God and Knowledge

Herman Bavinck's Theological Epistemology

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567698988
• eBook ISBN: 9780567692306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto offers a fresh reading of Herman Bavinck's theological epistemology, and argues that his Trinitarian and organic worldview utilizes an extensive range of sources. Sutanto unfolds Bavinck's understanding of what he considered to be the two most important aspects of epistemology: the character of the sciences and the correspondence between subjects and objects. Writing at the heels of the European debates in the 19th and 20th century concerning theology's place in the academy, and rooted in historic Christian teachings, Sutanto demonstrates how Bavinck's argument remains fresh and provocative. This volume explores archival material and peripheral works translated for the first time in English. The author re-reads several key concepts, ranging from Organicism to the Absolute, and relates Bavinck's work to Thomas Aquinas, Eduard von Hartmann, and other thinkers. Sutanto applies this reading to current debates on the relationship between theology and philosophy, nature and grace, and the nature of knowing; and in doing so provides students and scholars with fresh methods of considering Orthodox and modern forms of thought, and their connection with each other.

1

Re-reading Bavinck’s theological epistemology

Christianity, Christian-theism has first laid the foundation and paved the way for this organic unity of science.¹

If [a unified worldview] is possible, it can be explained only on the basis of the claim that the world is an organism and thus has first been thought of as such. Only then do philosophy and worldview have a right and ground of existence, as it is also on this high point of knowledge that subject and object harmonize.²

On 1 May 1903, Friesche Kerkbode, a Christian newspaper based in Friesland, printed a summary of a lecture that Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) delivered at a theological conference there on Thursday, 30 April of the same year. This lecture took place a year before the publication of Bavinck’s Christelijke wetenschap and was on the same subject. Bavinck’s theses in the lecture discussed the difference between positivistic (modern) and Christian views of science and how Christianity can help the academic disciplines flourish.³ After remarking that Bavinck’s lecture exposed the false assumptions underlying the opposition against Christian scholarship, the journalist wrote that Bavinck called for the indispensability of Christianity for scientific practice. The article ended with an encouragement to its readers:

Therefore it is more necessary than ever for science to become practiced and taught in Christ, the spirit, to the support of the church, the blessing of society, the sanctity of the fatherland, the extension of God’s kingdom, [and] the glory of his name. A high, sacred, delightful ideal desires us. May it inspire us all with courage and gird [us] with strength. It is a dedication and effort worth all of our strength.⁴

The lecture prompted an intense enthusiastic response in the audience and the Christian commentator present there. But what, exactly, did Bavinck mean by this? What kind of resources would Christianity provide that might nurture the flourishing of the sciences?

The concern here is broader than the usual connotations that attend the English word ‘science’ – wetenschap refers not merely to matters of the empirical hard sciences but also to all higher learning and fields of knowledge in general. As such, it corresponds closely to the German Wissenschaft.⁵ In this context, Herman Bavinck insisted on the medieval dictum that theology remains the queen of the sciences, though, as this study will show, he did this while considerably redefining the meaning of that queenship. In what sense, then, can he reassert theology’s priority in the academy in this modern context? Is its material content to be siphoned off into its own sphere in distinction from the other sciences, or does it govern in such a way that it plays an influential role, reshaping how the other sciences are viewed? Bavinck’s context amplifies the significance of his answers to these questions. Following the heels of the German debates concerning theology’s place in the academy, and after the 1876 Higher Education Act in the Netherlands that significantly altered the character of theological and religious studies in an attempt to accommodate both modernist and traditionalist conceptions of the role of theology in higher education, Bavinck wrestled with these issues with acute urgency.⁶

The subject matter of this study consists in examining the meaning of his response to this situation – his characterization of science and knowledge as a ‘single organism’ and the concomitant claim that the placement of theology into a purely ecclesial sphere is to compromise the ‘organism of science’ (organisme der wetenschap).

This is amplified clearly in his parliament speech that addressed the 1876 Higher Education Act, which connected the act to the views of Utrecht University professor Cornelis Opzoomer (1821–92). Bavinck argued that a few decades earlier, Opzoomer had posited an entailment relationship between ‘the principle of the separation between Church and State’ and the consequence that the ‘theological faculty must be removed from the organism of science’ that existed in the universities.⁷ Opzoomer’s argument to locate theology within the church rather than the academy was, to Bavinck, a splitting of a singular organism – it fails to do justice to the character of theology and the sciences as a whole.

In his perspective, the 1876 Act is the embodiment of the result of a series of modern movements that questioned the scientific (wetenschappelijke) character of theology and its relation to the other sciences. Propelled by the strict distinction erected by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) between a knowledge that is ‘limited to the circle of experience’ and a faith that rests on ‘personal, practical motives’, dogmatics became gradually understood as the formal articulation of subjective mental states rather than a proper scientific study.⁸ Under the pressures of these intellectual shifts, theologians who followed Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) lead in seeking to justify theology’s place within the academy at times posed an opposition between Wissenschaft and confessionalism, by arguing that the role of the theologian was concerned not with normative truths for all ages but ‘with the interconnection of whatever doctrine has currency in a given social organization called a Christian church at a given time’.⁹ Within this trajectory, too, others sought a mediating theology (Vermittelungstheologie) that attempted to fuse traditional Christian doctrines with the demands of the new Weltanschauung. The result of this was a ‘tendency to replace all transcendent-metaphysical statements about God, his essence and attributes, his words and works, with descriptions of Christian experience and its content’.¹⁰

By 1876 in the Netherlands, the place of dogmatics and theological reflection in the academy was also reshaped. Religious studies, as the science of religion, would be included in the universities as an objective study that examines the phenomenon of religions, whereas the ‘dogmatic and practical disciplines’, Bavinck observed, ‘would be taught under the auspices of the church’.¹¹

I Preliminary observations: Orthodox and modern

Herman Bavinck stood on the grounds of Reformed orthodoxy in response to these perceived challenges and devoted much of his career writing on these topics.¹² After writing his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, he committed several works on the scientific character of theology, how human knowing is possible and the relationship between theology and the other sciences. Most of these works have remained untranslated. In 1904, he published two studies that tackled these issues directly: Christelijke wereldbeschouwing (Christian Worldview) and Christelijke wetenschap (Christian Science).¹³ While the former work argues that the Christian faith provides more holistic answers concerning issues of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, the latter work sets out a Christian understanding of scholarship in response to positivistic accounts of science. These two works, together, argue that Christianity offers unique resources to scholarship due to its distinctly organic vision of life. Bavinck’s 1908 Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary, the Philosophy of Revelation, continued this focus by arguing, inductively, that divine revelation rests behind every area of study.¹⁴ Alongside other essays, his inaugural addresses at Kampen in 1883 and the Free University of Amsterdam in 1902 both tackle similar issues of how to relate and offer a Christian account of theology and the other sciences.¹⁵ Relevant to our purposes here, too, is Bavinck’s 1897 work Beginselen der psychologie, in which the inner workings of human cognition and its various faculties are parsed out.¹⁶

Bavinck challenged the charges against the orthodoxy of the post-Reformation period that came from modern theologians, which tended to report that Reformed scholasticism presented an arid form of rationalistic inquiry in their claim that a systematic knowledge of God was attainable.¹⁷ In this sense, Bavinck’s thought could be used to support some current trajectories that argue for the continuity that exists between the post-Reformation scholastics and the Reformers themselves.¹⁸ The distinctive literary styles that often are noted to distinguish Calvin from the divines that came after him do not prove so much a difference of substance but a transition from a time of pioneering to confessionalization according to the needs of Reformation theology in the academies. Bavinck understood that the Reformation was rooted in the medieval theology and that it drew from that heritage in a critical manner. He effectively resisted theologically motivated caricatures that introduce false binaries, for example, between being scholastic and biblical, or between Trinitarianism and federalism, into readings of Reformed scholasticism.

Indeed, his response to the intellectual currents that opposed the scientific character of theology is fundamentally attuned to these classical instincts. In particular, Bavinck insisted on two axiomatic principles: that God’s revelation means that theology remains scientific and that theology can and should be related to other academic disciplines. This involved recovering the classical conviction that dogmatics must attend to the metaphysical implications of Scriptural revelation while obeying the obligation to relate all things back to their creator. ‘A choice has to be made’, he wrote. ‘Either there is room in science for metaphysics and then positivism is in principle false, or positivism is the true view of science and metaphysics must be radically banished from its entire domain.’¹⁹ ‘Theology as a particular science’, after all, ‘assumes that God has unmistakably revealed himself.’²⁰ Insofar as a positivistic and modern definition of science precluded this conviction one must simply make a choice between two antithetical definitions of science.²¹ Echoing a classical and Thomistic axiom, Bavinck affirmed that ‘dogmatics is the knowledge that God has revealed in his Word to the church concerning himself and all creatures as they stand in relation to him.’²²

Likewise, to excise the study of theology from the academy in order to relocate it strictly within the church is not to be considered an honour or service to theology itself. ‘Scripture’ remains ‘a book for the whole of humankind and has meaning for all of human life’,²³ and thus dogmaticians, too, have a responsibility to tease out the riches of divine wisdom in relation to the ‘world of science [erve der wetenschap]’.²⁴ The relocation of dogmatics into a separate sphere would be to the detriment of both science and practice, rather than an improvement.²⁵

Yet it would be a mistake to draw the conclusion from this that Bavinck sought a mere return to the orthodoxy that once was in an act of retreat. John Bolt’s observation that Bavinck’s serious interaction with modern philosophy is a ‘hallmark of his exemplary work’ remains apt.²⁶ Indeed, Bavinck’s desire to set up an orthodox alternative to the intellectual challenges in his da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Re-reading Bavinck’s theological epistemology
• 2 Bavinck’s organicism – God, anthropology and revelation
• 3 Organism and Wetenschap – the structure of Bavinck’s epistemology
• 4 Between Aquinas and Kuyper
• 5 Bavinck, Thomas Reid, the ‘gap’ and the question of subjects and objects
• 6 The Absolute and the organic – Bavinck and Eduard von Hartmann
• 7 Revelation, the unconscious, reason and feeling
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright