Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics: Experience Necessary

We’ve paused to consider Bavinck’s discussion of eschatology as prologue to the incarnation. Its pretty serious stuff. It takes over the OT function of prophecy and recasts it according to fulfillment then sends it out into the world as the kingdom. How the kingdom looks depends on how one views the incarnation: they are inseparably linked. Through a careful discussion of modernist Christology Bavinck warns us against dividing up the kingdom by separating the historical Christ from the mystical Christ from the Synoptic Christ all the way down to the real Christ. We need to proceed with caution, says Bavinck, for this is not a fun academic puzzle with good grades and prizes: this is a battle of concepts, not words.

The incarnation of Christ has been a debate since the apostolic era. The subject is endless due to its very premise: the infinite God of the universe became a finite human being, how? Scholastics following John of Damascus attribute the divine nature occupying the human as heat does iron: it animates the human nature allowing it to participate in divine wisdom, power and glory. Lutherans differ a little, but the Reformed are looking to something with a more consistent explanation.

The unity of Christ’s divine and human nature is maintained rigorously, Bavinck adds, by the rule, “the finite is not capable of [containing] the infinite.” This explains the purely human development of Christ and a real distinction between his humiliation and exaltation. Accordingly, this explanation of the incarnation never falls back on the problem of the divine nature which tends to suffer the most risk in the mind as unbelievable. Between Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Arians, and Chalcedon, many good people suffered from the how-did-he game: If he’s God (starts every question) how did he get tired and hungry? How did he suffer and die? How did he perform miracles? It’s a road to nowhere. So the Reformed stressed that it was the person of the Son who became flesh- not the substance [the underlying reality] but the subsistence [the particular being] of the Son assumed human nature. This idea of Christ, though with a sharper distinction between the natures, is unalterable, yet the “conscious personal life of Christ” stands out in its brightest and most glorious hues. There is however a problem.

Not everyone appreciates the boundaries of the Chalcedon symbol. There were other traditions that followed the mess of folk religion under the umbrella term Gnosticism, and the ‘old Ebionitism’ which inform everything from mysticism to rationalism. Bavinck’s analysis of modern Christology advanced by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl speaks right into the latest chapters of the quest for the historical Jesus, the new perspective on Paul, and the postmodern fall out of ethical metanarratives in history. Add the credit crisis and you have everything. But we are concerned with Christ. If he is an ordinary person only, who nonetheless founded the kingdom as the highest form of ethical teaching in history, the kingdom is then a moral experience and a personal experience started by Christ’s amazing knowledge of God (Harnack). Worse than a kind of Christianity on autopilot, it created a (false) dichotomy between the historical and apostolic Christ, leading people down a reductionist path to a mere human being.

Supposing it’s all a works-based righteousness it would be false to pray, ‘Thine is the kingdom.’ Christ’s teaching and not his person become the kingdom, and is subject to the subjects. It strips away New Testament unity, the resurrection, his mediatorial office, and ends in a variety of religious feelings. Some say, that’s it! But for the moment we will pause again before Bavinck explains the centrality of the incarnation in reformed dogmatics.