The following essay investigates whether in his Stone Lectures of 1908, published with the title Philosophy of Revelation, Herman Bavinck had in mind any distinctive conceptions of divine and creaturely ontology, or of the Creator/creature relation, or whether he conceived of divine revelation in a way that suggests a noteworthy conception of Creator/creature ontology and relation.Footnote 1
The first edition of Bavinck's Prolegomena was published in 1895, and a second expanded edition appeared in 1906. Thus, as the editors of the recently republished lectures note, ‘PoR constitutes the mature Bavinck on issues pertaining to revelation, philosophy, epistemology, and ontology’.Footnote 2 Bavinck's aim in the lectures appears to be twofold. First, his primary task is apologetic. The lectures come across as an extended vindication of the Christian faith as a world and life view with triune divine self-giving – that is, revelation – at its centre. In the Stone Lectures, Bavinck generally utilises an ‘impossibility of the contrary’ or reductio argumentative strategy. He seeks to demonstrate a universal acknowledgement, indeed an anthropological awareness, of the existence of a transcendent God and the need for divine revelation, but also that without corrective Christian revelation that awareness gives way only to incoherence and confusion. In the opening lecture Bavinck explains that modern thought has returned with renewed interest to the ideas of revelation and religious experience, but with its heavy subjectivism proves incapable of confessing divine transcendence, and thus true theism. ‘The philosophy of revelation … must take its start from its object, from revelation’, and ‘cannot be construed a priori’.Footnote 3 Thus only Christ himself, the ‘center’, even the ‘heart’ of revelation, can satisfy that religious undercurrent of human culture.Footnote 4
Reading the Stone Lectures as an apologetic for Christianity as such coheres nicely with George Harinck's study of developments in Bavinck's engagement with modernism. In a second stage of that engagement, dating from 1890 or so, Bavinck heralded the demise of modernist anti-supernaturalism and, noting a renewed interest in religion, ‘took the new cultural shift mainly as a possibility to unite Christians of all kinds on the common denominator of the objectivity of God's Word and law’, on ‘the belief that there exists a personal God, who revealed Himself and could be known by humans’.Footnote 5
Second, Bavinck challenges unsatisfactory conceptions of revelation and scripture found within the church. These polemical but constructive doctrinal concerns are secondary but conspicuous. Two emphases hold steady throughout the lectures in this regard, tracking with the notions of the history and the order of salvation. Bavinck labours to theologise, against the backdrop of higher criticism, the historical context in which scripture took form; and he argues tirelessly for a constructive theological appreciation of those universal, philosophical and religious, indications of the knowledge of God and of revelation.Footnote 6
John Bolt takes this latter aim, in his view a kind of pre-dogmatic anthropology, to be the central one. He argues that in general subsequent Dutch neo-Calvinism failed to capitalise on Bavinck's call for serious reflection on ‘the reality of concrete religion and the anthropological-epistemological grounds for the possibility of revelation’, ‘an anthropologically sensitive metaphysics of religion’.Footnote 7 Bolt acknowledges one possible exception: Bavinck's nephew, missiologist Johan Herman Bavinck.Footnote 8 Bolt argues that, in light of Bavinck's PoR, ‘Reformed systematic theology today has two tasks’.Footnote 9 These are ‘to affirm a modest natural theology that is anthropologically attuned to the concrete religious experience of people in the twenty-first century’, and ‘a revived realist metaphysics’.Footnote 10
Bavinck returns in each and every lecture to the indispensability of Christ-centred special revelation. He argues that divine transcendence and divine revelation are everywhere acknowledged in religion and philosophy; but such acknowledgements outside the circle of special revelation come invariably in idolatrous, pantheistic form and end in scientific incoherence. One example, from the lecture on religion:
First, it [religion] always includes faith in a divine power, which is distinct from the world, far above it, and can govern and guide it according to its own will; and, secondly, it puts man himself personally into connection with the divine power, so that he sees in the affairs of God his own affairs, and allied with God can defy the power of the whole world, even unto death. But this idea of religion has only come to its true and full embodiment of Christianity. For all religions which exist without special revelation in Christ, and equally all confessions and worldviews which differ from it, are characterized by this common peculiarity: that they identify God and the world, the natural and the ethical, being and evil, creation and fall, and therefore mix up religion with superstition and magic. There is only one religion which moves on pure lines and is conceived altogether as religion, and that is Christianity.Footnote 11
‘Bavincks’ PoR; therefore natural theology’ is a startling non-sequitur.Footnote 12 So, in the interest of preserving the tenor of Bavinck's lectures, one might take Bolt's ‘natural theology’ to mean a theology of nature, or of the nature of the human creature and context, or a biblical anthropology,Footnote 13 and ‘metaphysics’ to indicate something in the realm of prolegomena or general revelation, a revelatory appreciation of ‘what there is’. What is needed, in other words, is a revelationally robust account of the human situation in anticipation of special revelation, a doctrine of the Creator/creature relation hospitable to special revelation as we find it. One must at least in part reason from special revelation as effect to its cause and possibility. Accordingly, Bavinck's first lecture concludes with a brief discussion of general and special revelation, their distinction and interdependence.Footnote 14 Somewhere between the doctrine of God and the fact of Holy Scripture, in other words, one may expect to find a theology of the possibility of Creator/creature intercourse which unfolds within the sphere of human experience. Indications of a natural knowledge of God is not the whole of Bavinck's theology of the human situation.
