Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics: The End of Certainty

I delivered a paper on Bavinck this year at the ETS annual meeting in New Orleans. It marked a full year spent in Bavinck’s theology. As our series on Bavinck comes to a close, we end on a personal note: Bavinck’s theology of certainty in the face of personal uncertainty and the trial of personal faith.

When the economy took a nose dive early last year so did we. I found myself out of work and our future plans decidedly uncertain. You can see where this is going. One of the greatest things about Christianity is its hope and encouragement when things look bleak. And it’s far too easy to criticize the message of the Gospel as a ‘hope for the best’ pat answer when life doesn’t go your way. This is a little different. The question I was facing was not so much ‘why is God putting me through this rough patch’ but rather, ‘do I really know what it means that God has spoken, sin notwithstanding?’ I began comparing my circumstances and my faith like so many believing Christians to “find God” somewhere in the mix. The meaning of ‘find God’ was what most professing Christians usually mean in the broad sense: finding the way out of the rough and striding on down the fairway. But I found something a little different.

For the true Christian, writes Bavinck, faith precedes certainty. Faith is never a shot in the dark. Faith is not irrational or random, or floating around in the air. One must first say ‘I believe’ before they can say ‘I understand.’ The object of faith is God: Knowing God as God. How is Bavinck so confident of this? so dogmatic about it? God’s revelation has permeated the world as deeply and as far reaching as sin has marred and obscured it. In other words the question for Bavinck is never ‘does God exist?’ but rather, ‘what is my relationship to him?’

I had wrestled with these questions in the classroom and now I was wrestling with them at home, at church, in the market place, and in my heart of hearts as well. Was I praying for deliverance for the sake of my career and place in the world, or was I praying to know God the redeemer and truly find his character in my actions and my attitude? Bavinck says true faith is always tested. Psalm 107 confirms it.

The contrast with faith and certainty is not always reason and ambiguity. These short meditations over the last attempted to cover a lot of the core content in Bavinck’s theology in the areas of faith, certainty, scripture, forgiveness of sin in Christ, and growth in faith and praise to God. I hope that in many ways the content of these articles last year was not the result of an intellectual exercise for its own sake, but is deeply concerned with contrasts: the contrast of faith and action, belief and understanding, theology and doxology, the stuff of life (Eph. 2:10).