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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books in Christian Studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Justin McGarry, one of the regular hosts for this channel. And today we will be talking about the book on theology, Herr Invovings Academic Orations, published by Brill 2021.
And I'm talking today with the translator and editor, Bruce Pass. Bruce, welcome to the show. Well, Justin, it's lovely to be here. These four speeches were written by the late 19th, early 20th century Dutch theologian, Herr Invovink.
And as the title indicates, the speeches are his academic addresses, which he gave at different points in his career as a theology professor. Two of the speeches were from his years at the company, theological school. And he was from his years at the Free University of Amsterdam, which was established by the other Dutch theologian, statesman, pastor, journalist Abraham Kuiper, in one sense the leader of the Nokowus Movement at the time. And this volume also includes a very helpful introduction by the editor, translator, providing an important intellectual setup for each of the speeches as well as some explanation and analysis of the speeches.
So he lists a few of the key themes that you can find throughout the speeches, but also points to some interesting features of Bobing's thought. And this translation is one of those, a number of translations that are coming into the English language by these Dutch and Nokowus thinkers, and probably will continue to play a significant role in the burgeoning Bobing scholarship. So Bruce, really interesting group of speeches, but before we talk about Bobing, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself. Oh, thank you, Justin.
Yeah. Well, yes, I came to Bobing in my undergrad, theological studies, and it was increasingly intrigued by his work. In the stream of doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh that I became interested in translating these speeches, I was aware of some of Bobing's academic gradations firstly through some English translations that had already been done. So Common Grace had been translated some time ago in the Calvin theological journal and I'd read that.
But I remember when I first started reading Bobing thinking that, wow, modernism and orthodoxy seems actually an important publication, and it would be great to have that one in English. So to translate these four speeches became a side project while I did my doctorate and modernism and orthodoxy was one of the speeches that I translated. And this was a great journey of discovery because in the back of the 60s, Jan Fainhoff, I think it was, who said that next to Reform mathematics, the most important works Bobing wrote are these speeches. And it's quite funny because they're quite long and you can imagine sitting at a graduation ceremony with Bobing talking for hours.
And evidently he didn't deliver the whole thing as a speech. He did a slightly shortened version at the ceremony and then a slightly longer text was published after the fact. So maybe those Dutch students aren't quite as amazing as they first seen. That actually is something that occurred to me was how long it would have been to sit through one of these.
That's a clarifying point. One of these speeches is 20,000 words. That's a very long speech. Even if he's speaking relatively quickly, 150 words a minute, you can do the maths and work out.
Yeah. How long it would take to actually read the whole thing? Yeah. I think it was James Egglinson's biography on Bobing, where at one point, I think it was Bobing was critical of American audiences for some of his speeches.
And I kind of being like, well, I enjoyed reading these, but I don't know that I could sit through it. So that was definitely a helpful point. Yeah. So I think that's also the case when he did his stone lectures at Princeton.
What we have is the stone lectures is a bit longer than what he actually delivered in person in Princeton. Yeah. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of context for some of the speeches as well, where some of Bobing's bio fits in with that. Yeah.
So I selected these speeches for a couple of different reasons. Thematically, they connect to the same topic of theological method. And so there's a thematic unity there. Like the first page where he talks about the discipline of theology or what he, you know, in Dutch the Vedans have the science of theology.
That in itself requires a bit of explanation because we don't talk about a science of theology in English. That's quite confusing. We think about biology as a science, but especially in the European discourse of the 19th century, science is being used in terms of a university discipline, like a field of inquiry where you have knowledge that is generated by the inquiry. So that's what is being discussed, you know, the discipline of theology, as it were.
That's the first speech. And that's right at the beginning of his academic career. So he delivered that speech when he was appointed to the company, Theological School, the staff, who finished his doctorate and did a year of parish ministry. And then the final speech is actually the last work where he directly addresses theology as its modernism in Orthodoxy.
It's 1911, so it's not right at the end of his life. But George Haring describes it as a bit of a swan song in some ways. So you get a nice coverage of the development of Babik's thought. And in between, I included religion and theology, which is a really important speech that he delivered at the beginning of his tenure in Amsterdam.
And there are certain echoes between that speech and the science of whole theology. He even mentions that speech because when he began to come to make some think about that. And that he's effectively talking about the same topic that with the benefit of all those years experience. And the second speech is called the teaching office.
And that's just a fascinating one that he comes out of the church political question of what relationship does the free university stand to the Dutch churches, the denomination? And in what relationship does free academic inquiry stand to the preparation of ministers of the word? And so there's a lot of wrangling trying to unify the company, Theological School, and the free university. And Barvick was supporting Carper in that, but it never happened.
But this speech comes out of that church political situation that unfolded over a very long time. But Barvick is actually exploring a question closely connected. What is the relationship between the teaching that a minister does in the bullfoot, the teaching that a professor does at a seminary and say, you know, the academic inquiry that a theologian might do, whether that's in historical theology or constructive theology. In what sense is there a relationship between those three things?
And so he's looking at the office of a teacher, of course, in the accountants of Dort. They identify four officers, not just an elder and a deacon, as it were, but the teacher is one of those. So university professor is a church office. And so it's the launching pad for a very interesting exploration of theology.
Where does theology sit in relation to the church, as opposed to sacred doctrine? So yeah, that's a really intriguing speech. And I think it's, in many ways, it's classic Barvick. The one thing that stood out to me as I was going through it was how much time he gave to the history of the university.
That was a surprise to me. And as you pointed out, he is trying to, he's looking at the relationship of theology as a study to multiple institutions, the church's state. Yeah, so that's one of the contemporary that he will be addressing this question, which is still a problem. You know, what is the relationship of these different institutions?
And where does theology fit? For example, you still have theology at British universities. You don't really have theology at any of the Australian universities. You have it in some of the ivy league still, with Harvard Divinity School.
It's an interesting question still, is what do we do with theology? But this historical overview that you mentioned, I think, is kind of the great strength and the Achilles heel of Barvick's whole method of thinking. And it shows what a product of the 19th century, he is. It's a very 19th century way of thinking that if you're asked a question, then the only way to approach it is to tell a narrative.
You must approach this historically. Barvick does this all the time. So I note in the introduction that some of the newspaper reviews of this speech are quite intriguing because the newspaper reporters speak very candidly and often they're more perceptive than perhaps an academic might be who's listening to it all. One of them says, Barvick is plainly very learned, but I'm not sure we're any clearer having listened to all of that.
And to be honest, that can be the great weakness of this historical overview. This historiographical way of presenting a theological argument is that you can just end up in the end with this narrative. But the number of the question in some ways can be left unanswered. But I'd love to actually just, I think the great strength about it though is also that he won't begin to think about a question until he knows what has been said about it across the 2000 year history of the church.
And because he was such a good student of language, as he can engage with all of the literature in regional languages. I mean the man knew Arabic as well as the biblical languages in Latin, but that he's reading much Arabic of course in this discussion. But some of the stuff that he draws out about the PhD and where it came from and the significance of it is just fascinating for the question of what does it mean to teach. So he draws on the idea of having a license to teach that is granted by the poet, but also after the Protestant Reformation how that proceeds.
Yeah, so I found that speech actually the most illuminating in some ways, even if it's nowhere near as theologically interesting as modernism and orthodoxy. Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I think he did, that was very helpful, especially considering these speeches have not been available in English, was you trace a few themes across them. One being the influence of Schleimacher, and I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what you see of Boving and how is he engaging Schleimacher?
Yeah, I mean the use of Schleimacher in Boving is still a field of inquiry that there's a lot to do still there. So I mentioned in the introduction of Cory Brocker at a nice book about in Schleimacher and concentrates on how he uses the same vocabulary. So there's a formal appropriation as a very Schleimacher. But I suggested in introduction that there's actually a great deal of material appropriation of Schleimacher and that comes out in the speeches.
And I mentioned a few things, but the more you're looking at Boving, the more you'll recognize this material appropriation of Schleimacher. And some examples of that is, you know, like he uses the trope of a prince of the church. He talks about theology as the crown, or the jewel in the crown of the theological sciences. And there's all of this stuff that comes straight out of the brief outline for study theology famously, well not quite, I guess it depends how famous it is, is where they're in our books, but he identifies the seed of religion in Calvin with Schleimacher's feeling of absolute dependence, which is an extraordinary thing to say.
And very interesting, the way he will stitch Schleimacher into Calvin just in his historical, historiographical argument that way. It's not a very positive thing to do, you know. So there's just so much to do with Schleimacher still. But I suggest that the interesting thing with Schleimacher in these speeches is the way you see an antisecularization of Schleimacher is viewed by Bavic as a code belligerent against secularism.
Schleimacher is a white knight rescuing the church. And that's what Schleimacher does so well at one level. And Bavic liked that very much. And this whole idea of speech is interesting too, because famously Schleimacher wrote on religion speeches to its culture despises.
So I think at that level there's some interesting residences with Schleimacher when Bavic and Schleimacher are battling a kind of secularizing impulse, which comes out of the enlightenment. And this comes out very strongly actually in a work I'm working on at the moment, the foremost problems of contemporary dogmatics, a very long series of lectures. Bavic wrote over 300 pages. And the way he characterizes Schleimacher and comes and haggle in those lectures.
