Reformed Dogmatics : Volume 3

Sin and Salvation in Christ

Herman Bavinck, John Bolt, John Vriend

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780801026560
• eBook ISBN: 9781441205957
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The classic work of Reformed theology by renowned theologian Herman Bavinck

In partnership with the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, Baker Academic is proud to offer in English for the very first time the third volume of Herman Bavinck's complete Reformed Dogmatics. This masterwork will appeal not only to scholars, students, pastors, and laity interested in Reformed theology but also to research and theological libraries.

"Bavinck was a man of giant mind, vast learning, ageless wisdom, and great expository skill. Solid but lucid, demanding but satisfying, broad and deep and sharp and stabilizing, Bavinck's magisterial Reformed Dogmatics remains after a century the supreme achievement of its kind."--J. I. Packer, Regent College

"This magisterial work exhibits Bavinck's vast knowledge and appreciation of the Christian tradition. Written from a Reformed perspective, it offers a perceptive critique of modern theology. . . . Recommended."--Library Journal

1

THE ORIGIN OF SIN

The fallen world in which we live rests on the foundations of a creation that was good. Yet, it had scarcely been created before sin crept into it. The origin of sin is a mystery; it is not from God, and at the same time it is not excluded from his counsel. God decided to take humanity on the perilous path of covenantal freedom rather than elevating it by a single act of power over the possibility of sin and death.

Genesis 2:9 speaks of two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both are integral to the Genesis narrative, and attempts to discount one or the other destroy narrative meaning. Similarly, efforts to explain the meaning of either of the trees in terms of progress and development (tree of life as awakening of sexuality) ignore the plain reading of prohibition and punishment associated with eating the trees’ fruit. No, the story is a unity, and it is about the fall of humanity and the origin of sin. Genesis 3 is not a step of human progress but a fall.

This fall, however, is not simply human effort to achieve cultural power as a means of becoming independent from God. The Bible does not portray human cultural formation as an evil in itself so that rural simplicity is preferable to a world-dominating culture. The point of the “fall” narrative in Genesis is to point to the human desire for autonomy from God. To “know good and evil” is to become the determiner of good and evil; it is to decide for oneself what is right and wrong and not submit to any external law. In short, to seek the knowledge of good and evil is to desire emancipation from God; it is to want to be “like God.”

The entry into sin comes by way of the serpent’s lie. The serpent’s speaking has often been mistakenly considered an allegory for lust, sexual desire, or errant reason. The various mythical interpretations and even attempts to explain the narrative in terms of animal capacity for speech before the fall all fail to meet the intent of the passage and the teaching of Scripture as a whole. The only appropriate explanation is to recognize, with ancient exegesis, the entrance of a spiritual superterrestrial power. The rest of the Bible, however, is relatively silent about this, though its entire narrative rests on this spiritual conflict between the two kingdoms. Sin did not start on earth but in heaven with a revolt of spiritual beings. In the case of humanity, the temptation by Satan resulted in the fall. Scripture looks for the origin of sin solely in the will of rational creatures.

The Christian church has always insisted on the historical character of the fall. In our day this is challenged by historical criticism as well as evolutionary dogma. Those who would challenge this notion attempt instead to accommodate it by demonstrating the reality of the fall from experience, thus validating Genesis 3 as a description of reality rather than as history. This rests on a misunderstanding; it ignores the fact that we need the testimony of Scripture in order to “read” our experience aright. Neither the Genesis account nor its historical character can be dispensed with. In fact, objections to the reality of the fall are themselves increasingly under review by more recent trends in the biblical and archeological/anthropological sciences. The Genesis account, especially of the unity of the human race, speaks positively to our conscience and our experience.

Though no true parallel to the biblical account has been found, it is clear from the myths of other ancients that underlying the religious and moral convictions of the human race are common beliefs in the divine origin and destiny of humanity, in a golden age and decline, in the conflict of good and evil, and in the wrath and appeasement of the deity. The origin and essence of sin, however, remain unknown to them. The origin of sin is sometimes found in the essence of things, its existence even denied by moralists and rationalists, treated as illusion or desire as in Buddhism, or dualistically traced to an ultimately evil power. Philosophers have treated sin as hubris that can be overcome by human will, as ignorance to be overcome by education in virtue, or even as a fall of preexistent souls. However, outside of special revelation sin is either treated deistically in terms of human will alone or derived pantheistically from the very necessary nature of things.

Both views also found their way into Christianity. The British monk Pelagius rejected all notions of original sin and considered every person as having Adam’s full moral choice of will. The fall did not happen at the beginning but is repeated in every human sin. Though the church rejected Pelagianism in its extreme form, Roman Catholicism maintained the notion of a less than completely fallen will, limiting the fall to the loss of the donum superadditum, which can only be restored by sacramental grace.

When the Reformation rejected Roman Catholic dualism, streams within Protestantism, notable rationalist groups such as the Socinians as well as the Remonstrants robbed Christianity of its absolute character by dispensing with the need for grace in some measure. The image of God is regarded as the fully free will, which, like that of the pre-fall Adam, remains intact. While we are born with an inclination to sin, this inclination is not itself culpable; atonement is needed only for actual sin. Suffering is not necessarily linked to sin; it is simply part of our human condition.

Interesting attempts have been made to reconcile Pelagius with Augustine. Ritschl agrees with Pelagius that the human will and actual sin precede the sinful state or condition. But he also then insists that these singular sinful acts mutually reinforce each other and create a collective realm of sin that exerts influence on us, a reinforcing reciprocity that enslaves all people. Others combine Ritschl’s approach with evolutionary theory. When this is envisioned in strictly materialistic and mechanistic terms, all notions of good and evil, the possibility of a moral life, vanish behind physical and chemical processes. A more acceptable route is to see the evolution of moral life as one in which human beings rise above their primitive animal nature as they become more humanized, more civilized. From this evolutionary viewpoint, sin is the survival of or misuse of habits and tendencies left over from our animal ancestry, from earlier stages of development, and their sinfulness lies in their anachronism. The remaining animal nature is shared by all people; sin is universal, but so is moral responsibility and guilt.

This attempt to reconcile Augustine and Pelagius fails at several levels. Apart from the lack of proof for materialistic evolution, the major obstacle is explaining the origin of a free human will in the evolutionary process. To think of the will as somehow outside of human nature and unrelated to it is psychologically inconceivable. In fact, moral freedom not only becomes precarious, moral improvement becomes virtually impossible. Sin’s power increases, and explanations for its origin flounder. Thinkers move from attributing it to human nature to cosmic explanations—all matter is evil. From there it was an easy step to locate evil in a tension of potencies within God himself as in the theosophical tradition of Böhme and Schelling. Hegel even considered the fall as the Ur-fact of history when the Absolute realized itself in the world as its own alternative existence. From here it is a small step to Buddhism, which considers existence itself as the greatest sin.

The question of sin’s origin, like the question of existence itself, is an enigma. The philosophical tradition provides evidence for the scriptural teaching that this world is inexplicable without a fall but provides no satisfactory explanation. Sin cannot be inferred from the sensual nature of humanity since the “spiritual” sins of those who are older are often more appalling than the “fleshly” sins of youth. Asceticism does not solve the problem of sin; monks take sin with them into the cloister in their hearts. Appealing to the Pauline understanding of “flesh” to defend this view fails. “Flesh” is a sinful direction of the heart in opposition to the Holy Spirit and is not a contrast between material and immaterial or spiritual. From attributing sin to human nature it is a natural move to attribute it to the Creator. Consistent with our experience of life’s contradictions, sin is the necessary obstacle to our moral development and perfection. Sin is God’s own will; it is his design for creation. While there is a semblance of truth here, sin is made eternal, inferred from physical matter, necessary not accidental, seen not as the antithesis of good but as a lower grade of the good; this view makes God the author of sin. Scripture and human moral consciousness rebel against these conclusions. Pessimism and libertinism are the natural consequence of this view.

The question of God’s will in relation to sin is vexing. Those who speak of God’s permission with respect to sin rightly seek to avoid making him the author of sin. However, because this formulation risks denying God’s full sovereignty, Reformed theology, following Augustine, was never satisfied with the idea of permission. At the risk of using “hard sayings,” Reformed theologians insist that while God does not sin or cause sin, sin is yet not outside his will. In addition, God created human beings holy and without sin; sin’s origin is in the will of the rational creature. God most certainly created human beings to be capable of sin; he willed the possibility of sin. How that possibility became reality is, however, a mystery. Sin defies explanation; it is a folly that does not have an origin in the true sense of the word, only a beginning. Attempting to locate the time of the fall, too, is impossible. Attempts to identify that time in the preformed chaos of Genesis 1:1 or in notions of preexistent souls are theologically and philosophically, as well as scripturally, without ground. We must be satisfied with the straightforward account of Scripture: humanity was created good and by its own volition, at a given time in the beginning, fell from that state and plunged into sinful alienation from God, who incorporates sin into his purposes, even as something that had to be there though it ought not to be there.

[307] When God had completed the work of creation, he looked down with delight on the work of his hands, for it was all very good (Gen. 1:31). Granted, at that moment the world was only at the beginning of its development and hence enjoyed a perfection, not in degree but in kind. Inasmuch as it was something that was positively good, it could become something and develop in accordance with the laws God had set for it. When Scripture has a positively good world precede this fallen world, it presents to human thought a basis of support that philosophy simply cannot provide. For when philosophy conceives original being as insubstantial potency, which is nothing, but can become anything, it reasons apart from reality and attempts to satisfy us with an abstraction. From nothing, nothing can become; apart from any antecedent being, there can be no becoming, and evil only becomes possible if the good has priority, not only in an ideal sense but in reality. The fallen world in which we live rests on the foundations of a creation that was very good inasmuch as it came forth from the hands of God. But that world did not long continue to exist in its original goodness. It had scarcely been created before sin crept into it. The mystery of existence is made even more incomprehensible by the mystery of evil. Almost at the same moment creatures came, pure and splendid, from the hand of their Maker, they were deprived of all their luster, and stood, corrupted and impure, before his holy face. Sin ruined the entire creation, converting its righteousness into guilt, its holiness into impurity, its glory into shame, its blessedness into misery, its harmony into disorder, and its light into darkness. But where does that evil come from? What is the origin of sin? Scripture vindicates God and presents a continuous theodicy when it proclaims and maintains that God is in no way the cause of sin. He, Scripture says, is righteous, holy, far from wickedness (Deut. 32:4; Job 34:10; Ps. 92:15; Isa. 6:3; Hab. 1:13), a light in whom there is no darkness (1 John 1:5); he tempts no one (James 1:13), is an overflowing fountain of all that is good, immaculate, and pure (Ps. 36:9; James 1:17). He prohibits sin in his law (Exod. 20) and in the conscience of every human (Rom. 2:14–15), does not delight in wickedness (Ps. 5:4), but hates it and demonstrates his wrath against it (Ps. 45:7; Rom. 1:18). He judges it and atones for it in Christ (Rom. 3:24–26), cleanses his people from it by forgiveness and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30) and, in the event of continued disobedience, wills to punish it with both temporal and eternal penalties (Rom. 1:18; 2:8).

THE GENESIS STORY OF THE FALL

When it comes to the origin of sin, Scripture always points us in the direction of the creature. For that reason, however, it is never isolated from God’s government nor excluded from his counsel. On the contrary: it is God himself who, according to his special revelation, created the possibility of sin. Not only did he make humanity in such a way that it could fall, but he also planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden, confronted Adam with a moral option by means of the probationary command, whose decision had the greatest significance for himself and all his posterity, and, finally, even permitted the temptation of the woman by the serpent. It was God’s decision to take humanity on the perilous path of freedom rather than elevating it by a single act of power above the possibility of sin and death.

According to Genesis 2:9, there were two trees in the garden for which God had a special purpose: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Since the tree of life does not surface again in the story, except in Genesis 3:22, 24, some scholars believed that it did not belong in the original report and was only inserted later. An argument against this, however, is that it is most natural for the tree of life not to be mentioned again between 2:9 and 3:22, because the entire narrative revolves around the other tree, the tree of knowledge. Furthermore, the tree of life occurs not only in 2:9 and 3:22, 24 but also in Proverbs 3:18; 13:12; Revelation 2:7 and 22:2, and in the sagas of many peoples.[1] Others, accordingly, have voiced the suspicion that the tree of life is original in the Genesis story but that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was inserted later.[2] And it is in fact true that up until now no parallel has been found elsewhere; but this circumstance does not change anything by having it arise later and having it inserted in the paradisal story. The questions still remain and become much harder to solve: Where does the tree of the knowledge of good and evil come from, and why was it included in Genesis 2 and 3? More important is the fact that this tree cannot be taken out of this narrative without completely changing its character and even robbing it of its real content. The probationary command, the temptation, and the punishment all concern the eating of the fruit of that tree. If the original story had only mentioned the tree of life, the reason why eating from that tree was prohibited and threatened with such a heavy penalty makes no sense. Some argue that the intent of Genesis 3 is simply to relate how humans, by eating from the tree of life, became conscious of their vitality, awakened to their sex drive, and passed from a state of childlikeness to that of maturity.

But if that is the heart of the story, why were humans prohibited from eating the fruit of that tree, fruit that would give them this vitality and life? Were they not permitted to outgrow their childlikeness and to become conscious of their sex life? But they had already been given the mandate to multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it (1:28); Adam had already been given a wife with whom he was to become one flesh (2:24); and what evidence is there in the narrative or in its entire context that the life of sex and being sexually awakened was something sinful in itself? Resounding from the entire Old Testament, rather, is that fertility is a great blessing from God. If Genesis 3 were designed to tell us about the awakening of the sex drive, the punishment threatened and applied to the violation of the command would be totally incomprehensible. Why did the punishment consist in death? Why did it strike the woman especially in her becoming a mother? Why, despite all this, is she nevertheless called “the mother of all living”? And, finally, why were both the man and his wife denied the chance to eat from the tree of life and to stay in the garden? Reading the narrative without bias, one gets an impression of profound unity[3] and of its obvious aim to tell us not about the progress and development but about the fall of humankind. The entire context in which the story occurs shows that it seeks to tell us about the origin of sin. Preceding it is the creation of humans by the hand of God and in his image, and following it, in brief outline, comes the story of increasing wickedness in the human race up until the flood.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is undoubtedly so named because humans, by eating of it, would acquire a knowledge of good and evil such as they had not had until then, one that was forbidden to them and denied to them. The question, however, is what that knowledge of good and evil amounts to. The usual explanation is that, by eating of the tree, humans would gain empirical knowledge of good and evil. But this has rightly prompted the objection that this knowledge of good and evil would make humans like God—as not just the snake (in Gen. 3:5) but also God himself (in 3:22) says—and God certainly has no empirical knowledge of evil, nor can he have it. In addition, by eating of the tree, humans especially lost the empirical knowledge of the good. Finally, [in this view] Genesis 3:22a must then be interpreted as irony, which by itself is already implausible but specifically in conflict with verse 22 as a whole. Others therefore came up with the idea that Genesis 3 relates the development of the human race from an animal state to self-consciousness and reason, and they therefore viewed the fall as the first hazardous undertaking of reason, the genesis of moral life, the origin of culture, the happiest event in the history of humanity. This, in earlier times, was the idea of the Ophites, who held the snake to be an incarnation of the Logos,[4] and later of Kant, Schiller, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dutch Reformed Translation Society
• Preface
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part I: The Fallen World
• Part II: Christ the Redeemer
• Part III: The Work of Christ
• Part IV: Salvation in Christ
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Select Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover