Part 1 of The “Organic-Perfecting” Key to Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics

Herman Bavinck was a theologian at the crossroads of Reformed orthodoxy and late Modernity. We see this in his own sense of calling. He chose to be part of a church that seceded from a secularizing tradition and yet he chose to study at Leiden so as to be exposed to the depths of modern thought. For decades there were scholars who saw this as an enigma: the manifestation of “two Bavincks.”1 His most influential work was the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, which has only in recent years been fully translated into English. Its structure tells us something very crucial about the essence of his theology.

Note that, following the Prolegomena (Volume 1), the next three volumes have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as their heads: God and Creation (Volume 2), Sin and Salvation in Christ (Volume 3), and Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Volume 4). So we can say that the doctrine of the Trinity is structurally foundational to all that Bavinck thought. But there are two other ideas that are less obvious to the newcomer to Bavinck.

These two elements have been drawn out in recent years by James Eglinton and Brian Mattson. The first is what Eglinton calls the “organic motif,”2 since Bavinck thought and wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century when so much of theoretical thought was either following closely behind the metaphors of the evolutionary narrative, or at least borrowing analogies from it. Eglinton’s book, Trinity and Organism, traces this out. The second of these ideas is more familiar to those who have at least received doses of Bavinck’s thought. In a maxim—grace restores nature. It is often said that while for Aquinas grace perfects nature, for Bavinck it merely restores it. I do not think that is a fair assessment of Bavinck. The two ideas complementary when we think it through. At any rate, Mattson’s book Restored to Our Dignity explores Bavinck’s teleological anthropology along these lines: “Anthropology requires eschatology.”3

If we put all this together, what we gather from reading through the Reformed Dogmatics is that all created things will display an organic-perfecting nature because of the nature and purpose of the triune God.

We could even conceive of this as “Trinitarian metaphysics” because of how Bavinck himself hinted at restoring a “metaphysical” theology; and the flow of Bavinck’s thought is occupied in mapping out the nature of the largest things in created reality on the basis of the nature of the triune God. We can even begin to see this through the concepts of First and Final causality. So it is to the doctrine of God that we turn to first. This is found in Volume 2 of the Reformed Dogmatics.  

The Trinitarian Foundation to the Organic-Perfecting World

We will have to leave aside much of the nuance in Bavinck’s doctrine of the Trinity. His expression of how the ontological and economic Trinity relate stands in the same stream of the dominant Western thought since Augustine. Two things will concern us instead: the general metaphysics of his whole theology proper and the economy of the Trinity in its relation to the world. It is both unity and diversity in the Trinity that Bavinck is arguing as a necessary cause for the unity and diversity in the world.4 Other “theistic” constructs do not sufficiently ground creation, redemption, and restoration. 

In light of recent discussions about “theological mutualism,” even among Reformed theologians, we would do well to ask whether Bavinck succeeds, at each point, in clearly distinguishing the cause in the divine life (ad intra) and his effects (ad extra). My own conclusion is that he does. One reason why this may be relevant when reading Bavinck is that, while he calls us back to metaphysics in theology, he nonetheless handles natural theology, at least on the surface, in a way similar to Barth and Van Til. It may be that this gets to the core of what places Bavinck on the “frontier” between Reformed Scholastics and the more immanent foundations of the New Calvinism.

There is indeed a legitimate natural theology, he maintains, but it is the Spirit and Word that legitimize it.5 At least we can say that Bavinck is consistent on this point, even if the language provides a regrettable foundation for Van Til’s further banishment of natural theology.6 What matters here is that Bavinck calls for a return to metaphysics in our dogmatic thinking. I contend that this robust, classical idea of the ontological Trinity is what grounds the relationship between the economic Trinity and creation.

He says,

“In God there cannot be anything that is something other or less than God. There is nothing intermediate or transitional between the Creator and the creature.”7

Thus Bavinck is solid in resisting the kind of theistic personalism that makes sense of God’s relational immanence by imagining a third ontological category between eternal Being and temporal becoming: some relational nature in God separate from his ontological nature. 

We must keep in mind those two key ideas of the “organic motif” and “eschatological anthropology.” With the help of these two dissertations on Bavinck’s thought, we may speak in terms of the first cause and end cause of all created reality. We may even take an additional step: If “Trinity ad intra leads to organism ad extra,”8 so that we have a full “Trinitarian creational ontology,”9 then what follows is that all created things possess an organic-perfecting nature flowing from, through, and back to the triune God. The concise logic of Romans 11:36 pervades the structure and content of the four volumes. 

A few early misgivings can be easily answered. First, the point is not that God is organic. Rather, all else is organic because of him. But God is Triune, to which the nature of all organisms conform. Second, though Bavinck mentions a handful of triads, the “vestiges (or traces) of the Trinity”10 throughout creation need only show diversity in unity: not necessarily trinities. Third, analogies of the Trinity in the world are just that: analogies. They are not identities. So this is consistent with ectypal, as opposed to archetypal, theology. The “Trinity is wholly unlike anything else, but everything else is like the Trinity.”11

“Granted, all God’s outward works (opera ad extra) are common to the three persons. ‘God’s works ad extra are indivisible, though the order and distinction of the persons is preserved.”12

In other words, what is proper to the divine persons may be divided into the set of eternal relational distinctions (Father, Son, Spirit) and the set of economic role distinctions (initiating, operating, perfecting13). The three are one First Cause in relation to the world of effects, but still all things “proceed from the Father, are accomplished by the Son, and are completed in the Holy Spirit.”14 It is in the New Testament revelations of the Son’s incarnation and the Spirit’s outpouring that we more clearly see the divine economy shaping the new world out of the old, but it is crucial that the Son and Spirit “are not viewed as secondary forces.”15 For Bavinck the Incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit have their “archetype”16 in the eternal generation and procession; so that the economic Trinity “mirrored”17 the ontological.

Bavinck sees the creation, as a whole, as an organism. By this he means a “unity … in which all the parts are connected with each other and influence each other reciprocally.”18 Theology itself is an organism, always expanding out of the information revealed from the ultimate Life.

Eglinton provides examples: “dogmatics and ethics ‘are related members of a single organism’, the cosmos is an ‘organism’, Christ is the ‘organic’ centre of revelation, the visible church is an ‘organism’, Scripture itself is an ‘organism’ and its inspiration is ‘organic’ and so forth.”19

God’s unity entails the unity of the world, and also of our mind’s reflection upon it. In this way worldview thinking is essential to theology. It is not something that may be reduced to the fact that Enlightenment Germans invented the word. Each item—Scripture, man, Christ, church—must be considered in light of how they, together, speak of their Trinitarian source and end. 

As ontology concerns being as such, we note that the world also is. Thus one’s metaphysics encompasses what kind of a world this is. That brings us to our last piece of Bavinck’s foundation: nature and grace. These two form a singular redemptive-history that avoids all species of unbiblical dualisms20 as well as all forms of monism.

Throughout the Reformed Dogmatics we are steered clear of the extremes of deism and pantheism. Denial of the ontological Trinity leads to pantheism; denial of the economic Trinity leads to deism. These are two sides to the same coin for Bavinck.

An organic account demands that nature and grace are united in one created reality. Grace does not simply restore nature in the end, but perfects it. Sometimes he uses the word “re-formation”21 for this perfection. He does this to distinguish the “perfection” he has in mind from a mere “paradise restored.” That means that the sum total of the organisms comprising the whole creation becomes a maximally greater world than the original.

Bavinck’s Organic-Perfecting Doctrine of Scripture

What does it mean that the Scriptures are an “organic-perfecting” Word? Bavinck had what we might call a dynamic view of inspiration. The divine and human authorship form a unity, yet the divine precedes. There is an analogy to the Incarnation here, though it cannot be pressed too far. On the other hand there is something more unique about the kind of inspiration that Bavinck had in mind. It is both God-breathed and God-breathing.

The latter is not meant so as to contradict biblical sufficiency. It is simply that its attribute of divine inspiration is true not only of the animation of Scripture’s original human writers but that there is also an ongoing quality that drives its intended audience toward their end. In the Word, the divine condescends in the human so that the human may participate in the divine. Evangelicals might want to call the one “inspiration” and the other “illumination” to avoid confusion, but one can see clearly enough what Bavinck is doing. He offers descriptions which seem identical to the general Evangelical doctrine:

“Divine inspiration is above all God speaking to us through the prophets and apostles, so that their word is the word of God. What has been written is ‘that which has been spoken by God’.”22

However, Scripture is also the “organic principle, the seed, the root, out of which the plant of dogmatics grows.”23 This is not to be confused with the view of Newman, where Scripture was like a seed and tradition the progressing organism. The reason that these cannot mean the same thing is that Newman was also assuming that both Scripture and tradition are equal as sources, whereas Bavinck, while speaking of Scripture, church, and Christian consciousness as “sources,”24 unequivocally held the Bible over the other two. Although Bavinck criticized much post-Reformation dogmatics for entertaining a too mechanistic view of Scripture.25 

Three aspects of the human side of this doctrine must be grasped. Incarnation, humiliation, and servant form, are all attributes of the divinely inspired human words that have obvious analogies to the Incarnation of the Word: the God-Man.

“But just as Christ’s human nature, however weak and lowly, remained free from sin, so also Scripture is ‘conceived without defect or stain’; totally human in all its parts but also divine in all its parts.”26

We could summarize his organic-perfecting doctrine of Scripture in this way. Because divine inspiration is “a permanent attribute of Scripture,” therefore “Scripture is the servant form of revelation.”27 The Word “serves” man in the progress of the church as an organism. In order to reach God’s chief end of glorifying himself in all creation, special revelation “must strive to the end of re-creating the whole person after God’s image.”28 Short of this transformation of the whole man, there is either mere intellectualism, moralism, or mysticism, depending on which faculty is inflated at the expense of the others.

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1. James P. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: T & T Clark, 2012, 28-33

2. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 27

3. Brian G. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny: Eschatology and the Image of God in Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 4

4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (hereafter RD), II:422, 436

5. So as to not get bogged down in the subject, my assessment of Bavinck’s doctrine of natural theology may be summarized in this way: (1) He is consistent at least insofar as he coherently casts natural theology as a legitimate exercise (a) for the regenerate believer and (b) guided by Scripture; yet (2) he is still inconsistent in the same way Van Til would be, yet to a lesser extent, by calling “general revelation” by that name in comparing the two forms of revelation, and then shifting back to a dichotomy between “revelation” (meaning strictly special revelation) as opposed to “reason” (meaning strictly what Van Til would come to mean by autonomous reason): I:87, 105-108; II:492. Bavinck does not seem reductionistic and sectarian about this, as was Van Til, so it does not tend to detract from the overall brilliance of the Reformed Dogmatics.

6. cf. Laurence O’Donnell, Bavinck’s Bug’ or ‘Van Tilian’ Hypochondria?

7. RD, II:332

8. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 80

9. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny, 56

10. cf. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 83

11. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 89

12. RD, II:318

13. These three words he seems to use with approval from Basil’s, On the Spirit; RD, II.319

14. RD, II:319

15. RD, II:421

16. RD, II:320

17. RD, II:318

18. RD, II:436

19. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 101

20. I would categorize these as (1) equal-and-opposite dualism where there is more than one ultimate being, and (2) segregated dualism, where the two realities lose relationship. Deism commits to the latter by God removing himself from the picture at the beginning. It seems to me that Bavinck would recognize this classification.

21. RD, IV:720

22. RD, I:429

23. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 158

24. RD, I:61, 85, 86

25. cf. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 165

26. RD, I:435

27. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 172, 73

28. RD, I:346