The Kuyper Center Review, Volume 2: Revelation and Common Grace

By John Bowlin

The Abraham Kuyper Center for Public Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary was established in admiration of Kuyper, whose life as pastor, theologian, journalist, and politician remarkably exemplifies how confidence in the truth of a Christian worldview can be expressed in both theory and practice. The chapters in this book were originally presented at the annual Kuyper Conferences of 2009 and 2010 and are inspired by the themes of those conferences: “Philosophy and Revelation: A Celebration of the Centenary of Herman Bavinck’s 1908-1909 Stone Lectures” (2009) and “Common Grace and ‘A Common Word’” (2010).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467434768

Book preview

PART I

PHILOSOPHY AND REVELATION

Revelation and Grace in Herman Bavinck

Jan Veenhof

For me, it is a great honor and joy to be in the same place where Bavinck delivered his Stone Lectures in 1908.¹ At this conference we will learn more about the life and work of Herman Bavinck, who wholeheartedly supported Abraham Kuyper’s attempt to align historic Reformed theology with the mind and culture of his time. However, as regards his personality and style of writing, Bavinck differed considerably from the resolute and imperialistic Kuyper. Bavinck was known for his modesty and his readiness to acknowledge elements of truth in the thoughts of others. A broad and thorough knowledge of history was linked to a great openness for topical matters and new developments. His magnum opus, which bears witness to his enormous erudition, is the best Dogmatics to have been published in the Netherlands in the last 120 years.² Ever since I began to study theology Bavinck has fascinated me, and therefore I take great pleasure in delivering a lecture on the topic of Revelation and Grace in Herman Bavinck.

In Bavinck’s view, the idea and reality of revelation have the highest priority. Religion in the true sense of the word is preconditioned by the existence, the revelation, and the knowability of God. All knowledge of God has its origin in the revelatory action of God. Though revelation entails communication, it has to be borne in mind that God does not primarily communicate a series of supernatural truths, but rather there is essentially revelation of himself, self-revelation. In and through his revelation God comes to humankind and leads humankind into relation with him. Thus, the aim of communication is community. This revelatory action is motivated by love, and this love finds its deepest origin in God’s own Being. The triune Godhead is communion, love itself. To quote Jan Luycken, a Dutch poet from the seventeenth century, God is an eternal giving. And the act of God giving himself continues in what happens in time: in the creation of the universe, in the history of nature and world, and in the history of salvation, which has been enabled by the incarnation. Bavinck therefore sees a connection between generation, creation, incarnation, and revelation.³

In this context it is important to point to the fact that the revelation in time and history originates from creation. In the work of creation through Word and Spirit, says Bavinck, the outline of all subsequent revelations is drawn. Creation is not just a past event but a continuous process. God remains Creator up to the present day. Any reflection on the notion of providence in dogmatic theology has to take revelation into account. Whatever God has done and is still doing in nature and history, in the life of humankind and in the life of individuals, is revelation, specifically self-revelation. It is all handcrafted by the Maker and shows aspects of this Maker.

This revelation can be designated as general revelation because it comprises everything, including culture and science, law-giving and the function of individual conscience, and it is revealed to all human beings. It is remarkable that, according to Bavinck, even the non-Christian religions find their origin in this general revelation, which has to be distinguished from the special revelation.⁴

By distinguishing between general and special revelation, Bavinck follows a longstanding theological tradition. However, he has serious reservations about some concrete versions of this tradition. Later post-Reformation theology was inclined to understand this revelation in a rational way. According to this type of theology, revelation includes veritates, truths, which can be comprehended by reason, and it often speaks about a natural revelation, which is to be completed by a supernatural one. The natural revelation is some sort of Unterbau, or substructure, whereas the supernatural one is the Überbau, or superstructure which must be added to the Unterbau. The classic Roman Catholic theological tradition also distinguishes between natural and supernatural revelation.

Although Bavinck is not always consistent with his own qualifications, it is clear he does not like the duality of natural-supernatural. He prefers the distinction general-special. One reason for this preference concerns his view on the relation between nature and grace, which we will bring up in the following. Another important reason is that, according to Bavinck, revelation, including general revelation, never has the character of things, facts, which have been given and now, in their givenness, are subject to our rational analysis. On the contrary, revelation is always a continuous act of God, through which God searches for humankind. The given revelation can never be isolated from the revealing God, who gives himself.

General revelation is of great significance, but it is not sufficient. Its insufficiency is mainly caused by the sinful state of humankind, which makes it impossible for them to truly understand general revelation as revelation. Special revelation is therefore needed, which basically is a revelation of salvation. This revelation is characterized by verbal communication, much more so than is general revelation. It reveals the plan and the way of redemption and is also instrumental in renewing humanity and the world. This special revelation is realized in the history of salvation. It is special revelation because it is addressed to specific persons and specific communities, the people of Israel and the Christian church. It is concentrated in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This revelation is documented in the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments.

It is not Bavinck’s intention to postulate two completely separate revelations. It is interesting to see that from different angles he speaks about the mutual connections and the cooperation of both in the course of history. The duality should not be interpreted as a dualism since it is based on a unity that is constituted by the gracious will of God to save the world. This comprehensive view on revelation is beautifully expressed in the beginning of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures:

Revelation, while having its center in the Person of Christ, in its periphery extends to the uttermost ends of creation. It does not stand isolated in nature and history, does not resemble an island in the ocean, nor a drop of oil upon water. With the whole of nature, with the whole of history, with the whole of humanity, with the family and society, with science and art it is intimately connected. The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation, the secret of all that exists in all its forms. The deeper science pushes its investigations, the more clearly will it discover that revelation underlies all created being. In every moment of time beats the pulse of eternity; every point in space is filled with the omnipresence of God; the finite is supported by the infinite, all becoming is rooted in being. Together with all created things, that special revelation which comes to us in the Person of Christ is built on these presuppositions. The foundations of creation and redemption are the same. The Logos who became flesh is the same by whom all things were made. The first-born from the dead is also the first-born of every creature. The Son, whom the Father made heir of all things, is the same by whom he also made the worlds. Notwithstanding the separation wrought by sin, there is a progressive approach of God to his creatures. The transcendence does not cease to exist, but becomes an ever deeper immanence. But as a disclosure of the greatness of God’s heart, special revelation far surpasses general revelation, which makes known to us the power of his mind. General revelation leads to special, special revelation points back to general. The one calls for the other, and without it remains imperfect and unintelligible. Together they proclaim the manifold wisdom which God has displayed in creation and redemption.⁵

According to Bavinck, both types of revelation should be considered as acts of grace. But just as he distinguishes between general and special revelation, Bavinck also draws a distinction between general and special grace. The notion of a common or general grace has become well known thanks to Abraham Kuyper’s voluminous monograph. Kuyper presented a very profound historical, theological, and cultural elaboration of this topic by referring to several statements of Calvin. Bavinck had already discussed this motif in his rectoral address in Kampen before Kuyper’s magnum opus was completed. Although Kuyper may have inspired Bavinck to deal with this subject, Bavinck developed his own original thoughts on this topic, which were much briefer than Kuyper’s but fundamentally in the same vein.⁶ Several times Bavinck speaks about common grace in his other publications. While analyzing those passages, I came to the surprising conclusion that the notions of common grace and general revelation basically function as correlata, just like special grace and special revelation.

Grace, both common and special, is the origin and content of revelation, general and special revelation respectively. The dual character that Bavinck attributes to revelation also characterizes grace. The formulations used by Bavinck to designate general revelation re-occur in his description of common grace. Common grace is important because it includes the blessings of providence, the restraining of evil and sin, the impulses to justice in society, cultural and scientific attainments etc., but is not sufficient. Only special grace can break through the power of evil and sin and bestows us with God’s love in forgiveness and renewal.

