Introduction
George Harinck, writing on the theological and cultural temperament of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), observed that Bavinck ‘was part and parcel of modern culture and contributed to its character and direction’.Footnote 1 But to what extent is such a statement true of Bavinck's well-known Dutch Reformed theology of the orthodox secessionist variety? To be sure, in Bavinck one finds an irenic mind whose Reformed confessional commitments did not hinder him from engaging the culture in which he lived.Footnote 2 Drawing from the deep wells of Reformed orthodoxy and influenced by the training he received at Leiden University, he saw that such engagement was not accidental to the task of theology, but essential. In Bavinck we encounter an uncommon blend of principled orthodoxy and irenic learning – so much so that past interpreters have thought of Bavinck as a conflicted thinker. There were ‘two Bavincks’, the secondary literature claimed: an orthodox, classical Bavinck and a modern, idealist Bavinck.
Recent scholarship, however, has called attention to the unity of Bavinck's thought. Rather than positing two conflicting strands within Bavinck's theology, interpreters are now exhorted to read Bavinck in terms of his trinitarian and organic outlook.Footnote 3 For Bavinck, the triune God is an archetypal unity-in-diversity qualitatively distinct from creation, which is made up of interconnected unities-in-diversities in becoming. Bavinck uses the organic motif to negotiate the tensions within different ideologies and systems into a coherent whole, thus providing him with the conceptual apparatus to deploy various thinkers in an eclectic yet theologically principled manner.Footnote 4 ‘But the Christian church and theology were, generally speaking, more sensible; adopted a critical, eclectic point of view; and tried, while investigating everything, to retain the good.’Footnote 5
With these observations in view, it is not surprising that in current discussions concerning Reformed catholicity and theological retrieval, Bavinck is often invoked as a paradigmatic model to follow.Footnote 6 Retrieval, it is argued, is a fruitful means of engaging present theological concerns in an act of ressourcement. We are called to look back to the past, and to revisit the treasures of wisdom in the ancient, medieval and post-Reformation divines as a way forward in contemporary dialogues.
Yet it seems to us that the current calls to model Bavinck's catholicity have been somewhat myopic. For while these appropriations certainly call attention to the fact that Bavinck draws from the past divines, they often do so only to show that Bavinck resists the theologies prevalent in his day. Writing on Bavinck's epistemology, for example, David Sytsma argues, ‘Bavinck was claiming the superiority of Thomistic epistemology as a handmaiden for theology over the contemporary philosophical trends of empiricism and rationalism.’Footnote 7 Further, John Bolt writes that the metaphysics of Bavinck follows the ‘great tradition’ characteristic of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Francis Turretin.Footnote 8 These readings, to be sure, are accurate representations of Bavinck as far as they go. The implication therein, however, is that Bavinck merely retrieves the past without any substantial modifications, and, perhaps, that Bavinck only appreciates his contemporaries as thinkers to the extent that they agree with the classical authors.Footnote 9
At worst, neglecting the centrality of the organic motif and Bavinck's self-consciously eclectic method may lead interpreters to identify Bavinck with a particular thinker – a move that would tempt one to read Bavinck as a conflicted thinker when he steps outside the bounds of the given system. Arvin Vos's recent article, for example, assumes that Bavinck was a thoroughgoing Thomistic realist and assesses Bavinck on the basis of that assumption, concluding that Thomas was the better realist of the two.Footnote 10 As a result, where Bavinck deviates from Thomas, or where Bavinck uses other thinkers (like Kant), Vos charges Bavinck with inconsistency.Footnote 11 A strength of our thesis is its capacity to account for Bavinck's use of various thinkers while resisting the tendency to absolutise any particular retrieval, thus doing better justice to Bavinck's thought on its own terms.
The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Bavinck's catholicity is broader than these interpreters portray. Indeed, it is our contention that for Bavinck, to be Reformed and catholic, principled and eclectic, is not merely to acknowledge the diversity within the confessional boundaries of seventeenth-century Protestant scholastics or traditional Reformed orthodoxy. Rather, to be Reformed and catholic is to develop a stance in which the fruits of thinking from Aristotle to Kant, from Augustine to Schleiermacher and from Thomas to Hegel, are together considered valuable. To be sure, Bavinck disagrees with some of these thinkers, but he navigates them in a reciprocal fashion where the thought of one may inform another's.Footnote 12 This, we contend, is what Bavinck exemplified so well. As Veenhof notes, though Bavinck draws freely from the past, he was determined to do so while indeed ‘passing by Kant’.Footnote 13 For Bavinck, particular deployment is not systematic endorsement. This stance, we believe, bears a greater capacity to account for Bavinck's frequent use of both classical and modern sources.
