by Joshua Shaw

In the beginning of Pascal’s Pensées, Part I, Chapter I (online here), there is the famous distinction between those subjects whose material is contained entirely in books, and so dependent entirely upon authority, and those subjects whose material (the corporeal world) is dependent upon sense perception (i.e., experience) and reason (paraphrasing the first four paragraphs). In the latter category he includes what we would call the ‘the hard sciences,’ viz., mathematics, physics, medicine, and so on, as well as music and architecture; in the former he includes the humanities, viz., history, language, theology, and geography.

What has held up scientific progress down to his time, according to Pascal, was the confusion of revelation and reading, God’s work of creation with man’s work of interpretation and thus to misapprehend the nature of both:

The respect we have for antiquity, in matters in which it should have the least weight, it carried to such a degree at the present day, that we make oracles of all its thoughts, and mysteries of its obscurities. (Part I, Ch. 1, 39)

Because, for example, a disproportionate amount of energy was exerted on understanding Galen’s thoughts about medicine and the human body, rather than studying the body itself, much exertion was in vain and the progress of medicine faltered.

Similarly, Herman Bavinck, who has been introduced by Matthew Gaetano in a previous post here, argues that revelation has been confused with interpretation but with different application. He roots his argumentation about the failures of modern theology in the fundamental similarity of God’s two great works of revelation. His comparison between these two groups of sciences, i.e., theological and natural sciences, thus contrasts with Pascal’s.

 In the third chapter of the first volume of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (Reformed Dogmatics), Bavinck discusses the formation of Dogma in the East and West. Here he has mostly to set himself apart from Liberal Protestantism, e.g., Adolf Harnack, on the one hand, and Roman Catholicism on the other.

He approves of Harnack’s methodological tracing of dogma because,

…above all it [Harnack’s Dogmengeschichte] broke with the loci-method [by which he means both the Catholic version as rooted in Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions, as well as that of Melanchthon, for which see pgs. 26-28 of vol. I], traced the origin and development of dogma genetically (genetisch), viewed particular dogmas as parts of the total outlook of Christianity, and saw the latter in its connection with the entire cultural milieu in which the Christian religion arose and propagated itself.

However, these greats merits are overshadowed by his one-sided and mistaken definition of dogma. According to Harnack, ‘dogma in its conception and development is a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the Gospel,’ hence a mixture of Christian religion and Hellenic culture. But this view … [is] a false interpretation of the original essence of Christianity… (Vol. I, Prolegomena, 117)

Bavinck thus leaves behind the Harnackian conclusions about the essence of Christianity, necessitated by Harnack’s false understanding of the relationship between dogmatics (“thinking God’s thoughts after Him”) and its source (Holy Scripture). Both are real and ontologically distinct. The source is therefore not, as with Harnack’s Scheiermachian understanding, located in the Christian consciousness of God as Father and Christ as Savior. Moreover, a drastic reduction of ‘the essence’ of Christianity to the Sermon on the Mount, as Bavinck argues, is simply a confusion of dogma and Scripture and in fact the replacement of one dogma (Harnack’s), with the dogmas of the Church catholic. This undervaluation (onderschatting) of dogma turns out to be a replacement of the well-reasoned creeds of the Church with one simplistic and novel dogma. In underestimating the Church’s dogmas, Harnack overestimated his own and made the further mistake of putting his dogma in the place of the source of all dogma: Holy Scripture.

Yet on the other side Bavinck must modify what he calls an “overestimation” (overschatting) of “dogmatic labor,” which he sees at work in the Catholic tradition (ibid., 118). Bavinck recognizes that Catholicism, at the time which he was writing, had not doctrinally put Tradition on equal footing with Scripture, but he believed that the interpretive authority of the pope and the role of the Fathers–who surely added some things genuinely new and not to be found in Scripture–would inexorably lead, and in effect already had, to a confusion of the two (ibid., p. 65). (I grant of course that some of my Catholic readers will disagree with this judgement.) He goes on describing the Catholic view:

The original Christianity… is a seed that found its normal [normale, probably in the Latin sense, norma = standard, rule, as in Eng. adjective ‘normative’] development in the Catholic Church and specifically in Catholic dogma. In other words, it is a principle embodied in its purity in the church and a text on which the church has furnished infallible commentary.

