Part 2 of The “Organic-Perfecting” Key to Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics

Bavinck’s Organic-Perfecting Doctrine of Man

On the one hand “man is a created being, and for that reason alone he cannot be the goal of creation.”1 On the other hand, man becomes the chief of all means for divine glory. Bavinck’s handling of being and becoming demands this. “God’s becoming human” in a sense begins at the creation and then through providentially leading history to Christ. Yet “its culmination” is only in Christ.2

Original man is eschatological because the broadest sense of the imago Dei is not simply what man is, but what man is for”3 or to what he is to become. And what he is to become passes through the fires of sin and death. Can we say that because God ordained the fall, partly to accomplish this perfecting work, that therefore sin is necessary to the best end? Not at all. This would make the distortion equal to the design: good and evil would be logically coextensive. It would also make sin void of its antithetical, ethical qualities.4

One might wonder what Bavinck made of evolutionary thought at this point. Briefly stated, he is more antithetical to Darwinism than was his contemporary Warfield. Consequently when he speaks of man headed toward a perfecting image, it will be grace that perfects human nature first by rescuing its downward trend in Adam’s race. This is why he spends so much time in dealing with an evolutionary model of the origin of both man and sin.5 

Man does not simply have the image of God but is that image.6 Man is renewed by that same image. What is interesting in Bavinck’s anthropology is the insistence that it is the whole God, not merely Christ, after which this image is modeled. The whole triune God is the archetype for the whole of man.7

Man is not designed, at first, after the Ideal of Christ, as Osiander taught,8 but “the Incarnation of God is proof that human beings and not angels are created in the image of God, and that the human body is an essential component of that vision.”9 So, on the other hand, “Creation itself must be conceived in infralapsarian fashion, and Adam was already a type of Christ.”10 Incarnation presupposes the distortion of man. God not only knew Adam would fall, but designed primal history to culminate in Christ’s image-restoration.

The most difficult, and philosophical, item in Bavinck’s whole ontology is how he situates man in between God and the rest of creation. He ascribes “‘being’ to God, ‘becoming’ to the universe and ‘being and becoming’ to humanity and the Incarnate Jesus (in whom Creator and created meet).”11 This is designed to explain redemptive history. Specifically how does God “enter into humanity” or “enter into becoming”? The creation of humanity and the Incarnation are the only two points where being and becoming come together. In the Imago Dei, all human beings have this dual ontology: eternal and temporal, being and becoming. In “the Incarnation is the unity of being … and becoming.”12

Rome and the Reformation could agree about the Beatific Vision per se; yet, Bavinck adds that, “Rome views this final human destiny, which has been realized by Christ, as a Neoplatonic vision of God and a mystical fusion of the soul with God.”13 Both the present (assurance) and the secular (culture) are obscured. His analysis of the donum superadditum doctrine implies that Rome had a very different conception of humanity, law, and eternal life. Grace did not oppose sin so much as it opposed nature. In the Reformed view, grace opposes sin and thus the sinful nature.14 This has been a matter of controversy and has been under some reevaluation in our moment of theological retrieval.

Nevertheless, following Augustine, Bavinck at least maintains that man is “good, but changeably so. God alone is fully self-existent in all of his attributes and therefore immutable. Creatures, however, become and can therefore also degenerate … can be deformed and hence again reformed.”15

Bavinck utilizes the covenant of works to explain man’s nature and destiny. If Adam continued on he would have either advanced in glory or else transgressed and fallen.16 The organic connection of mankind depends upon the federal representation of mankind by their head. The end is explained by the beginning as much as the beginning is by its end. This original covenant becomes a balance between Roman and Lutheran errors. To the former, man had to merit a higher state and thus a supernatural grace was given within the image: gifts added to the nature of man, which, once lost, did not impair the original nature. To the latter, man had reached its pinnacle in Adam and was to become nothing more.17

This goes to the heart of what the image is. As eternal life possessed is essential to the image, it follows that man “had to be fully developed.”18

Everything is a teleological organism — each created thing made so as to naturally perfect, to tend toward that ideal end — but man is the highest of those made.

