In a recent interview, Laurence O’Donnell of the Bavinck Institute in Grand Rapids asked me to speak a bit about Herman Bavinck studies in America and the Netherlands. As for the latter, while I mentioned the names of Henk van den Belt, Hans Burger, George Harinck, Dirk van Keulen, and Jan Veenhof, and did not aim at completeness, I should perhaps have included James Eglinton, who, although not Dutch by birth, has lived in the Netherlands since 2010, working at the Theologische Universiteit Kampen, and whose book on Bavinck’s organic motif has been highly praised by Robert Covolo:

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Eglinton’s work for Bavinck studies. This volume convincingly overturns a paradigm that has stymied the field, and it does so in a way that elucidates one of the most creative theological minds in the modern period. What’s more, it does this while simultaneously offering an incisive overview of Bavinck’s theology. This accomplishment is all the more valuable given Eglinton’s rejection of a reading of Bavinck that ignores the problematic or unresolved issues in Bavinck’s thought. The result is one of the best companions to Bavinck’s theology in the English language. Eglinton’s work leads the way for a new generation of Bavinck scholarship keen to advance Bavinck’s vision for a capaciously Reformed, trinitarian orthodoxy capable of speaking with both integrity and relevance to our modern world. (read full review)

James Eglinton is also one of the main speakers at the Neo-Calvinism and the French Revolution conference in Paris next week (August 23-24).