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Herman Bavinck's Reformed eclecticism: On catholicity, consciousness and theological epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2017

Cory Brock  and
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto
Cory Brock
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX, [email protected]; [email protected]
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX, [email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that Herman Bavinck's organic worldview allows him to use classical and modern thinkers in an eclectic yet theologically principled manner. To vindicate this claim, the article observes Bavinck's self-conscious comments regarding the task of Reformed catholicity, his use of Schleiermacher and Augustine to construct a theological account of self-consciousness, and his resituating of Thomistic motifs within an organic framework in his epistemology. In so doing, the article suggests that Bavinck's catholicity is broader than previously observed, thus generating a different way of interpreting Bavinck's use of thinkers who are often thought to be in tension.

Keywords

Herman BavinckReformed catholicSchleiermacherself-consciousnesstheological epistemology
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 310 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 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), p. 62.Google Scholar

2 Harinck, George, “‘Something that Must Remain, If the Truth is to be Sweet and Precious to us”: The Reformed Spirituality of Herman Bavinck’, Calvin Theological Journal 38 (2003), p. 261 Google Scholar.

3 Mattson, Brian G., Restored to our Destiny: Eschatology and the Image of God in Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics (Leiden: Brill, 2012)Google Scholar; Eglinton, James, Trinity and Organism: Toward a New Reading of Herman Bavinck's Organic Motif (London: T&T Clark, 2012)Google Scholar.

4 Eglinton, James, ‘Bavinck's Organic Motif: Questions Seeking Answers’, Calvin Theological Journal 45 (2010), p. 67 Google Scholar.

5 Bavinck, Herman, ‘Christianity and Natural Science’, in Essays on Religion, Science and Society, ed. Bolt, John, trans. Boonstra, Harry and Sheeres, Gerrit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008)Google Scholar, p. 93.

6 For an example, see Allen, Michael and Swain, Scott, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015)Google Scholar.

7 Sytsma, David, ‘Herman Bavinck's Thomistic Epistemology: The Argument and Sources of his Principia of Science’, in Bolt, John (ed.), Five Studies in the Thought of Herman Bavinck: A Creator of Modern Dutch Theology (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011)Google Scholar, p. 47. Sytsma's essay traces the scholastic sources of Bavinck's treatment in Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena [hereafter RD], vol. 1, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 221–33. Interestingly, observing the same section in Bavinck's dogmatics, Veenhof detects not a mere retrieval of Thomism, but rather an imitation of Kant, inasmuch as Bavinck characterises his epistemology as in between empiricism and rationalism, just like Kant's. See Veenhof, Jan, ‘De God van de filosofen en de God van de bijbel: Herman Bavinck en de wijsbegeerte’, in Harinck, George and Neven, Gerrit (eds), Ontmoetingen met Herman Bavinck (Barneveld: De Vuurbaak, 2006)Google Scholar, p. 223.

8 Bolt, John, ‘ Sola Scriptura as an Evangelical Theological Method?’, in Johnson, Gary and Gleason, Ronald (eds), Reforming or Conforming? Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008)Google Scholar, pp. 82, 89.

9 Sytsma even claims that Bavinck's account of knowledge is ‘largely a reproducing of Aquinas's account’ in ‘Herman Bavinck's Thomistic Epistemology’, p. 27. Another example is Paul Helm, who enlists Bavinck as one who upholds classical Reformed orthodoxy in Helm's defence of that orthodoxy against supposedly post-modern deviations in Faith, Form and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and its Postmodern Critics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014).

10 Vos, Arvin, ‘Knowledge According to Bavinck and Aquinas’, Bavinck Review 6 (2015), pp. 9–36.Google Scholar

11 Vos, ‘Knowledge According to Bavinck and Aquinas’, pp. 9, 30, 36.

12 For Bavinck, Christian theology has the capacity and right to create her own, and in the past she ‘freely fashioned for herself a philosophy or appropriated an existing one such as that of Aristotle as she had need of it and use it without doing harm’. Bavinck, Herman, ‘The Theology of Albert Ritschl’, trans. John Bolt, Bavinck Review 3 (2012), p. 123 Google Scholar.

13 Bavinck ‘blijft bepaald door de traditie van Thomas, maar is wel “door Kant heengegaan”’. Veenhof, ‘Herman Bavinck en de wijsbegeerte’, p. 221.

14 Bavinck, Herman, ‘Foreword to the First Edition (volume 1) of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek’, trans. John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 45 (2010), p. 10 Google Scholar.

15 The ‘modern Bavinck’ represents one pole of the two-Bavincks hypothesis, the other being the ‘orthodox/secessionist Bavinck’. For a detailed explanation see Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, pp. 27–50.

16 Bavinck, Herman, ‘The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’, trans. John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 27/2 (1992), p. 220Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 224.

18 RD, vol. 1, p. 44.

19 Bavinck, ‘Foreword’, p. 9.

20 The point here is to make note of the extent of engagement. While much of it is, admittedly, critical of modern philosophical thought, it is also appreciative at times. Bavinck's use of Schleiermacher in particular is surprisingly vast. References to Schleiermacher are the sixth most frequent in comparison to all other authors. See the index of RD, vol. 4, for a partial list.

21 Bavinck, ‘Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’, p. 229. For more criticisms of Roman Catholic theology across Bavinck's corpus, see Bavinck, Christelijke wetenschap (Kampen: Kok, 1914), p. 17Google Scholar; RD, vol. 1, pp. 98–9, 102–4, 240, 304, 319–22, 510–12, 571–2, 620–1.

22 Bavinck, ‘Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’, p. 229.

23 Bavinck, ‘Foreword’, p. 10.

24 Ibid.

25 Bavinck, Herman, Mijne reis naar Amerika, ed. Harinck, George (Barneveld: Uitgeverij De Vuurbaak, 1998), p. 58 Google Scholar. ‘Het calvinisme is toch niet de eenige waarheid!’ See Harinck, George, ‘Calvinism Isn't the Only Truth: Herman Bavinck's Impressions of the USA’, in Wagenaar, Larry J. and Swierenga, Robert P. (eds), The Sesquicentennial of Dutch Immigration: 150 Years of Ethnic Heritage. Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (Holland, MI: Joint Archives of Holland, 1998), pp. 151–60Google Scholar. We understand that the concepts Calvinism and Reformed are not entirely the same.

26 Bavinck, ‘Foreword’, p. 10.

27 Ibid.

28 The distinction between a catholic and authoritarian use of the church fathers has also been present in the ethos of the Reformed tradition since Calvin. See especially Lane, Anthony N. S., John Calvin, Student of Church Fathers (Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1991)Google Scholar.

29 ‘Want wij zijn kinderen van dezen tijd, en nemen dankbaar elke goede gave aan, welke de Vader der lichten in deze eeuw ons schenkt.’ Bavinck, Herman, Modernisme en Orthodoxie (Kampen: JH Kok, 1911), p. 13Google Scholar.

30 Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation [hereafter PoR] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909).

31 PoR, p. 22. Bavinck defines his task this way: ‘a philosophy of revelation . . . will trace the idea of revelation, both in its form and its content, and correlate it with the rest of our knowledge and life’, PoR, p. 24. Bavinck's self-definition of his task suggests that John Bolt's argument that Bavinck's purpose in writing a philosophy of revelation (and not a theology of revelation) was to ‘explore the reality of revelation in general . . . as a universal phenomenon’ requires nuance (Bavinck on the Christian Life: Following Jesus in Faithful Service (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), p. 136). We can characterise Bavinck's purpose in these lectures as the task of investigating the way in which nature, culture, religion and other areas of human knowledge are actually instances of responses to general revelation, which leads them to anticipate more coherent responses from special revelation. This is the case because, for Bavinck, the content of revelation is determined by theology's task (PoR, p. 24), and that ‘[g]eneral revelation leads to special, special revelation points back to general. The one calls for the other, and without it remains imperfect and unintelligible’ (PoR, p. 28). Bavinck's task is thus to relate the content of both modes of revelation to other areas of knowledge, and not to explore a generic definition of revelation.

32 PoR, p. 25.

33 PoR, p. 56.

34 PoR, p. 66.

35 For a condensed presentation of Schleiermacher's philosophy of self, see especially Thandeka, The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

36 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Kritischer Gesamtausgabe, ed. Fischer, Hermann, Barth, Ulrich, Cramer, Konrad, Meckenstock, Günter, and Selge, Kurt-Victor (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–)Google Scholar, II.10, p. 2.

37 So Thandeka: ‘Schleiermacher identified the gap between the rational mind and the empirical world (which includes the rational mind's body)’. Embodied Self, p. 2.

38 PoR, p. 27. ‘The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation, the secret of all that exists in all its forms.’

39 See Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith [hereafter CF], ed. Mackintosh, H. R. and Stewart, J. S. (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2011)Google Scholar, §§2–6, 3–30.

40 PoR, p. 66.

41 Ibid.

42 CF, §4.2, 13–14.

43 PoR, p. 67.

44 Ibid.

45 It is worth noting that in Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation, revelation is pre-cognitive in character, and cannot be identified with a process of reasoning. Johan H. Bavinck, Herman Bavinck's nephew, would define general revelation the same way. Commenting on Romans 1, Johan Bavinck says this: ‘If we wish to use the expression “general revelation” we must not do so in the sense that one can logically conclude God's existence from it. This may be possible, but it only leads to a philosophical notion of God as the first cause. But that is not the biblical idea of “general revelation”. When the Bible speaks of general revelation, it means something quite different. There it has a much more personal nature . . . God's deity and eternal power are evident; they overwhelm man; they strike him suddenly . . .They creep up on him; they do not let go of him, even though man does his best to escape them’ (The Church between Temple and Mosque (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966), p. 124). This distinction between revelation and reason is missed when one posits that general revelation provides an impetus to construct a pre-dogmatic model of natural theology.

46 PoR, p. 67.

47 CF, §4.4, 16.

48 PoR, p. 79.

49 PoR, p. 63.

50 PoR, pp. 64–5. Bavinck is working from Augustine's Soliloquies. See Augustine, Soliloquies, and Immortality of the Soul, ed. and trans. Watson, Gerard (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990)Google Scholar.

51 van den Belt, Henk, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust (Leiden: Brill, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 294.

52 Ibid., pp. 249, 254, 266–7.

53 Bolt, John, ‘Review of Henk van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust’, Journal of Reformed Theology 4 (2010), p. 76 Google Scholar.

54 Here, Henk van den Belt was right to focus on Bavinck's subject-object discussions.

55 RD, vol. 1, p. 214.

56 Bavinck, Herman, The Certainty of Faith, trans. der Nederlanden, Harry (Ontario: Paideia, 1980), p. 19Google Scholar.

57 Bavinck, ‘Christelijke wereldbeschouwing’, p. 19.

58 Brian Mattson has also noted Bavinck's transcendental direction in Restored to Our Destiny, pp. 36–7, 41–2, 44.

59 RD, vol. 1, p. 224. Emphasis mine.

60 RD, vol. 1, p. 227. This is not unlike Kant, who held that a distinction obtains between the object represented and the representation of the object. So, Kant in his preface to the 2nd edn of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘If, however, our criticism were true, [it teaches] us to take an object in two senses, namely, either as an appearance, or as a thing in itself’. Bxxviii, trans. Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 24. Cf. Pinkard, Terry, Germany Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 19–44 Google Scholar; Bowie, Andrew, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 13–14 Google Scholar.

61 The idea of a mental representation, in Kant, is the product of the union between intuitions received from the external world and the concepts of the ego. On the anxiety of whether God or external things in themselves may be known since Kant, see Wolterstorff, Nicholas, ‘Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?’, Modern Theology 14 (1998), pp. 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 ‘. . . uit de eene voorstelling kan hij slechts tot een andere besluiten, maar nooit overbrugt eene redeneering de klove tusschen het denken en het zijn’. Bavinck, Herman, Christelijke wereldbeschouwing (Kampen: Kok, 1929), p. 18Google Scholar.

63 ‘. . . dat wij in de gewaarwordingen en voorstellingen eene betrouwbare kennis van de objectieve werkelijkheid bezitten’. Ibid., p. 20.

64 PoR, p. 56. Emphases mine.

65 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1785)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 254, 258–60, 299–300, 369.

66 RD, vol. 1, p. 228.

67 RD, vol. 1, p. 231.

68 RD, vol. 1, p. 231.

69 It seems to us that much of the secondary literature on Bavinck's theological epistemology pays too much attention to the section on scientific principles in the first volume of the Dogmatics. It is much better, rather, to situate this section within all that Bavinck says concerning organicism and knowledge.

70 RD, vol. 1, p. 227.

71 Ibid.

72 Cf. Sytsma, ‘Herman Bavinck's Thomistic Epistemology’, p. 29, n. 83.

73 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae [hereafter ST], trans. Cardinal Browne, Michael (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968)Google Scholar, 1.85.2.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid. See also 1.75; 1/2.5; 2/2.23.6. Cf. Kilma, Gyula, ‘Aquinas on the Materiality of the Human Soul and the Immateriality of the Human Intellect’, Philosophical Investigations 32 (2009), pp. 163–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 RD, vol. 1, p. 227.

77 For a thorough account of this, see Eglinton, Trinity and Organism.

78 RD, vol. 1, p. 586.

79 RD, vol. 2, p. 376 (emphasis added). Bavinck points to Romanticism as an origin of the organic idea, and to Hegel and Schleiermacher for their efforts to overcome subject and object, in RD, vol. 1, pp. 260, 521. This observation puts Bavinck quite close to Kuyper, who, in Jacob Klapwijk's summary, answered the same question this way: ‘How does one account for this “fit” [between subjective representation and external object]? Kuyper's romantically tinted answer is that our world is like a living organism. Everything in it is organically connected with everything else in it.’ ‘Abraham Kuyper on Science, Theology, and University’, in Bishop, Steve and Kok, John H. (eds), On Kuyper: A Collection of Readings on the Life, Work, and Legacy of Abraham Kuyper (Sioux Center: Dordt College Press, 2013), p. 228Google Scholar.

80 PoR, p. 76.

81 RD, vol. 2, p. 392.

82 Bavinck, Herman, ‘The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System’, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman, Bavinck Review 5 (2014), pp. 90–103 Google Scholar (esp. pp. 90–4).

83 RD, vol. 1, p. 231.

84 ‘De leer van de schepping aller dingen door het Woord Gods is de verklaring van alle kennen en weten, de onderstelling van de correspondantie tusschen subject en object’. Bavinck, Christelijke wereldbeschouwing, p. 28.

85 ‘Het is dezelfde Goddelijk wijsheid, die de wereld organisch tot een geheel verbindt en in ons den drang naar eene ‘einheitliche’ wereldbeschouwing plant’. Ibid., p. 32.