Unity or Distinction? Herman Bavinck’s Use of John Calvin and Later Reformed Orthodoxy in His Doctrine of the Two States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the doctrine of Christ’s two states of humiliation and exaltation in Herman Bavinck’s and John Calvin’s thought, with the aim of illuminating Bavinck’s use of Calvin. The article begins by exploring Calvin’s use of the two states and argues that his treatment of Christ’s descent into hell is an important though understudied example of his broad approach to the two states, an integrative view of Christ’s exaltation in humiliation. An overview of the status duplex in subsequent Reformed orthodox thought is then provided, including Zacharias Ursinus’s commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, the Leiden Synopsis , and the Westminster Larger Catechism. Finally, this article shows how Bavinck’s history, theology and defense of the two states retrieves some of Calvin’s emphases, and yet, despite Bavinck's positioning of himself within a Reformed unanimity, largely favors the later Reformed orthodox position and does not note where Calvin and these later thinkers disagree. While both Calvin and Bavinck favor a view of unity and simultaneous distinction in the relationship between humiliation and exaltation, for Bavinck, the distinction is preeminent, while for Calvin, the unity is.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| 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".