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Ontology and revelation in Bavinck's Stone Lectures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2020

Nathan Daniel Shannon
Nathan Daniel Shannon*
Affiliation:
Torch Trinity Graduate University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: n.shannon@ttgu.ac.kr
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Abstract

This essay examines Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures (1908), published as Philosophy of Revelation, for indications of a noteworthy conception of the relation between ontology and revelation. One discovers in the lectures that in responding constructively to various challenges to the Christian faith, Bavinck pushes in a direction documented in recent studies of his work: toward doctrinal organicism. What emerges in terms of ontology and revelation is Bavinck's belief that Christianity is distinguished primarily by confession of a real divine relational initiative, understood in terms of the incarnation, which serves as the ontological precondition of divine revelation and thus as vindication of creaturely naming of God.

Keywords

Herman BavinckNeo-Calvinismrevelation
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 112 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 Bavinck, Herman, Philosophy of Revelation: A New Annotated Edition (hereafter PoR), ed. Brock, Cory and Sutanto, Nathaniel Gray (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2018)Google Scholar. According to the editors, Bavinck delivered at Princeton only six of the ten lectures he had written. All ten were published in English, translated by Geerhardus Vos and others, in 1909. ‘Introduction to the Annotated Edition’, p. xxx.

2 Brock and Sutanto, ‘Preface to the Annotated Edition’, in Bavinck, PoR, p. xiii. For historical and biographical background, see Bratt, James D., ‘The Context of Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures: Culture and Politics in 1908’, The Bavinck Review 1 (2010), pp. 4–24Google Scholar.

3 Bavinck, PoR, p. 23.

4 Bavinck, PoR, pp. 24, 241. Bavinck says that the problem of evil is the only noteworthy challenge to the Christian worldview: ‘Against this organic worldview … only one argument is advanced. But it is an argument which is of very great weight, for it is drawn from the awful misery of the world. And this misery viewed both as sin and suffering is a touching and heartbreaking fact. The whole creation is in travail. Anguish is the fundamental trait of all living things. Vanity, change, and death are written on all existing things. Humanity walks by the margin of an abyss of guilt. It perishes under the anger of God and is troubled by his wrath. How can such a world be reconciled with the wisdom, the goodness, the omnipotence of God?’ PoR, p. 90.

5 Harinck, George, ‘The Religious Character of Modernism and the Modern Character of Religion: A Case Study of Herman Bavinck's Engagement with Modern Culture’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 29 (2011), pp. 73Google Scholar, 76. According to Harinck, Bavinck concentrated his hope for catholicity on a defence of orthodoxy: ‘In the first decade of the twentieth century Bavinck paid a lot of attention to the position of those who were disappointed in the anti-supernaturalistic character of modernism and were returning to Christian religion in one way of the other. It irritated him that their attitude towards orthodoxy did not change… In the end there were only two worldviews: the atheistic or the theistic’ (pp. 75–6). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the relevance of Harinck's article. Also noteworthy: Bavinck's vision of Calvinism as providing the principles for Christian unity in diversity is explored in Nathanial Gray Sutanto, ‘Confessional, International, and Cosmopolitan: Herman Bavinck's Neo-Calvinistic and Protestant Vision of the Catholicity of the Church’, Journal of Reformed Theology 12 (2018), pp. 22–39.

6 Bavinck construed the clash between modernist anti-supernaturalism and Christian orthodoxy, as well as that between the older conceptions of revelation and the newer, as the ‘mechanical’ versus the ‘organic’. ‘Secondly, he applied the word “mechanical” not only to the pre-modern view of Scripture, but also to anti-supernatural modernism.’ Harinck, ‘Religious Character of Modernism’, p. 71.

7 John Bolt, ‘An Opportunity Lost and Regained: Herman Bavinck on Revelation and Religion’, Mid-America Journal of Theology 24 (2013), pp. 86, 94. Without question this is a significant theme in the lectures, but reading the lectures one never gets the impression that Bavinck has the Reformed theologian in mind in that sense. Additionally, at key points an apologetic or even evangelistic focus dominates. The conclusion of the final lecture (pp. 239–45) is an important example. Henk van den Belt describes the lectures as ‘an apologetic defense of the Christian faith’ in which ‘Bavinck … maintains the presupposition of Christian faith’ and ‘seeks a way to demonstrate why Christianity is the only plausible answer to the epistemological and existential challenges of modernity’. Henk van den Belt, ‘Religion as Revelation? The Development of Herman Bavinck's View from a Reformed Orthodox to a Neo-Calvinist Approach’, The Bavinck Review 5 (2013), pp. 23, 25.

8 More recently, Daniel Strange's work is certainly relevant here: ‘For Their Rock is Not as Our Rock: The Gospel as the “Subversive Fulfillment” of the Religious Other’, Journal of the Evangelical Society 56 (2013), pp. 379–95; Their Rock is Not Like Our Rock: A Theology of Religions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014).

9 Bolt, ‘An Opportunity’, p. 95.

10 Ibid., p. 96.

11 Bavinck, PoR, p. 240. Of this lecture van den Belt says: ‘The whole chapter can be read as a defense of the importance of the former distinction between true and false religion’. ‘Religion as Revelation?’, p. 26.

12 Bolt calls for ‘modifying our view of revelation’ (‘An Opportunity’, p. 83). Uncharitably read, his recommendations are met in something like Karl Rahner's Hearers of the Word.

13 Such as Johan Herman Bavinck, ‘Human Religion in God's Eyes: A Study of Romans 1:18–32’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 12 (1994), pp. 44–52; and, again, Strange, Their Rock.

14 ‘General revelation leads to special revelation, and special revelation points back to general revelation. The one calls for the other, and without it remains imperfect and unintelligible. Together they proclaim the manifold wisdom which God has displayed in creation and redemption.’ PoR, p. 25.

15 Herman Bavinck, ‘The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System’, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman, The Bavinck Review 5 (2014), p. 95.

16 E.g. the latter portion of lecture 7, ‘Revelation and Christianity’, pp. 155–61. The latter half of this lecture is an extended treatment of the place of special revelation in history. The point of departure is the tendency of history of religions to favour a Babylonian origin of Hebrew religion. Bavinck does not deny continuity. He even appreciates selectively the cultural legacy of Babylon, but defends the uniqueness of Israel as well by highlighting various points of contrast introduced by special revelation. He argues that the special revelation given to Israel was, first of all, a restoration of special revelation which had been originally, since Gen 3, the possession of all peoples, and which is in fact the proper completion of general revelation. He then argues that special revelation corrected, indeed reversed, Babylonian religion and theology. The principal distinction of Hebrew revelation is not ethical monotheism but the gospel.

17 Bavinck, PoR, p. 21.

18 Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1975), pp. 3–4.

19 Vos, BT, p. 5.

20 Ibid.

21 Bavinck, PoR, p. 242.

22 Vos, BT, p. 8.

23 Ibid.

24 Bavinck, ‘Pros and Cons’, p. 91.

25 James P. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck's Organic Motif (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2014); Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, ‘Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 18/2 (2016), pp. 174–90.

26 On the latter, see Herman Bavinck, Prolegomena, vol. 1 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 435–48; Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., God's Word in Servant-Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture (Jackson, MS: Reformed Academic, 2008), pp. 47–103; Tiago Machado Silva, ‘Scripture as Revelation in Herman Bavinck's Theology’, Puritan Reformed Journal 10/1 (2018), pp. 154–71.

27 See Bolt's (‘An Opportunity’, pp. 88–94) critical review of both Berkhouwer's ‘correlation’ and Kuitert's ‘covenant divine ontology’.

28 In lecture 2, ‘Revelation and Philosophy’, he writes: ‘A philosophy which, neglecting the real world takes its start from reason, will necessarily do violence to the reality of life and resolve nature and history into a network of abstractions. This also applies to the philosophy of the Christian religion. If one be unwilling to take revelation as it offers itself, then one will detach revelation from history and end by retaining nothing but a dry skeleton of abstract ideas’. PoR, p. 32.