This essay proceeds in two parts. We first observe Bavinck's own statements concerning the practice of theological catholicity in both his foreword to the first edition of the Reformed Dogmatics (Gereformeerde Dogmatiek) and in his address, ‘The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’. Our second section offers two parts that together provide principal examples of how Bavinck performs this catholicity. First, we show how Bavinck uses both Augustine and Schleiermacher in reshaping his conviction of the reality of the self–God–world relations and the universal extent of revelation. Second, we observe how Bavinck draws from the resources of Thomas Aquinas and idealism to discuss and overcome the subject–object dichotomy between representations and external reality. With the organic motif in place, one sees more clearly how Bavinck unifies various aspects of systems that one might think to be in an irreconcilable tension, thus exemplifying matured balance in thinking while avoiding the pitfalls of one-sidedness.
On self-conscious reformed catholicity
Herman Bavinck's theology is catholic and ecumenical. It is never ancient without also being current. It never cries ad fontes without inciting development. The Reformed Dogmatics, along with his wider and later writings, is not a repristination of classical orthodoxy but a reappropriation of it in a modern context. Bavinck's catholicity brings the ancient into conversation with the modern but never precludes the modern by inciting the ancient: ‘to cherish the ancient simply because it is ancient’, he writes, ‘is neither Reformed nor Christian. A work of dogmatic theology should not simply describe what was true and valid but what abides as true and valid. It is rooted in the past but labors for the future.’Footnote 14 It is at the centre of Bavinck's concept of catholicity to be both a historically orthodox dogmatician, appealing to the confessions both ancient and (Dutch) Reformed as accurate interpretations of the scriptures, and a modern dogmatician engaged in the new questions of both philosophy and theology. Bavinck was, it should be remembered, while not necessarily a post-Kantian theologian, a theologian after Kant. If one looks for the so-called ‘modern Bavinck’ by setting him across from his orthodox self,Footnote 15 each staring into the eyes of the other and recognising their opposite as a moment of confusion, then neither will be found. Rather, his modern self is an aspect of his orthodox self, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Before developing some of Bavinck's modern motifs mentioned above we will examine Bavinck's use of a well-known set of terms in the much neglected and, in the Anglophone world, relatively unknown foreword to the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek. In this text, Bavinck explains the task of his dogmatic project in regards to the relationship between theological modernity and ancient and early modern orthodoxy through the use of two concepts: ‘reformed and catholic’. For Bavinck, the point is this: the requirement for modern theological and dialectical engagement is already contained in the concept of catholicity.
In his address to the Kampen Theological School in 1888, ‘The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church’, Bavinck reflects upon the ancient symbol, the Apostles’ Creed, and its confession regarding the ‘catholic church’. According to Bavinck, the creedal use of ‘catholic’ is synonymous with ‘universal’. Bavinck employs the universal concept in three ways: the church (i) is a unified whole, (ii) is inclusive of all believers of every nation in all times and places, and (iii) embraces the whole of human experience, including both the provision of the cure of sin and its reach in reforming the entire life of humanity (a work of the doctrine of re-creation).Footnote 16 The resurrection of Christ, for Bavinck, accomplishes this reality wherein the national election of Israel stretches to encompass all:
Christianity knows no boundaries beyond those which God himself has in his good pleasure established; no boundaries of race or age, class, or status, nationality, or language. Sin has corrupted much; in fact, everything . . . The Gospel is a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person but also for humanity, for the family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.Footnote 17
While Bavinck's 1888 address proclaims the ontological reality of the catholicity of the church (as both an invisible and visible unity), his 1895 foreword outlines catholicity in action. In other words, he discusses catholicity as a task, as an imperative in obedience to its indicative. He answers this question: what does a dogmatician do in a religion that is catholic? The task of catholicity, for Bavinck, comprises three elements: (i) universal communion, (ii) ecumenical polemics, (iii) and the hunt for abiding truth.
The first task of the catholic dogmatician is to commune, to live in fellowship with the generations of the saints of the past. For Bavinck, dogmatics is the enterprise of ‘thinking God's thoughts after Him’.Footnote 18 By this famous dictum, he means thinking according to the revealed Word of God, an illuminated form of reasoning on the basis of something other than reason left to itself. Dogmatics, then, is reasoning under the conditions of God's thought made speech – a necessarily obedient act. In doing so, one forms an organic synchronous relation to the whole of history (which is a redemptive organism itself), and with all those who have done the same. The task of theology, then, fulfils the command that the church be one body. The one body drinks deeply from the depths of every other age, tribe, nation and tongue not for the sake of creating structures of authority but in order to read the scriptures in community.
Accordingly, in the Reformed Dogmatics, the reader will find an unusual quantity of citations and engagement with traditions other than his own. For Bavinck, ‘Irenaeus, Augustine, and Thomas do not belong exclusively to Rome; they are Fathers and Doctors to whom the whole Christian church has obligations’.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, he also aims the principle of catholic communion at the present – it is not merely a principle of ressourcement. In Bavinck's text, it is, perhaps to the reader's surprise, Kant, Schleiermacher and Ritschl that nearly parallel in quantity the citations and engagement with Augustine, Thomas and Calvin.Footnote 20 Bavinck's catholicity takes none as authority but precludes none as interlocutor and partner in ‘thinking God's thoughts’. Dogmatics as a task embraces a universal communion of both the past and present, which is reflected in Bavinck's method: eclecticism. His eclecticism, which is implicit in the foreword itself, precludes a reductionist identification of a singular tradition in the Reformed Dogmatics in total.
The second task of the catholic dogmatician is to make distinctions. Through polemical engagement, the dogmatician pursues the purity of the church catholic. In the context of the late nineteenth century, after the publication of Aeterni Patris and the establishment of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, Bavinck emphasises the commonality that Protestantism shares with Rome. He does so, however, without ignoring disagreement or refusing to engage in irenic polemics. It is here that Bavinck's ecumenicity in light of his commitment to polemics comes to the fore. For Bavinck, the catholic dogmatician necessarily polemicises against, primarily, what he sees as the nature/grace dualism of Rome. He does so, however, for the sake of pursuing (i) the possibility of ecumenicity and (ii) the idea of a unity in diversity – a pan-Christendom that embraces a wide-ranging ecclesiology which transcends any instantiation of the church as an institution and power structure.
According to Bavinck, then, the catholicity of the church demands an organic rather than a solely institutional concept of the church. The task of Christianity as a renewing leaven rather than systematic elevation of the natural order (which he sees in Rome's eschatology) is the presupposition of this necessary polemical task:
It depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology. How we relate grace to nature, re-creation (herschepping) to creation (schepping), determines whether our ecclesiastical vision will be broad or narrow. The affirmation of the catholicity of the church and of the universalism of Christianity is of the greatest significance in our time, which is so rife with errors and schisms.Footnote 21
Additionally, he writes,
With this, Rome, that considers itself to be truly catholic, changes the character of New Testament catholicity. The catholicity of the Christian principle that purifies and sanctifies everything is exchanged for a dualism that separates the supernatural from the natural by considering it as transcendent above the natural.Footnote 22
The Christian principle is the idea of the gospel as leaven that does the work of renewal and reformation on the whole of the cosmos. This principle works from within the church outward to the human heart, the nations, the arts, sciences and the natural order. It includes a broad ambience of ecclesiastical ecumenicity and a commitment to the renewal of the organic and natural cosmos as an end unto itself. For this reason, Bavinck's principle of ecumenism requires a polemic against Rome's soteriology and ecclesiology. Bavinck interprets Rome's limitation of soteriology (as a result of a nature/grace dualism) and the ecclesiological bounds of the church catholic to its hierarchy, as implying a mechanical rather than organic relation between the two. For Bavinck, the concept of catholicity requires the recognition of a pan-Christendom that promotes the broad work of the church, at once visible and invisible, in the natural order.
The third and final task of the catholic dogmatician is an assumption of the previous two: one must search for what is true and valid no matter where it is found. The search for the truth transcends the retreat to commitment to structures of authority outside of the principle of revelation and theologically informed reason, God's self-manifestation and the principia of theological knowing. The principles of communion and polemics assume the search for truth in the contemporary age: ‘a work of dogmatic theology should not simply describe what was true and valid but what abides as true and valid. It is rooted in the past but labors for the future.’Footnote 23
The term ‘reformed’ is, for Bavinck, a catholic nuance. Its scope is limited in relation to the weight of the word ‘catholic’. The concept ‘reformed’ is a reference to the manner in which catholicity performs, a recognition that one works from a tradition outwards. He believes the Reformed tradition to contain the most relatively pure reflections on theology ever produced. According to Bavinck, nevertheless, while generally being the most pure statement of truth, the Reformed tradition is not ‘exclusively’ so.Footnote 24 He once proclaimed as much at the fifth general council of the Alliance of Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System in Toronto in 1892: ‘Calvinism is not the only truth’!Footnote 25
The term ‘reformed’, nevertheless, entails only one sense because the concept ‘catholic’ coinheres with the concept ‘reformed’. To be reformed is to be catholic. The adjective ‘reformed’ adds little extra.
In no other confession [than the Reformed] does the Christian faith in its religious, ethical, and theological character come as clearly into its own; nowhere else is it acknowledged as deeply and broadly, so widely and freely, is it so truly catholic, as in the churches of the Reformed tradition.Footnote 26
One of the central reasons for writing the Reformed Dogmatics is that Bavinck read the past century's rationalism as a devolution of Reformed thought. He hints here at the motivation for his own dogmatic work: ‘the Reformed faith has also experienced a lack of progress and even deformation’, a deformation of its mission to catholicity.Footnote 27
To conclude this first section, we propose that the two-Bavincks hypothesis, that Bavinck is a duality constituted by a modern/orthodox binary at various points in his writings and life, was a result of misreading the mandate of his catholicity: to be both a Dutch Reformed orthodox pastor of the secession church and a modern theologian. Can Reformed catholic orthodoxy coinhere with modern dogmatic theology? For Bavinck, according to the concept of catholicity, it must.
Bavinck's catholicity draws from the fathers for the sake of reading the scriptures in the whole communion of saints. This, for Bavinck, includes exploring the questions of theological modernity and modern Roman Catholicism. Nowhere does he posit that any tradition of history has the claim to the structure of authority.Footnote 28 Rather, in prudence, the catholic theologian listens to those who have come before but for the sake of the future and with an open mind to clarification. To be catholic is to be informed by both ancient and modern: ‘because we are children of this time, we gratefully receive every good gift which the Father of lights bestowed on this era’.Footnote 29 To be a modern theologian is to draw from that which is current by setting it in conversation with the past for the sake of the consistent reformatio of both dogma and culture. To ignore either is to fail to be catholic. This modern meets catholic ressourcement was vibrant in the neo-Calvinist enterprise in the Netherlands decades before Karl Barth's project of retrieval or that of la nouvelle théologie.
Bavinck's catholicity implies a commitment to the Christianity of the ecumenical councils and of the Reformed confessions, and to its development using the questions of modern thought, both within and without the spheres of theology. The content of this ‘without’ becomes clearer as one reads the scope of Bavinck's texts and finds dogmas interpreted and adjusted at the margins by disciplines like cognitive psychology. The ‘within’ is as diverse as the ‘without’, but its primary interlocutor, for Bavinck, is the idealists and the theologians of consciousness, Schleiermacher and his progeny: the Vermittlungstheologie and the Dutch Ethical theologians.
Ancient meets modern: an Augustinian-Schleiermachian self
Herein lies catholicity in action. Modernity meets late antiquity in Bavinck's Schleiermacher – a participant in the ‘new metaphysic’ of Augustine, the turn to the inner self. Bavinck's incorporation of Schleiermacher's philosophy is no small ‘dependence’. He subsumes into his account of reality and revelation the father of modern liberal Protestantism, but does so in a way that the questions of his modernity are incorporated under the conditions of a Reformed orthodoxy. While there had been a day where philosophy and science had blunted the sword of revelation with the rock of reason, at the turn of the twentieth century Bavinck saw a renewed interest in things unseen. Both the academic and social imaginary were recovering from the scientism of the late nineteenth century, and they were, he supposed, rediscovering revelation and Hegel. Revelation unfolds. It opens up before us. It holds a central place in the world. This the ancients knew and this was the content of the awakening from the disenchanted death of the post-Darwinian nineteenth century, as Bavinck saw it. The time was apt then for Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation, given in part in 1908 at Princeton Seminary and in full one year later in its printed edition.Footnote 30
A philosophy of revelation is an account, he supposes, of revelation and how it unfolds and undergirds every area of life – how it opens to us in experience.Footnote 31 Therein we see the relation of philosophy to theology. They are very much concerned with the same subjects from the perspective of differing types of questions. While theology wants to know ‘what’ and ‘who’, philosophy asks ‘by what mechanism’, ‘by what logic’, ‘under what conditions’. Under what conditions and by what mechanism does revelation come to us? How do we come to know God, he wonders. Here the reader finds a surprising answer on two fronts. On the one hand, Bavinck's status is well known as the high mark of Dutch Reformed orthodoxy in a secession tradition in the Dutch neo-confessional age. He was a secessionist pastor of Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, a strict confessor of the Three Forms of Unity and the editor of the Leiden Synopsis Purioris Theologiae. On the other, in his opening thesis he states that ‘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’.Footnote 32
To begin with the second front first, Bavinck inaugurates the search for the ‘how’ of revelation by invoking the cogito. What is the only path to the assumed reality of revelation? This path (weg) is the path of reality itself. In discovering reality we discover that ‘revelation is the secret of all that exists’. The question, therein, turns to discovering this reality of revelation. That way, he argues, is ‘the path of self-consciousness’ (weg van het zelfbewustzijn).Footnote 33 When turning from this dimension of his thinking to his identity as the notable theologian of the secessionist church, he, to the reader's surprise, takes Schleiermacher as his source. What is his purpose in the invocation of the cogito? Bavinck's point is not to lay stress on ‘thinking’ but on the ‘I’ that thinks. Instead of cogitare, in other words, we begin epistemologically with cogito. The difference is not in the act of thinking but in the subject: it is the ‘I’, the transcendental ego that underlies all self-activity. The point, therefore, is not about ‘thinking’ at all: ‘the core of our self-consciousness is, as Schleiermacher perceived much more clearly than Kant, not autonomy but a sense of dependence’.Footnote 34 The question that is left is how does one who renounces the a priori philosophy justify his path to the discovery of the reality of revelation through the invocation of Schleiermachian self-consciousness?
He does so precisely in this way: by insisting that (as Schleiermacher perceived) invoking self-consciousness is not invoking the cogito but the embodied ‘I am’.Footnote 35 While we do not have space to develop this point here, Schleiermacher's later notion of immediate self-consciousness and feeling are an enlargement of his early philosophy. Schleiermacher's early philosophy budded into his philosophy of the self and its relation of thinking to knowing in his lectures on the Dialektik, which were offered six times from 1811 to 1831.Footnote 36 Bavinck, having read these lectures, interpreted Schleiermacher's self as something other than Cartesian. Schleiermacher's self-consciousness was an awareness of the unity of intellect and organism, an embodied self.Footnote 37 Feeling serves in this philosophical grammar as the transition point or conjunction between both the organic and intellectual functions in thinking, and as the transition from thinking to doing, the necessary transcendent condition of the self that relates thinking to willing to acting. Bavinck locates the ‘how’ of revelation's movement in adopting this conceptual framework.
Revelation is not so much something to introduce, but something into which we are inducted by nature of being human, by the reality of existing. It is the secret of the world, he supposes.Footnote 38 In self-consciousness, revelation first makes itself known to us. This occurs in a few steps, all of which remain for Bavinck, as they did for Schleiermacher, pre-cognitive.Footnote 39 First, in being aware of ourselves we are aware of something definite, a specific being. ‘And this definite mode of being’, he argues, ‘most generally described, consists in a dependent, limited, finite, created being. Before all thinking and willing, before all reasoning and action, we are and exist, exist in a definite way, and inseparable therefrom have a consciousness of our being and of its specific mode’.Footnote 40 This specific mode of being is as embodied spirits which form an ‘organic unity’ of self. This mode of being also includes our distinct relation as embodied spirits both from and to other ‘objects’ (i.e. to the world). The first leads to the second point: in the awareness of the embodied self as a unity of being and thinking, we ‘feel (gevoel) ourselves dependent on everything around us’.Footnote 41 As embodied definite beings, we are aware of our place in a cosmos of materiality and consciousness. We ‘feel’ a unity of organism with this reality. Bavinck, herein, has invoked thus far Schleiermacher's bi-elemental definition of self-consciousness: feeling ourselves to be what we are and feeling ourselves coexistent with an other, on which we depend.Footnote 42 He develops the second aspect further by naming a third point: ‘with all creatures’, he argues, ‘we feel ourselves . . . dependent on some absolute power . . . this feeling of dependence is not a philosophical conception . . . but a fact’.Footnote 43 Like Schleiermacher, it is not a philosophical conception because it is pre-cognitive and, therefore, pre-philosophical.
Notice that this process is a conceptual outworking of an immediate experience. In accord with Schleiermacher, Bavinck follows the pattern of unity of self, dependence upon the external and dependence upon the absolute. It is by feeling, he supposes, that we are convinced of both the world and God.Footnote 44 This he calls revelation because it is not a discovery but a fact of being, which we are awoken to by the One we are absolutely dependent upon, the triune God. This is, we might suppose, his philosophical rumination on a Reformed reading of Romans 1:18–19.Footnote 45 He recounts this fact as such:
Just as confidently as man is convinced in his self-consciousness of his own existence and of the reality of the world, does he believe also in the reality and personality of God. This belief is interwoven with his self-consciousness, more particularly with its double testimony to dependence and freedom. These are not antagonistic, but rather postulate each the other.Footnote 46
The difference with Schleiermacher is in the conclusion: while Bavinck adopts both Schleiermacher's conceptual framework and the steps of his argument, his conclusion is not that the God (Woher) of absolute dependence is an indirect and undefined postulate of feeling.Footnote 47 He concludes, rather, that this God is the personal God who actively reveals – the fact of feeling oneself dependent is thus a result of God's self-revelation. Bavinck's philosophical construction of self and dependence is not prior to dogmatics, but a philosophical consideration of its subject matter that proceeds from it. Religion, then, in accordance with his Dogmatics, is a universal fact. Religion is the result of and response to the revelatory experience of the God of Christian theism:
Thus, when man grows up and develops in accordance with the nature implanted in him, not in detachment from the world and the social organism, but in the environment in which a place was assigned to him at birth, he attains as freely and as inevitably to the knowledge and service of a personal God as he believes in his own existence and that of the world. He does not invent the idea of God nor produce it; it is given to him and he receives it. Atheism is not proper to man by nature, but develops at a later stage of life, on the ground of philosophic reflection; like scepticism, it is an intellectual and ethical abnormality, which only confirms the rule. By nature, in virtue of his nature, every man believes in God. And this is due in the last analysis to the fact that God, the creator of all nature, has not left himself without witness, but through all nature, both that of man himself and that of the outside world, speaks to him.Footnote 48
Herein lies the connection to Bavinck's confession that this philosophy of self-consciousness was first so understood by Augustine. In the mind and world, God makes himself known. ‘Augustine was the first who so understood self-consciousness.’Footnote 49 By the light of the revelation of Christian theism, ‘Augustine descended deep into his own inner life; forgetting nature, he desired to know naught else but God and himself. There he found thought to be sure, but not thought alone . . . for in himself always life preceded thought; self-consciousness, reflection; experience, science.’Footnote 50 Augustine, Bavinck suggests, discovered in self-consciousness that humans are definite beings, not pure beings. There, he discovered the starting point of what Bavinck calls ‘a new metaphysic’. This ‘new metaphysic’, he argues, Schleiermacher discovered afresh, in contradistinction to both Descartes and Kant.
Bavinck, in his philosophical account of how revelation comes to us, offers a paradigm of his catholic methodology. He communes with the old and new. He does not invoke the new without the ancient. He does not invoke the ancient without a desire to inform the new. But – and this is especially important in avoiding one-sided presentations of his philosophical ruminations – in his Philosophy of Revelation he gives the conceptual framework and argumentative schema of Schleiermacher first place. He recognises in Schleiermacher an Augustinian tool.
Medieval meets modern: from Aquinas to organism
One can further discern Bavinck's eclectic deployment of modern and classical tools in the way in which he sought to overcome the inherited problem of the subject–object dichotomy. Indeed, the way Bavinck approached this question has stirred much disagreement, accentuating the false dilemma of whether Bavinck was modern or classical in his thinking. Henk van den Belt observes that Bavinck's extended focus on this topic displays his position as a modern theologian, because the subject–object dichotomy (and the overcoming of that dichotomy) seems to ‘dominate’ the structure of Bavinck's thought.Footnote 51 In Van den Belt's judgement, this focus further reshapes Bavinck's theology and epistemology toward modern grounds, as Bavinck lays a greater emphasis on the role of the subject in faith and in the acquisition of knowledge than previous Reformed theologians.Footnote 52 These comments received particular critical attention in John Bolt's review of Van den Belt's monograph. Bolt saw in Bavinck's theological epistemology not a greater affinity toward modern philosophy, but rather a clean retrieval of Thomism:
But, is [the grounding of faith within the religious subject] not obviously necessary when we are trying to explain how religious subjects come to certainty of knowledge about God and the world? And why does Van den Belt consider this ‘disappointing’ and suggest Bavinck's tendency to subjectivism? (290ff.) Is Bavinck here not simply being a good Augustinian or Thomist in his realism?Footnote 53
If instead one refocuses the discussion on Bavinck's use of the organic motif to negotiate eclectic systems in tension, however, one can see a different picture. Rather than asking the question of whether Bavinck was moving towards modernity or staying within classical boundaries, we are pressed to see how Bavinck uses sources eclectically from both milieux in an attempt to overcome the subject–object dichotomy.
