His dissertation was entitled Geloof en Openbaring in de nieuwe Duitse theologie (Faith and Revelation in Recent German Theology).

He came to his post at the Free University after the Second World War in which the Dutch national community suffered much from Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and culminating in the Hunger Winter of 1944.

In his report back to the GKN, Berkouwer recommended that they join the latter, and they did so, remaining active and becoming one of the first evangelical denominations to enter the mainstream ecumenical movement.

Berkouwer displayed in his Studies in Dogmatics an openness that allowed him to develop a friendship and shared views with Hendrikus Berkhof, the leading professor of systematics in the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church from which the Gereformeerde Kerken had split-off in the nineteenth century).

However, it did not extend so far as to relieve the conscience of the VU theological faculty in regard to their required subscription to the seventeenth-century Canons of Dort, a task which remained to Berkouwer's student and successor in the Chair of Dogmatics, Harry M. Kuitert.

(Kuitert, however, went further than his mentor, breaking completely with the Berkouwer and Middle Orthodox tradition and turning publicly to an informal unitarian stance.)

Berkouwer wrote a new theological short essay in almost every issue of the GKN weekly Gereformeerde Weekblad, which garnered responses from clergy and laity all over the Netherlands and beyond.

The newspaper theological-articles, letters of response, and classroom refinements in turn led to the publication of books over many years under the general series name, Studies in Dogmatics (the last word usually being rendered in English as systematic theology).

The original publisher of the Dutch series is Kok (Amsterdam, the Netherlands); the English, Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA).