Reformed Dogmatics : Volume 2

God and Creation

Bavinck, Herman, Bolt, John, Vriend, John

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781441206138
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In partnership with the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, Baker Academic is proud to offer the second volume of Herman Bavinck's complete Reformed Dogmatics in English for the very first time. This masterwork will appeal to scholars, students, pastors, and laity interested in Reformed theology and 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

1

THE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY OF GOD

The knowledge of God is the central, core dogma, the exclusive content of theology. From the start of its labors dogmatic theology is shrouded in mystery; it stands before God the incomprehensible One. This knowledge leads to adoration and worship; to know God is to live. Knowing God is possible for us because God is personal, exalted above the earth and yet in fellowship with human beings on earth.

God’s special relationship with his people Israel, with Zion as his dwelling place, suggests not confinement or limitation but election. Israel’s religion did not evolve from henotheism to ethical monotheism but is rooted in the divine call of Abraham/Israel and God’s initiative in establishing a covenant with Israel. Though the Old Testament refers to “other gods,” it never takes their reality seriously. Israel’s God is God alone, the Lord of heaven and earth. He is the Creator of heaven and earth, who manifests himself in various ways to specific people at particular times. This revelation is never exhaustive of God’s being but partial and preparatory to the supreme and permanent revelation in Jesus Christ. This personal God is the high and lofty One, who inhabits eternity and also is with those who are of a contrite and humble spirit. His fullness dwells bodily in Christ, who emptied himself and took on the form of a servant. He also resides in the church as his temple. God is both personal and absolute.

Unity of God’s personality and absoluteness is not maintained outside the revelation given in Scripture. Philosophers, notably in the Platonist tradition, see God (the Good) as the distant One, the unknowable One, transcending even Being itself. In Plotinus only negative theology remains; we can only say what God is not. Gnosticism went even further, considering God as absolutely unknowable and ineffable, the eternal silent abyss.

Christian theology agrees that human knowledge of God is not exhaustive: we cannot know God in his essence. Since no description or naming of God can be adequate, human language struggles even to say what God is not. This incomprehensibility of God’s essence was most vigorously affirmed by Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Erigena, for whom God transcends even being and knowing itself. Scholastic theology was more cautious and positive but affirmed God’s essential unknowability. Thomas Aquinas distinguished the immediate vision of God, knowledge by faith, from knowledge by reason. The former is ordinarily reserved for heaven; on earth all knowledge is mediate. God is knowable only in his works, notably in the perfections of his creatures.

Though not necessarily following Luther’s “hidden God,” Reformed theology in its aversion to all idolatry has insisted that God infinitely surpasses our understanding, imagination, and language. As the Reformation tradition’s consciousness of divine incomprehensibility waned, philosophers, notably Kant, reaffirmed it. The three transcendental ideas—the soul, the world, and God—cannot be objectively demonstrated; they can only be postulated as the necessary conditions for knowledge. That they are “known” by practical reason does not add to our volume of real, meaning scientific, knowledge. With the exception of Hegel, the doctrine of divine unknowability has penetrated modern consciousness. All predicates about God are seen to be statements about humanity writ large. God is a human projection (Feuerbach); religion is the deification of humanity itself.

For others, this sort of atheism has also claimed too much. Human limitations and the finiteness of human knowledge should lead us to abstain from such judgments. Knowledge is limited to the observable (positivism), and beyond that we confess our ignorance (agnosticism). Metaphysics was distrusted and speculation eschewed. This agnosticism, of course, means the death of theology, though theologians did attempt various rescue missions.

Agnosticism does have weighty arguments on its side. As humans we are limited in our finiteness. Modern thought, however, goes further and argues that divine absoluteness and personality are forever incompatible. To conceive of God in personal terms is to make him finite. For God to relate to us, he must be somehow limited. Consequently, all that is reasonably left is some version of an impersonal moral world order.

Now, Christian theology has always acknowledged the tension between our view of God as personal and absolute. We are limited to the knowledge obtained by sense perception; we affirm the unsearchable majesty and sovereign highness of God. But though God is thus beyond our full comprehension and description, we do confess to having the knowledge of God. This knowledge is analogical and the gift of revelation. We know God through his works and in his relation to us, his creatures. This truth is beyond our comprehension; it is a mystery but not self-contradictory. Rather, it reflects the classic distinction Christian theology has always made between negative (apophatic) and positive (cataphatic) theology.

If we cannot speak of God analogically, then we cannot speak of him at all. If God cannot be known, neither can he be felt or experienced in any way. All religion is then empty. But modern philosophical agnosticism makes the same error as ancient Gnosticism. By reducing God to “inexpressible depth” and “eternal silence,” they make the universe godless, in the most absolute sense of the word. What it all comes down to is whether God has willed and found a way to reveal himself in the domain of creatures. This, the Christian church and Christian theology affirm, has indeed occurred. Thanks to revelation, we have true knowledge of God, knowledge that is relative and finite rather than comprehensive. Incomprehensibility does not imply agnosticism but an ingredient of the Christian claim to have received by revelation a specific, limited, yet well-defined and true knowledge of God. In the words of Basil, “The knowledge of God consists in the perception of his incomprehensibility.”

BEFORE THE DIVINE MYSTERY

[161] Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics. To be sure, the term “mystery” (μυστηριον) in Scripture does not mean an abstract supernatural truth in the Roman Catholic sense. Yet Scripture is equally far removed from the idea that believers can grasp the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense.1 In truth, the knowledge that God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding. In that sense it is all mystery with which the science of dogmatics is concerned, for it does not deal with finite creatures, but from beginning to end looks past all creatures and focuses on the eternal and infinite One himself. From the very start of its labors, it faces the incomprehensible One. From him it derives its inception, for from him are all things. But also in the remaining loci, when it turns its attention to creatures, it views them only in relation to God as they exist from him and through him and for him [Rom. 11:36]. So then, the knowledge of God is the only dogma, the exclusive content, of the entire field of dogmatics. All the doctrines treated in dogmatics—whether they concern the universe, humanity, Christ, and so forth—are but the explication of the one central dogma of the knowledge of God. All things are considered in light of God, subsumed under him, traced back to him as the starting point. Dogmatics is always called upon to ponder and describe God and God alone, whose glory is in creation and re-creation, in nature and grace, in the world and in the church. It is the knowledge of him alone that dogmatics must put on display.

By pursuing this aim, dogmatics does not become a dry and academic exercise, without practical usefulness for life. The more it reflects on God, the knowledge of whom is its only content, the more it will be moved to adoration and worship. Only if it never forgets to think and speak about matters rather than about mere words, only if it remains a theology of facts and does not degenerate into a theology of rhetoric, only then is dogmatics as the scientific description of the knowledge of God also superlatively fruitful for life. The knowledge of God-in-Christ, after all, is life itself (Ps. 89:16; Isa. 11:9; Jer. 31:34; John 17:3). For that reason Augustine desired to know nothing other and more than God and himself. “I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? No: nothing at all.” For that reason, too, Calvin began his Institutes with the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves, and for that reason the Genevan catechism, answering the first question, “What is the chief end of human life?” stated, “That human beings may know the God by whom they were created.”2

But the moment we dare to speak about God the question arises: How can we? We are human and he is the Lord our God. Between him and us there seems to be no such kinship or communion as would enable us to name him truthfully. The distance between God and us is the gulf between the Infinite and the finite, between eternity and time, between being and becoming, between the All and the nothing. However little we know of God, even the faintest notion implies that he is a being who is infinitely exalted above every creature. While Holy Scripture affirms this truth in the strongest terms, it nevertheless sets forth a doctrine of God that fully upholds his knowability. Scripture, one must remember, never makes any attempt to prove the existence of God, but simply presupposes it. Moreover, in this connection it consistently assumes that human beings have an ineradicable sense of that existence and a certain knowledge of God’s being. This knowledge does not arise from their own investigation and reflection, but is due to the fact that God on his part revealed himself to us in nature and history, in prophecy and miracle, by ordinary and by extraordinary means. In Scripture, therefore, the knowability of God is never in doubt even for a moment. The fool may say in his heart, “There is no God,” but those who open their eyes perceive from all directions the witness of his existence, of his eternal power and deity (Isa. 40:26; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:19–20). The purpose of God’s revelation, according to Scripture, is precisely that human beings may know God and so receive eternal life (John 17:3; 20:31).

Thanks to that revelation, it is certain, first of all, that God is a person, a conscious and freely willing being, not confined to the world but exalted high above it. The pantheistic understanding that equates God and the world is absolutely foreign to Scripture. This personality of God is so prominent everywhere that the question may arise whether by it his oneness, spirituality, and infinity are not being shortchanged. Some texts convey the impression that God is a being who, though greater and more powerful than human beings, is nevertheless confined to certain localities and restricted in his presence and activity by the boundaries of country and people. Not only does Scripture ascribe to God—as we will see later—an array of human organs and attributes; but also it even says that he walked in the garden (Gen. 3:8), came down to see Babel’s construction of a tower (Gen. 11:5, 7), appeared to Jacob at Bethel (Gen. 28:10ff.), gave his law on Mount Sinai (Exod. 19ff.), dwelt between the cherubim on Zion in Jerusalem (1 Sam. 4:4; 1 Kings 8:7, 10–11). Scripture also therefore calls him the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the king of Zion, the God of the Hebrews, the God of Israel, and so on. Many modern theologians have inferred from these expressions that Israel’s most ancient religion was polydaemonism, that YHWH, taken over from the Kenites, was originally a mountain god, a fire god, or a thunder god, and that after the conquest of Canaan he gradually became the God of Israel’s land and people, and that this henotheism only became absolute monotheism as a result of the ethical conception of his essence in the works of the prophets.3

This evolutionistic representation, however, fails to do justice to the facts of Scripture and is incompatible with a number of elements that, according to the witness of Scripture, are integral to the doctrine of God. A few remarks will make this clear. The creation of Adam and Eve (Gen. 2:7, 21), like YHWH’s walking in the garden (Gen. 3:8), are recounted graphically but are represented as being the activity of the same God who made the entire universe (Gen. 2:4b). YHWH’s appearance at the building of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:5, 7) is introduced by saying that he descended, that is, came down from heaven, which is therefore viewed as his real dwelling place. In Genesis 28:11ff., a pericope that in modern works on Israel’s religious history is considered a locus classicus (also cf. Josh. 24:26ff.; Judg. 6:20ff.; 1 Sam. 6:14), not the stone but heaven is YHWH’s dwelling place; in verses 12 and 13, the LORD introduces himself as the God of Abraham and Isaac, promises to Jacob the land of Canaan and innumerable descendants, and guarantees that he will protect him wherever he may go (vv. 13–15). The idea of a “stone deity” is wholly absent here; the stone is merely a memorial of the marvelous event that occurred there. The localization of YHWH on Mount Sinai (Exod. 3:1, 5, 18; Judg. 5:5; 1 Kings 19:8) occurs just as much in writings that, according to modern criticism, are of later origin and definitely monotheistic (Deut. 33:2; Hab. 3:3; Ps. 68:8). True, YHWH revealed himself on Mount Sinai, but he does not reside there in the sense that he was confined to it. On the contrary, he came down from heaven upon Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:18, 20). In the same way, Scripture speaks of an intimate relationship between YHWH and the land and people of Israel but does this not only in records from an older period (Gen. 4:4; Judg. 11:24; 1 Sam. 26:19; 2 Sam. 15:8; 2 Kings 3:27; 5:17) but also in witnesses that, according to many critics, date from the monotheistic period (Deut. 4:29; Amos 1:2; Isa. 8:18; Jer. 2:7; 12:14; 16:13; Ezek. 10:18ff.; 11:23; 43:1ff.; Jon. 1:3; Ruth 1:16; cf. John 4:19). YHWH is the God of Israel by virtue of his election and covenant. Accordingly, in an unclean pagan country he cannot be worshiped in the proper, prescribed manner, as also the prophets testify (Hos. 9:3–6; Amos 7:17; etc.), but that is very different from saying that outside of Canaan he cannot be present and active. On the contrary: he accompanies Jacob wherever he travels (Gen. 28:15), is with Joseph in Egypt (Gen. 39:2), raises up the widow’s son by the prophet Elijah in Zarephath (1 Kings 17:10ff.), is recognized by Naaman as the God of the whole earth (2 Kings 5:17ff.).

GOD AND THE GODS

As a result of this close relationship between God and Israel in the Old Testament dispensation, many texts do not pronounce themselves, so to speak, on the question whether the gods of other peoples are...