Herman Bavinck Harmonizes Faith And Reason

When Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) delivered a lecture series seeking to identify the main problems that plague modern thought, he argued that attempts to separate faith from knowledge explain some of modern life’s ills. Perhaps surprisingly, he also argued this problem began long before the rise of modernity. Less surprisingly, he finds the solution in the Reformed tradition, specifically in neo-Calvinism’s emphasis on holistic thinking.

Bavinck delivered the lectures that would become The Foremost Problems of Contemporary Dogmatics: On Faith, Knowledge, and the Christian Tradition at the beginning of his time at the Free University of Amsterdam, likely writing much of it in 1903–4. Though the full manuscript is unpublished and unfinished, the historical section of those lectures was more complete. In this new English translation of the historical section, readers will find what they’ve come to love and expect from this Dutch Reformed theologian—a patient description and analysis of various thinkers, an application of Reformed dogmatics that’s sensitive to late modern issues, and a self-awareness of historical location.

For Bavinck fans, these lectures are a treasure. They give evidence of his self-consciously neo-Calvinistic conception of the Reformed faith, even early in his career. They also contain some of his sharpest critiques of what he perceives to be a Roman Catholic and modern philosophical tendency to separate faith and knowledge. We get a small sample of what it might have been like to sit in Bavinck’s classroom more than a century ago.

Neo-Calvinism’s Unifying Power

Neo-Calvinism, a movement spearheaded by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, contextualizes Reformed orthodoxy for the sake of contemporary application. Bavinck met the theological challenges of his day head on. “What inspires this theme,” he wrote, “is the conviction that anyone who may soon have to lead their people must be at home in their own era. He must be a child of his own time, understand his own time” (2).

Theological leadership requires faithfulness in the present age. Too often, when confronted with the problems of the present period, theologians are tempted to retreat to the past because “it is much easier to make the past one’s own, for this lies at some distance.” Though we can find “sources” and “guides” from the past, Bavinck argues it’s the “present that surrounds us.” He shows that “talking big is not enough, and neither will sticking our heads in the sand prove to be of any benefit in the long run” (2).

Neo-Calvinism can rise to contemporary challenges because of its commitment to holistic thinking and living. We see this in its insistence that Christianity isn’t merely about acts or beliefs but about working out a whole worldview. According to Bavinck, this way of thinking of Christianity (or at least Protestantism) as a whole was a recent development. He argues, “In earlier times the question was not posed in this way: One investigated the various loci (topics), compared and contrasted each doctrine with the accounts of the other denominations or confessions.”

But such an approach, Bavinck argued, treated these issues “atomistically and aphoristically.” Bavinck was working to explain Christianity by “a single principle,” because that’s what his modern context demanded (33). Neo-Calvinism, he argued, could meet that challenge in ways that Roman Catholicism couldn’t.

Critique of Roman Catholicism

Bavinck’s critique of medieval Catholicism begins from his belief in Christianity’s holistic character. Roman Catholic thought, he argued, produced a “dualism that was expressed in an antithesis of knowing and believing. The Reformers did not accept this” (54). Roman Catholicism’s dualism is evident in its quantitative distinctions between nature and grace, between natural and supernatural theology, and between faith and reason.

Salvation is attained not by supplementing nature with grace but by accepting a gift given us by God

In contrast, Protestants conceive of the main problem facing humanity not as “nature against grace, which is a quantitative opposition” but as an ethical one: of sin against God. Salvation is attained not by supplementing nature with grace but by accepting “a gift given us by God” (50). On the topic of natural theology, general and special revelation cannot be considered quantitatively, as if special revelation merely adds to general revelation, for Bavinck argues that the “Reformed have conceptualized Christianity, not only as a religion but also as a Weltanschauung (“worldview”)” (58).

Yet, in perhaps a controversial evaluation, Bavinck argues that dualism had infiltrated Reformed theology through the adoption of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy. Bavinck writes,

It was a big mistake among the Reformed that they did not recognize the necessity of a Christian philosophy. When they soon had need of a philosophy, they adopted the framework of Aristotle and Thomas. Thus theologia naturalis was immediately placed next to theologia supernaturalis (“supernatural theology”). (75–76)

He interprets Thomas along the lines of the Pure Nature Thomist stream that’s still alive and well today (e.g., in the work of Lawrence Feingold and Steven A. Long).

In this model, he argues, reason and faith “stand dualistically side by side on the scientific domain.” He complained that among some Reformed theologians, when reason and revelation seemed to conflict, “reason ever gained ground and revelation lost more ground” (76). Bavinck’s lectures are intended to call theologians back from these dualistic accretions from inadequate philosophies.

Critique of Modern Philosophy

Christian theology needs philosophy. However, as Bavinck argues in Reformed Dogmatics, “Christian theology has never taken over any philosophical system without criticism and given it the stamp of approval.” Thus, it’s no surprise Bavinck turned his critical eye toward popular modern philosophies in these early lectures.

For example, Bavinck argues that though “conservative elements still remained in Hegel’s philosophy (immortality, the deity of Christ, the Trinity), . . . his method wrecked everything” (173). Those who followed Hegel laid the groundwork for extreme subjectivism because they “divinized the individual, and they divinized this human being yet further at the cost of nature” (186). Such errors must be resisted, not accommodated, within the Reformed tradition.

Bavinck shows that theologians who sought a mediation between confessional Christianity and modernism “did not succeed” because they failed to recognize that the world “did not reject Christianity on account of the deficient form of orthodoxy but on account of its content (miracles, the deity of Christ, etc.)” (194–95). Therefore, despite the fact that Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel attempted to defend some formal elements of Christianity, they were unable to overcome the dichotomy between faith and knowledge in a way that comported with confessional Christian faith.

Thus, in Bavinck’s judgment, the rise of materialism and the total rejection of faith is a mature consequence of the separation between faith and knowledge, which was nurtured by medieval Catholicism and flowered in modern philosophy.

Bavinck in the Raw

This sharp analysis in unpublished lectures makes for fascinating reading because it provides a glimpse of Bavinck as he was in the lecture hall. Perhaps because this is an unpublished and unfinished manuscript, the normally restrained Bavinck critiques his interlocutors with an unusual candor.

In Bavinck’s judgment, the rise of materialism and the total rejection of faith is a mature consequence of the separation between faith and knowledge.

No doubt devotees to the thought of, say, Aquinas, the post-Reformation scholastics, Hegel, or Schleiermacher will be frustrated by some of Bavinck’s comments in these lectures. His critiques here should be balanced by his more measured criticisms in his published works like Reformed Dogmatics and Philosophy of Revelation.

This excellent translation of an academically rigorous text gives us Bavinck’s raw reflections on what it means to be a faithful Reformed theologian in his day. It exposes us to his frank judgments of some theologians that remain influential in our day. Bruce Pass and Gert de Kok have served Bavinck scholars by making these indispensable lectures available to the English-speaking world.