and the new Christianity (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 269). For example, an idea akin to the praeparatio evangelica was being expressed by the younger churches, revitalizing the view that the older religions were as the Old Testament to the New. Indian theologian A. J. Appasamy wrote that “most Christians in India have come to acknowledge that the philosophies and religions of India have not been inspired by the powers of darkness, but that through them all can be seen, sometimes clearly but sometimes dimly, the hand of God leading men on” (Appasamy 1928, p. 473). Bavinck saw his fears about the deficiency of historical approaches to theology of religions as confirmed in a 1942 conference in Poona, India, where fellow Dutch missionary Johannes Hoekendijk (1912–1975) encouraged a study of the early fathers for the facilitation of indigenous theology (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 250). Since “naturally, the questions currently sizzling on all mission fields are in essence the same” as the early church, Bavinck worried that the source for answers and the subsequent conclusions would exert a deep influence upon the younger churches (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 250).

But Bavinck believed that estimations of non-Christian religions and religio-cultural heritages among his contemporaries provided inadequate explanatory power. For he argued they were not accounting for the categories of suppression and exchange in Romans 1:18–25, and the status of Gentiles—unbelievers who are without God’s special revelation—as cut-off from God in Ephesians 2:12 (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 108). In Bavinck’s diagnosis, missiological discussion among his contemporaries and the new churches suffered from a deficient theological prolegomena which did not have biblical exegesis as the foundation for missiology, and therefore also lacked an appropriate theological anthropology. These shortcomings meant gravitation towards an overly positive account of fallen humanity’s capabilities and achievements in the realm of religion. If suppression is pervasive yet partial, then enquiry into the status of non-Christian religion shifts from the identification of truths to the theological meaning of such elements under the judgement of Romans 1:18–25. Bavinck saw the history of religion as a “strange mix of beauty and ugliness” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 95). Non-Christian traditions do exhibit truth and value. But they do so always simultaneously as suppression and exchange. Bavinck’s theological conservatism was paired with his characteristic Reformed eclecticism. He was willing to draw upon psychology and historical comparison as ancillary means of clarifying how revelation may be encountered and resisted in his exegesis of biblical texts. Bavinck’s analysis is Augustinian in its discussion of religion as a matter of disordered loves. The refusal of the will in receiving revelation bends knowledge rather than eliminating it. On this view, religious history is a history of responses to revelation. The goods represented in those responses are real, but they remain theologically indeterminate because they belong to the same economy of suppression and exchange. Despite the apparent pessimism of Bavinck’s assessment of non-Christian religious consciousness, his thought was thus more complex. His exegesis of Romans 1:18–25 led him to believe there was a sense of genuine knowing when the knowledge of God touched an individual. This is something which Bavinck believed Karl Barth had misunderstood in his reading of the reformed tradition (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, pp. 272–73). Calvin’s reference to the useless lamps of revelation shining in the darkness for example was not to be taken absolutely. Bavinck appears to have been reading the reformer more closely than Barth here, as Calvin did not take the suppression of general revelation as absolute and warned against rejecting truth given by God’s Spirit wherever it may be found (Calvin 1960, 2.11.12–16). In his own metaphor, Bavinck expressed that “general revelation does not simply slide past people like a drop of rain does off the waxy leaf of a tree” (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 283). There are rather different levels of suppression within the individual. Citing his close colleague Hendrik Kraemer (1888–1965), he believed that “even in this fallen world God shines through in a broken, troubled way” (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 273). Bavinck was seeking his own historical answers to the question of religions. He did so in order to build an account that he believed was consistent with the Reformed tradition. For despite Barth being one of the Reformed tradition’s leading twentieth-century representatives, Bavinck believed there was greater balance to be found in the tradition than he perceived in the Swiss theologian’s writings.

Yet given this unwillingness to assert the worthlessness of human response to general revelation, in what sense did Bavinck believe God’s light shines through, or non-Christian responses to revelation contain truth? For him this was a question with vital consequences, with such “urgently relevant questions […] occupying the thought of many millions and are determinative for the future” (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 271). He thought it possible to cautiously but consistently affirm the presence of value in other religions, since, echoing Calvin again, even in an idol factory there is a reflection of divinity, “a measure of reverence and awe, and a desire for worship” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, pp. 107–8). One comment on secularisation and traditional religion sheds light on how Bavinck believed this valuation might be possible within his broader system. For secularisation’s “spiritual condition is worse than those within the non-Christian religions” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 108). By positing a continuum, Bavinck made it possible to distinguish between better and worse, or fuller and more distorted, responses to revelation. For Bavinck, the disordered response to God could take recognisably religious forms. It could also appear in apparently secular forms, where the religious impulse is denied but replaced by functional substitutes. If secularisation is a “worse” condition, then even misdirected worship still exposes an inextinguishable human orientation. For Bavinck, religious consciousness is therefore evident not in the particular object that replaces God, but in the fact that worship cannot be abolished without leaving some substitute in its place.

Bavinck’s account may appear privative here. Yet the continuum he posits facilitates a more nuanced reading of what replaces true worship, insofar as such replacements can function as vestiges of an ineradicable orientation. They may display genuine religious seriousness in an appreciation for beauty, devotion, or philosophical contemplation, while remaining, precisely as substitutes, hollowed out by the repression of God. Thus “in all the beauty, devotion, and philosophical contemplation of other religious systems, there remains a horrible void within them, for they search but repress God himself” (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 108), and “One may be thankful that other religions believe in some god, but the gods that are created often fill Christians with horror” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 108). Though “desire for worship […] is directed towards the wrong object”, humans remain worshippers in their reacting to God’s revelation. Revelation is repressed, but it is not destroyed. This repressed knowledge “forms nuclei around which conceptual complexes of a totally deviant nature crystallize” (J. H. Bavinck 2013b, p. 290). It is this nature of humankind as irrepressible worshipers, who suppress revelation into crystallisations of truth and falsity, that undergirds Bavinck’s important distinction between vague and specific truth.

5. Vague and Specific Truths

Bavinck used the categories of vague and specific truths as ways in which the question of truth in non-Christian religions can be examined. The category of vague truths indicates that non-Christian religions are built around what he called the “nuclei” of general truths, such as God, creation, man, sin, salvation, and law. Non-Christian religions thus bear a relation to truth. Yet these truths are redirected, so that “the more one explores other religions, the more one becomes aware that there exists a great void (J. H. Bavinck 2013a, p. 108)”. In Bavinck’s system the possibility of specific truths therefore becomes untenable. Specific truths would be normative theological knowledge that describes God’s concrete identity and manner of dealing with humanity such as who God is, how God relates to the world, and what salvation finally is, rather than merely registering those general nuclei in an indeterminate or displaced form. As Bavinck’s comments on beauty in other religions suggest, the denial of specific truths was not a denial that particular statements in non-Christian religions may be correct. Rather he denies that they deliver truth about God as God. Hence the paradoxical judgement that religions may display genuine religious seriousness and still lack saving truth. This also provided the framework for Bavinck to retain the concept of fulfilment, that “all human need, expressed in various ways and religious systems, is fulfilled in Christ” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, pp. 108–10). For Christ fulfils other religions only in the vague truth sense, in that non-Christian systems were unknowingly forming their specific truth claims around the nuclei of suppressed revelation. Bavinck’s account of the relationship between Christianity and other religions is therefore one of “subversive” rather than contiguous fulfilment (Strange 2014, p. 42).

Fulfilment therefore has limits in Bavinck’s scheme. It does not mean that Christianity brings to completion a religious process that is already, in itself, oriented toward the goal of true worship. It means that Christ answers the human need that has been misdescribed and misdirected within human religion. For Bavinck fulfilment meant a clarifying interruption. Christianity does not merely make stronger claims than other religions as in Troeltsch. Christianity arises from special revelation, and therefore brings a norm that other religions cannot supply from within their own construction of specific truths. At this point his account can seem to press toward monologue rather than exchange. A theology of religions organised around suppression, and around the sui generis character of special revelation, appears to leave scant space for the listening that Bavinck treats as indispensable to missionary encounter. Lamin Sanneh criticised Kraemer’s position as detrimental to “interfaith and intercultural understanding” when there could have been great missionary expansion in the twentieth century, because the “failure to accord a place in his system to that pluralism” which characterises modern society undermined the cause of mission (Sanneh 1997, p. 570). This criticism of Kraemer can equally apply to Bavinck given the direct theological influence they shared as teacher and pupil (Visser 2003, p. 31). Bavinck insisted that mission is “discussion,” yet linked that dialogue to humility rather than to the suspension of truth-claims (J. H. Bavinck 1941, p. 54). To understand how such discussion is possible on his premises, one must keep in view the emphasis on the prolegomenal priority of special revelation.

