Editor, desiringGod.org
By a delightful stroke of Godâs providence, the English language bears witness to a husbandâs job description in the very word
husband. For a husband is a man who practices
husbandry, or cultivation. Like a master gardener, his job is to so nurture and tend to his wife that she brings forth flowers.
We should beware of stretching the image too far, of course. No woman is merely a passive patch of soil, helpless until a husband comes to cultivate her. Remember Anna and Abigail, women who flourished either without a husband (Luke 2:36â38) or with a foolish one (1 Samuel 25:3). Such women (and our churches know many of them today) bloom like wildflowers in the desert, planted and tended by a greater Groom.
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Who is Herman Bavinck, and why should contemporary Christians care about him? James Eglinton’s penetrating new study, Bavinck: A Critical Biography, goes a long way toward answering these questions.
Eglinton, who teaches Reformed theology at the University of Edinburgh, has produced a magisterial work that figures to become the leading biography of the great Dutch Reformed theologian (1854–1921). Along with Abraham Kuyper, Bavinck was an important figure in the neo-Calvinist movement in the Netherlands in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. A theological giant in his own right, Bavinck has received increased attention in the English-speaking world, especially following the translation of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, but is still too little known (especially outside the Dogmatics).
Pastor, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Lebensunwertes Leben is a chilling German phrase that means âlife unworthy of life.â It was coined in 1920 by two German professors, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, who thought that people with congenital, mental, or developmental disabilities burden their families and the state while contributing nothing. Hoche described such people as âhuman ballastâ and âempty shells of human beings.â These are lives unworthy of life, they argued, and it should be permissible to end them.
That argument was the seed that grew into the horrific fruit of the Holocaust. Before the Nazis built Auschwitz or perfected the gas chamber, there was Knauer, a baby born blind, missing a leg and part of an arm, and considered to be an âidiot.â When a family member requested a âmercy killingâ for Knauer, Hitler and his personal physician, Karl Brandt, directed doctors at the University of Leipzig to end Knauerâs life.
On Theology: Herman Bavinck s Academic Orations presents four previously untranslated works by Herman Bavinck (1854-1921). These works offer important insights into Bavinck’s conceptualisation of the discipline of theology, its place in the modern university, and the relation in which theology stands to religion. In the introductory essay, Bruce R. Pass draws attention to the way these speeches shed light on the development of Bavinck’s thought across his tenure at the Kampen Theological School and the Free University of Amsterdam as well as the complex relationship in which Bavinck’s thought stands to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. E-Book (PDF)