But this view undermines both Scripture and dogma. … There is a history of dogma and dogma only if there is a revelation that furnishes the material for it. (119)

Here the metaphor underlying Bavinck’s argument starts to emerge and on the next page Bavinck unfolds this compressed metaphor, providing us the point of contact with Pascal, where we began our post:

What takes place in theology also takes place mutatis mutandis in the other sciences. Though their object is given in nature or history, the ultimate object of all sciences is to understand the infallible thoughts of God embodied in the works of his hands. Similarly the material and content for theology, specifically dogmatics, are given in Holy Scripture.

For every science there is an object and that object is (must be!) given and discrete; all the theorizing in the world about the object adds nothing to the object itself, but rather–in the classical definition–conforms our mentem ad rem (‘mind to the thing’). In biology or chemistry or physics, nothing is added to the datum, the given, of the world through the theories of Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, or Isaac Newton; instead our minds are increasingly conformed to the world as it really is; that is, to the general revelation of God’s character, in which “the invisible attributes of His divinity are clearly seen,”–so too with special revelation.

Though completely consistent with General Revelation (as Bavinck himself often affirms, e.g., p. 87), Scripture also differs from General Revelation in that “word and fact are always connected.” As communication and speech, “it does not merely convey facts that we have to explain, but itself clearly illumines those facts” (ibid., p. 94). My purpose here, however, is not to dwell on the difference but the similarity between God’s two great works of revelation.

Returning to Pascal we meet this metaphor from the other side of revelation. On the one hand we ought first to acknowledge the vast underlying agreement between Bavinck and Pascal over against modern Protestant Liberalism–most importantly, that faith is a kind of knowing and that theology belongs in the university alongside the other disciplines.

On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that the distinction of Pascal is not absolute, insofar as “in no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved” (J. G. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 46 here). And yet, we must acknowledge Pascal’s point that no real progress is possible–at least not steady and sure progress–when we confuse the objects and subjects of science, i.e., divine revelation and human interpretation. One sentence from Pascal illustrates both the agreement and disagreement between these two thinkers:

[The explanation of this difference between the two sciences] should give us an aversion to the malice of others, who employ reason alone in theology instead of the authority of Scripture and of the Fathers. … [It is necessary to] confound the insolence of those bold men who introduce novelties into theology. (Thoughts, Sect. I, Ch. 1, 41)

Bavinck, like Pascal, would (and did!) repudiate with horror all genuine novelties as regards the discrete fund of divine revelation (to which Pascal would apparently add ‘the fathers’). Nevertheless, a qualification is necessary, for Bavinck would say that in dogmatics reason–while undergirded and extended by faith–is precisely what must be used in theology. For Bavinck, just as the mind never replaces, justifies, or grounds the world around it,

Dogmatics is never more than a faint image and a weak likeness of the Word of God; it is a fallible human attempt, in one’s own independent way, to think and say after God what he in many and various ways spoke of old by the prophets and in these last days has spoken to us by the Son. (ibid., 55)

He suggests throughout that infallible is a word which we may only predicate of God’s words (even if they may also be called man’s). There is a fullness in reality that cannot be rendered in words; there is a fullness, indeed infinity, in the thoughts of God, which may only be expressed under true inspiration of the Holy Spirit. (Even here of course we are not fathoming the depths of the divine Mind).

An acceptance of Protestant principles thus does not, however, mean a complete abandonment of the notion of progress, nor again does it mean blind acceptance of the crass and linear understanding of it common since the Enlightenment. From Bavinck’s view, though the dominant theology of the Middle Ages required sifting, it contained much that was good (he speaks with high regard for Peter Lombard, (especially) Bonaventure and Thomas among others (see Matthew Gaetano’s post on Bavinck for more in this connection) The Holy Spirit will do his work in the Church.

Similarly, the material and content for theology, specifically dogmatics, are given in Holy Scripture. And the church is led by the Holy Spirit in such a way that it gradually absorbs this content into its consciousness and reproduces it in its own language. The interpretation, formulation, and systematizaion of divine revelation therefore advances slowly and not without much aberration to the right and to the left. But it does go forward. The Holy Spirit’s leading is the guarantee that it will; he does not rest until he has caused the fullness of Christ–which includes the fullness of his truth and wisdom–to dwell in the church and has filled that Church with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:19). Therefore, just as there is unity and continuity in the development of every science, so is this true in theology and dogmatics. (ibid., 120)