After this brief description of Bavinck’s view on revelation and grace in their double forms, the question arises how these concepts are related to an aspect of Bavinck’s thinking that may be designated the focal theme of his theology, viz. the relationship between grace and nature.⁷ In the confrontation with Rome Bavinck develops his fundamental thesis that grace does not devalue or oppress nature but restores it. This fundamental thesis he elucidates and elaborates in various ways. It is clear that Bavinck explains and updates an important motif of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. According to Bavinck, the Reformation was not just a reformation of the church, but a new conception of Christianity itself. By harking back to the New Testament, the Reformers, especially Calvin, rehabilitated the first article of Christian faith. The world is just as divine as the church. The world is corrupted by sin, but through grace it is also being saved from sin.

Bavinck opposes the introvert attitude, the suspicion of culture that he observes in circles of his own separated church and in other Christian communities. The grace of Christ is not restricted to the inner life of Christians, but purifies and renews all human life, including the domains of culture, scholarship, education, social structures, and politics. In all these areas Christians are to fulfill a God-given task. Surely, grace is soteriological but the object of the soteria is the whole world. The kingdom of heaven is a treasure, but also a leaven. It is with profound conviction and impressive eloquence that Bavinck pleads for what he describes as the catholicity of Christianity.

It is beyond any doubt that Bavinck, whilst elaborating and formulating this central theme of his theology, primarily focuses on special grace. However, the work of this grace with its universal and catholic perspective presupposes common grace. The world can only be saved and sanctified because it has been sustained by common grace throughout its existence. This illustrates and confirms the interrelationship between special and common grace. Common grace somehow creates the possibility for special grace to work. The same interrelation applies to revelation in its two forms.

So it is justified to state—and here we are using the formulations of Bavinck himself—that what is common is a preparation for that which is special and that, conversely, the special relies on the general.⁸ At the same time it must be noted that there would be no common grace at all if special grace had not entered the world and humankind. The reality of the one is unthinkable without the reality of the other.

It is clear that in this view the providence of God cannot be a neutral action. The providential action of God, which is all-comprehensive, common par excellence, has an intention, a function, which is subservient to the intention and function of special grace. Common and special grace are inseparably linked, not only in their coexistence and cooperation but also in their intention. The goal of both forms is the full realization of the Kingdom of God.

In the preceding we paid much attention to Bavinck’s distinction between common and special because this differentiation plays such an important role in his concept of revelation and grace. It is necessary to consider the background and motivation of Bavinck in connection with this distinction. Bavinck was a deeply religious and pious person yet at the same time a very modern man and scholar. The serious cultural problems of his time lived not only in his head but also in his heart. A crucial issue that marked the philosophical and theological struggles of that time concerned the contrast between supranaturalism and naturalism. In his expositions about revelation and grace Bavinck sought to define his own position in relation to both patterns of thought. It is remarkable that his arguments are not only of an intellectual nature but also reflect an authentic religious concern.

As we have seen, Bavinck accentuates the value and dignity of nature and world as God-given creation, and he thus reacts against the supranaturalism in Roman Catholic theology and in post-Reformation theology and spirituality, especially the typically pietistic branches. The world is not lower than grace and essentially good in spite of corruption by sin. God respects and honors this world, does not annihilate and replace it by another world, but will renew it. Redemption is re-creation. Therefore, the deeds for and in this world may be seen as a religious task. It is important to note that, according to Bavinck, this positive estimation of nature as creation is in every respect fundamental to an appropriate understanding of the Christian doctrine, which has to avoid the failures of the supranaturalistic approach of the old orthodoxy. I mention here as an example of this Bavinck’s treatment of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. He proposed replacing the older mechanical view with an organic concept that integrates the historical, cultural, and psychological factors.

