James Eglinton continues his project of clarifying the theological vision of the Dutch Reformed theologian, Herman Bavinck. In this new critical biography, the author shifts gears from giving the kind of doctrinal analysis evident in his 2012 work, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck's Organic Motif to a biographical exploration that builds off his claim that Bavinck was a far more consistent theological mind than many of his interpreters have allowed. In his earlier work on Bavinck, Eglinton challenged the reigning hermeneutic, established primarily in Jan Veenhof's 1968 study Revelatie en Inspiratie, in which the author portrays Bavinck as a kind of ‘Jekyll and Hyde theologian who vacillates between moments of “orthodoxy” and “modernity” without ever resolving his own basic crises of theological identity’ (p. 28). Eglinton objects to the ‘two Bavincks’ model of interpretation, and to the subsequent scholarship that has tended to balkanise the Dutch theologian's work, interpreting him through either an ‘orthodox’ lens or a ‘modern’ one, with aspects of his thought being categorised in one and placed in opposition to the other. Eglinton wants Bavinck studies to move beyond this approach to consider how the implications of his new reading bear upon interpreting his theology as well as understanding the overall shape of Bavinck's life.

The burden of Eglinton's project is not so much to persuade the reader that his hermeneutic is the right one, as it is to give a portrait of Bavinck that conveys a more complete picture of the Dutchman. Eglinton effectively achieves this through a close textual reading of Bavinck's own journals (dagboeken) and letters, a compendious treatment of Bavinck's life as recorded in the Dutch press of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by drawing deeply from archival material housed in both Kampen and Amsterdam, and by including research from unpublished material. In so doing, Eglinton has weaved these sources into a magisterial account of Bavinck's life and career.

Before Eglinton's biography, Ron Gleason's book, Herman Bavinck: Pastor, Churchman, Statesman, and Theologian (2010), was the first substantial work written in English. Prior to Gleason, the most significant and influential biographies on Bavinck, upon which Gleason relies, were written by Valentijn Hepp (Dr. Herman Bavinck) and R.H. Bremmer (Herman Bavinck en Zijn Tijdgenoten). Both works are written in Dutch, with Hepp's biography of Bavinck published in 1921, shortly after Bavinck's death, and Bremmer's work appearing in 1966. Eglinton's interpretation of Bavinck corrects a number of speculative remarks and less historically chastened comments found in these biographies.

An instance of Eglinton righting a biographical wrong concerns Ron Gleason's claim that Bavinck's fiancée Johanna was not someone with whom he was seeking a dialogue partner on theological matters (p. 173). Gleason's portrayal of Johanna might therefore suggest that she was not the woman who, having ‘enjoyed a privileged upbringing’, was as theologically interested, culturally sophisticated and independently minded as Eglinton shows her to be. Eglinton's skillful analysis not only halts a wrong impression, but adds depth of detail to the life of Johanna. In Eglinton's postscript, she is shown to be industrious in her efforts to carry on her husband's theological and social legacy after his death. In particular, Eglinton touches upon her involvement with the women's movement and her (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to see Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics published in German and English.

Another example is seen in Eglinton's engagement with Hepp's and Bremmer's suggestion that Bavinck, wracked by a sense of disappointment and despair in his later years, dispensed with the dogmatic task, as well as a distinctively Reformed identity, preferring instead a broader Christianity that focused more on evangelism (pp. 261–2). Eglinton does not shy away from the reality of the harsh experiences Bavinck felt in Amsterdam (in particular the failure to unite the Theological School and the Free University of Amsterdam), but he makes it very clear that it was Bavinck's sense of satisfaction with his constructive theology – articulated most fully in his Reformed Dogmatics – that made his transition into a more political role in the Dutch Parliament a smooth one, and not, as Hepp suggests, one that was motivated out of a sense of disillusionment with the theological enterprise itself (p. 264).

Bavinck's theological outlook embraced the theological distinctives attached to the labels ‘Calvinist’ or ‘neo-Calvinist’, but it was also an outlook that extended beyond them. He preferred his theology to be characterised as ‘Reformed’, because in the theology of the Reformation he found the resources that enabled him to ‘simultaneously [look] backward and forward, enabling both development and a sense of rootedness in history’ (p. 261). For Bavinck, the theology of the Reformation was not restricted to the sixteenth century but drew from the best of the Christian tradition with a view to addressing the most immediate problems confronting church and culture. Thus, Eglinton shows that when during the first decade of the twentieth century Bavinck began to worry about the emergence of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (specifically, the scope and potency of the latter's atheism), Bavinck was not threatened by the prospect of inhabiting a culture influenced by Nietzsche, nor did he relax his theological commitments; but he did recognize that his approach to public apologetics would have to adjust as a consequence. Eglinton shows that Bavinck's theology had a catholic depth of identity that was displayed with a cosmopolitan breadth of vision.

A biography succeeds in as much as the biographer is able to take the reader into the world of its subject rather than bringing the world of the subject into that of the reader. Stylistically, this is seen in Eglinton's stance to leave in place those peculiarly Dutch characteristics that make up Herman Bavinck and his context without trying to translate them unnecessarily into a more familiar rendering for an English readership. Materially, Eglinton assumes the task of biographer with the requisite ability of sympathising with Bavinck without canonising him. He occupies a critical distance between himself and Bavinck to the degree that he does not sanitise or ignore unfortunate or less than favourable moments. He reports Bavinck's private admission of simultaneous doubt and trust in Scripture to his friend, Snouck Hurgonje, in 1905 (pp. 238–9). He portrays Bavinck as a figure who at times is vexed by the weight of having to make difficult decisions in his personal life as well as, less frequently, withstanding pressure from those occupying positions of political power and influence, as in the ‘the Seinpost scandal’ in 1895. Having been appointed to chair a commission to determine whether there was any merit in the public critiques aimed at Abraham Kuyper by Kuyper's colleague, Alexander de Savornin Lohman, at the Free University of Amsterdam, Bavinck privately divulged information from the commission to Kuyper that led to the eventual ‘honorable discharge’ of Lohman from his professorship (p. 201).

Eglinton's is a critical biography that is prodigiously and meticulously researched; and yet because he writes with such clarity and accessibility, he avoids the plight suffered by some other intellectual biographies that bog the reader down in an exposition that is overly technical and specialized. While this reviewer would have preferred it otherwise, it is perhaps one of the reasons endnotes were chosen over footnotes. Nevertheless, and with this small quibble aside, this volume is likely to remain the definitive biography on Bavinck for the foreseeable future.