5.1. Pluralism and Dialogue

For Bavinck, the primary question is whether conclusions are compelled by the exegesis of God’s biblical self-revelation, rather than by utilitarian or existential considerations. He argues that a system which removed Christian exclusivity “tries to do justice to all religions by declaring that none of them is the absolute truth” and is therefore not actually operating in a humble mode of listening and understanding (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 89). On the contrary, he believed that a pluralist approach to interreligious dialogue claims objectivity for itself, while denying it to others (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 89). The a priori of biblical revelation or theological anthropology is replaced by another a priori in which “religion is treated as a merely human phenomenon and the question as to whether religion has anything to do with God is not even reflected upon” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 90). Religious ideas, including Christian ones, become “merely ways of expressing the fundamental notions which dwell in our hearts. This is the basic principle of modern philosophy of religion, and I do not hesitate to call it a fundamental error” (J. H. Bavinck [1941] 1948, p. 90). Bavinck’s point concerns the assumptions that govern discussion about religion, since dialogue already presupposes an account of what religion is and how religious claims relate to reality. He therefore reframes the question posed by pluralist critiques of religious dialogue. For him the issue was whether pluralism can occupy a place in theological reasoning without first deciding, implicitly or explicitly, the status of revelation and the character of religious truth. Since pluralism cannot avoid such adjudication while also claiming to represent neutrality, it becomes self-contradictory. It replaces the normative standard it challenges with normative and therefore exclusionary claims of its own. Bavinck’s missionary strategy was grounded in his prolegomenal foundations. For him, exclusivist truth-claims are not the greatest threat to listening and mutual understanding. The greater danger for Bavinck is a substitution, especially if unacknowledged, of one controlling a priori for another in theology of religions and missionary practice.

5.2. Meeting in Love

Yet Bavinck’s biography was also an example of how his sui generis view of Christianity alongside non-Christian religion did not impede listening and understanding (J. H. Bavinck 1981, p. 15). He saw a purely antithetical approach of rational argumentation as a psychologically deficient way to interact with others. But he also believed that a sympathetic method where Christianity and non-Christian religions are partners in a quest for truth as “theologically irresponsible” (J. H. Bavinck 1960, p. 184). He believed the correct approach was “not antithetic, for it does not … ridicule … nor is it sympathetic, for it does not view paganism as a precursor to the gospel … nor is it thetic, because it attempts to come as near as possible to the life and thought of those to whom the message is being presented” (J. H. Bavinck 1946, p. 71). In fact “missionary work is in practice always discussion and cannot be anything but discussion” (J. H. Bavinck 1941, p. 54). This discussion can take place through the points of contact present in non-Christian religions due to their “vague truths”. Bavinck also believed that such discussion could not happen from a position of arrogance, since he argued that in the Christian “the pagan continues to live and breathe”, who “realizes at every moment that the weapon he points at the other has wounded himself as well” (J. H. Bavinck 1960, p. 126). What can be missed in critiques like Sanneh’s is that Bavinck’s insistence on Christian exclusivity was paired with a demanding ethic of humility—an account of listening that begins with self-knowledge and repentance rather than with the suspension of truth-claims:

Meeting-in-love includes the recognition of myself in the other person, a sympathetic feeling of his guilt and a sincere desire in Christ to do with this man what Christ has done with me … in the proper approach there is always an awareness of being on the same level with the person and there is a real consciousness of our common guilt in the eyes of God. It is this which gives the approach a warm undertone.

(J. H. Bavinck 1960, p. 126)

6. Summary

Bavinck’s account of non-Christian religious consciousness was based on the priority of special revelation, the reality of general revelation, the universality of human knowledge of God, and how suppression, based on his exegesis of Romans 1:18–25, distorts revelation into totalizing religious systems. Yet Bavinck’s distinction between vague and specific truth functioned as a crucial mediating category in his thought, allowing contact with divine reality in other religions while denying that their normative truth-claims can be affirmed as such. Bavinck’s account of religions did not dismiss non-Christian religion but neither did it provide a theory of religious progress. His goal was an account of religious life as simultaneously responsive to God and evasive that fit within the broader trajectories of the Reformed theological tradition’s Augustinianism and eclecticism in which Bavinck operated.

7. Some Contemporary Applications for the Chinese Christian Context

J. H. Bavinck’s account of religions is complex. His thought on this topic needs to be read as a series of interrelated judgements, each of which narrows the range of claims that may responsibly follow. Scripture, as special revelation, provides the criterion for theological judgement about religion. God’s universal self-disclosure takes place in general revelation, while Romans 1:18–25 undergirds the basic account of non-Christian religion as a pattern of suppression and exchange. The distinctions between vague and specific truth, and between religious systems and particular persons, permit appraisal without flattening lived religion through simplistic diagnoses. Bavinck’s thought is well suited for adaption to the Chinese context. Religion in China is not straightforwardly available as a single object of analysis or a settled complex of institutions. Religion is a contested public category, one which has been shaped by long histories of moral formation and ritual practice, and episodes of disruption and administrative reclassification that have altered what counts as religion in public life. Religion in modern China cannot be understood apart from these contests over public meaning in a secular age, and the competing visions of social order that accompany them (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, pp. 3–11, 221–22). At the same time, the persistence and reconfiguration of multiple traditions, including popular ritual practice and diverse Christian forms, has led sociologists to describe the recent history of religion in China in terms of survival and revival, accompanied by increased institutional variety (Yang 2011, ix–xii). Bavinck’s framework warns that theological accounts of religion in China must avoid two errors. The first is to treat inherited ritual and moral worlds as merely inert residues of previously meaningful beliefs and practices. The second is to approach rapid social and intellectual change as though it had dissolved the older problem of worship and its direction.

7.1. Revelation, Confucian Ritual Worlds, and Cultural Christianity (Wenhua Jidutu)

Bavinck’s account of nuclei around which conceptual complexes gather allows Chinese Christian theology to describe Chinese religious phenomena without collapsing them into either fulfilment narratives or reductive naturalism. His scheme means that genuine religious seriousness can be acknowledged while also refusing to treat such connective points as determinate knowledge of God as God. The theological question concerning the object and direction of religious practices cannot be settled by the resemblance of certain values alone. A point of contact with a non-Christian religious or philosophical idea or practice may be granted as real, while its theological normativity remains in dispute between the two religions. This distinction has immediate consequences for the study of Chinese traditions whose self-understanding is frequently ethical and ritual. Confucian moral cultivation, for example, operates through thick practices of formation—such as family obligations, ritual propriety, embodied habits of reverence—that are difficult to classify as religion within modern Western taxonomies, yet remain saturated with metaphysical and moral claims about reality and the good. Confucianism therefore undeniably encompasses a spiritual dimension. As a religio-philosophical tradition, it articulates a religious worldview through its cosmological framework. Mary Tucker describes this cosmological orientation as manifested in the interplay between the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the universe, achieved via spiritual practices such as communitarian ethics, self-transformation, and ritual relatedness. This overarching cosmological perspective informs and directs all facets of human existence. The religious aspect of Confucianism entails distinct ethical principles and responsibilities tailored to varying human relationships, fostering both individual self-cultivation and a harmonious connection between humanity and the broader cosmos. Confucian self-cultivation may be understood as a means of integrating the individual into the larger patterns of life that are embedded within society and nature (Tucker 2003, p. 3).

Bavinck’s method can interpret such phenomena as sites where nuclei such as law, guilt, obligation, and hope are manifested in public life. His method also asks how those nuclei have been suppressed and encrusted over into forms of self-justification, or sacralised social order. His category of vague truth encourages understanding and description, since it does not require the analyst of another religious tradition to deny the cultural particularity through which religious consciousness is expressed. At the same time, it blocks inferences from the perceived depth of a tradition to saving truth due to the absence of Bavinck’s specific truths—the normative knowledge of God’s identity and saving work that arises from special revelation. Bavinck’s category of secular substitutes applies the same reasoning to modern Chinese settings in which explicit religious practice is weakened, while moral commitment and symbolic meaning continue to gather around ultimate concerns. Bavinck’s remark that secularisation may signal a “worse” spiritual condition than life within non-Christian religions is helpful here. It treats the fading of recognisably religious forms as a development with spiritual significance instead of a neutral change in social organisation. Forms of public moral seriousness or civic virtue that are detached from explicit religion thus need not be read as mere emancipation from non-Christian religion, nor dismissed as cynicism. They can be approached as secular consolidations of the same underlying concerns—the same gatherings of vague truths capable of real social effects.

In Chinese contexts, this caution is important for modern intellectual projects that treat religion as a human phenomenon which can be adequately explained by historical, psychological, or political accounts. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, amid economic restructuring and rapid urban development, urban Christian communities in China expanded markedly. As they grew, many urban churches placed greater weight on social responsibility and on the church’s contribution to the wider public good. A number of Chinese intellectuals began in the same period to re-examine the orthodox Marxist characterisation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Some described this reassessment in a polemical shorthand as a “second Opium War”. The central claim was that religion should be recognised as a durable element within Chinese society and that religious traditions might contribute to Chinese culture rather than merely impede it (Bays 2012, p. 200). During the 1990s, some scholars in China’s secular universities began to examine the ethical claims of Christianity, with particular attention to Protestantism. This work treated Christianity not only as a private commitment but as a possible resource for public moral reflection. It asked in a historically and philosophically attentive way whether Christian argument might illuminate wider norms and patterns of judgement within contemporary Chinese society (Bays 2012, pp. 199–202). Some of these intellectual and academic engagements with Christianity have been discussed under the category of “cultural Christians” or “culture Christians” (wenhua jidutu) (Zhuo 2001, pp. 283–300). Many of these scholars learnt Christianity mainly through their own academic activities such as translating Christian classics rather than from the institutional churches (Lam 2010, pp. 21–34). In terms of their attitude towards Christianity, one influential typology distinguishes between three types of scholars. Type A scholars consider Christianity as a foreign religion without any religious commitment themselves. They often focus on the difference between the features of Christianity and Chinese culture by conducting comparative studies between the two. Type B scholars hold a more sympathetic attitude towards Christianity even though they likewise often do not have a faith commitment. They approach Christianity from a social-anthropological perspective. Type C scholars are committed to doing Christian theology with a personal faith background. However, their methods are often confined by broader expectations in the humanities and social sciences and have to hold a so-called academic neutral position. Bavinck’s critique of pluralist method, and of concepts of religion that make reference to God’s self-revelation invisible, does not entail hostility to the human sciences. His thought calls rather for candour about the prior commitments that control such work.

These considerations explain why the work of so-called cultural Christians, and the wider “Sino-Christian theology” movement, should be considered alongside Bavinck’s theology of religions. Sino-Christian theology has often developed within universities as an attempt to express Christian claims in Chinese scholarly language. Its writers have varied relationships to church membership and confession, and these relationships are not always made explicit. This context bears directly on Bavinck’s account because it raises the problem of reconciling public academic discussion of Christianity with the normative claims of special revelation. It also raises the related issue of how those claims are altered when Christianity is treated chiefly as a cultural inheritance or moral vocabulary. (Hanke-Estevez 2025, pp. 67–73). Bavinck’s approach allows such discourses to be taken seriously. For academic discussion of Christianity may become one of the sites in which nuclei of revelation are made newly expressible within Chinese intellectual life.

7.2. Suppression, Conversion, and Ecclesial Formation

Bavinck’s distinction between system-level totality and the interior histories of persons has particular pastoral value in Chinese contexts. Religious life may be lived through family-oriented traditions, especially in more rooted local settings, or through ad hoc or even regular allegiance to traditional practices such as Buddhist rites by those who may formally identify as irreligious. Bavinck’s system/person distinction can guard against two errors in the Chinese context. It discourages a single simplistic theological diagnosis of non-Christian beliefs and practices as mere unbelief in which there is no value in understanding them or differentiating accurately between them. On the other, it cautions against reading ethical and aesthetic refinement or philosophical seriousness as evidence of an incipient orientation toward the gospel. Bavinck’s anthropology supports more flexible interpretations of Chinese religious practices. Suppression is pervasive but enacted unevenly. Systems can turn exchange into durable religious patterns, while the belief and practices of individual persons may demonstrate tensions and contradictions within those same patterns.

Ecclesiological consequences follow from this. Where conversion requires the reordering of practices, such as around honour, mourning, and family solidarity, the church’s work calls for a patient formation that is neither accommodation nor denunciation. This is because under Bavinck’s categories the issue is not only whether particular rites are permitted or forbidden. The issue is also whether the church, in its response to non-Christian religiosity, forms persons whose loves are redirected without simply abandoning the vague truths which old practices pointed towards. Such formation depends upon catechesis that can identify nuclei with sympathy, including reverence and obligation, while also teaching how the same nuclei become sites of distortion when they are directed toward created goods as though they were ultimate. These concerns bear on figures such as Jia Yuming (1880–1964), a prolific evangelical theologian of the Republican period. He affirmed the authority of Scripture while sustaining a measured appreciation of Chinese cultural inheritance. He also spoke of the Chinese people as marked by an inherently religious disposition, and expressed confidence that Chinese intellectual life was capable of receiving Christian claims:

We Chinese people are people of religious thought. The mind of following and fearing the heavenly mandate has been revealed in the superior-subordinate relationship between ruler and subject. It has been passed on from generation to generation, and has nearly become an inherited nature, or our so-called religious belief of China, which is better than all other countries’ in the world. We also believe that God is the father of all creatures, who is ‘the creator of nature and the origin of heaven and earth’.

(Jia 1921, p. 67)

Jia argued that the Chinese pursuit of fulfilling the heavenly mandate, the highest moral end of life in traditional Chinese thought, could be redirected into reverence for and obedience to God. In that respect his proposal and its underlying rationale are analogous to what Bavinck believed possible in reorienting existing practices rather than their simple replacement.

The system/person distinction also helps Christian communities to avoid a pastoral harshness that mistakes social habituation for deliberate rebellion. Jia was equally attentive to the persistence of ancestor reverence, which he identified as a recurring obstacle to Christian profession (Jia 1949, p. 68). However, with a deep understanding of Chinese culture, he grasped the nature of ancestor reverence as a systematic cultural inheritance and moral obligation—what may be described in Bavinck’s system as systematic suppression through a culturally embedded redirection of religious truth. Rather than offering a harsh and condescending critique of individuals engaged in ancestor worship, Jia sympathetically observed that the nature of this sinfulness is systematised and cultural. For Jia, sinful customs (zui su) constitute the periphery of sin, that is, the sinful environment in which human life is situated. Ancestor reverence, as one such sinful custom, had become a moral obligation for the Chinese people, such that failure to perform it would be regarded as immoral (Jia 1949, p. 68). Bavinck’s language of suppression helps make sense of culpable evasion of God’s revelation without assuming that motives are fully transparent. Such evasion may be sustained by aspects such as habit or social obligation, rather than by explicit conscious intention. Bavinck’s posture therefore encourages closer attention to the moral psychology of non-Christians and converts who continue to inhabit traditional religious patterns. These patterns may be sites of suppression. Yet that suppression is uneven, socially embedded, and not always consciously articulated.