29 Ibid., p. 20.

30 Ibid.

31 ‘Whosoever within the world tries to reduce unity to uniformity, being to becoming, spirit to matter, man to nature, or the reverse, always plays false with the other half of the distinction’. Ibid., p. 88

32 Ibid., p. 20.

33 Ibid., pp. 20–1. He later writes: ‘Eternity and time, immensity and space, do not differ quantitatively but qualitatively. And since the words absolute, eternal, immense, and infinite are predicates and, when substantivized, form only empty abstractions, they presuppose a transcendent subject differentiated from the world to whom they belong’. Ibid., p. 75.

34 Ibid., p. 21.

35 See note 14 above.

36 Bavinck, PoR, p. 24.

37 This is confirmed toward the end of lecture 7: ‘The special revelation which comes to us in Christ not only gives us the confirmation of certain suppositions, from which history proceeds and must proceed, but itself gives us history, the kernel and the true content of all history … Furthermore, revelation gives us a division of history. There is no history without division of time, without periods, without progress and development. But now take Christ away. The thing is impossible, for he has lived and died, has risen from the dead, and lives to all eternity; and these facts cannot be eliminated – they belong to history, they are the heart of history … revelation teaches that God is the Lord of the ages and that Christ is the turning point of the ages. And thus it brings into history unity and plan, progress and aim.’ Ibid., pp. 115–16.

38 Ibid., p. 180.

39 Ibid. Elsewhere he warns: ‘A system as system, including a dogmatic system, has no cons, but only pros. It obtains a shadowy side, occasionally even a very dark side, only when and to the extent that it corresponds decreasingly to its unique idea, and thereby is less of a system.’ Bavinck, ‘Pros and Cons’, p. 96.

40 Bavinck, PoR, p. 178.

41 Ibid., p. 180.

42 Ibid. That is, not salvation, not its structure, but its antecedent plan, its conception or one might say the theological reality of its possibility, determines Christian theological method.

43 Ibid., pp. 180–1.

44 ‘The whole person is taken into fellowship with that one true God; not only his feelings, but also his mind and will, his heart and all his affections, his soul and his body’. Ibid., p. 178. Much like Vos's rationale for covenant, noted above.

45 Ibid., pp. 181, 182.

46 Ibid., p. 181.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 189.

50 Ibid., p. 182.

51 Ibid., p. 241.

52 Ibid., p. 177.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., p. 178.

55 Ibid., p. 179.

56 Ibid., p. 189.

57 Muller, Richard A., ‘Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism’, Westminster Theological Journal 45/1 (1983), pp. 22–40Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., p. 31.

59 E.g.: ‘When Hegel says of the infinite and the finite: “The truth is the inseparable union of both” … we recognize in this not the primum verum (first truth) but the πρῶτον ψεῦδος (first lie) of his philosophy’. PoR, p. 18. Eglinton argues that Veenhof's hasty identification of the organic motif in Bavinck with that of German Idealism and a largely generic history of organic thought led to a disjointed reading of Bavinck's theology. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, pp. 53–4, 56, 59, 64–71. Eglinton highlights ‘the major difference between organicism according to Idealism and the neo-Calvinists, between Hegel and Bavinck’, as that between panentheism and Bavinck's ‘rigid separateness between God and the cosmos’ (p. 70). See also Tseng, Shao Kai, G. W. F. Hegel (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2018), pp. 72–7Google Scholar.

60 Bavinck, PoR, p. 210

61 Ibid., p. 115.

62 Bavinck, Herman, God and Creation, vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics, trans. Vriend, John, ed. Bolt, John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 100Google Scholar.

63 ‘The creation is the first revelation of God, the beginning and foundation of all subsequent relveation. The biblical concept of revelation is rooted in that of creation.. ‘In a strict sense there is no immediate revelation either in nature or in grace. God always uses a means … by which he reveals himself to human beings.’ Herman Bavinck, Prolegomena, pp. 307, 309.

64 ‘All revelation is anthropomorphic, a kind of humanization of God.’ Bavinck, Prolegomena, p. 310. ‘Scripture does not just contain a few scattered anthropomorphisms but is anthropomorphic through and through.’ God and Creation, p. 99.

65 Bavinck, God and Creation, p. 103.

66 Ibid., p. 104.

67 Ibid.