RTS Papers / Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics / Fall 2018
BAVINCK’S ORGANIC-PERFECTING DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
What does it mean that the Scriptures are an “organic-perfecting” Word? Bavinck had what we might call a dynamic view of inspiration. The divine and human authorship form a unity, yet the divine precedes. There is an analogy to the Incarnation here, though it cannot be pressed too far. On the other hand there is something more unique about the kind of inspiration that Bavinck had in mind. It is both God-breathed and God-breathing. The latter is not meant so as to contradict biblical sufficiency. It is simply that its attribute of divine inspiration is true not only of the animation of Scripture’s original human writers but that there is also an ongoing quality that drives its intended audience toward their end. In the Word, the divine condescends in the human so that the human may participate in the divine.
Evangelicals might want to call the one “inspiration” and the other “illumination” to avoid confusion, but one can see clearly enough what Bavinck is doing.
He offers descriptions which seem identical to the general Evangelical doctrine: “Divine inspiration is above all God speaking to us through the prophets and apostles, so that their word is the word of God. What has been written is ‘that which has been spoken by God’.”
However, Scripture is also the “organic principle, the seed, the root, out of which the plant of dogmatics grows.” This is not to be confused with the view of Newman, where Scripture was like a seed and tradition the progressing organism.
The reason that these cannot mean the same thing is that Newman was also assuming that both Scripture and tradition are equal as sources, whereas Bavinck, while speaking of Scripture, church, and Christian consciousness as “sources,” unequivocally held the Bible over the other two. Although Bavinck criticized much post-Reformation dogmatics for entertaining a too mechanistic view of Scripture.
Three aspects of the human side of this doctrine must be grasped. Incarnation, humiliation, and servant form, are all attributes of the divinely inspired human words that have obvious analogies to the Incarnation of the Word: the God-Man. “But just as Christ’s human nature, however weak and lowly, remained free from sin, so also Scripture is ‘conceived without defect or stain’; totally human in all its parts but also divine in all its parts.”
We could summarize his organic-perfecting doctrine of Scripture in this way. Because divine inspiration is “a permanent attribute of Scripture,” therefore “Scripture is the servant form of revelation.” The Word “serves” man in the progress of the church as an organism. In order to reach God’s chief end of glorifying himself in all creation, special revelation “must strive to the end of re-creating the whole person after God’s image.” Short of this transformation of the whole man, there is either mere intellectualism, moralism, or mysticism, depending on which faculty is inflated at the expense of the others.
BAVINCK’S ORGANIC-PERFECTING DOCTRINE OF MAN
On the one hand “man is a created being, and for that reason alone he cannot be the goal of creation.” On the other hand, man becomes the chief of all means for divine glory. Bavinck’s handling of being and becoming demands this. “God’s becoming human” in a sense begins at the creation and then through providentially leading history to Christ. Yet “its culmination” is only in Christ.
Original man is eschatological because the broadest sense of the imago Dei is not simply what man is, but what man is for” or to what he is to become. And what he is to become passes through the fires of sin and death. Can we say that because God ordained the fall, partly to accomplish this perfecting work, that therefore sin is necessary to the best end? Not at all. This would make the distortion equal to the design: good and evil would be logically coextensive. It would also make sin void of its antithetical, ethical qualities.
One might wonder what Bavinck made of evolutionary thought. Briefly stated, he is more antithetical to Darwinism than was his contemporary Warfield. Consequently when he speaks of man headed toward a perfecting image, it will be grace that perfects human nature first by rescuing its downward trend in Adam’s race. This is why he spends so much time in dealing with an evolutionary model of the origin of both man and sin.
Man does not simply have the image of God but is that image. Man is renewed by that same image. What is interesting in Bavinck’s anthropology is the insistence that it is the whole God, not merely Christ, after which this image is modeled. The whole triune God is the archetype for the whole of man. Man is not designed, at first, after the Ideal of Christ, as Osiander taught, but “the Incarnation of God is proof that human beings and not angels are created in the image of God, and that the human body is an essential component of that vision.” So, on the other hand, “Creation itself must be conceived in infralapsarian fashion, and Adam was already a type of Christ.” Incarnation presupposes the distortion of man. God not only knew Adam would fall, but designed primal history to culminate in Christ’s image-restoration.
The most difficult, and philosophical, item in Bavinck’s whole ontology is how he situates man in between God and the rest of creation. He ascribes “‘being’ to God, ‘becoming’ to the universe and ‘being and becoming’ to humanity and the Incarnate Jesus (in whom Creator and created meet).”
This is designed to explain redemptive history. Specifically how does God “enter into humanity” or “enter into becoming”? The creation of humanity and the Incarnation are the only two points where being and becoming come together. In the Imago Dei, all human beings have this dual ontology: eternal and temporal, being and becoming. In “the Incarnation is the unity of being … and becoming.”
Rome and the Reformation could agree about the Beatific Vision per se; yet, Bavinck adds, “Rome views this final human destiny, which has been realized by Christ, as a Neoplatonic vision of God and a mystical fusion of the soul with God.” Both the present (assurance) and the secular (culture) are obscured. His analysis of the donum superadditum doctrine implies that Rome had a very different conception of humanity, law, and eternal life. Grace did not oppose sin so much as it opposed nature. In the Reformed view, grace opposes sin and thus the sinful nature. Following Augustine, Bavinck maintains that man is “good, but changeably so. God alone is fully self-existent in all of his attributes and therefore immutable. Creatures, however, become and can therefore also degenerate … can be deformed and hence again reformed.”
Bavinck utilizes the covenant of works to explain man’s nature and destiny. If Adam continued on he would have either advanced in glory or else transgressed and fallen. The organic connection of mankind depends upon the federal representation of mankind by their head. The end is explained by the beginning as much as the beginning is by its end. This original covenant becomes a balance between Roman and Lutheran errors. To the former, man had to merit a higher state and thus a supernatural grace was given within the image: gifts added to the nature of man, which, once lost, did not impair the original nature. To the latter, man had reached its pinnacle in Adam and was to become nothing more.
This goes to the heart of what the image is. As eternal life possessed is essential to the image, it follows that man “had to be fully developed.” Everything is a teleological organism - each created thing made so as to naturally perfect, to tend toward that ideal end - but man is the highest of those made. There is a fascinating synergy here between Bavinck’s understanding of the way all created things are designed and Thomas’ appropriation of Aristotelian teleology, as in his Fifth Way to show God’s existence, for example.
Further, all of the spheres of society are viewed through the lens of the original relationship between God and Adam. “Among rational and moral creatures all higher life takes the form of a covenant.” At this point, two more things should be said that connect to what is more widely known as Neo-Calvinism. We might call this the psychological and sociological dimensions of Bavinck’s anthropology. Psychologically, we might summarize that the concept of “image” is both noun and verb: ontology and ethics together. Sociologically, man was not created alone. As the Trinity is a diversity in unity, so the image of God is seen more perfectly in a community. He does so without losing any of his individuality.
The orders of creation in Augustine become the “social spheres” of the Bavinck-Kuyper synthesis. However such has been understood by later cultural agendas, what matters here is that the image is more like the Trinity in cooperation with the whole of humanity, each sphere in its turn: “Not as a heap of souls on a tract of land, not as a loose aggregate of individuals, but as having been created out of one blood.”
Indeed the failure of modern ideologies, typified by the French and Russian Revolutions, constituted for Bavinck a collapse of “individualistic and atomistic view of humanity and of the sin dominant in it.” That may seem paradoxical at first glance. After all collectivism was certainly at the heart of those ideologies. But his point is that sin is original and internal. Neither individual moral actor nor social reconstruction can transcend the distortion of humanity. In this way the Pelagian error lies under the surface of all modern, even secular, attempts to recast sin and salvation.
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