Bavinck on the Archetypal/Ectypal Distinction

“The relation of God’s own self-knowledge to our knowledge of God used to be expressed by saying that the former was archetypal of the latter and the latter ectypal of the former. Our knowledge of God is the imprint of the knowledge God has of himself but always on a creaturely level and in a creaturely way. The knowledge of God present in his creatures is only a weak likeness, a finite, limited sketch of the absolute self-consciousness of God accommodated to the capacities of the human or creaturely consciousness. But however great the distance is, the source (principium essendi) of our knowledge of God is solely God himself, the God who reveals himself freely, self-conciously, and genuinely.”

-Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vo. 1: Prolegomena, p. 212

Lutherans and Calvinists

This is taken from Bavinck’s chapter on Reformed Dogmatics in the section The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology. While appreciating the overlap which existed between early Reformed and Lutheran theology, he makes sure to note the differences in each respective system, focusing specifically on the different starting points for both.

“The difference seems to be conveyed best by saying that the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically.  The Reformed person is not content with an exclusively historical stance but raises his sights to the idea, the eternal decree of God.  By contrast, the Lutheran takes his position in the midst of the history of redemption and feels no need to enter more deeply into the counsel of God.  For the Reformed, therefore, election is the heart of the church; for Lutherans, justification is the article by which the church stands or falls.  Among the former the primary question is: How is the glory of God advanced?  Among the latter it is: How does a human get saved?  The struggle of the former is above all paganism- idolatry; that of the latter against Judaism- works righteousness.  The Reformed person does not rest until he has traced all things retrospectively to the divine decree, tracking down the ‘wherefore’ of things, and has prospectively made all things subservient to the glory of God; the Lutheran is content with the ‘that ‘and enjoys the salvation in which he is, by faith, a participant.  From this difference in principle, the dogmatic controversies between them (with respect to the image of God, original sin, the person of Christ, the order of salvation, the sacraments, church government, ethics, etc.) can be easily explained.”

-Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1: Prolegomena, p. 177

Augustine Is The Dogmatician of the Christian Church

“Augustine became a theologian of the greatest importance for later dogmatics, one who dominated the following centuries.  Every reformation returns to him and Paul.  For every dogma he found a formula that was taken over and repeated by everyone else.  His influence extends to all churches, schools of theology, and sects.  Rome appeals to him for its doctrine of the church, the sacrament, and authority, while the Reformation felt kinship with him in the doctrine of predestination and grace.  Scholasticism, in construing its conceptual framework, took advantage of his sharp observation, the acuteness of his intellect, the power of his speculation- Thomas, in fact, was called the best interpreter of Saint Augustine.  Mysticism, in turn, found inspiration in his neoplatonism and religious enthusiasm.  Both Catholic and Protestant piety buoy themselves up on his writings; asceticism and pietism find nourishment and support in his work.  Augustine, therefore, does not belong to one church but to all churches together.  He is the universal teacher (Doctor universalis).  Even philosophy neglects him to its own detriment.  And because of his elegant and fascinating style, his refined, precise, highly individual and nevertheless universally human way of expressing himself, he, more than any other church father, can still be appreciated today.  He is the most Christian as well of the most modern of all the fathers; of all of them he is the closest to us.  He replaced the aesthetic worldview with an ethical one, the classical with the Christian.  In dogmatics we owe our best, our deepest, our richest thoughts to him.  Augustine has been and is the dogmatician of the Christian church.”

-Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1: Prolegomena, p. 138

Only Within the Communion of the Saints Can the Love of Christ Be Comprehended

“Scripture is not a legal document, the articles of which only need to be looked upon for a person to find out what its view is in a given case.  It is composed of many books written by various authors, dating back to different times and divergent in content.  It is a living whole, not abstract but organic.  It nowhere contains a sketch of the doctrine of faith; this is something that has to be drawn from the entire organism of Scripture.  Scripture is not designed so that we should parrot it but that as free children of God we should think his thoughts after him.  But then all so-called presuppositionlessness and objectivity are impossible.  So much study and reflection on the subject is bound up with it that no person can possibly do it alone.  That takes centuries.  To that end the church ahs been appointed and given the promise of the Spirit’s guidance into all truth.  Whoever isolates himself from the church, i.e. from Christianity as a whole, from the history of dogma in its entirety, loses the truth of the Christian faith.  That person becomes a branch that is torn from the tree and shrivels, an organ that is separated from the body and therefore doomed to die.  Only within the communion of the saints can the length and the breadth, the depth and the height, of the love of Christ be comprehended.”

-Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, Vol. 1, (p. 83)

“Theologians Never Come to Scripture From The Outside”

“Accordingly, theologians never come to Scripture from the outside, without any prior knowledge or preconceived opinion, but bring with them from their background a certain understanding of the content of revelation and so look at Scripture with the aid of the glasses that their churches have put on them.  All dogmaticians, when they go to work, stand consciously  or unconsciously in the tradition of the Christian faith in which they were born and nurtured and come to Scripture as Reformed, or Lutheran, or Roman Catholic Christians.  In this respect as well, we cannot simply divest ourselves of our environment; we are always children of our time, the products of our background.  The result, therefore, is what one would expect:  all the dogmatic handbooks that have been published by members of the school of biblical theology faithfully reflect the personal and ecclesiastical viewpoint of their authors.  They cannot, therefore, claim to be more objective than those of explicitly ecclesiastical dogmaticians.”

-Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1: Prolegomena, (p. 82)

“Humanity’s entire weal and woe depends on religion”

Since humanity’s entire weal and woe depends on religion, only that certainty will do that is absolute and obtainable by all, even the simplest of people.  If religion is to be what it is said to be, viz., the service of God, the love of God with all one’s mind, heart, and strength, then it must be grounded in revelation, in a word from God that comes with his authority.  Divine authority is the foundation of religion and therefore the source and basis of theology as well.  All this is naturally implied in the concept and essence of religion.

Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1: Prolegomena, (p. 77)

A Summary of Bavinck’s Critique of Schleiermacher

According to Schleiermacher, true religion consists exclusively in devout states of consciousness and feeling.   According to Bavinck, Schleiermacher’s very premise is philosophically untenable. Religious feeling necessitates an object from which that feeling derives its significance. Therefore, not every state of consciousness and feeling is religious in nature, but only those that are triggered by a unique metaphysical force.  Bavinck then concludes that religious feeling plays a penultimate role in pointing back to the ultimacy of a more transcendent reality, which gives the feeling a uniquely religious quality.  Consequently, religious feeling can never be severed from the domain of metaphysics.

Faith rests upon knowledge and knowledge arouses trust. Faith, knowledge, and trust all pre-suppose a certain conception of God, and conceptions of God rest upon metaphysical premises, the very thing Schleiermacher wished to banish from his religious system.

Presuppositionlessness In Positivistic Theological Method

Total presuppositionlessness renders study and research impossible.  But if nevertheless presuppositionlessness is one’s aim and one takes a positivistic position with respect to religion, the inevitable result is a “theology of ‘mood’ in place of concepts, a system of paradoxes in place of sober truth, the ‘art’ of being enthused about everything in place of the conviction which looks for a fixed standard of things.”  In this area the purely empirical method results in surrender to the relativism of the historical process or event and the loss of one’s ability to judge the truth content of a religion.  It also results in the tendency to judge religious phenomena purely esthetically in terms of their “beauty.”  Then, as Nietzche did with Nero and Cesar Borgia, one goes into raptures over ecstatics and fanatics as the religious showpieces of humanity.

Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1: Prolegomena, (p. 73)

The Essence of the Christian Religion

The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.  Theology is about God and should reflect a doxological tone that glorifies him.

Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1: Prolegomena, p. 61

Revelation-Based Normativity and the Church

I’ve started up my reading of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics now that I have some more time on my hands, and spent the majority of my afternoon reading chapter 2: The Method and Organization of Dogmatic Theology.  In the introduction to the chapter, Bavinck discusses the relationship between dogmatics and the church, doctrine and confessionalism, the fallible and the infallible.  He begins the introduction pointing out that “From the beginning, Scripture served as the rule of faith and the foundation of all theology.  As the church spread into and engaged the broader world, it became necessary to clarify and firm up the rule of faith against false teaching (p. 59).”  The genuine desire to further clarify apostolic teaching in the midst of heresy and error led “to the rise of strong epsiscopal teaching authority and an increased dependance on the authoritative church tradition.  Reaction after reaction eventually gave birth to an antischolastic reversal in philosophy and theology, represented by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.  Experience replaced knowledge, ethics replaced metaphysics, and dogma was re-defined along subjective, personal, and “spiritual” lines.  After looking at these trends in philosophy and theology, Bavinck reaches the conclusion that:

“Neither scientific objectivity nor complete subjectivity are possible.  All knowledge is rooted in faith, and for faith to be real it must have an object that is knowable.  This requires a divine revelation that is more than a fulfillment of subjective desire.  Religion must be true and provide its own distinct path to knowledge and certainty.  Christian theologians must place themselves within the circle of faith and, while using church tradition and experience, take their stand in the reality of revelation (p. 59).”

An unrelated issue here, but a very important one, is the distinct path to knowledge and certainty that Bavinck speaks of.  This profoundly conflicts with strong and moderate foundationalist approaches to apologetics in the tradition of Descartes and 17th century rationalism in that Christian epistemology can never be severed from the “reality of revelation” that Bavinck speaks of.  Foundationalism finds its primary epistemic principle in objective foundations of truth discovered through reason. Christian apologetics, in the tradition of theologians like Bavinck, Vos, and Van Til, finds its basic epistemic principle in the “reality of revelation” and refuses to proceed on any other grounds.

Consequently, Schleiermacher’s proposed subjectivism grounded in the Christian conciousness has no place whatsoever in Church Dogmatics.  Neither does Hegel and his dialectical process, or Kant and his  anti-metaphysical moralism.  Dogmaticians are bound to Scripture alone.

Bavinck continues his discussion and beautifully explains the relationship between dogmatics and the church.  Out of a genuine concern that dogmaticians might use sola Scriptura as a license for individualism in the process of method and organization, he re-states the necessity of including confessional and cultural factors in the practice of Church Dogmatics.

“The concern for revelation-based normativity in dogmatics must not be construed to serve as a reason to overlook or deny the importance of confessional and cultural factors in dogmatic treatises.  No one is free from the biases of church upbringing and particular environmental contexts.  We are always products of our background, including our ecclesiastical upbringing.  Awareness of this reality led some to attempt divesting themselves of their confessional identities and returning to the more confused and ‘pure’ gospel situation of the New Testament and the early church.  So-called ‘biblical theology’ is then opposed to ‘scholastic theology’ as though the latter were not at all biblical.  But setting Scripture over against church teaching is as wrong as separating heart and mind, feeling and knowing.  The sole aim of dogmatics is to set forth the thoughts of God that he has laid down in Holy Scripture.  Dogmatic theology is possible only for one who lives in the fellowship of a Christian church.  While Scripture is logically the only foundation of church and theology, pedagoically, the church is prior to Scripture.”

Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1: Prolegomena, p. 60 (emphasis mine)

I’ll conclude by saying that anti-scholasticism will always end up conceding to the very evil it proposes to solve.  At first glance, this tendency doesn’t seem all that bad.

We don’t want to be bound by church tradition, right?  Aren’t confessions, creeds, and dogmatic treatises attempting to usurp the primacy of Holy Scripture?  Isn’t that what Rome believes?  I’ll adhere to no creed but the Bible!

This kind of thinking ultimately distorts truth and hinders its progress by elevating individual autonomy to a place of supremacy.  We end up with thousands of different interpretations of Scripture, no way to safeguard truth against error, and an individualistic conception of Christianity devoid of the church and its ministry of word and sacrament.  As Bavinck writes “Dogmatic theology is possible only for one who lives in the fellowship of the church (p. 59).”  Biblically, the church is invested with the authority that the modern evangelical consensus gives to the individual mind.

That’s all I’ve got!  Stay tuned for more Bavinck!