As I intend to demonstrate here, Bavinck's PoR holds untapped resources for productive reflection on precisely that issue, dialogue between revelation and ontology. In other words, I find convincing Bolt's claim that there is more to learn from these lectures, but I suspect that Bavinck's lead points in a different direction than that which Bolt suggests: toward increased doctrinal organicism. Indeed Bavinck saw the ‘reasonableness’ of Christian faith in precisely such terms:
Now, it is the difficult but nonetheless glorious task of dogmatics to prove to the mind that the confession of the church is reasonable in the highest sense of the word. But then the primary requirement for our thinking mind is that the church's dogmas do not stand disconnected alongside one another, but they must be contained within one another; that together they constitute an unbreakable whole, an organic unity, a true and complete system. If the confession of the church is not merely a fruit of the imagination and a mythological ‘gimmick’ (Spielerei), but a description of real acts of God, of a unique life, and if dogmatics still deserves to be called a science, then that strict requirement cannot be avoided. A dogmatic system is the requirement that science places upon theology, and it is the proof of the reasonableness, of the genuinely scientific nature, of Christianity.Footnote 15
One indication of such promise is Bavinck's auspicious if undeveloped excurses, scattered throughout the lectures, into biblical theology and the historical organism of revelation and redemption.Footnote 16 One need only observe the fruit borne in the work of Geerhardus Vos, who translated the first English edition of the lectures, to appreciate the constructive value of Bavinck's resistance to higher criticism, on the one hand, and to narrow conceptions of revelation in the church on the other.
Bavinck wrote: ‘The old theology construed revelation, after a quite external and mechanical fashion, and too readily identified it with Scripture. Our eyes are nowadays being more and more opened to the fact that revelation in many ways is historically and psychologically “mediated”.’Footnote 17 Vos’ approach to biblical theology, similarly, serves to ‘fill in the gap’ between the doctrines of the will and work of God and the doctrines of revelation and redemption by conceiving of history as their coalescence. He says: ‘The inward hidden content of God's mind can become the possession of man only through a voluntary disclosure on God's part. God must come to us before we can go to Him.’Footnote 18 Vos’ is not a literary approach to biblical theology, which takes for granted more or less settled doctrines of revelation. Instead he focuses on the acts or the actualities of historical, redemptive self-giving: ‘the study of the actual self-disclosures of God in time and space which lie back of even the first committal to writing of any Biblical document, and which for a long time continued to run alongside of the inscripturation of revealed material … is called the study of Biblical Theology’.Footnote 19 ‘Biblical theology deals with revelation as a divine activity.’Footnote 20
In the closing minutes of his Stone Lectures Bavinck declared that ‘between this whole universe and the will of God as it is made known to us in the gospel, there exists a spiritually and historically indissoluble unity’, and that ‘revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance (verband) with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike’.Footnote 21 Vos writes that the ‘Biblical and Shemitic idea’ of knowledge is ‘to have the reality of something practically interwoven with the inner experience of life’, so that ‘“to know” can stand in the Biblical idiom for “to love”, “to single out in love”’.Footnote 22 ‘Because God desires to be known after this fashion, He has caused His revelation to take place in the milieu of the historical life of a people.’Footnote 23
Bavinck scholarship has not yet produced much of a statement on the relationship between revelation and ontology, but a few of the basic ingredients have been identified. In addition to these biblical theological themes, one notes especially Bavinck's organic motif, which he explains as follows:
Whenever we come into contact with an organism, we see at work a force, a principle, a vis vitalis or whatever people may term it … That mysterious, hidden power is exactly what comprises the organic … Within inorganic nature, everything is aggregate, with things appended to each other from the outside; so there is no real whole, no genuine unity, and thus no diversity. But within organisms, each small part is governed, formed, and predisposed by the whole. Thus, the whole precedes the parts, and supplies each part with its own function within the whole. Within the organic for the first time we encounter a whole in terms of its parts, unity in diversity, principle within the system.Footnote 24
As scholars have noted, the organic motif holds sway in Bavinck's reflections on Trinity and anthropology and, noteworthy presently, also history, redemption and revelation.Footnote 25 Bavinck notes in several places that revelation is an organism whose genetic unity is the redemptive mission of the Son, and that the bedrock of history is none other than the plan of God, and Bavinck defends an ‘organic’ view of the inspiration of scripture.Footnote 26 Again, confirmation of what Bavinck has in mind might be found in Vos, who argued from both doctrinal and exegetical angles – deductively from the doctrine of God; inductively from the data of scripture – for the same organic coherence of history, redemption and revelation. If soteric unity of revelation, then covenant, eschatological unity of canonical history (which begins with creation); and if so then in all likelihood history and historic revelation indicate a Creator/creature relation, not merely allowing for such organicism but likely requiring it – history and relation distinguishable but inseparable from the beginning. This would mean that from the covenant of works through to Revelation 21:3 a single relational ontology is in view.Footnote 27 Notice also that thus far readers of Bavinck have not come away with the impression that he wished to contend head-on with classical theism. He defends classical essence and attributes and Trinity, and in so doing borrows freely from the Cappadocians, Boethius, Augustine and Aquinas.
Drawing these two threads together – organicism in the doctrines of history and revelation and no concerted demurral from classical theism – suggests that neo-Calvinism, or Bavinck in particular, may have something noteworthy to offer on the question of the Creator/creature relation, not only for the sake of a richer account of the organism of revelation and scripture but also in productive acknowledgement of the concerns of process thought and historical criticism.
Needless to say, as that triad – history, redemption and revelation – indicates, a conclusive statement of Bavinck's views would require treatment of a large portion of the primary sources, including the doctrines of God, creation, providence, covenant and so on. The more modest aim of the present essay is an examination of key passages from Bavinck's Stone Lectures with these questions in mind.
Lecture 1: The idea of a philosophy of revelation
In a context in which modern notions of immanence and subjectivism dominated theological thought, Bavinck responds not with a rehearsal of classical attributes, transcendence or asymmetrical relation, but with a biblical reworking of divine immanence.Footnote 28 He argues that deism, in conceiving of ‘God's dwelling place’ as ‘somewhere far away, outside the world’, and of ‘his transcendence’ as indicating ‘that he has withdrawn from creation and now stands outside the actuality of this world’, must acknowledge that thereby ‘we lose him and are unable to maintain communication with him’. Footnote 29 Bavinck recommends a better balance: ‘His existence cannot become truly real to us unless we are permitted to conceive of him as not only above the world, but in his very self in the world and thus as indwelling in all his works.’Footnote 30
He indicates here that transcendence and immanence are mutually informative notions (not to say complementary realities), and that the doctrine of God implies the structure of Christian religious experience.Footnote 31 In the case of deism, untenable iterations of immanence, apparently incompatible with secondary causes, meet a corrective in the form of a speculative, depersonalised notion of transcendence. The heavens are indeed high above the earth. Bavinck responds exegetically:
The transcendence which is inseparable from the being of God is not meant in a spatial or a quantitative sense. It is true Scripture distinguishes between heaven and earth and repeatedly affirms that God has heaven especially for his dwelling place and specifically reveals there his perfections in glory. But Scripture itself teaches that heaven is part of the created universe. When, therefore, God is represented as dwelling in heaven, he is not thereby placed outside the world but in the world and is not removed by a spatial transcendence from his creatures.Footnote 32
