Herman Bavinck on Revelation, Worldview, and Culture
In Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck addressed everything from worldviews to ethnic supremacy, antithesis to apologetics—and two of the lectures were originally given in downtown Louisville
In 1908, Dutch Calvinist theologian and church leader Herman Bavinck visited Louisville to deliver two lectures at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The dates of these lectures in Louisville were October 20 and 21, 1908, according to the results of some newspaper sleuthing by my colleague Gregory Wills.
The titles of the lectures were “Christianity and the Religious Experience” and “Christianity and the Future.” These lectures became chapters 8 and 10 in the book Philosophy of Revelation, published in 1909. Six of the chapters began as the Stone Lectures, delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary after Bavinck left Louisville (“From Holland,” The Courier-Journal, October 19, 1908). Other lectures were delivered as part of his tour of the western United States, which brought him to Chicago where he boarded a train to Louisville and arrived on October 13, 1908.
According to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Herman Bavinck’s lectures in the western United States had been met with “one continuous ovation” (“A Distinguished Hollander,” The Courier-Journal, October 13, 1908)—perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but apparently they were very well received, according to a number of other newspaper articles of the time.
The Louisville lectures were delivered in the stunning Victorian Gothic structure that still stands on the northeast corner of Broadway and South First Street. Today, this building is part of the downtown campus of Jefferson Community and Technical College. Then, it was home to the Presbyterian Theological Seminary. During those years, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was housed at Fifth and Broadway—about four blocks west of the Presbyterian seminary—in buildings that no longer exist today.
It seems that A.T. Robertson may have walked down Broadway in 1908 to meet the esteemed Herman Bavinck at the Presbyterian seminary, and either Robertson or Bavinck might well have mentioned the possibility of a Dutch edition of Robertson’s short Greek grammar. In any case, in correspondence penned about a year later, Robertson and Bavinck do seem to have picked up on an earlier conversation about such a translation, which was published in 1912.
In 1909, the lectures that Bavinck delivered in Louisville, Princeton, and elsewhere were published as Philosophy of Revelation, which I recently read. As I often do, I followed my reading by synthesizing my recollections in a summary to incorporate into future course lectures, which I’ve provided below.
The Antithesis You Might Not Expect
Herman Bavinck’s Philosophy of Revelation begins with an antithesis between two worldviews—but it’s probably not the antithesis you would expect, if you’ve read the works of Abraham Kuyper or Cornelius van Til.
This antithesis is one declared by Assyriologist Hugo Winckler about five years before Herman Bavinck visited the United States. According to Winckler, there have been only two worldviews (Weltenschauungen) in the entire history of humanity, the ancient Babylonian worldview and the modern empirico-scientific worldview. All religion, Christianity included, is nothing more than another iteration of the outmoded Babylonian worldview.
In these decades that followed the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, the concept of incommensurable worldviews had already picked up currency among philosophers and theologians. Bavinck was following, in different ways, James Orr and Abraham Kuyper in developing a distinctly Christian worldview, but he was well aware of the broader discussions of the concept as well.
Herman Bavinck rightly rejects Winckler’s syncretism, but he acknowledges “an element of truth” as well, noting that some sort of supernatural worldview had indeed remained prevalent among all peoples throughout human history until relatively recently. Humans have always assumed “a higher and holier order of invisible powers and blessings” behind what we see.
Before the eighteenth century, the existence of a supernatural world—and the necessity, possibility, and reality of a special revelation—had never been seriously called into question. But Deism, springing up in England, emancipated the world from God, reason from revelation, the will from grace…. It subjected the authenticity of revelation, especially of “traditional revelation,” … to the critical test of reason.
Creation now served the purpose not of expressing God’s glorious design but of giving “the world an independent and autonomous existence.” Thus the revolution in France—unlike the American revolution, which preserved the “divine right” of a legitimate magistracy—subverted the previous social order and reduced rule to popular whim and will. Revolution then gave way to evolution, which practiced the same principle of autonomy in scientific rather than political garb.
Attempts at political autonomy did not come to an end with the rise of scientific autonomy, however; they simply took a different form. Charles Darwin located the law of nature in the misery of the natural order, and Karl Marx found the laws that govern human social order in the misery of society. Both, in their own ways, saw their systems as opportunities for humanity to be set free from the supernatural.
The Modern Return of the Mystical and the Metaphysical
Speaking in the opening decade of the twentieth century, Herman Bavinck noted that, after a reign of anti-supernatural intellectualism throughout the nineteenth century, people now seemed to be drifting back toward a yearning for the metaphysical and even the mystical. And yet, this new religious and philosophical turn was no less dangerous than the anti-supernaturalism of the nineteenth century. The new turn redefined the divine and downgraded the essence of deity to an inward reality in the cosmos. Divine revelation and human discovery were thus reduced to nothing more than two manifestations of the same reality.
While holding firmly to an orthodox and historically-informed view of revelation, Bavinck also recognized that the changes brought about by the rise of scientific investigation have compelled Christians to make some modifications in how they conceive of revelation. According to Bavinck, although modern science should never cause Christians to doubt the truthfulness of revelation, “the great enrichment our worldview has received from science … must give rise to a somewhat modified conception of revelation.” The psychologically-mediated and historically-situated aspects of revelation must be taken more clearly into account.
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. Not only is special revelation founded on general revelation, but it has taken over numerous elements from it. The Old and New Testaments are no longer kept isolated from their milieu.
Nevertheless, just as science does not precede life but flows from it, knowledge of God flows from the reality of revelation. Precisely because Christianity rests on revelation, its content—although never contradicting reason—transcends reason.
Only Three Possible Worldviews
Modern movements toward metaphysics and mysticism have been characterized by autonomy and autosoterity—that is to say, an anarchism of self-rule and a volitional delusion that human beings can attain their own salvation. And yet, none of these modern trends is utterly or completely new. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch, “the number of those who have had something really new to tell the world has always been remarkably small, and it is astonishing to observe on how few ideas humanity has actually subsisted.”
According to Bavinck, there have been only three possible worldviews throughout history:
theistic,
naturalistic (whether pantheistic or atheistic), and
humanistic.
Although Bavinck never explicitly relates this triad to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, he seems to be correcting Dilthey’s well-known claim that there are only three metaphysical worldviews, grounded in humanity’s perceived relation to nature. These three worldviews are, according to Dilthey,
naturalism,
objective idealism, and
subjective idealism.
For Bavinck, naturalism and objective idealism seem simply to be two different expressions of a naturalistic worldview, while Bavinck’s humanism includes the idealism of freedom that characterized Dilthey’s subjective idealism but without the Christian aspects which Dilthey attempted to conflate with Greek philosophy. Because the worldview taxonomy that Dilthey formulated is based on a twofold relation of humanity to nature instead of Bavinck’s threefold relation of God, world, and humanity, Dilthey’s formulation is defective and includes no clear place for orthodox theism.
According to Bavinck, differing worldviews have not succeeded one another in history, as August Comte seemed to think. Instead, they have recurred in successive waves throughout history. This triadic worldview structure frames Herman Bavinck’s critiques of monism and pragmatism. Monism opts for the One and has no place for the Many while pragmatism chooses diversity and loses unity.
Self-Consciousness as Starting-Point of a New Metaphysics
For Immanuel Kant and the German idealists, “the human knowing faculty is confined to the world of phenomena and does not know anything of what lies behind it.” Against Kant, Bavinck argued that, “in self-consciousness,” humanity is dealing not with a “mere phenomenon” but with an actual “noumenon,” antecedent to all reasoning and inference.
“In self-consciousness our own being is revealed to us directly, immediately, before all thinking, and independent of all willing.” Augustine of Hippo was, according to Bavinck, “the first who so understood self-consciousness.”
Augustine went back behind thought to the essence of the soul, and found in it not a simple unity but a marvelously rich totality; he found there the ideas, the norms, the laws of the true and the good, the solution of the problem of the certainty of knowledge, of the cause of all things, of the supreme good; he found there the seeds and germs of all knowledge and science and art; he found there even, in the triad of memorial, intellectus, and voluntas, a reflection of the triune being of God. Augustine was the philosopher of self-examination, and in self-consciousness he discovered the starting point of a new metaphysics.
At the core of our self-consciousness—Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher had rightly recognized—was a deep awareness of our utter dependence. This sense of dependence is not, however, an abstract category for Bavinck. It is a fact which is no less a fact than the best-established facts of natural science. It is genuinely empirical, universally human, and immediate.
Through self-consciousness, “God makes known to us man, the world, and himself.” The image of God and this accompanying self-consciousness were not, for Bavinck, supernatural additions to human nature but an integral part of what it means to be human. Where Schleiermacher and his heirs erred was by attempting to separate the subjective experience of religion from knowledge and assent.
How the Object of Study Determines the Form
Simply because revelation is not accessible to natural science doesn’t make it any less true. Natural science, after all, requires all sorts of metaphysical concepts which, according to Bavinck, “are not derived from experience but are present from the very start, ideas like ‘thing’ and ‘property,’ ‘matter’ and ‘force,’ ‘aether’ and ‘movement,’ ‘space’ and ‘time,’ ‘cause’ and ‘design.’”
Every field of study “must borrow its form from the object which it investigates, for method is determined by the object.” Thus theology—as the study of a being who is beyond us and can only be know through revelation—must rely for its data on revelation and particularly historical revelation. Special revelation represents the fulfillment of what humanity already knows through self-consciousness and general revelation.
Special revelation … takes up, confirms, and completes all that had been from the beginning put into human nature by revelation and had been preserved and increased subsequently in the human race. The earlier view, which exclusively emphasized the antithesis, … suffers from one-sidedness.
Whoever seeks fellowship with God, excluding all history and revelation in nature and history—that is to say, without Christ—… comes to a religious feeling which misses the objective reality, which feeds only on itself, and therefore also digests itself; he who frees himself from all fellowship with what is before and around him ruins himself by his autonomy.… Jesus was not the first Christian; he was and is the Christ. He is not the subject but the object of religion…. Christianity, according to its own confession, does not exist through the strength and fidelity of its confessors, but through the life and will of its Mediator.
How Can We Know Whether or Not It’s True?
But how can Christian revelation be known to be true? How is its truth proclaimed to the unbeliever? And how is it confirmed in the believer?
According to Bavinck, the revelation of God in Christ must be true because only the revelation of God in Christ—distinguishable from yet inseparably connected to the written revelation of Scripture—offers an answer to the pangs of the human conscience that arise from a universal sense of lostness and need. It would seem, then, that proclamation to the unbeliever would begin at his or her point of lostness, complaint, and despair.
When proclaiming the gospel, the Christian religion
joins to itself … the witness of all conscience.…
From the whole history of humanity resounds a heartbreaking complaint over the disruption of life; it finds its finest expression in the songs of the poets, but each person knows it by experience; all religion is animated by it, every effort toward reform proceeds from it, all ethics assume the imperative tone after the descriptive one, and every philosophy strives to set the heart at ease as well as satisfy the understanding.
Christianity and Christianity alone provides a real answer to humanity’s “heartbreaking complaint over the disruption of life.” Only through Christianity faith can humanity’s highest longings be brought to their point of perfection.
When responding to this good and glorious gospel, some may respond more emotionally while others embrace the gospel more intellectually, but neither response is to be condemned. “All do not have the same experience of guilt and grace; the deeper knowledge of sin, and the richer comfort of forgiveness, are not the root but the fruit of Christian faith.”
The fault of parachurch movements—such as the Methodists in Bavinck’s own day—was not in their attempts to awaken conscious action; it was in their attempts to elevate one “definite form of conversion” as normative while insufficiently recognizing the centrality of “the organic existence of the church.” The richness of the gospel allows for a range of different responses.
The gospel is so rich, and the salvation purchased by Christ contains so many and diverse benefits, that the most varied needs of humanity are satisfied by it, and the richest powers of human nature are brought to development….
The cross of Golgotha is the divine settlement with the divine condemnation of sin. There it is revealed that sin exists; it is no fiction which can be conquered by thought, no external defect which can be obliterated by culture; but it is an awful reality and has a world-historical significance. But although it exists, it has no right of existence; it should not exist, and therefore it shall not exist.
Christ himself is the center of Christianity, and it is only in his death and resurrection that the cries of anyone’s conscience can be wholly comforted and satisfied. “Christ is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian…. He is Christianity itself.”
For the Christian, total certainty about the truth of the faith does not ultimately come through rational reflection but through the inward presence of Christ through conversion. “The one equally sovereign and almighty, holy, and gracious will of God, which meets us and speaks to our conscience in the person and work of Christ, is the firm basis of our certainty.”
Conversion is “the source” of our “certainty as to the truth,” which God reiterates through the Spirit, the written Word, and the witness of fellow Christians throughout all time.
In and by our own testimony, we hear the testimony of the Holy Spirit, which in its turn is added to the witness of Holy Scripture and of the church of all centuries. In this witness, the souls of all God’s children are secure; through the swell of doubt, it leads them into the harbor of God’s love….
The truth of this testimony lies … in the system of the whole world, in the existence of the Christian church, and in the need of the human heart.
Only God’s revelation in nature and in Scripture form a “harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the human heart.” Divine revelation is satisfying because it reveals the world as it truly is. “The world appears as Scripture shows it to us, … exactly as it is shown to our unbiased view”
Christianity and Modern Culture
Because Christianity is both the corrective to and the fulfillment of humanity’s attempts to relieve the pangs of conscience, we must neither look “so kindly upon culture” that we abandon our confession nor turn our “backs on the entire culture” in an attempt to maintain the purity of our faith. Instead, we must live as a community that is both the fulfillment and a divine rebuke of the culture. We are “the new humanity, in which Jew and Greek found their unity and destination.”
Bavinck recognizes the difficulty of defining “culture” and briefly describes two “great circles” of culture.
The first has to do with the production and distribution of material goods.
The second refers to “ideals of the true, the good, and the beautiful, by means of literature and science, justice and statecraft, works of beauty and art.”
When it comes to the second sense of “culture,” Bavinck recognizes that “modern culture, in some respects, and according to some estimates, forms an antithesis to that of former centuries. But this antithesis is not absolute” (emphasis added).
All our modern civilization, art, science, literature, ethics, jurisprudence, society, state, and politics are leavened by religious, Christian, supranaturalistic elements, and still rest on the foundation of the old worldviews…. Much … will have to be done before the modern, pantheistic or materialistic, worldview shall have conquered the old theistic one. Indeed, in view of the past history of humankind, it may be safely added that this will never happen….
We are all, whether we will or not, standing on the shoulders of former generations. All our society, family, labor, vocation, state craft, legislation, morals, habits, arts, sciences are permeated still with the Christian spirit. The opponents of Christianity know this very well, and their antagonism against Christianity is so strong just because the Christian spirit shows itself all along the line, leavens everything, and exerts its influence even upon them notwithstanding themselves.
Since modern culture is “not a finished thing,” it will not do for Christians simply to declare that modern culture is in conflict with Christianity. Culture is always in progress and vestiges of Christianity will—and indeed must!—remain embedded even in modern culture. Otherwise, civilization itself will cease to function. “A ‘fund of moral laws’ is always and everywhere found. Every man acknowledges that in morality a law is laid upon him which obliges him to obedience in his conscience.”
Culture is not to be evaluated on the basis of personal preferences or any ethnic or national loyalties. In fact, Herman Bavinck condemns every hint of national and ethno-racial supremacy:
Race glorification acquires such a serious character and so far exceeds all bounds, that the virtues of the race are identified with the highest ideal. Germanness, for example, is placed on a level with Christendom, and Jesus is naturalized into an Aryan in race….
In the New Testament, … worship of the one only true God is emancipated from all national limits and is thus raised to its true condition as a worship in spirit and in truth.
Culture and intellectual progress are never to be seen as absolute goods, for Bavinck. Both are as apt, in a fallen world, to be used for evil as for good.
Culture brings with it its blessings but also its dark shadows and serious dangers; it develops attributes and powers in men which are highly valuable, but it does this almost always at the cost of other virtues which are not of less value…. Intellectual development … may also become a dangerous instrument in the hands of hate.
Cultured people are no less prone to fornication, debauchery, self-indulgence, excess, and so on than less cultured people (de volken van lage cultuur), and many of the highest expressions of culture are “handmaids to all these sins.” To put it another way, sin is no respecter of rank, and a cultured imagination is no antidote to sin.
Culture is always and only to be evaluated on the basis of its congruity with the gospel, for “if the gospel is true, then it carries within it its own standard for the valuation of culture.” The gospel is not “at enmity with culture” in every instance; to the contrary, “the resurrection is the fundamental restoration of culture.”
Despite the manifold blessedness of culture in the second sense, culture alone can never “content the heart and does not meet all the needs of the soul.” At the same time, culture does point to the message that not only fulfills humanity’s deepest needs but also corrects and completes human culture. To put it another way, the Christian message does not reject but perfects all that is true, beautiful, and good in every culture.
The true and the good and the beautiful, which ethical culture means and seeks, can only come to perfection when the absolute good is at the same time the almighty, divine will.
This will is ultimately expressed through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which stands as both the judgment and the fulfillment of human culture. “The history of mankind after the resurrection of Christ is the execution of the judicial sentence which was passed on the cross.” The gospel of Jesus Christ “is opposed to nothing that is pure and good and lovely,” and it is through the gospel that we are enabled to look most objectively at culture. The gospel “raises us above time and teaches us to view all things from the standpoint of eternity.” Thus “man must first become again a son of God before he can be, in a genuine sense, a cultured being.”
Modernity from the Standpoint of Eternity
So what does modernity look like when considered “from the standpoint of eternity”?
According to Bavinck, in the modern way of thinking, “there is nothing firm, unchangeable, steadfast; there is no status quo but only an eternal movement.” In all things, there is becoming but never being; there is constant progress but no stable absolute. In Bavinck’s thinking,
If there is no being but only becoming, then there is no final state, either on this side of death for humanity or on the other side for the individual man…. There is no final end, no completion of the process of the world, and no rest for the human heart.
This constant drive to make progress produces a form of Pelagianism, and “the more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine and the less with Pelagius. Knowledge of the law awakens the need for grace.”
A constant press for progress is hopeless, but this hopelessness isn’t only because of the unending demand for progress that never finds a place of rest. Hopelessness also infects this press for progress because progress is not good in and of itself. Progress always brings both evil and good. According to Bavinck, “What da Costa said of the invention of printing, that it was a gigantic step to heaven and to hell, may be applied to all scientific and technical elements of culture.”
It is only in God’s revelation that being and becoming are brought together in perfect harmony. “All being and becoming … rests on the foundation of a revelation of God.” Of course, complete fulfillment of this revelation will only be found in the future. Thus, in some sense, “everything we value in this life is connected with the future…. All worldviews … end in an eschatology, and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.”
This does not mean we should passively wait for the future that God has planned without seeking the good of the world here and now. In Scripture,
man is given a vocation with reference to this world. Though good, yet it is not ‘finished'.’ It exists in order to be replenished, subjected, made the object of knowledge, and ruled over by man. To this extend it would be proper to say that it was man’s task to make the world true and good.”
There is a danger, Bavinck admits as he considers the future, that
modern culture, progressing in its anti-supernaturalistic course, will be stirred up to anger against the steadfastness of believers and attempt to accomplish by oppression what it cannot obtain by reasoning and argument.”
Perhaps now, in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, we are approaching what Bavinck described in the opening decade of the twentieth century.
If so, so be it.
The highest ideal for the Christian is not, after all, “to make peace with the world, with science, with culture at any price, but in the world to keep himself from the evil one.” According to Bavinck, it is only through revelation that we are able to recognize what it looks like to live such a life.