There is a fascinating synergy here between Bavinck’s understanding of the way all created things are designed and Thomas’ appropriation of Aristotelian teleology, as in his Fifth Way to show God’s existence, for example.  

Further, all of the spheres of society are viewed through the lens of the original relationship between God and Adam. “Among rational and moral creatures all higher life takes the form of a covenant.”19 At this point, two more things should be said that connect to what is more widely known as Neo-Calvinism. We might call this the psychological and sociological dimensions of Bavinck’s anthropology. Psychologically, we might summarize that the concept of “image” is both noun and verb: ontology and ethics together.20 Sociologically, man was not created alone.21 As the Trinity is a diversity in unity, so the image of God is seen more perfectly in a community. He does so without losing any of his individuality. 

The orders of creation in Augustine become the “social spheres” of the Bavinck-Kuyper synthesis. However such has been understood by later cultural agendas, what matters here is that the image is more like the Trinity in cooperation with the whole of humanity, each sphere in its turn: “Not as a heap of souls on a tract of land, not as a loose aggregate of individuals, but as having been created out of one blood.”22

Indeed the failure of modern ideologies, typified by the French and Russian Revolutions, constituted for Bavinck a collapse of “individualistic and atomistic view of humanity and of the sin dominant in it.”23

That may seem paradoxical at first glance. After all collectivism was certainly at the heart of those ideologies. But his point is that sin is original and internal. Neither individual moral actor nor social reconstruction can transcend the distortion of humanity. In this way the Pelagian error lies under the surface of all modern, even secular, attempts to recast sin and salvation.  

Bavinck’s Organic-Perfecting Doctrine of Christ

Just as in Bavinck’s doctrine of man, so in his doctrine of Christ, we see clear inroads to Reformed particularism, as it has been called. It is not entirely clear whether or not he had fairly evaluated the whole of other traditions that were subject of criticism, or, if he had, whether he could not have done a better job marking out who he was criticizing at some points, as opposed to others who were more orthodox in those traditions.

The most interesting and provocative thing that Bavinck says about the Incarnation is that Christ is at the middle of history as “an organic center,” so that all of revelation both points toward him and is also illuminated by him. The incarnation is “climax, crown, and completion”24 of all revelation.

In the first place the Son is the logos involved in Creation, not as the Gnostics believed in terms of an intermediary, but nevertheless the divine Idea possessed by the Father: both Wisdom25 and Word26 of God. “The whole world is thus the realization of an idea of God.”27 

Bavinck explores the road to the Chalcedonian definition, reconciling the explicit belief in “one person, two natures” among the Latin theologians and the often “unstable” language used in the East. Speaking of his historical tour through the Patristic era, we might wonder: How close is Bavinck’s idea of perfected humanity to the theosis doctrine? Many of the fathers articulated this in the extreme. It has Peter’s language of “partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) as a proof-text and is occasionally expressed in the maxim that, “He became like us (human) that we might become like him (divine).”28

Bavinck’s evaluation of that doctrine is that the Greeks tended toward rationalism and mysticism. As such, “what mattered most was his divine essence, which was communicated in human form and thus received and enjoyed by human beings.”29 Both the clear separation of the two natures and the centrality of Christ’s satisfaction were thereby obscured. More than that, he seems to insist that the Greek, Roman, and Lutheran Christologies had the divine nature becoming human rather than the divine person of the Son.30 In the nineteenth century, as orthodox Christology was eroding, theologies of becoming were more explicit in allowing the divine to undergo change in the Incarnation. 

What all these, and more extreme deviations Bavinck interacts with, miss is that “Only the theistic and trinitarian confession of God’s characteristic essence opens the possibility for the fact of the incarnation.”31 Thus not only does the Trinity explain the organism of that Image in the Garden; but only the Trinity explains the role of the Incarnation in its perfection. The union of God and man, as personal beings in communion, requires “a mediator who himself participates both in the divine and human nature.”32 Now why the Son in particular? Revisiting the idea of unity of the Godhead in all of the works of God, “what is peculiar to the Son” is what makes it fitting that the Word was made flesh. “The Father could not be sent, for he is the first in order … In the divine being [the Son] occupies the place between the Father and the Spirit, is by nature the Son and image of God, was mediator already in the first creation, and as Son could restore us to our position as children of God.”33 So the whole Trinity is causal in the incarnation in efficiency and end, yet it is fitting for the Son alone in matter and form. 

Two paradoxes are implied by this doctrine that a theologian as profound as Bavinck could not avoid. The incarnation makes us wonder whether God changed to “become” flesh and whether God was “bound” to send his Son given the eternal decree.

As to the first, the incarnation is no more problematic than creation as a whole. If the creation of anything ad extra implies no change in God (that is, all ontological changes occur in the effects) then the same holds for the human nature of the Son. And Bavinck goes further in making any creation a possibility on the ground of the eternal generation of the Son.34 As to the second conundrum, the divine decree and essence are inseparable, so both are as immutable as they are eternal. This implies that all that is in the divine decree is necessarily the case; and that further seems to imply that it would be impossible for God to have done otherwise. Although I think there are additional good responses, Bavinck’s focus is certainly intriguing: “it is rooted in the free and conscious consultation of the three persons. It is a personal, not a natural work … it does not rest in the essence of God but in the person.”35

The communicability of God is treated as an attribute worthy of future inquiry. Because of the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, it follows that God can affect creation, revelation, and incarnation. All of these are fundamentally communicative acts of the divine.36 Only the Trinitarian view of God can explain such effects and it is the attribute of divine communicability that is specifically in view. This is perhaps the most underrated of Bavinck’s insights. Christ as the epistemological center—the revelatory center—is often discussed by theologians, but in the communicability of the triune God there is an eternal rationale for its necessity in creation. 

Incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, humiliation and exaltation, all say something about Christ’s relationship to the original and future image of God. Saving grace is always grace perfecting nature. It neither repudiates nor resets the original image. It restores: not to the original static position, but to the more dynamic, final perfection originally set in motion. We will leave aside the false premises of Rome and Anabaptists with regard to whether Mary could have sin or Christ could partake in the Adamic nature. Bavinck is thorough enough in correcting these. What our attention turns to is the organic-perfecting implications of Christ assuming “not only a true but also a complete human nature.”37

Orthodoxy speaks of Christ being fully (or truly) human, and that he is. But what if Christ alone is fully human and the rest of us are still becoming?

Whatever is essential to the idea of Man, in the divine decree, must include that which is final; and of the final, that which is intellectual and moral, that which is spiritual and bodily, that which is individual and communal. Again, whatever is essential is also now fallen. So, as many of the Fathers insisted, Bavinck echoes, “For whatever is unassumable is incurable.”38 If it was designed for restoration, then it was purchased in redemption.

On the other hand, what is united to the divine person is not a separate human person, as in Nestorianism. This is crucial for the believer’s mystical union with God in Christ:

“this union can only be conceived as a union of the person of the Son with an impersonal human nature. For if the human nature in Christ had its own personal existence, no union other than a moral one would have been possible … His work did not consist in bringing back to communion with God the one individual person with whom he united himself; on the contrary, his assignment was to assume the seed of Abraham, to be head of a new humanity and the firstborn of many brothers.”39

The way that this Man functions in the covenant makes it impossible that Christ is simply the “Ideal Man” in the Platonic sense of man’s form. He must be particular to be Head. And yet Bavinck leans on Aquinas to say that the “human nature of Christ must be considered as though it were a kind of organ of the divine nature.”40 How does this escape Apollinarianism or Monothelitism? 

Christ’s knowledge as human is called “infused” and “acquired,” himself perfecting and being perfected. It is both divine gift and real human act. “The human consciousness in him, though having the same subject as the divine consciousness, only to a small degree knew that subject, that ‘I,’ indeed knew it as a whole but not exhaustively.”41 Bavinck then shows how our own knowledge as and of ourselves is a faint yet fitting analogy of this. 

To channel Mattson again, eschatology is Christological.42 Let us consider final man as an individual and mankind as a community. In the first place, Christ is the perfection of the man created “in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.”43 Aside from the intellectual and volitional dimension, there is also a legal and moral dimension; but both destined to be fulfilled in One far greater than Adam: “Remember further that Christ not only acquired what Adam lost but also what Adam, in the way of obedience, would have gained.”44 Nor could the restoration of the moral creature have been otherwise. Christ’s sinlessness was not simply coincidental with either his mission or the Gospel accounts. It follows from his morally perfect divine person.

There is no contradiction between Christ’s inability to sin and his human perfectibility that learned obedience. Since the former flows from his divine nature and thus guarantees the latter in his humanity. Bavinck diagnoses our inability to grasp this as either the Nestorian starting point with the human per se or the modern starting point of moral development through autonomous will.45 Goodness in the human Christ, like knowledge, is both infused and acquired. 

The fountain of merit flows from Christ alone, through the channel of the covenant of grace. In the Reformed tradition, the high Christology and distinctive doctrines like active obedience went together. The Son assumed human nature so that human nature could be and do all that God designed. How we draw the line between humiliation and exaltation is also crucial. The humiliation of Christ does not consist in his being man as such, but only in assuming whatever is in the imperfected state. With the resurrection and ascension, he is exalted man.46 In one sense he is perfecting man; in another sense he already has. 

In the second place, eschatology is Christological in the perfection of communal man. We can see this in proper definition of the kingdom. Liberal theology was increasingly envisioning a kingdom without consulting its true King. In correcting this, Bavinck also speaks in the language of the biblical theologians, that the kingdom “is realized in two sweeping moments,”47 what we today shorthand as the “already / not yet.” “The kingdom of God is the sum of all spiritual and natural benefits,”48 but the order matters. If grace is perfecting a fallen nature, then by no means can the orders of creation heal themselves apart from the work of the King.  

The relationship of religion to culture, or of the inner man to the outer world, is central to Bavinck’s thinking here. The heart of the worshiper (or idolater) is primal in this relationship.49 The parade of alternative theories of the atonement landed finally in Ritschl and his school making the cross into moralism. When the optimism of modern culture faded, such a humanistic gospel was blamed and the choices are either total unbelief or a return to the orthodoxy of the historic church.

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1. RD, II:425

2. RD, I:344

3. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny, 4

4. RD, III:56-59

5. RD, II:512-520, 536-38; III:49-53

6. RD, II:532, 33

7. RD, II:554-55.

8. Andreas Osiander becomes the focal point of this teaching earlier in the Reformed Dogmatics, probably because he was Calvin’s foil in this controversy - cf. Institutes, I:15.3; II:12.5-7 - but Bavinck later provides an extensive list of those who held this view, including Duns Scotus, Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, Pighius, and Socinus: RD, III:278

9. RD, II:560

10. RD, III:278

11. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 115

12. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 125

13. RD, II:542

14. RD, II:545-48

15. RD, III:67

16. RD, II:564

17. RD, II:572

18. RD, II:573

19. RD, II:568

20. cf. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny, 110

21. RD, II:576-77

22. RD, II:577

23. RD, III:88

24. RD, III:278; cf. I:587

25. Proverbs 8:22, 1 Corinthians 1:24, Colossians 2:3

26. John 1:1, 1 John 1:1, Revelation 19:13

27. RD, II:425

28. This quotation is attributed both to Irenaeus, Against Heresies, and Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3

29. RD, III:255

30. RD, III:259

31. RD, III:275

32. RD, III:275

33. RD, III:276

34. RD, III:277

35. RD, III:276, 77

36. RD, III:278; cf. 281

37. RD, III:297

38. RD, III:298

39. RD, III:305

40. RD, III:307

41. RD, III:312

42. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny, 105

43. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q.10

44. RD, II:543; cf. 573; III:313

45. RD, III:313-14

46. RD, III:310

47. RD, III:248

48. RD, III:247

49. RD, III:327-28