The Multifaceted Work of Christ: Herman Bavinck’s Doctrine of Atonement as Both Corrective and Retrieval
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay examines Herman Bavinck’s doctrine of atonement within his treatment of Christ’s humiliation in volume three of his Reformed Dogmatics . Through an investigation of Bavinck’s critiques of key nineteenth century theologians and of Bavinck’s own constructive account of the atonement, I show that Bavinck intended his theology of Christ’s work to serve as a corrective to the dominant approach to the theology of the atonement in his day. Against what he considered one-sided views of Christ’s work, I argue that Bavinck sought to offer an account which emulates Scripture in its multifaceted character. This theology further sought to retrieve and build upon historical Christian theology, most notably that of Anselm and especially the Protestant Reformers, in its focus on Christ’s vicarious satisfaction as the central (though not only) concern of his redeeming action. This exploration of Bavinck’s doctrine of the atonement not only deepens our understanding of Bavinck’s theological method but has relevance for broader studies of nineteenth and early twentieth century conceptualizations of Christ’s person and work and shows Bavinck’s attractiveness for contemporary constructive approaches to the atonement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".