Louis Berkhof

Life

Berkhof was born in October 1873 in Emmen, in the province of Drenthe in the northeastern Netherlands. His father was a baker. The family belonged to the Seceder church, which had broken away from the Dutch national church in 1834, and in 1882 they emigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan. He grew up in the United States as a member of the Christian Reformed Church and is said to have become firmly established in his faith around the age of nineteen.

In 1900 he graduated from Calvin Theological Seminary and became pastor of the Christian Reformed church in Allendale, Michigan. Beginning in 1902 he studied for two years at Princeton Theological Seminary, earning a Bachelor of Divinity (B.D.) degree; during this period he is known to have been influenced by B. B. Warfield and Geerhardus Vos, among others. He then served as pastor of the Oakdale Park church in Grand Rapids. In 1906 he became a professor at his alma mater, Calvin Theological Seminary. For roughly the first twenty years he taught biblical studies, and from 1926 he taught systematic theology. In 1931 he became president of the seminary, serving until his retirement in 1944. He died in Grand Rapids on May 18, 1957, at the age of 83.

Ministry and Work

Berkhof wrote twenty-two books over the course of his life. His major work, Systematic Theology, grew out of his lectures at Calvin Theological Seminary. It first appeared in 1932 in three volumes—an introductory volume and the two-volume Reformed Dogmatics—and he continued to revise it after it was retitled Systematic Theology in 1938. The work is regarded as a concise English-language presentation of Dutch Reformed theology in the line running from John Calvin to Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese, and by around 1950 it had become a standard seminary textbook. He also wrote The History of Christian Doctrines (1937), doctrinal summaries for students and laypeople, and a book on the principles of biblical interpretation. In 1951 he delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, which were published as The Kingdom of God.

Influence on the Korean Church

Systematic Theology has been translated into Korean several times. In 2001 a translation by Kwon Soo-kyung and Lee Sang-won was published under the title Berkhof's Systematic Theology, and a redesigned edition appeared in 2017. According to the publisher, this translation also renders the German and Dutch quotations omitted from earlier translations. In the same year, Berkhof's condensed Manual of Christian Doctrine was published in a translation by Park Hee-seok under the title An Introduction to Berkhof's Systematic Theology.

Berkhof also left his mark on the theology of Park Hyung-nong, who laid the foundations of conservative Presbyterian theology in Korea. A study of Park's doctrine of the covenant of works (the doctrine concerning the covenant God made with Adam before the Fall) concludes that Park assimilated and systematized the work of Berkhof and other Reformed theologians. Berkhof's books are known to have long been used as textbooks or reference works in systematic theology at Presbyterian seminaries.

Assessment

Berkhof is regarded less as an original or speculative theologian than as one who excelled at organizing and explaining Reformed doctrine in an orderly way. Supporters cite the conciseness and clarity of his books as their strengths. Others, however, note that his work offers few new ideas and that its compressed style makes it difficult to read.

Berkhof's theology follows the Calvinist understanding of predestination and covenant theology. Consequently, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions shaped by Wesleyan theology or Arminianism differ from him on subjects such as predestination and free will. Within these traditions his books are read as a representative summary of the Reformed position.