On the other hand, Bavinck opposes naturalistic tendencies in modern philosophy, theology, culture, and science. Bavinck seeks out the representatives of modern thought and tries to convince them that nature and culture, religion and science, history and philosophy are based on divine revelation. The first opposition is predominant in his rectoral addresses in Kampen about catholicity and common grace, whereas in his Stone Lectures and some other publications from his period in Amsterdam he more strongly emphasizes the second opposition. Bavinck’s confrontation with modern theology must be mentioned in this regard. He engaged in an intensive critical dialogue with liberal theology throughout his life. It is interesting that this dialogue is the topic of his last specifically theological publication, viz. his rectoral address in Amsterdam in the year 1911. In this address he pointed to the fact that many liberal theologians put the Christian religion on a par with all the world’s religions. They rejected the unique and absolute character of the Christian faith and considered revelation as a universal religious phenomenon. In their thinking there was no place for supernatural revelation that had specific content. It is remarkable that Bavinck in this confrontation does not offer an apology for the supranatural as a complement of the natural. The term supernatural was too problematic for him to do so, and he used a strictly religious argument instead. He states that it is not possible to base faith in the love of God on the observation of nature. Faith can only be founded on revelation with a specific content, a revelation that comes to man objectively in the person of Christ and subjectively in the testimony of the Spirit.⁹ Bavinck is here fully in line with his statement in the Stone Lectures, which I quoted before: general revelation conveys to us the wisdom and power of God; special revelation brings us in contact with his heart and love.

Thus, whereas Bavinck in the confrontation with supranaturalism emphasizes the interrelationship between the common and the special, he stresses their differences in the second confrontation. Meanwhile, he never sets aside his conviction that the duality is rooted in the unity. A precious testimony in this respect is a letter of Bavinck to his friend, the scholar Snouck Hurgronje. Upon receiving from Bavinck the Dutch edition of the Stone Lectures, Snouck Hurgronje wrote him a letter of thanks that included some comments. In his reply, Bavinck wrote Snouck Hurgronje about the intention of his lectures. My lectures, wrote Bavinck, aimed to clarify the state of humanity and world. Without a higher almighty and gracious power, the world will perish. But thanks to the testimony of the prophets, Christ, and of the apostles we know that such an almighty and gracious will exists. To accept and recognize that as the truth is indeed an act of faith, which the whole world and above all our own heart urge us to do. And, Bavinck argues, accepting that testimony as truth also means recognizing it as revelation from God because otherwise one could not accept it as truth.¹⁰ Bavinck here designates the unity of the two forms in a subtle way by distinguishing between the almighty and gracious will of God. The two adjectives, almighty and gracious, apparently point to general and special revelation, yet both are embedded in the will of God!¹¹

In order to understand Bavinck’s intentions, it is essential to reflect on his background and motivation. However, such a careful consideration does not exclude critical observations. For instance, the terms common, general, and special are not always exactly defined and as such are not in every respect unequivocal. Bavinck wavers between stressing their intimate connection on the one hand and their essential difference on the other, and it is not always clear how both viewpoints can be reconciled. This ambiguity not only surfaces in Bavinck’s analysis of revelation but also in some other contexts. His thinking repeatedly shows a rather equivocal attitude towards positive appraisal and criticism of the same ideas and phenomena. A striking example is his evaluation of the non-Christian religions. As we have seen, Bavinck states that they are part of general revelation and grace, and that they have their positive value and importance. However, he is also of the opinion that none of them has a good view of God and the relation between God and humanity.¹² While this tension is a sign of Bavinck’s fairness, at the same time it is difficult to grasp what he intends by it.

To conclude, in the long run the duality of general and special revelation cannot satisfy us fully. There are problems that urge us to reconsider some of Bavinck’s ideas. Nowadays the whole discussion about natural theology and the possibility of points of contact requires a different approach. The relation between Christian religion and other religions is an urgent issue and too complicated to be treated only through the categories of common and special. Existential questions are raised. Can we also find signs of the love of Christ in our world extra muros ecclesiae? Can the ancient concept of the logos spermatikos¹³ be of any benefit in addition to the newer concept of the cosmic Christ?¹⁴

The designation cosmic Christ reminds us of the impressive and beautiful manner in which Bavinck speaks about Jesus Christ as the mediator, not only of re-creation and redemption but also of creation, e.g. in the paragraph quoted before. In Christ as mediator the dualism and duality comes to a deep unity. This position of Christ may function as an encouraging perspective for any further investigation of the intriguing topics and questions mentioned above.

In our efforts to seek answers Bavinck himself guides us. Although Bavinck does not offer us cut-and-dried solutions, he stimulates us to open our minds and our hearts to consider all aspects of the questions. I am convinced that he serves as an excellent guide in our quest for answers for our own time and situation.

REFERENCES

Bavinck, Herman. 1888. De Katholiciteit van Christendom en Kerk: Rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theologische School te Kampen. Leiden: Donner. Translated as The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church by John Bolt. Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992): 220–51.

———. 1894. De algemeene genade: Rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theologische School te Kampen op 6 December 1894. Kampen: Zalsman. Translated as Common Grace by Raymond C. van Leeuwen. Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 35–65.

———. 1909. The Philosophy of Revelation. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

———. 1911. Modernisme en orthodoxie: Rede gehouden bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Vrije Universiteit op 20 October 1911, pp. 32–34. Kampen: Kok.

———. 2008. Reformed Dogmatics, Vols. I–IV. Edited by John Bolt and translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker.

de Bruijn, J., and G. Harinck, eds. 1999. Een Leidse vriendschap: De briefwisseling tussen Herman Bavinck en Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 1875–1921. Baarn: Ten Have.

Fox, Matthew. 1988. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Hepp, V. 1922. Dr Herman Bavinck. Amsterdam: W. ten Have.

Hoekema, A. A. 1953. Herman Bavinck’s Doctrine of the Covenant. Diss., Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kuyper, A. 1902–1905. De gemeene gratie I–III. Leiden: Donner.

van den Belt, H. 2008. The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology. Leiden: Brill.

van Keulen, D. 2003. Bijbel en dogmatiek: Schriftbeschouwing en schriftgebruik in het dogmatisch werk van A. Kuyper, H. Bavinck, en G. C. Berkouwer. Kampen: Kok.

Veenhof, Jan. 1968. Revelatie en inspiratie: De openbarings- en schriftbeschouwing van Herman Bavinck in vergelijking met die der ethische theologie. Amsterdam: Buijten en Schipperheijn.

———. 2006. Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck. Translated by A. M. Wolters. Sioux City: Dordt College Press.

line

1. This paper was presented at the annual conference of the Abraham Kuyper Center for Public Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, in April 2009. The theme of the conference was: Philosophy and Revelation: a celebration of the centenary of Herman Bavinck’s 1908–9 Stone Lectures. I thank Dr. Alinda Damsma for her willingness to read the text of my address.

2. For a brief description and characterization of the life and work of Bavinck, see John Bolt’s introduction to the first volume of the English edition of Herman Bavinck’s magnum opus Reformed Dogmatics, vols. I–IV, edited by John Bolt and translated by John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008). My analysis in this paper is based mainly on the expositions of revelation in Reformed Dogmatics, vol. I. For more on this topic, see J. Veenhof, Revelatie en inspiratie: De openbarings- en schriftbeschouwing van Herman Bavinck in vergelijking met die der ethische theologie (Amsterdam: Buijten en Schipperheijn, 1968); A. A. Hoekema, Herman Bavinck’s Doctrine of the Covenant, unpublished dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1953. For Bavinck’s view on scripture, its inspiration, authority, and use, see D. van Keulen, Bijbel en dogmatiek: Schriftbeschouwing en schriftgebruik in het dogmatisch werk van A. Kuyper, H. Bavinck en G. C. Berkouwer (Kampen: Kok, 2003); H. van den Belt, Autopistia: The Self-Convincing Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology, Faculty of Theology, Leiden University, 2006, also published with the title The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

3. See Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. II, paragraph 231; vol. III, paragraphs 362 and 363.

4. See Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. I, paragraph 88.

5. The Philosophy of Revelation (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), pp. 27ff.

6. De algemeene genade: Rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theologische School te Kampen op 6 December 1894 (Kampen: Zalsman, 1894); translated as Common Grace by Raymond C. van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 35–65. This address can be regarded as an extension of Bavinck’s earlier rectoral address De Katholiciteit van Christendom en Kerk: Rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theologische School te Kampen (Leiden: Donner, 1888); translated as The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church by John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992): 220–51. Kuyper first published his ideas in his weekly De Heraut (the Herald) in the years 1895–1901. Later these articles were published together in De gemeene gratie I–III (Leiden: Donner, 1902–1905).

7. See Veenhof, Revelatie en inspiratie, pp. 345–65. This part of my book has been translated and published as Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, translated by A. M. Wolters (Sioux City: Dordt College Press, 2006).

8. Bavinck employed the Dutch words voorbereiden and teruggrijpen op.

9. See H. Bavinck, Modernisme en orthodoxie: Rede gehouden bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Vrije Universiteit op 20 October 1911 (Kampen: Kok, 1911), pp. 32–34.

10. The original Dutch version of the correspondence is quoted by V. Hepp in his biography Dr Herman Bavinck (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 1922) and has been published recently in J. de Bruijn and G. Harinck, eds., Een Leidse vriendschap: De briefwisseling tussen Herman Bavinck en Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 1875–1921 (Baarn: Ten Have, 1999), pp. 163–65. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) was a fellow student of Bavinck’s in Leiden. He studied both theology and Semitic philology and became an internationally renowned Arabist. After a lengthy stay in the Dutch East Indies, where he worked as an adviser to the government, he became professor in Leiden in 1907. He befriended Bavinck at the beginning of their student days, and their friendship lasted until Bavinck’s death in 1921. For Bavinck’s own intentions in his Stone Lectures, see the Vorwort in the German translation Philosophie der Offenbarung: Vorlesungen (Stone Lectures) für das Jahr 1908 gehalten in Princeton N.J. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1909). He accentuates there the contemporary relevance of the concept of revelation. According to Bavinck, only the revelation that has been given us in Christianity corresponds with the desires and demands of a coherent worldview.

11. The criticism in the Stone Lectures of monism in its different forms returns in this rectoral address of 1911. Against monism with its opposition to the reality of varieties and contrasts in nature and humankind, Bavinck defends his view as follows: There is certainly a unity, yet it is not found within the world itself, because this unity rests only in God’s will and hand (p. 38).

12. See Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. II, paragraphs 250–259.

13. The pneumatology of Kuyper and Bavinck comes to mind here. Both of them advocate that the Holy Spirit is not only active in salvation and re-creation but also in the cosmos, being the Spiritus Creator.

14. See Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).

Bavinck, Nietzsche, and Secularization

Gordon Graham

I

For most of the twentieth century, the sociology of religion was dominated by the idea of secularization—the thesis that the distinguishing features of modern culture are inhospitable to religion. The consequence, it was held, would be a steady decline in religion wherever modernization got a hold, and it was widely believed that empirical evidence confirming this was everywhere. Generally, the thesis was presented as a purely factual claim that could be greeted either with enthusiasm or with regret. Secularists could welcome it as the end of oppressive superstition and the beginning of human freedom; religionists could lament it as a loss of the sacred and the hollow triumph of humanism. But for the social scientist, it was simply a matter of recording a historical change, albeit a seismic one.

The precise evidential basis of this thesis was never entirely certain. To compare the start and finish of a historical trend requires comparative data about past and present, and good data from periods when people did not gather statistics or conduct social surveys is difficult to obtain. There is the further matter of what exactly this data should be. Statistics on church attendance, religious marriage, burial of the dead and the like, even if we have them, need to be interpreted before they can tell us much about the cultural position of religion. In addition, the precise status of the secularization thesis itself was uncertain. Did it simply describe a widespread, but purely contingent, cultural change, or did it explain in some deeper way why that change was taking place, thereby making it historically irreversible? Once raised, this question revealed that though agreement among social theorists on the facts about religion’s decline might be widespread, there were very deep differences between them about secularization as an explanatory process—and not just its basic mechanisms, but its timing as well. Was the key to be found in the success of science and technology, or increasing prosperity, or the rise of popular democracy? Did it begin with urbanization, industrialization, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859?¹

These important questions did not derail the thesis, however. Rather, they provided topics for further sociological debate, until late in the century. Then, thanks to the growth and spread of Islam, the reassertion of evangelical Christianity in American politics, the rise of New Age spirituality in Europe, the appeal of orthodox Judaism in Israel, the political invocation of Hinduism in India, and the revival of religion in Russia and China in the wake of communism, the thesis suddenly lost almost all its plausibility. It was confronted, on a global scale, with phenomena that it could not accommodate. By 1999 the sociologist Peter Berger, in a collection of essays significantly entitled The Desecularization of the World arrived at this conclusion: the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false … [and] a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.²

Berger adds, I contributed to this literature. I was in good company—most sociologists of religion had similar views, and we had good reasons for holding them. Perhaps so, but despite even the most determined attempts to confine attention to strictly empirical inquiry, the sociological and historical debates about the decline of religion were always intertwined with philosophical arguments between the defenders of religion and the advocates of secularism. The interconnection is easy to understand. If secularization was a fact, this seemed to imply that secularism had history on its side. With the collapse of the supposedly empirical thesis, religion appears in some way to be restored to credibility, and secularism put on the defensive. Though to some extent the tables are indeed turned, this is a matter of associated rhetoric. The case for secularism as the philosophical rejection of religion is not weakened by social trends. In fact the true impact of the demise of the secularization thesis should be seen as a welcome liberation of the underlying philosophical debate between secularism and religion that sociological theorizing tended to disguise. Critical intellectual issues are reopened that appeared to be permanently closed.

Secularism was (or is) the ideology of modernity. The seeming loss of empirical support only means that in post-modernity it has to resume its original and more obviously prophetic role—warning the world about the dangers implied by the return of religion. By the same token, a global increase in religiosity, especially in its more fundamentalist manifestations, does nothing to confirm what protagonists of religion formerly said about spirituality and the human condition. It only means that they come under additional pressure to show that the return of religion is truly a matter of rediscovering something humanly valuable, and not merely lapsing back into a less enlightened past.

Among the issues that are open to discussion once more is that of revelation. In a cultural world where secularism was protected by a belief in secularization and bolstered by the success of natural science, the concept of revealed as opposed to discovered truth seemed wholly outdated. In a world where secularism must once more make its case, however, the question arises whether the abandonment of revealed truth is not amongst its more serious weaknesses. The debate is an ancient one. It concerns the truth or falsity of Protagoras’s slogan: Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

II

Over the course of a year between 1908 and 1909, Herman Bavinck delivered his Stone Lectures on The Philosophy of Revelation at Princeton. Reading them more than one hundred years after they were delivered, their relevance to contemporary concerns is striking. What makes this relevance all the more remarkable, however, is the fact that they do not have a modern feel about them. In part this is a matter of language. The translation from Dutch into English in the versions still available was made soon after the lectures were delivered, and consequently its literary style has an old-fashioned resonance. Taken sentence by sentence, this is not the way people would express themselves nowadays. No doubt the archaisms could be eliminated in a more modern translation, but even then the lectures would retain some indelible marks of their time.

Chief among these are the debating partners with whom Bavinck was engaged. Several intellectuals of considerable standing in the period figure prominently in his text. For the most part they are now almost unknown, or at best very distant cultural memories. For instance, Stanley Hall the educational psychologist and sometime President of Clark University is frequently cited. So too is Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who was instrumental in making Darwin’s theory of evolution widely known. Neither is a thinker much discussed today or even regarded as an author of consequence. Haeckel’s History of Creation has been out of print since 1921 and Hall’s Aspects of Child Life and Education is available only in a literary heritage reprint. For Bavinck, Hall and Haeckel were powerful cultural voices with whom it was essential to contend; for us they are antique figures of questionable merit and little relevance.

And yet, despite dated language and intellectual sparring partners long since relegated to intellectual history, it is not difficult to detect their relevance to the post-secularization debate between secularism and religion. While Hall and Haeckel have largely receded into the history of ideas, Bavinck does give sustained attention to issues that figure prominently in contemporary culture. Amongst other things, these include the relation of evolutionary biology to biblical religion, the relevance of anthropology and paleontology to human self-understanding, the epistemological credentials of science, the foundations of morality, the nature of historical understanding, and the tendency for confessional theology to be displaced by the study of religion. These are all topics at the forefront of current intellectual debates. The spectacular publishing successes of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, together with the media coverage and public debates they prompted, are powerful evidence of the extent to which biology is thought to hold the key to deciding what is and what is not credible in religion. The investigations of ethnologists and primatologists, discussed most notably in Frans de Waal’s influential book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, have reawakened philosophical hopes of a purely naturalistic explanation of the role of fundamental values in the conduct of personal and social life. Environmentalism has prompted critical questions about the adequacy of humanistic attitudes to the natural world, while multiculturalism has renewed anxieties about the epistemological status and social acceptability of confessional theology. Bavinck may address interlocutors whose names mean nothing to us, but his responses to them seem easily transferable to imaginary interlocutors a century on, and without much loss of force or relevance. Indeed it can plausibly be contended that their emergence from the past gives them extra interest in the context of contemporary debates on the same topics, since some of these—notably the science versus religion debate—have grown stale and tiresome. Bavinck’s lectures carry the promise of lines of thought that are new to us, and for this reason intriguing and productive.

Still, this question remains. Can it be the case that thoughts about the subject of revelation that were based on a Reformed theology ignorant of genetics, global communication, sexual liberation, and ecology, can speak to a world in which all these are key? The answer, I shall suggest, lies in Bavinck’s implicit intellectual context, a context which he makes explicit only from time to time, but which, thanks to the renewed debate between secularism and religion, is our context too. Moreover, the debate is likely to be better than it currently is if we return to the intellectual world Bavinck was addressing. David Bentley Hart effectively makes this point in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Best known among these fashionable enemies are the popular critics of religion—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—whom Hart contrasts very unfavorably with their predecessors.

The extraordinary scientific, philosophical and political ferment of the nineteenth century provided Christianity with enemies of unparalleled passion and visionary intensity. The greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit.… By comparison … today’s gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.³

Hart singles out Nietzsche as the greatest of Christianity’s critics. In Bavinck’s Philosophy of Revelation—undoubtedly a sober and demanding investigation of what Christianity is—there are just four or five express references to Nietzsche. Yet his spirit hovers over the whole text, and especially the chapter entitled Revelation and Culture (which was not in fact one of the Stone Lectures). It might seem odd and even paradoxical to ally a convinced exponent of Protestant orthodoxy with Christianity’s fiercest critic—the man who could declare the Christian conception of God to be one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth⁴ and that Christianity has been up to now mankind’s greatest misfortune.⁵ Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that Bavinck’s knowledge of Nietzsche was limited. Yet there is a sense, which I hope to explain, in which Bavinck clearly shares Nietzsche’s analysis of just what the relation is between Christian faith and a secular culture that is strongly inclined to reject it.

III

Nietzsche died less than a decade before Bavinck delivered his lectures, and not long after, his sister Elizabeth, though a devoted and effective literary executor of his work, committed (in the words of Gilles Deleuze) the highest treason to her brother’s ideas when she tried to place Nietzsche in the service of national socialism.⁶ This had a profoundly distorting effect on his reputation and reception. It is true that his conception of the Übermensch may in part have lent itself to this distortion, yet the association with Nazism (which did not come to power until more than thirty years after his death) caused a philosopher of great originality and insight to be widely reviled and discounted by several generations of thinkers. This great change in status from eccentric genius to racist pariah is reflected in the sharp contrast between Max Weber’s careful pre-war discussion (in The Social Psychology of the World Religions, 1922) of Nietzsche’s brilliant essay on the theory of resentment in the psychology of religion, and the superficial treatment he received in Bertrand Russell’s post-war History of