Bavinck’s categories can also illuminate the problem of forming Christian identity through comprehensive systems that begin to function as substitutes for truth itself. This temptation is especially visible in Chinese settings, where communities may seek stability through strict boundary marking and a rhetoric of purity, whether doctrinal or familial/tribal. Bavinck’s warning about Christianity’s vulnerability to “pseudo-religion” is therefore an important ecclesial self-diagnostic. For the fabrica idolorum does not cease at baptism, and can assume a churchly form. Chinese ecclesial diversity amplifies these issues. Contemporary Protestantism in China has been described as existing in forms such as rural and urban, registered and unregistered, congregations shaped by pietistic or charismatic inheritances, and newer communities drawn toward Reformed and confessional traditions (Chow 2018). Within one influential account, the rapid embrace of “Calvinist” Christianity since the 1990s appears as a contextual development shaped by particular social and intellectual conditions, rather than as a simple transplantation of Western denominationalism (Chow 2021, pp. 560–74). Bavinck’s thought encourages the process of the formation of Chinese Christian identity to be taken seriously, while maintaining that theological assessment requires further standards than fidelity to a historic doctrinal standard. For even a contextually intelligible embrace of a particular Christian tradition, including a Reformed or Calvinistic one, may still harden into “pseudo-religion”.

7.3. Bavinck, Ectypal Theology and Sino-Reformed Contextualisation

A recurrent anxiety in Chinese Christian debates about contextualisation concerns the perceived choice between doctrinal immobility and cultural capitulation. Bavinck’s prolegomenal insistence that theology is normed by Scripture can be misread as a mandate for formal sameness. Yet within the Reformed tradition that Bavinck inhabited, the archetypal/ectypal distinction echoes his account of why contextual theology is a theological and epistemological necessity. Human theology is ectypal because it is finite, creaturely, historically situated knowledge of God. Yet it remains subordinate to God’s self-revelation rather than being mere bottom-up projection of human ideas and desires. In recent Sino-Reformed discussion, the use of the ectypal distinction has been highlighted in the work of Abraham Kuyper and rooted in early modern Reformed scholasticism, with theology as inherently “tempo-spatial,” resulting in a “pilgrim theology” across cultures, including Dutch and Chinese forms that share “true theology” while taking distinguishable shape (Eglinton 2025, pp. 77–97).

The relevance of this for Chinese Reformed reception appears in the call for a Sino-Reformed confession. Ximian Xu has argued that Reformed theology remains an “exotic plant” within mainland Chinese Christianity insofar as Chinese Reformed communities rely heavily on Western legacies and thereby inhibit the emergence of specifically Sino-Reformed particularities (Xu 2022, pp. 175–76). His proposal does not repudiate historic confessions but shows how confessional reception is a contextual theological act. In Xu’s account, a Sino-Reformed confession would “actualise” the incarnational character of Christian truth within Chinese culture, while resisting the “mechanic” adoption of Western confessions as identity tokens (Xu 2022, p. 177). Under Bavinck’s scheme such tokens can carry an increased risk of hardening into pseudo-religion. Xu further suggests that such work could become a cooperative “turning point” for the reconciliation and unity of divergent Chinese Reformed constituencies, with the confession functioning as a shared act of discernment shaped by local concerns and by common grace (Xu 2022, pp. 181–82).

Read in light of Xu’s call for a Sino-Reformed confession, Bavinck’s position shows what such a project can claim and what it must refuse. If Scripture is the criterion by which the church judges its claims, then local form is not a concession to cultural pressure but an implication of ectypal theology. Creaturely knowledge must be spoken in particular languages and learned within particular histories. A confession drafted in Chinese circumstances can therefore be understood as an act of reception that tests inherited formulations by revelation, rather than necessarily an attempt at ecclesial novelty. At the same time, Bavinck’s account of suppression and his warning about Christianity’s vulnerability to pseudo-religion impose a further discipline. Confessional retrieval can itself become a comprehensive system that substitutes for truth, especially when confessional language is treated chiefly as a badge of belonging. Bavinck’s own insistence on “meeting in love” presses in the opposite direction. It requires that confession be pursued with repentance and with a sober sense of shared fault, rather than with a blind confidence in the purity of one’s party.

7.4. Mediated Reception of Theological Traditions in China

The process of confessionalisation, read alongside Bavinck’s method, points to a further Chinese test case regarding the act of theological reception itself. Bavinck’s own eclectic practice suggests a guarded form of appropriation, in which resources drawn from existing theological traditions or modern scholarship more broadly conceived may be used to clarify judgement while remaining accountable to Scripture. However in contemporary Chinese Christian life what is often appropriated is not first-hand engagement with existing theological sources, but traditions mediated through factors such as translation choices or reliance on foreign training avenues. A particular theological tradition such as neo-Calvinism may be present in China, but there also needs to be awareness of what version of a tradition is being received, and how that reception conditions theological judgement. Ximian Xu argues in the case of Dutch neo-Calvinism in China that this tradition is frequently mediated through interpretations prevalent in strains influenced by Van Tillian networks, with Kuyperian and Bavinckian emphases sometimes arriving indirectly and in reduced form (Xu 2023, p. 70). He also notes that the limited availability of primary sources in Chinese translation narrows what can be read, and can reinforce selective patterns of reception (Xu 2023, p. 74). These observations are salutary when seen in the context of Bavinck’s thought, which depends on pairing judgement with “meeting in love”, including exchange amongst fellow Christians. When reception of a theological tradition which is in fact pluriform hardens into a single accent, the result could be damaging for a young movement. The Neo-Calvinistic antithetical posture can encourage confidence while neglecting the demands Bavinck places on humility. Confessional language can be a legitimate and even necessary marker of belonging and group identity. Yet a rapid or overly narrow attachment of the moniker “Reformed”, or “Neo-Calvinist”, can function as a face-value label that displaces the slower task of theological judgement in local questions. Xu’s critique of “mechanic reception” identifies one concrete form of this danger within Chinese Reformed communities (Xu 2022, p. 179). Yet the remedy according to Bavinck’s premises is not less doctrine but more serious formation, so that confession is practised in a way that includes self-critique, and is sustained by repentance as well as instruction.

7.5. Meeting in Love in the Chinese Context

For Bavinck, missionary engagement begins from the recognition that Christians and non-Christians alike stand guilty before God. This shared condition prevents condescension, but it does not require Christians to abandon the unique claims of Christian confession. The concept of vague truth means careful discernment of nuclei, wherein Chinese traditions articulate genuine but suppressed and misdirected goods. Such listening provides genuine points of contact for discussion. Yet Bavinck’s “meeting in love” requires an accompanying self-knowledge. For the Christian recognises the persistence of idolatrous desire within Christian and church life. For Bavinck this recognition means approaching others without the detachment of superiority nor with a naïve romanticism with its tendency to produce premature agreement. His model is about mutual encounter under revelation. This becomes especially important where Christianity is understood through typologies that flatten its claims into a generic option for the religiously inclined consumer. Bavinck’s thought addresses the a priori assumption of such views. Discussion of religion always presupposes an account of truth and revelation, which means that dialogue that assumes the non-unique status of Christianity as a prerequisite cannot function as a neutral court of appeal. Gavin D’Costa’s argument that pluralism tends to reproduce exclusivism at the level of meta-claims offers one philosophical analogue to Bavinck’s concern about the locus of normativity, and whether that locus is acknowledged (D’Costa 1996, pp. 223–32). For Chinese contexts, especially in Sino-Christian theology, where dialogue is often pursued within academic contexts shaped by a bottom-up naturalism, Bavinck’s emphasis on prolegomena highlights the non-neutral terms of theological discussion.

This analysis bears directly on public witness and intellectual presence. Chinese public theology as a Christian intellectual work in China has been treated as a generational phenomenon that includes state-sanctioned church voices, secular academic discourse, and urban growth in Calvinism, each with its own public ambitions and constraints (Chow 2021, pp. 560–74). Bavinck’s account prompts the questions whether forms of public Christian discourse remain subordinate to special revelation, and whether such interactions are conducted in the manner Bavinck describes as meeting in love. In Chinese settings this principle cautions against two opposite misuses of truth: reducing Christian claims to what secures cultural legitimacy, or using those claims chiefly to secure boundary and status. Christian discourse becomes loving when it is coherent over time, willing to judge itself, and marked by patience. It must also refuse to adopt identity-markers in ways that substitute for the long work of organic growth, whether in individual lives or in academic and ecclesial institutions.