Reformed Dogmatics

Abridged in One Volume

Herman Bavinck, John Bolt

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801036484
• eBook ISBN: 9781441240187
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

An accessible summary of the classic work by renowned theologian Herman Bavinck

Herman Bavinck's four-volume Reformed Dogmatics is one of the most important theological works of the twentieth century. The recently completed English translation has received wide acclaim.

Now John Bolt, one of the world's leading experts on Bavinck and editor of Bavinck's four-volume set, has abridged the work in one volume, offering students, pastors, and lay readers an accessible summary of Bavinck's masterwork. This volume presents the core of Bavinck's thought and offers explanatory materials, making available to a wider audience some of the finest Dutch Reformed theology ever written.

Praise for Reformed Dogmatics

"Bavinck's magisterial Reformed Dogmatics remains after a century the supreme achievement of its kind."--J. I. Packer, Regent College

1

DOGMATIC THEOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

TERMINOLOGY

[1] Throughout the history of the church, theologians have used different terms to describe the orderly study of the Christian faith and the summary of its truth content.[1] Many Protestant theologians of the immediate post-Reformation period began to follow the Lutheran Philipp Melanchthon’s Loci Communes (“Common Places”) in designating the various topics of theology as loci.[2] This term, a translation of the Greek τοποι, comes from classical writers such as Cicero who used the term for the general rules or places where a rhetorician could find the arguments needed when treating any given topic. Loci, in other words, were the data bases, the proof-text barrels used by debaters as sources of material to bolster their arguments. For theologians seeking to serve the church, the loci were the places one could look for Scripture’s own statements about a particular topic.

When Melanchthon wrote his Loci Communes, the first major work in Reformation evangelical theology, he was commenting on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The end result was an outline of the principal truths of the Christian faith as taught in Scripture, treated under a number of basic rubrics or categories such as God, creation, sin, law, grace, faith, hope, love, and predestination. The purpose was to instruct the faithful in the teachings of the Bible.

Over time, as subsequent generations of theologians desired a more systematic treatment of the truths of the faith, the looser term loci passed into disfavor and a preference grew for the word theologia. However, theologia by itself did not do justice to the different kinds of literature that served the church, and qualifiers such as “didactic,” “systematic,” “theoretical,” or “positive” were added to distinguish these summary overviews of biblical teaching from biblical ethics or “moral” theology as well as from “practical” or pastoral theology. Eventually, the term “dogmatics” was added to describe this specific kind of theologia.[3] “Dogmatics” has the advantage of anchoring such study in the normative teachings or dogmas of the church. Dogmas are truths properly set forth in Scripture as things to be believed. Although a truth confessed by the church is not a dogma because the church recognizes it but solely because it rests on God’s authority, religious dogma is always a combination of divine authority and churchly confession. Dogmas are truths acknowledged by a particular group, though church teaching must never be identified with divine truth itself.

[2] The word dogma, from the Greek dokein (“to be of the opinion”), denotes that which is definite—that which has been decided—and is therefore fixed. Thus the church fathers speak of the Christian religion or doctrine as the divine dogma, of Christ’s incarnation as the dogma of theology, of the truths of the faith that are authoritative in and for the church as the dogmata of the church, and so forth. Included are doctrinal truths and rules for Christian living that are established and not subject to doubt. There are varieties of dogma based on different authorities. Political dogma rests on the authority of the civil government, while philosophical dogmas derive their power from self-evidence or argumentation. By contrast, religious or theological dogmas owe their authority solely to a divine testimony, whether this is perceived, as among pagans, from an oracle, or, among Protestant Christians, from Scripture or, among Roman Catholics, from the magisterium of the church. The Reformation tradition recognizes no truth other than that which is given on the authority of vGod in Holy Scripture. “The Word of God grounds the articles of faith and beyond that no one, not even an angel.”[4] Dogmas, articles of faith, are only those truths “which are properly set forth in Scripture as things to be believed.”[5] Among Reformed theologians, therefore, the principle into which all theological dogmas are distilled is: Deus dixit—God has said it.

The concept of dogma also contains a social element. Truth always seeks to be honored as truth, and the authority of dogma depends on its ability to command recognition and thus to maintain itself. Though a given proposition is true in and of itself if it rests on the authority of God quite apart from any human recognition, it is intended, and has an inherent tendency, to be recognized by us as such. Dogma can never be at peace with error and deception. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance for every believer, and particularly for theologians, to know which scriptural truths, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have been brought to universal recognition in the church of Christ. By this process, after all, the church is kept from immediately mistaking a private opinion for the truth of God.

The church of Christ therefore has a responsibility with respect to dogma. To preserve, explain, understand, and defend the truth of God entrusted to her, the church is called to appropriate it mentally, to assimilate it internally, and to profess it in the midst of the world as the truth of God. The power of the church to lay down dogmas is not sovereign and legislative; it is a power of service to and for the Word of God. Still, this authority has been granted by God to his church; it enables and authorizes her to confess the truth of God and to formulate it in speech and writing. The dogmatic theologian’s task is to examine how the church’s dogma arose genetically from Scripture and how, in accordance with that same Scripture, it ought to be expanded and enriched. The dogmatic theologian searches for the inner coherence of Scripture’s teaching and its full expression. In this the theologian is guided by the confessions of the church but is not restricted to their historical and particular limitations.

A tension thus is apparent in that religious or theological dogma combines divine authority and churchly confession, presenting the dogmatic theologian with the challenge of determining the relation between divine truth and the church’s confession. Church dogma is never identical with the absolute truth of God itself since the guidance of the Holy Spirit promised to the church does not exclude the possibility of human error. At the same time, it is a mistake to devalue dogma itself as a temporary aberration from the pure essence of a non-dogmatic gospel as many modern theologians do.[6] Opposition to dogma is not a general objection to dogma as such but a rejection of specific dogmas judged unacceptable by some. Adolf von Harnack in his History of Dogma, for example, developed the thought that Christian dogma was a product of the Greek spirit working on the substratum of the gospel[7] and, with many others, sought the essence of Christianity in a general moral conviction wrought in the human soul that God is our Father, that we are all brothers and sisters, and that this kingdom of God exists in an individual’s soul.[8] Harnack did not repudiate all dogma but simply substituted a new dogma for the old dogmas of historic Christianity. Dogma cannot be avoided in religion; one who clings to the truth of religion cannot do without dogma and will always recognize unchanging and permanent elements in it. A religion without dogma, however vague and general it may be, does not exist, and a non-dogmatic Christianity, in the strict sense of the word, is an illusion and devoid of meaning. Without faith in the existence, the revelation, and the knowability of God, no religion is possible. Those who claim to be non-dogmatic simply indicate their disagreement with specific dogmas; rejection of orthodox Christian dogma is itself most dogmatic. The disagreement, then, is not about whether religion requires dogma; it is about which dogmas one affirms and rejects.

Finally, the word “dogma” is sometimes employed in a broader, and then again in a more restricted, sense. Sometimes it denotes the Christian religion as a whole, including the articles of faith drawn from Scripture and the rites and ceremonies of the church. As a rule, however, the word is used in a more restricted sense for the doctrines of the church, for the articles of faith that are based on the Word of God and therefore obligate everyone to faith. Dogmatic theology, then, is the system of the articles of faith.

[4] This formal understanding of dogmatics, however, is limited. We need to move on to the material content of dogmas. Is dogmatic theology about “doctrine of God, primarily, and of creatures according to the respect in which they are related to God as to their source and end,” as Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined it?[9] Concerned about the “practical” application of theology, some are inclined to shift the emphasis to the human person in need of salvation or to the Christian life of discipleship as a focal point.

The move toward a more subjective, practical notion of theology received a great boost by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Denying that we could know anything about God, since he defined “knowledge” strictly in terms of sensory experience of phenomena in this world, Kant sought to rescue faith by positing as moral truths the existence of God, the soul and its immortality. Dogma thus has the status of personal conviction of faith grounded in moral motives. Nineteenth-century theologians who followed Kant shared his basic metaphysical conviction that God cannot be known but only believed.[10] For Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the content of the Christian faith is nothing more than the piety and faith of Christian believers at a given time. In his own words: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech,” and “Dogmatic Theology is the science which systematizes the doctrine prevalent in a Christian Church at a given time.”[11] Others, such as Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), followed Kant more directly in construing the content of the Christian faith in strictly moral-ethical terms, while Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) made the historical, psychological, and comparative scientific study of religions the object of theological inquiry and summary. When dogmatic theology becomes nothing more than a description of the historical phenomenon that is called the Christian faith, it ceases to be theology and simply becomes the study of religion.[12]

The historical, social, and psychological study of concrete religion, including the Christian religion, is a valid and appropriate discipline. What is problematic is the claim that such study is all that can legitimately be done; that we cannot know what we believe. Whether the reasons are philosophical or apologetic, to turn theology into religious studies is to evade the question of truth. The strain that this places on theological practitioners is intolerable; the human soul rebels at ignoring or denying in the academy what one confesses in church. The human mind is not amenable to such double-entry bookkeeping, to a dual conception of truth. What in effect often happens is that the Christian confession yields to a science of religion that claims to be without bias. The academy arrogates unto itself the mantle of knowledge and science by studying religion scientifically, and relegates dogmatic theology to a church seminary concerned about faith-experience and the practice of ministry. To the degree that a study of the Christian religion is “scientific,” it can only be descriptive.

[5] But science aims at truth and if dogmatic theology aims to be real science, it cannot be satisfied with description of what is but must demonstrate what necessarily has to be considered truth. Christian theology must resist those who turn their backs on all metaphysics, dogma, and dogmatic theology and think of religion in terms of subjective moods of the mind. Religion is then reduced to a matter of feeling and mood and not one of ideas that are true or false. It is a mistake to oppose dry intellectualism in theology with a radical turn to feeling. The Christian religion stands or falls on the truth of our knowledge of God; if God cannot be known, if God is not known, then religion itself collapses. Thus, Christian theology depends for its very existence on the assured conviction that God can be known, that he has revealed himself to humanity and that we can speak about that knowledge in an orderly manner. Dogmatic theology is, and can only exist as, the scientific system of the knowledge of God. More precisely and from a Christian viewpoint, dogmatic theology 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.

[6] Not everyone is happy with such an understanding of theology. Objections are raised against the idea that God can be known as well as to the claim that a systematic, scientific examination of this knowledge is possible or should be attempted. The objectors insist that the Christian faith is not about head knowledge but about a personal relationship to God in Christ resulting in a godly life. If we must speak of knowledge, so they insist, it is of a quite different sort; call it faith-knowledge.[13] The objection to a speculative and rationalistic theology that loses sight of faith and the place of the heart is understandable and right. However, to substitute feeling or moral conduct for knowledge confuses categories and creates grave difficulties of its own. When we speak of “faith knowledge” we must ask: Is there a real object to our faith? If we say we believe in God, does God truly, i.e., objectively, exist or is God only a matter of our subjective consciousness? As much as we should appreciate the concerns of those who insist that the way we come to the knowledge of God is different from the means by which we gain knowledge of this world and its objects, we cannot avoid the question of truth. It is true that we do not believe that God exists, in the first place, because someone has marshaled an abundance of data and evidence that convinces our reason. We come to know through faith and not through external sense perception of things. But we cannot bracket our intellect from our faith-knowledge; faith is the faculty by which we come to know, it is not the source of faith. It is quite true that God cannot, like the phenomena of nature and the facts of history, be made the object of empirical investigation. For God to be knowable he must have revealed himself not only in deeds but also in words. The objective knowledge we need for dogmatic theology comes from divine revelation. To say that dogmatic theology is the system of the knowledge of God serves to cut off all autonomous speculation; it is to say that God cannot be known by us apart from his revelation and that the knowledge of God we aim at in theology can only be a transcript of the knowledge God has revealed concerning himself in his Word.

THEOLOGY AS THE SCIENCE OF GOD

[7] Our task today is to frame the whole of Christian knowledge in accordance with the manner in which it develops out of the evangelical faith. The knowledge of God we examine and summarize must always remain the knowledge of faith. At the same time, we insist that God has revealed himself in such a way that from this revelation we can learn to know him by faith. Furthermore, if God’s revelation contains real knowledge of God, it can also be thought through scientifically and gathered up in a system. Theologians are bound to God’s revelation from beginning to end and cannot bring forth new truth; they can only as thinkers reproduce the truth God has granted. Since revelation is of such a nature that it can only be truly accepted and appropriated by a saving faith, it is absolutely imperative that a dogmatic theologian be active as believer at the beginning, the continuation, and the conclusion of the work. A Christian theologian can never arrive at knowledge that is higher than the Christian faith. Precisely because a true faith-knowledge of God exists, dogmatic theology has the knowledge of God as part of its content and can rightly claim to be a science.

This seems strange to many Christians today because by “science” they have in mind the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. It is exactly here that we have our problem—a tyranny of empiricism and naturalism.[14] It is a mistake to concede to the materialism of either of these philosophical positions since it is becoming increasingly clear that even the “hardest” of the physical sciences such as physics incorporate, as sciences, some measure of subjectivity. What one accepts as “facts” is often determined by a priori religious and philosophical commitments. What we believe we see and how we interpret what we think we have seen are, of course, not subject to arbitrary whim; skepticism is as unwarranted as credulity. At the same time, fully detached scientific objectivity is a myth. It is totally futile to silence all subjectivity in a scientist, to deny to faith, religious and moral convictions, metaphysics and philosophy their influence on scientific study. One may attempt it but will never succeed because the scholar can never be separated from the human being.

[8] With this in mind, we can speak with complete justice of dogmatic theology as a science about God, and there is no objection whatever to gathering this knowledge of God in a system.[15] We understand by “system” nothing more than the ordinary scientific project of gathering a particular discipline’s body of knowledge into an intelligible, coherent, meaningful, ordered whole. Objections arise to the idea of “system” from a number of quarters, notably from poets and literary critics who resist the abstraction needed to do systematic or dogmatic theology. A typical comment: “The Bible wasn’t written as systematic theology . . . [but as a narrative] . . . in images and stories.”[16]

We must acknowledge that the complaint sometimes is valid; theology can be poorly presented and appear abstract, lifeless, intellectually arid. At the same time, misuse or abuse does not invalidate all use. There is no room in dogmatic theology for a system that attempts to deduce the truths of faith from an a priori princ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• PART I: PROLEGOMENA: INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY
• PART II: THE TRIUNE GOD AND CREATION
• PART III: HUMANITY AND SIN
• PART IV: CHRIST THE REDEEMER
• PART V: THE HOLY SPIRIT AND SALVATION IN CHRIST
• PART VI: THE SPIRIT CREATES A NEW COMMUNITY
• PART VII: THE SPIRIT MAKES ALL THINGS NEW
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Notes
• Back Cover