RTS Papers / Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics / Fall 2018
Herman Bavinck was a theologian at the crossroads of Reformed orthodoxy and late Modernity. We see this in his own sense of calling. He chose to be part of a church that seceded from a secularizing tradition and yet he chose to study at Leiden so as to be exposed to the depths of modern thought. For decades there were scholars who saw this as an enigma: the manifestation of “two Bavincks.” His most influential work was the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, which has only recently been fully translated into English. Its structure tells us something very crucial about the essence of his theology. Note that, following the Prolegomena (Volume 1), the next three volumes have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as their heads: God and Creation (Volume 2), Sin and Salvation in Christ (Volume 3), and Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Volume 4).
This paper will argue that in Bavinck’s overall theology, all created things will display an organic-perfecting nature because of the nature and purpose of the triune God.
I am referring to this as “Trinitarian metaphysics” because the flow of Bavinck’s thought is occupied in mapping out the nature of the largest things in created reality on the basis of the nature of the triune God. In showing this, we must introduce how Bavinck’s theology proper can simultaneously call for a return to metaphysical reflection (especially of the ontological Trinity) and hold out the very specific triune Persons as Fountainhead of all unity and diversity. Then we will be able to turn our doctrinal emphasis on Bavinck’s view of (1) Scripture, (2) Man, (3) Christ, and (4) the Church. These will all have both an organic and perfecting nature because of the glory of the Trinity.
THE BEGINNING AND END OF BAVINCK’S THEOLOGY
We will have to leave aside much of the nuance in Bavinck’s doctrine of the Trinity. His expression of how the ontological and economic Trinity relate stands in the same stream of the dominant Western thought since Augustine. Two things will concern us instead: the general metaphysics of his whole theology proper and the economy of the Trinity in its relation to the world. It is both unity and diversity in the Trinity that Bavinck is arguing as a necessary cause for the unity and diversity in the world. Other “theistic” constructs do not sufficiently ground creation, redemption, and restoration.
In light of recent discussions about “theological mutualism,” even among Reformed theologians, we would do well to ask whether Bavinck succeeds, at each point, in clearly distinguishing the cause in the divine life (ad intra) and his effects (ad extra).
My own conclusion is that he does. One reason why this may be relevant when reading Bavinck is that, while he calls us back to metaphysics in theology, he nonetheless handles natural theology, at least on the surface, in a way similar to Barth and Van Til. It may be that this gets to the core of what places Bavinck on the “frontier” between Reformed Scholastics and the more immanent foundations of the New Calvinism.
There is indeed a legitimate natural theology, he maintains, but it is the Spirit and Word that legitimize it. At least we can say that Bavinck is consistent on this point, even if the language provides a regrettable foundation for Van Til’s further banishment of natural theology.
What matters here is that Bavinck calls for a return to metaphysics in our dogmatic thinking. I contend that this robust, classical idea of the ontological Trinity is what grounds the relationship between the economic Trinity and creation.
He says, “In God there cannot be anything that is something other or less than God. There is nothing intermediate or transitional between the Creator and the creature.” Thus Bavinck is solid in resisting the kind of theistic personalism that makes sense of God’s relational immanence by imagining a third ontological category between eternal Being and temporal becoming: some relational nature in God separate from his ontological nature.
Two profound ideas connect Bavinck’s theology proper to the whole drama of creation, redemption, and restoration. The first has been called the “organic motif” by James Eglinton, while the second is described in Brian Mattson’s terminology: “Anthropology requires eschatology.” With the help of these two dissertations on Bavinck’s thought, we may speak in terms of the first cause and end cause of all created reality. We may even take an additional step: If “Trinity ad intra leads to organism ad extra,” so that we have a full “Trinitarian creational ontology,” then what follows is that all created things possess an organic-perfecting nature flowing from, through, and back to the triune God. The concise logic of Romans 11:36 pervades the structure and content of the four volumes.
A few early misgivings can be easily answered. First, the point is not that God is organic. All else is organic because of him. But God is Triune, to which the nature of all organisms conform. Second, though Bavinck mentions a handful of triads, the “vestiges (or traces) of the Trinity” throughout creation need only show diversity in unity: not necessarily trinities. Third, analogies of the Trinity in the world are just that: analogies. They are not identities. So this is consistent with ectypal, as opposed to archetypal, theology. The “Trinity is wholly unlike anything else, but everything else is like the Trinity.”
“Granted, all God’s outward works (opera ad extra) are common to the three persons. ‘God’s works ad extra are indivisible, though the order and distinction of the persons is preserved.” In other words, what is proper to the divine persons may be divided into the set of eternal relational distinctions (Father, Son, Spirit) and the set of economic role distinctions (initiating, operating, perfecting).
The three are one First Cause in relation to the world of effects, but still all things “proceed from the Father, are accomplished by the Son, and are completed in the Holy Spirit.”
It is in the New Testament revelations of the Son’s incarnation and the Spirit’s outpouring that we more clearly see the divine economy shaping the new world out of the old, but it is crucial that the Son and Spirit “are not viewed as secondary forces.” For Bavinck the Incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit have their “archetype” in the eternal generation and procession; so that the economic Trinity “mirrored” the ontological.
Bavinck sees the creation, as a whole, as an organism. By this he means a “unity … in which all the parts are connected with each other and influence each other reciprocally.” Theology itself is an organism, always expanding out of the information revealed from the ultimate Life. Eglinton provides examples: “dogmatics and ethics ‘are related members of a single organism’, the cosmos is an ‘organism’, Christ is the ‘organic’ centre of revelation, the visible church is an ‘organism’, Scripture itself is an ‘organism’ and its inspiration is ‘organic’ and so forth.” God’s unity entails the unity of the world, and also of our mind’s reflection upon it. In this way worldview thinking is essential to theology. It is not something that may be reduced to the fact that Enlightenment Germans invented the word. Each item--Scripture, man, Christ, church--must be considered in light of how they, together, speak of their Trinitarian source and end. As ontology concerns being as such, we note that the world also is. Thus one’s metaphysics encompasses what kind of a world this is.
That brings us to our last piece of Bavinck’s foundation: nature and grace. These two form a singular redemptive-history that avoids all species of unbiblical dualisms as well as all forms of monism.
Throughout the Reformed Dogmatics we are steered clear of the extremes of deism and pantheism. Denial of the ontological Trinity leads to pantheism; denial of the economic Trinity leads to deism. These are two sides to the same coin for Bavinck. An organic account demands that nature and grace are united in one created reality. Grace does not simply restore nature in the end, but perfects it. Sometimes he uses the word “re-formation” for this perfection. He does this to distinguish the “perfection” he has in mind from a mere “paradise restored.” That means that the sum total of the organisms comprising the whole creation becomes a maximally greater world than the original.
(#Bavinck #Eglinton #Mattson #ReformedDogmatics #Trinitarian #organicist)
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