He describes them all as friends rather than foes, the real foes are the materialists and the atheists and the enlightenment rationalists. And it's just very interesting that he doesn't view these three thinkers as belonging to that category. There's a great quote where he says, you know, there's no Sadducee. That's such a great law.
Yeah, you did you point to the connection between it for the third speech, which is on religion and theology that Bavic has this seeming engagement Schleimacher on that particular speech. But the fourth speech is essentially Bavic sort of defending the neo-Calvinist movement. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about how he tries to distinguish what they're doing in the modern times with traditional theology, so to speak, versus mediating theology. Yeah, I think that's really important.
And that's what makes this speech interesting, because it shows how the contemporary reception of Bavic and Kuiper, you know, they're having to defend their credentials that they weren't modern theologians. Whereas it's kind of the other way around these days. So you have to have a bit of trouble convincing people that they are modern thinkers. And so the basic argument that Bavic is trying to make is that they're different to modern theologians.
But there's also some very clever rhetoric where Bavic is wanting to argue that even the most liberal of liberal theologians are actually more orthodox than they are willing to admit. And he went to this Congress of liberal theologians and gave a speech and actually made that argument. It's like Daniel in the lion's den. So Bavic was a terrific debater.
It must have been impressive to hear and make that argument at this Congress. But basically, he says, whenever a liberal theologian prays, he's dining off orthodoxy. There's a supernaturalistic element there. And even significant is that he brings it down to prayer because that's a praxist.
And I think one of the interesting things in Bavic is there's this almost pragmatist emphasis on praxis. You know, what you do discloses truth. You know, forms of life are actually where you get a glimpse of reality. And the fact that he focuses on prayer is a really interesting one.
So yeah, what monism and orthodoxy is very interesting. It's also interesting because you see a very clear example of the way German idealism frames the way he thinks, because he wants to distinguish between the representation and the idea. And that's a very idealist way of looking at things. And he wants to say that, you know, you can keep a modern representation of the world as long as you don't have the modern idea of the world.
So in other words, you can read your biology textbook and still be a Christian. It's what he's wanting to say. But for that, you need a Christian worldview. And that's where the worldview stuff starts to become very important in Bavic in this later period.
So you need a Christian worldview in order to do biology properly. That's kind of what he's saying. I know that you have to run here. But my last question just for is the act of the work of translating Bavic.
How would you say that it helps your understanding of him as a writer, as a thinker? Oh, you know, this is one of the great things that James Eglinton does and did with his students. He encourages students to work from the original language, which is terrific. That was very much part of my undergraduate training.
And he also gets students to do a bit of paleography as well. You know, handwriting. How do you read Bavic handwriting? Because there's a lot of works that are published.
A lot of material that you can read just in handwriting. So I would say that if you limit yourself to what's published and what's published in English, you're incredibly limited in the way you can understand a thinker. And so it's terrific that James encouraged us to learn Dutch as well as we could. And certainly for me, reading all this material that's not in English has really been very focal for all of my work in Bavic.
And I think it's just one way that you can serve a broader community by translating. And I began noticing that a lot of people actually have done theological translations as a part of their learning process. So if you look at a lot of contemporary theologians, you'll see that they have done this. So I would say it's also an essential part of your development as a thinker that you need to sit closely with a thinker in there by the time it slows you down when you read their works.
It also makes you pause to think what is really being communicated. So yeah, it's been a central part of my work for some time. And that's wonderful the way James insists that he's students work from the Dutch. Yeah, and I know Translian is often a thankless task task.
So that's much appreciated because for those of us who can't reach the redutch, it's very helpful. So you are working on some other things. Translations, editing projects, could you just list those off real quick for us so that people listeners can know what to look for? Yeah, just as I mentioned, finishing up work on clearly long book, it's over 300 pages, the foremost problems of contemporary dogmatics.
It's a series of lectures that I haven't wrote after he moved to Amsterdam. So it looks like he wrote them in 1903, 1904, but continued to deliver these lectures and work on them up to 1919 even. So not long before he died. And it's where he wants to explore, as the title would suggest, what he perceives to be the foremost problems in contemporary theology.
And in classic biopic style, he does that by exploring the history of thought. So the interesting thing is it's a very different history to the one you get in reform dogmatics. And as you work through this, it becomes clear that he thinks that the conceptualization of the act of faith is the most important dogmatic problem, which is, I must admit, even after all the badminton, I was surprised to read that. And it's very, very interesting.
The depth of engagement with particularly Richard and Trelch, but also, Hegel and Schleimacher is just remarkable. But as with anything badminton writes, you don't just need Dutch, you need German and Latin and the biblical languages. So he works in many different languages. So it's a big project and hopefully we can be done with it soon.
Well, thank you very much for your time. My pleasure. Nice to chat. Yeah, absolutely.