For Bavinck, achieving subject–object correspondence is the very definition of science, truth and knowledge.Footnote 54 He says this in numerous places. First, in the Dogmatics: ‘Science always consists in a logical relation between subject and object. Our view of science depends on the way we relate the two.’Footnote 55 Secondly, in the Certainty of Faith: ‘truth is agreement between thought and reality and thus expresses a relation between the contents of our consciousness and the object of our knowledge’.Footnote 56 Finally, in Christelijke wereldbeschouwing: ‘knowledge is accurately always and can never be other than a relation between subject and object. Once one or both falls away, there is no more knowledge.’Footnote 57
For Bavinck, therefore, the relationship between the subject and object is paramount. To understand the significance of this move in Bavinck, we must first grasp that Bavinck accepts the post-Kantian distinction between mental representations and the external world. Secondly, according to Bavinck's reasoning, the organic ontology is a tool that serves as a condition for the union of subject and object.Footnote 58
First, then, there is a duality between representations and world. Though he insists that knowledge of the outside world is possible, Bavinck holds that we cannot ‘deny the distinction that exists between the representation and the thing but at the same time maintains the inseparable connection between the two because it takes the representation as it presents itself’.Footnote 59 We obtain knowledge of the outside world not by a direct acquaintance with it, but by the mediation of representations, through which the world is somehow given. Bavinck thus explicitly holds to a dual-object view of the thing known, which encompasses the idea in our minds on the one hand, and the world outside on the other:
So on the one hand there is an essential difference between the thing and its representation, because the thing exists outside of us, has real existence there, while the second exists in us and merely has ideal existence. On the other hand, there is complete correspondence: the representation is an image, a faithful ideal reproduction of the object outside of us.Footnote 60
We immediately know a representation of the object, and it is through these representations that extra-mental objects are known. Bavinck's use of the word ‘representation’ (Dutch voorstelling) is of no small significance, as he employs it in discussions that involve post-Kantian epistemology.Footnote 61 For example, in the Christelijke wereldbeschouwing Bavinck argues that from Kant onwards the idealists have wrongly tried to establish the existence and epistemic accessibility of the external world by way of an inference from mental representations (voorstellingen): ‘out of one representation [the idealist] can merely infer another, but [he] can never by reasoning bridge the distance between thinking and being’.Footnote 62 It would be wrong, in Bavinck's view, to begin with the subject, and from there, to seek to infer the existence or epistemic accessibility of the external world. Instead, one must immediately affirm that we ‘possess in sensations and representations (voorstellingen) a reliable knowledge of objective reality’.Footnote 63
Bavinck reiterates that representation is the means by which we access the external world in Philosophy of Revelation:
The truth of idealism lies in this, that the mind of man, in other words, sensation and representation, is the basis and principle of all knowledge. If there be an objective reality, a world of matter and force, existing in the forms of space and time, then it follows from the nature of the case that the knowledge of it can reach me through my consciousness only . . . Apart from consciousness I know nothing. In the defense of this truth idealism holds strong ground over that naïve naturalism which thinks it possesses . . . a directly given reality, and which loses sight of the influence exerted by the subject in every perception of an object.Footnote 64
This acceptance of the mediating role of the mental representation in Bavinck seems to indicate at least one aspect in which he differs significantly from Thomas Reid, who famously argued that in perception one is not aware of any mental representation, but rather one immediately perceives the outside object itself.Footnote 65 We must ask, therefore, can we account for the claim that there obtains a correspondence between representation and reality? Returning to the Dogmatics, Bavinck admits that a reflection on the way the brain produces a mental image – an image distinct from the physical vibrations in the brain – and how that representation may faithfully reflect the world outside will confront us with an ‘insoluble riddle’.Footnote 66 How do these ideal images reflect a physical and non-mental reality? Bavinck makes this riddle even more perplexing when he brings into consideration the Aristotelian claim that the objects of science are not particulars but universals. The mind abstracts universals from individual particulars, but ‘the universality we express in a concept does not exist as such, as a universal, apart from us . . . it has its basis in things and is abstracted from it and expressed in a concept by the activity of the intellect’.Footnote 67 The universal in the mind is not in the particular – again, how does the concept in the mind actually help us ‘approximate’ reality? Bavinck admits that it is ‘strange, even amazing, that converting mental representations into concepts and processing these again in accordance with the laws of thought, we should obtain results that correspond to reality’.Footnote 68 Bavinck envelops the Aristotelian principle of abstraction into a Kantian frame in which knowledge of the world is mediated by representations, and in doing so he makes the gap ever more palpable.
In our judgement, throughout Bavinck's oeuvre, Bavinck makes at least two moves that allow him to establish the connection between mental representations and external reality: a retrieval of the scholastic principle that ‘like is known by like’ and a Reformed application of an organic ontology. The second of which, we believe, is more predominant and in fact situates the former.Footnote 69
First, then, Bavinck agrees with the ancient Greek philosophical principle that like can only be known by like, along with the scholastics’ distinction between the thing known by the mode of cognition and the mode of the thing known.Footnote 70 The scholastics, Bavinck notes, believed that ‘[o]bjects thus acquire an ideal existence in the soul by way of perception and thought . . . the things themselves do not pass into the soul but only their image or form’.Footnote 71 Thomas Aquinas also addressed similar questions concerning whether the contents of the mind do correspond with the reality outside of the mind.Footnote 72 Thomas, indeed, argues against the notion that ‘our cognitive faculties know only what is experienced within them, for instance, that the senses perceive only the impressions made on their organs’.Footnote 73 Instead, Thomas asserts that the things we understand ‘are the same as the objects of science’, and that the absurd consequence of the above bifurcation between impressions and external objects is that we would only know appearances.Footnote 74 Thomas affirms that impressions are a ‘likeness’ of the object, such that one can know the object; again, he asserts that ‘like is known by like’.Footnote 75 Thomas placed, then, a fixed gap between idea and object, whereas modern philosophy, in Bavinck's view, further created ‘an ever-growing gap’ between subject and object.Footnote 76
In many other places, Bavinck presses further than this and asks: what is it that makes impressions a ‘likeness’ of the object? What conceptual apparatus may allow us to say that subjective representations are ‘like’ the object they represent? Here his second move comes to the fore: subject and object correspond to one another because both come from the same triune God, and thus both obtain within an organically connected creation.