Bavinck does not here deny ‘removal’ by transcendence; he rejects spatial or quantitative construals of transcendence. That is, scripture affirms a lively divine immanence as the foundation for creaturely fruition of God and ‘real communication with him’. Bavinck sees in scripture a rich divine immanence, which, he says, poses no threat to genuine, qualitative transcendence but does serve to expose counterfeits, and forces a fuller appreciation of the divine attributes:
His exaltation above all that is finite, temporal, and subject to space limitation is upheld. Although God is imminent in every part and sphere of creation with all his perfections and all his being, nevertheless even in that most intimate union he remains transcendent. His being is of a different and higher kind than that of the world. As little as eternity and time, omnipresence and space, infinite and finiteness, can be reduced to one or conceived as reversed sides of the same reality, can God and the world, the Creator and the creature, be identified qualitatively and essentially?Footnote 33
The absoluteness of God, in other words, being qualitatively distinguished from all else, stands in no danger of ‘immanentization’ or ontological reduction by force of biblical realism or ‘intimate union’ and immanence. Rather the reverse; the immanence of God simply impresses upon us the mystery of God self-revealed and self-given. The metaphysics of the Creator/creature relation on display in biblical revelation, as Bavinck puts things here, must acknowledge a measure of mystery in order to affirm the absolute personality of God and the fullness of divine immanence. Bavinck indicates, in other words, a metaphysics of the Creator/creature relation which claims to balance qualitatively ‘other’ divine ontology with unqualified immanence, and he draws indications of this impossible cooperation from the doctrine of God, from religious experience, from the data of scripture, and here from a doctrine of special revelation:
Even as Christ the Son of God is from above, and yet his birth from Mary was in preparation for centuries, so every word of God in special revelation is both spoken from above and yet brought to us along the pathway of history. Scripture gives succinct expression to this double fact when it describes the divine word as ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ διὰ τῶν προφητῶν.Footnote 34
The ‘word of God through the prophets’, special revelation, is ‘divine word’. Just as Christ is neither the Son of God alone nor only born of Mary but both – the Son of God born of Mary – so special revelation is neither divine word alone nor merely creaturely but the word of God through the prophets. Bavinck is not discussing the doctrine of scripture here in his opening lecture on ‘The Idea of a Philosophy of Revelation’. He is indicating the revelational payout of a corrected notion of transcendence and a coordinate, intrepid doctrine of immanence. He draws tighter the organism of general-special revelational cooperationFootnote 35 by virtue, principally, of the fullness of the being of God. Drawing the first lecture to a close, Bavinck declares:
The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation … the secret … of all that exists in all its forms. … In every moment of time beats the pulse of eternity; every point in space is filled with the omnipresence of God; the finite is supported by the infinite, all becoming is rooted in being. Together with all created things, that special revelation which comes to us in the Person of Christ is built on these presuppositions. The foundations of creation and redemption are the same.Footnote 36
One detects various components of a christological conception of the organism of the Christian religion. The self-expression of God in the Son is the presupposition of revelation in history, and Christ himself, ‘in his person and work’, is the organism of special revelation specifically. The triune God is self-expressed, ‘in his very being present’, in creation and in redemption, especially in Christ the Son. The foundation of Bavinck's triune-theistic worldview, its difference in unity, is given in Christ as well.Footnote 37 The creature is always to be understood in-reference-to-God-in-the-Son because the creature truly is always in-reference-to-God-in-the-Son. The image-bearer and the realm of his experience display a non-necessary but real self-giving of the triune God in the Son.
