Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics: Between Science and Certainty

Is there a vacuum between science and reality? How is the object of God’s self-revelation introduced into the human consciousness? Herman’s answer to that question is depends on how you look at it .

Confronting the certainty of revelation and its scientific expression are three modernist schools of thought; rationalism, and empiricism, and realism. The mind and matter problem in rationalism unsuccessfully leads to an idealism contradictory to life and experience. “It does not,” argues Bavinck, “explain how and why every human automatically and spontaneously gets to ascribing objectivity and independent reality to the things preserved.” At the end of the day rationalism in all its forms and its given starting point cannot produce being.

If idealism cannot make the leap into reality, empiricism denies the immaterial world and leaves us with sheer materialism. Bavinck is noticeably more spirited here in his analysis. Empiricism does not account for immaterial concepts, or those truths not experienced by human beings such as logic and mathematics; and these things have dramatic impact on the material world. Further, in a qualified way, it is entirely unreasonable to demand that the scientist leave her feelings, emotions (passions) at the door before conducting research. These two roads, rationalism and idealism, are flawed just enough to hinder certainty and lead to inaccurate descriptions of life.

So what’s the solution? Bavinck says realism : the starting point for epistemology should be “ordinary daily experience.” For one, philosophy does not create the cognitive faculty; it simply finds it and attempts to explain it. The intellect is acted upon from the sensible world, and once the potential of the intellect (tabula rasa ) is active it immediately starts working according to its own ability (facultas ). What does Bavinck’s realism pay out? It brings us back to the principium essendi . God does not pack innate ideas into us at birth (Plato) or let us pry into idea of his very being (Malebranche), but instead displays his works of creation to the human mind. And there you have it: the groundwork to discuss general revelation. For Bavinck, and for all the sciences, this is not enough; we need the Logos that shines in the world to illuminate our consciousness and lead us from dogma to doxology.