By itself, therefore, it need not surprise us in the least that Scripture has at all times encountered contradiction and opposition. Christ bore a cross, and the servant [Scripture] is not greater than its master. Scripture is the handmaiden of Christ. It shares in his defamation and arouses the hostility of sinful humanity. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
Tag: Revelation
The Dogmatician: No One Rejects the Scriptures for Intellectual Reasons
Whether revelation is accepted or not is decided by our whole life-and-worldview. Decisive here is not historical criticism but self-criticism, not science but faith, not the head but the heart. Also obduracy comes out of the heart (cf. Mark 7:22). Our thinking is rooted in our being. ‘What you do follows from what you are’ (Operari sequitur esse—Schopenhauer). ‘Your choice of philosophy depends on the person you are. Our ideology is often only the history of our heart’ (Fichte). —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: God’s Book that Cannot but Be Read
No one escapes the power of general revelation. Religion belongs to the essence of a human. The idea and existence of God, the spiritual independence and eternal destiny of the world, the moral world order and its ultimate triumph—all these are problems that never cease to engage the human mind. Metaphysical need cannot be suppressed. Philosophy perennially seeks to satisfy that need. It is general revelation that keeps that need alive. It keeps human beings from degrading themselves into animals. It binds them to a supersensible world. It maintains in them the awareness that they have been created in God’s image and can only find rest in God. General revelation preserves humankind in order that it can be found and healed by Christ and until it is. To that extent natural theology used to be correctly denominated a “preamble of faith,” a divine preparation and education for Christianity. General revelation is the foundation on which special revelation builds itself up. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: Revelation Is the Revelation concerning Revelation
A true concept of revelation can be derived only from revelation itself. If no revelation ever took place, all reflection on the concept is futile. If, however, revelation is a fact, it and it alone—must furnish us the concept and indicate to us the criterion we have to apply in our study of religions and revelations. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: The Bread Science Can’t Engineer
And, further, the numerous manifestations of superstition evident today demonstrate that humankind cannot live by the bread of science alone but need every word that comes from the mouth of God. Indeed, science does not tell us what God is or what humanity is; it leaves us ignorant of the origin, essence, and goal of things. It can therefore never replace religion, nor ever compensate for its loss. —Herman Bavink, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: God Is Not Indifferent to Anything
Religious indifferentism assumes that it is immaterial to God how he is served. It deprives him of the right to determine the manner of his service; in any case it postulates that God has not prescribed the manner of his service. …Factually and objectively, however, nothing is indifferent, neither in nature, nor in the state, nor in science and art. All things, even the most humble, have their specific place and meaning in the context of the whole. Human beings are indifferent only to what they do not, or do not sufficiently, know: they automatically assess and appreciate what they do know. God, who knows all things, is not indifferent to anything. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: No Revelation Means No Religion
There is no religion without revelation. Scripture too derives subjective religion from revelation (Heb.1:1). It is, for that matter, perfectly natural that religion and revelation consistently go together and are most intimately connected. For if religion really contains a doctrine of God and of his service, it is self-evident that God alone has the right and ability to say who he is and how he wants to be served. “It is not the part of men to establish and shape the worship of God, but, having been handed down by God, it is for them to receive and maintain.”* Religious indifferentism assumes that it is immaterial to God how he is served. It deprives him of the right to determine the manner of his service; in any case it postulates that God has not prescribed the manner of his service. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
*Helvetic Confession
The Dogmatician: Unperturbable Happiness
The big question in religion is always: what must I do to be saved? In religion, what people pursue is something no lust or sensual pleasure, no science or art, no human or angel, something not even the whole world can give them: unperturbable happiness, eternal life, communion with God. But if this is the case, then again revelation is absolutely necessary; revelation, then, has to be the foundation of religion. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: The Target, the Arrow, and the Archer of Truth
The aim of theology, after all, can be no other than that the rational creature know God and, knowing him, glorify God (Prov. 16:4; Rom. 11:36; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 3:17). It is his good pleasure to be known by human beings (Matt. 11:25, 26). The object of God’s self-revelation, accordingly, is to introduce his knowledge into the human consciousness and through it again to set the stage for the glorification of God himself. But that divine self-revelation, then, cannot end outside of, before, or in the proximity of human beings but must reach into human beings themselves. In other words, revelation cannot be external only but must also be internal. For that reason a distinction used to be made between the external and the internal principle of knowing, the external and the internal word, revelation and illumination, the working of God’s Word and the working of his Spirit. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
The Dogmatician: We Know God because God knows God.
No knowledge of God is possible except that which proceeds from and by God (Matt. 11:27; 1 Cor. 2:10ff). …His self-knowledge and self-consciousness is the source (principium essendi) of our knowledge of him. Without the divine self-consciousness, there is no knowledge of God in his creatures. Pantheism is the death of theology. 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-consciously, and genuinely. —Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
No Other Boast 