Lecture 8: Revelation and religious experience
Lecture 8 addresses the psychology of religion and religious experience, and here too we find a christological conception of both the context and the nature of revelation. In this lecture as in the others Bavinck's aim is to demonstrate and defend the uniqueness of Christianity. He argues that modern thought, despite its showing some interest in religious psychology and experience, is incompatible with Christianity, and that to subject the data of the Christian faith to the structures of Baconian science or Kantian rationalism is to undermine its uniqueness. Bavinck argues that true religion should exercise a right to its own method: ‘After the criticism of “pure reason” … and after the criticism of “historical reason” … a “criticism of the religious reason” … is still necessary’.Footnote 38 His point is that modern approaches to these topics are basically hostile to Christianity because their structures disallow Christianity's claim to distinction, and that the content of revelation ought to determine the method of religious self-understanding – which is, Bavinck indicates, no more than what modern science has claimed for itself, the right of methodological self-definition. ‘Each science must borrow its form from the object which it investigates, for method is determined by the object.’Footnote 39
So ‘if theology possesses a reason for and a right to existence, it brings with it, as an independent science, its own method also’.Footnote 40 Christianity, Bavinck declares, ‘can never produce any other method than that which is given by its own object’. Footnote 41 Therefore: ‘The plan of salvation in the Christian religion determines the method of Christian theology.’Footnote 42 Bavinck identifies two components comprising the Christian plan of salvation which are impressed upon us in revelation: the immutability of God and his purposes, and the ongoing historical liveliness of redemptive communion with God. He says that the ‘Christian religion … by means of revelation seeks to bring us into fellowship with that God who manifests his truth in that he is always the same, in the past and in the present’.Footnote 43 For Bavinck this is the content of Christian religion: revelation is the means by which the immutable God draws people into redemptive fellowship with himself within the actual circumstances of creaturely experience.Footnote 44 Bavinck then distinguishes two essential components of the historical realisation of the plan of salvation: what are sometimes called the accomplishment or the historia of salvation, and its ordo or application. Both are essential. Revelation allows neglect of neither ‘history (historie) and revelation in nature and history (gescheidenis) – that is to say … Christ’, nor the real and actual realisation of fellowship with God: ‘the will of God to save the world … which goes on from day to day’.Footnote 45 As Bavinck explains in subsequent pages, it is this latter, the ordo salutis, which serves as the soteric foundation for Christian religious psychology and experience; while the ordo itself signifies refracted application of the singular historical accomplishment. Thus in Christian experience continuity is identifiable with the mediation of Christ, and difference, personal experience, with the benefits of the same mediation applied variously to sinners in the actual realm of their experience.
The immutability of God and his purposes is given in revelation inseparably along with the historic realisation of those purposes in terms of both the historia and ordo aspects of redemption, and the sum of this juxtaposition Bavinck sees in Christ himself: ‘The peculiarity of the Christian religion, then, as has been so often shown and acknowledged even by opponents, is in the person of Christ.’Footnote 46 Bavinck does not say that Christianity's peculiarity is Christ himself, but that its peculiarity is in Christ and given or revealed in him. Christ does not reveal only himself but himself as the substance of all things. Jesus ‘is not the subject but the object of religion’.Footnote 47 ‘Christianity is not the religion of Jesus … but Christ-religion.’Footnote 48
Bavinck's primary interest is to establish the unique structure of Christian thought with regard to religious psychology and experience. He makes the methodological point that Christian revelation presents to us an immutable God who himself works out salvation in history. Bavinck highlights the objective and historical component of revealed redemption, and then develops the subjective application of it, which unfolds in all the personal non-regularities of individual experiences of grace and conversion. ‘We have on the one side to maintain the dependence of religious experience on historical Christianity, and on the other side equally to recognize its independence and liberty.’Footnote 49 Throughout, Bavinck emphasises the theological character of soteric realities, arguing that even inquiries as subjectively focused as psychology and experience must be understood in terms of God and the active realisation of his will: ‘For all the steps in the way of salvation are God's work, the effect and fulfillment of his will; but because they take place in man and are realized in his consciousness and will, they may all be considered and described also from an anthropological point of view.’Footnote 50 This is not a concession to secular human science but an affirmation of the authority and scientific scope of revelation and of the christological structure of Christian self-understanding. Christ is the content of Christian revelation, and thus also the structure of revelation, and then, too, the ‘incarnation’ of Christian theological method. He says in lecture 10 that Christ ‘is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfilment, and consummation’.Footnote 51
‘There is only one religion’, Bavinck says, ‘which in principle condemns and prohibits all this superstition and magic, and that is Christianity’.Footnote 52 ‘Christianity is the absolutely spiritual religion … the idea of religion is completely fulfilled in it’, and all of which religion must consist ‘comes to true and total fulfillment in Christianity’.Footnote 53 That distinction between true and false religion does in fact stand or fall with method. When her defenders ‘have abandoned the self-sufficiency of the Christian religion, they cannot hold to a theology with a method of its own’.Footnote 54 If ‘theology acknowledges no other method than that which is usually taken in the sciences of nature and history, the religious man is not only totally dependent on the clericalism of science but religion itself is robbed of its independence and freedom’.Footnote 55 Turning to the Christian theologian, Bavinck says: ‘we have on the one side to maintain the dependence of religious experience on historical Christianity, and on the other side equally to recognize its independence and liberty’.Footnote 56 Here both the apologetic and the in-house polemical avenues coalesce, and Bavinck's dogmatic position is clear: in distinction from all religions and all competing accounts of religious experience, Christianity holds the true confession of the dwelling of God with man, presently, actually and eschatologically.
Summary and evaluation
The classical understanding of the Creator/creature relation, attributable to Thomas Aquinas, puts the asymmetry of the Creator/creature relation in terms of real and rational relations. God's relation to creation is rational, not real; it is not real for God because it does not perfect or augment or change in any way the divine being. The creature's relation to God is real (for the creature) because it signifies real change in the creature. The substance of this claim, ontological asymmetry and essential attributes, Bavinck never questions; he surely affirms it. What we have observed from the Stone Lectures, however, indicates that the revelational and hermeneutic implications of the classical account of the Creator/creature relation clash with Bavinck's understanding of revelation. And if differences are identifiable regarding revelation, then differences are likely to be found with regard to Creator/creature relation.
Take for example Richard Muller's defence of classical theism.Footnote 57 Muller believes that a decisive issue between classical theists and revisionists in the end comes down not to metaphysics but to interpretation of scripture:
The issue concerns the logical and theological priority of one set of statements over another. Do we read statements concerning divine repentance as dependent for their meaning upon logically prior statements concerning the absence of change in God, or ought we to read statements concerning the divine constancy as meaningful only when qualified by a doctrine of actual divine repentance?Footnote 58
Muller here notes tension in the biblical text between two sets or kinds of theological predicates, exemplified for example by Genesis 6:6 and Malachi 3:6, and so he raises a question of hermeneutical or theological logic: which sort of statements should receive interpretive priority, those affirming changelessness or those indicating change?
Muller's hermeneutical dilemma assumes that there are such sets of theological predicates in scripture, one comprised of statements affirming self-existence and classical theism and another of statements arising relationally; that the sets are self-evident; that each suggests a distinguishable metaphysic; and that they are metaphysically incompatible and therefore hermeneutically unequal. By contrast, Bavinck's Stone Lectures are an extended defence of the uniqueness of Christianity in specific terms, and thus a rejection of this dilemma. Bavinck is no Hegelian,Footnote 59 but he appears willing to release God and the text of scripture from the modal strictures of essentialist logic at a precise and specific point, that of relational reality. Bavinck reminds us that a metaphysical hermeneutic which could not acknowledge the hypostatic union is a methodology strange to the data, structure and context of Christian revelation. In the person of Christ, Muller's polarised predicates are united, unmixed, in a single divine person, and the incarnation is for Bavinck the revelation of the substance of revealed truth because deity self-given is the primary truth of created existence: ‘Creation’, he says, ‘was the first revelation, the principle and foundation of all revelation’.Footnote 60 ‘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.’Footnote 61
Defenders of a high view of scripture, in wrestling with the epistemological fallout of revelation of an infinite God to a finite creature, as a general rule hold that tension in the text is only apparent. If scripture is the Word of God, then objectively there are discrepancies only from the finite creature's point of view, according to our necessarily limited and fallible capacities and suppressive self-interest. Similarly, Muller's construal of the relational/hermeneutical problem demonstrates tension not within the text, as he suggests, but rather with the text, between scripture and the finite reader armed with a classical theological hermeneutic.
Malachi 3:6, for example, since it also is an example of non-necessary, redemptive revelation of God, applies considerable pressure to the terms of Muller's hermeneutic. Although Malachi 3:6 affirms changelessness, it does so within the context of historical religious relation. In fact, the changelessness affirmed there is given as the rationale for the restraint of divine judgement against the unfaithfulness of Israel. Notice that the contrast is between ample occasion for divine judgement of transgression (implicitly coupled with expectation of judgement as inferred from the moral perfection of God), on the one hand, and merciful self-restraint on the other. Although in Genesis 6 and the account of the flood the balance is tipped somewhat in the other direction, that narrative is comprised of negotiation between precisely the same terms. It would appear, then, that conceptual strain is to be found not between self-evidently distinct sets of biblical predicates but within the metaphysics of the covenant relation itself. The text in that sense resists Muller's dichotomy and thus exposes something of the disjoint between his theology of relation and the reality of divine revelation as such.
In Bavinck's view, the uniqueness of the Christian doctrine of God is the juxtaposition of absoluteness and personality which is displayed in the reality of revealed religion. The relational self-giving of absolute personality is, in other words, the ontological background of divine revelation as such. Bavinck therefore argues that a transcendent/immanent dialectic such as Muller's is symptomatic of Christ-less metaphysics, one that by obscuring the relation which sustains the intelligibility and trustworthiness – the realism, in effect – of divine revelation, indicates methodological renunciation of the God-man.
Bavinck's view of revelation, special revelation in particular, as a singular, organic testimony to redemption in the Son, produces a different result. ‘I and the Father are one’ and ‘Jesus wept’ are both true of the person of the Son of God, the former according to the divine nature and the latter according to the human nature. Both statements are accorded equal hermeneutical value because they are ontologically unequal, the one upholding the other. Bavinck writes in his Reformed Dogmatics that ‘the whole revelation of God is concentrated in the Logos, who became “flesh” and is, as it were, one single act of self-humanization, the incarnation of God’.Footnote 62 The hypostatic union, two natures unmixed and unconfused united in one divine person, serves as the logic of biblical interpretation and by extension of theological predication. In this sense, as Bavinck insists, revelation sets its own terms and provides its own internal logic. Bavinck's Christo-organic view of revelation implies, upstream, a Christo-organic revelatory will of God, a relational initiative of the triune God terminating in the Son, and downstream a Christo-organic hermeneutic capable of preserving such tensions in the biblical text, whether the reference be to the Son, the Father or the Spirit, or to the Godhead non-specifically. As revelation is incorporated into the organism of history and redemption, the triune work of redemption terminating in the Son sets the basic logic for biblical interpretation and the classical relational hermeneutical dilemma disappears.
This seems to me consistent overall with Bavinck's understanding of revelation as he delivered it at Princeton in 1908, and as it is found in the first two volumes of his Reformed Dogmatics. Bavinck says there that all revelation is mediated and that creation is not only the first but the prototypical self-revelation of God.Footnote 63 In that sense, he says, all of revelation, including scripture, is anthropomorphic, a ‘humanization’ of God.Footnote 64 The anthropomorphism of scripture as such, as a subset of anthropomorphic revelation, is indicated by the anthropomorphic linguistics of inscripturation. Bavinck surveys the anthropomorphic language of scripture demonstrating the facts that ‘all that pertains to human and even to creatures in general is … attributed to God’, that ‘the entire creation, all of nature … but especially the human world, is mined in Scripture’, that in the end ‘almost no limit is set to the use of anthropomorphic language’. Without the use of anthropomorphism, ‘dogmatics, specifically the doctrine of God, shrinks by the day’, and ‘theology is no longer able to speak of God because it no longer speaks from him and through him’.Footnote 65 In that sense, while the anthropomorphic language of scripture indicates the ontology of divine self-giving, it is that self-expression of God which vindicates the language utilised. A voluntary theological reality precedes the language of scripture.
Bavinck affirms, accordingly, what his view of revelation suggests, that a real created relation vindicates anthropomorphic revelation and subsequent creaturely naming of God. ‘In his names’, God ‘descends to the level of the finite and becomes like his creatures’.Footnote 66 ‘Here lies the reason why we can and may speak of God in creaturely language. We have the right to use anthropomorphic language because God himself came down to the level of his creatures and revealed his name in and through his creatures.’Footnote 67
