Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today we're pleased to share with you one of our articles on audio.

Orthodox yet modern, Herman Bovink as Cultural Apologist by N. Gray Sutanto, read by the author.

In How to Reach the West again, Tim Keller called for Christians to cultivate a Christian

high theory, a method of contextualization whereby Christians don't merely explain the gospel itself,

but also explain their own culture with the gospel.

Late in his ministry, Keller turned to Herman Boving, dates 1854 to 1921, for precisely this kind of project.

In Boving, we find the ground zero for many of the ways Christians in the 21st century speak about how to analyze, critique,

and evangelize the late modern world.

His writings are the primary sources for concepts that have been so taken for granted that

they are used without definitions, common grace, Christianity as a worldview, and subversive

fulfillment. Oddly enough, however,

Bavings' main works were untranslated until recently, with his four-volume reformed dogmatics

translated in 2008 and other seminal texts like Christian worldview and Christianity and

science, as late as 2019 and 2023.

Concepts like worldview and common grace have received a life of their own and Anglophone Christianity

apart from the source that first articulated these notions.

Involving, we find the silent influence behind many of the most formative minds in American

evangelicalism and reform theology, figures like Keller, Francis Schaefer, and Louis Burkhoff.

This is why in Gail Dornboss's and my forthcoming book, The Essential Hermann Bavink,

we seek to reintroduce his cortex in one volume, and why the Keller Center is including

a session bavig in a cohort on major figures in cultural apologetics.

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