I started volume one of Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics expecting to be defeated. I expected the kind of dense that requires a glossary and a translator.
What I found was a man who had read everything and was still worshipping.
That surprised me. I had prepared myself for a reference work. What I got was closer to an argument — not in the combative sense, but in the sense of a sustained case being made to a reader Bavinck assumed was serious. He assumed I cared about what was true. He did not assume I already knew the terms.
What volume one is actually about
The first volume covers the doctrine of revelation: Scripture, its nature, its authority, its relationship to the church's confession. This sounds narrow. It is not narrow. You cannot read it without being forced to think about why you trust what you trust.
The section that stopped me was his treatment of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. Not because it was new to me — it was not — but because he worked it out so carefully that the cheap version I had been carrying around felt embarrassing by comparison.
I am in volume two now. I expect to be in volume four by the time I am fifty. This is not a complaint.