For Bavinck a trinitarian doctrine of God implies a creation that reflects an organic unity and diversity – an interconnected whole that resists both polyphonic diversity and static uniformity.Footnote 77 After his argument that the mind plays a constructive role on the thing perceived, thus affirming again the distinction between the representation of the object and the object represented, Bavinck invokes this idea to resist bifurcating the two: ‘human beings are so richly endowed because they are linked with the objective world by a great many extremely diverse connections. They are related to the whole world. Physically, vegetatively, sensorily, intellectually, ethically, and religiously there is correspondence between them and the world; they are microcosms.’Footnote 78 Subject and object partake in the same organic reality. Though Bavinck redefines the organic motif through Reformed orthodoxy, he notes its origin in his contemporary ideological and romantic context:
The world by its very design is one organic whole. The two spheres, nature and morality, are most closely interconnected and interpenetrate each other at all times. The two, though certainly distinct, are never separated. One cannot designate a point in creation where the counsel and governance of God and the independent will and action of human beings begin. Especially in this century the historic and organic view of things has at every point driven out and condemned this Pelagian split.Footnote 79
In the Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck notes that idealism's recovery of the ‘absolute’ in order to establish ‘some connection between thought and being, between subject and object’, should deserve one's ‘appreciation’.Footnote 80 The difference between Bavinck and idealism, of course, is that for Bavinck the absolute is not the ‘substance’ that includes all being, but rather the personal God of Christian theism, who stands qualitatively distinct from the organic creation in which subjects and objects are pairs in relation. Further, Bavinck argues that the sovereign divine counsel ensures the organic interconnectedness of all things. ‘Just as in any organism all the parts are interconnected and reciprocally determine each other, so the world as a whole is a masterpiece of divine art, in which all the parts are organically interconnected. And of that world, in all its dimensions, the counsel of God is the eternal design.’Footnote 81 This organic conception of the decree as the basis of the organic nature of creation becomes for Bavinck the basis for his belief in the unity and possibility of the sciences, with theology as queen.Footnote 82 The work of the Logos is also situated within this organic ontology, as he is the active agent through whom the connections between subject and object continually obtain.Footnote 83
These observations shed light on Bavinck's programmatic statements in Christelijke wereldbeschouwing concerning the material connection between organicism, epistemology and worldview. The Christian doctrine of creation supplies the metaphysical resources necessary to account for the possibility of knowledge: ‘the teaching of the creation of all things through the Word of God is the explanation of all knowing and knowledge, the presupposition of the correspondence between subject and object’.Footnote 84 The knower is pressed to strive after a coherent knowledge of all things precisely because the same God who creates the world organically implants in knowing agents the desire for an organic worldview. ‘It is the same divine wisdom that created the organic world into a related single whole, which plants in us the impulse toward a uniform worldview’.Footnote 85
Conclusion
It seems clear by now that to say that Bavinck is ‘Thomistic’ and ‘Augustinian’, or to claim that Bavinck is a ‘post-Kantian’ thinker, would be true, but would fail to account for the whole of his thought. One cannot pit his use of Thomas against his use of Kant or the Romantic spirit. In Bavinck one encounters a practised conviction that an organic worldview bestows the freedom to use various thinkers in an eclectic manner. No one thinker or past philosophy holds absolute precedence over others, and to focus myopically on his use of a particular philosophy is to eclipse his unique and Reformed recalibration of important motifs in his thought. To reduce Bavinck's theology to a singular association with one thinker is to place him in a procrustean bed in which he cannot fit. We, in contrast, have provided two examples of such motifs that, one might say, conjoin to form an organic methodology. Questions remain concerning whether such a method can produce a responsible reading of a diverse collection of thinkers. One must also ask whether such eclecticism necessarily entails the disruption of a systematic, coherent whole, as the diversity of conceptual meanings from these various thinkers coalesce into Bavinck's singular argument.
It is true that in Bavinck we encounter a paradigmatic example of Reformed catholicity. However, if the observations of this essay are correct, that catholicity must also include fair attention to those thinkers that many argue cannot be included within the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy. It is for that very reason, however, Bavinck may be put forward as a compelling exemplar for Reformed theologians.
