by Nelson D. Kloosterman[1]
“Herman Bavinck has given us the greatest and most comprehensive statement of Reformed systematic theology in modern times,” wrote Cornelius Van Til in his Introduction to Systematic Theology.[2] This esteem echoes the earlier praise of Bavinck from Benjamin B. Warfield, describing Bavinck as a theologian who “has given us the most valuable treatise on Dogmatics written during the last quarter of a century—a thoroughly wrought out treatise which we never consult without the keenest satisfaction and abundant profit.”[3]
Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) grew up in a pastor’s home, in a devout Reformed household where family worship occurred daily. It consisted of prayer before every meal, Scripture reading and discussion after the meal, and concluded, as still is the case in the Netherlands today among many God-fearing households, with the singing of a psalm and prayer. Bavinck came to know the Lord at a very young age under the preaching of the gospel. He attended weekly catechism classes and benefited from Christian day school education. He became an ordained minister, and at twenty-eight years of age he was appointed professor of theology in the theological school responsible for training ministers for his denomination.
With his colleague Abraham Kuyper, Bavinck shared a lifelong interest, evident from his writing, speaking, and preaching, in the relationship between Christianity and culture, sphere sovereignty, and common grace. In 1908 Bavinck came to North America to deliver the Princeton Stone Lectures, which dealt with the subject of the philosophy of revelation.
When Bavinck came on the scene in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, evolution and naturalism had begun to dominate the sciences. The socio-political thought and philosophy of Ernst Troeltsch, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schleiermacher had already achieved international stature and acceptance. It was against the ideas and writings of these men that Bavinck spent a lot of his energy and effort. When applying the Bible’s teachings to the modern problems of anti-supernaturalism and evolutionism, Bavinck avoided simplistic, fundamentalistic argumentation. He was thoroughly acquainted with the history of both the Bible’s doctrine and ideas opposed to that doctrine. Because he knew his own history and the Bible’s history so well, as well as the history and thought of his opponents, he was able with much nuance to respond effectively to those opponents. He was internationally known as a balanced, careful, responsible thinker. Rather than isolate theology from the burning questions of his day, he sought to integrate theology in his answer to these questions in a fresh formulation of biblical doctrine and life.
We possess clear proof of Bavinck’s interaction with the issues of his day in his book, The Christian Family.[4] Although this work bears the marks of its time (Bavinck writes a chapter, for example, about how Christian homemakers should interact with their domestic servants), nevertheless, we can learn methods, principles, and approaches to issues affecting us in our own day.
Our particular interest in this essay is to open up Bavinck’s approach to the biblical teaching about humanity created in the image of God, with specific implications for, and application to, the Christian family.[5]
In Bavinck’s teaching about humanity in God’s image, we find two unusual accents: (1) the unfolding imago Dei, and (2) the covenantal-marital-nuptial imago Dei. These emphases are helpful for gospel preaching, for Christian living, and for the church’s witness in today’s world. The first part of this essay presents a summary of Bavinck’s general treatment, in his Reformed Dogmatics, of the doctrine of the imago Dei, or humanity in the image of God. The second part offers an explanation of one particular aspect of his teaching on this doctrine that undergirds his presentation of The Christian Family. In the final section, we will expand upon some important implications of Bavinck’s teaching for us today.
1. A summary of Bavinck’s treatment of the doctrine of imago Dei
In this summary we will present the standard components, the polemical components, and the creative components of Bavinck’s teaching about the imago Dei.
1.1 The standard components
Bavinck opens his discussion of this topic of theology with this pregnant sentence: “Creation culminates in humanity where the spiritual and material world are joined together.”[6] The careful reader will note that he did not say, “Humanity is where the spiritual world and the material world are joined together.” Nor did he say, “Humanity is where the spiritual and material worlds are joined together.” He wrote: “Humanity is where the spiritual andmaterial world are joined together.” From the outset, Bavinck emphasized with his doctrine of humanity the essential unity and integration of spirit and matter, an emphasis that is crucial to the biblical, Reformed understanding of the doctrine of humanity.
Bavinck’s treatment begins with a discussion of the relationship between Genesis 1 and 2. The essence of human nature is its being created in the image of God. He uses the term mikrotheos, or “microgod,” suggesting that human beings are little gods, if you will (although that could be dangerous if taken out of context). Bavinck remarks: “Underlying Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10 is the idea that humankind was originally created in God’s image and in the re-creation is renewed on that model.”[7] He goes on to treat the biblical data extensively, interacting with the history of biblical and theological interpretation available that is found in most standard works on the subject.
Bavinck insists there is no material difference between biblical words like “image” and “likeness,” claiming that these words that are simply used interchangeably. Scripture teaches that being created in God’s image is not restricted from God’s side in terms of some attributes of God, or in terms of one or another person of the Trinity, but that humanity bears God’s image fully and totally, reflecting the totality of the Triune God. Nor is this image-bearing limited from our side in that only part of us images God, such as our soul, or our intellect, or our holiness. Bavinck refused to restrict that reflective essence of humanity to any single one or several of those parts of human identity. The whole human person is the image of the whole Deity.
Scripture teaches that the image of God manifests itself in human dominion over the entire created world (Ps. 8; 1 Cor. 11:7). The image of God includes conformity to the will of God and re-creation in conformity to the image of God, the full manifestation of which is Jesus Christ. This recreated image of God refers primarily to putting on the new man, which consists in, among other things, righteousness and holiness. Bavinck also discusses the constitutional nature of human beings, in terms of dichotomy versus trichotomy. Finally, in connection with the standard components within this topic of systematic theology, Bavinck surveys issues relating to the relationship between body and soul, and the origin of the soul in terms of pre-existentialism, traducianism, and creationism.
1.2 The polemical components
We turn next to summarizing the polemical components in his treatment of theological anthropology. Already in the first section of his treatment, he engages the issue of creation and evolution, focusing on Darwinism and the origin of humanity. He provides a number of salient arguments against Darwinism. As to the age of the human race, he concludes that it began 5,000 – 7,000 years before Jesus Christ. In the context of polemics, one of Bavinck’s key arguments involved his emphasis on the unity of the human race.
[The unity of humanity] is, finally, not a matter of indifference, as is sometimes claimed, but on the contrary of the utmost importance: it is the presupposition of religion and morality. The solidarity of the human race, original sin, the atonement in Christ, the universality of the kingdom of God, the catholicity of the church, and the love of neighbor—these all are grounded in the unity of humankind.[8]
At the center of his polemical treatment in other areas is his critique of Roman Catholic supernaturalism. Here Bavinck is at his philosophical best. He examines in minute detail the structure of Roman Catholic metaphysics and theology, and he offers a biblical, Reformed response to that Roman Catholic metaphysics and structure of theology because it comes to bear immediately upon the doctrine upon the imago Dei with respect to the donum superadditum, nature and grace, and related components of the discussion.
1.3 The creative components
Before turning now to the creative components within Bavinck’s teaching about the imago Dei, we must observe that Scripture identifies at least three referents of the phrase imago Dei. The first referent to which that phrase applies is the individual human being (Gen. 1:26–27; 5:1; 9:6; 1 Cor. 11:7; James 3:9). The individual human being images God, and is an imago Dei. Secondly, Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). Thirdly, the new humanity is the imago Dei (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10). In addition, we know that Scripture uses the phrase “son of God” to refer to Adam, to Israel, to Jesus Christ, and to the new humanity.
We can identify two particularly creative elements, or components, in Bavinck’s doctrine of the imago Dei. The first is what I would term the unfolding imago Dei. In this context we must appreciate a term that is central to the theology of both Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper, namely, the idea of the organic and the notion of organism.
Brian Mattson clarifies for us the origins of the concept of the organic with Bavinck.[9] Recognizing that the term “neo-Calvinism” may suggest that Kuyper and Bavinck taught ideas beyond or alongside classic, genuine Calvinism, Mattson notes that some scholars link this emphasis on organism, organic, development, unfolding, etc., to the philosophy of idealism championed by Hegel and Schilling, an emphasis shared by the German history of religions school and the Dutch Ethical theologians. Mattson disagrees, appealing to the work of Richard Muller to correct this picture. Muller’s monumental analysis of the tradition of Reformed orthodoxy shows the tradition’s overarching interest in the biblical unfolding of dogmatic loci. In other words, the notion of organism, organic, unfolding, etc., belongs to Reformed orthodoxy itself, so that Kuyper and Bavinck can be seen as speaking to the issues of their day on the basis, and out of, their own theological tradition.
One example of such unfolding doctrine within the Bible is the doctrine of the resurrection. We know far more about that doctrine in terms of detail, depth, and scope, from the New Testament than we do from the Old Testament. In light of Muller’s work, Mattson concludes with regard to the use of the concept of the organic by Kuyper and Bavinck: “It is at least possible that Kuyper and Bavinck were speaking to the critical issues of their day out of the resources internal to their own historical-theological tradition. In fact, this hypothesis makes for a far more satisfying account.”[10]
With respect to the doctrine of humanity, then, this emphasis on the organic arose in connection with the doctrine of the covenant of works. Interestingly and importantly, Bavinck does not deny or criticize the doctrine of the covenant of works. He works with it! Among its components is this aspect, namely, that within the covenant of works, prelapsarian humanity did not yet possess their highest possible blessing. Although the creation was perfect, it was not yet complete. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we encounter a perfect Adam, a perfect creation, and a finished work of God. “God rested on the seventh day.” Among the things that distinguishes the Reformed view from the Lutheran view in connection with this doctrine of humanity as the image of God is precisely this claim: embedded within creation was a yet-to-be-completed future, a maturing; this future consisted of the unfolding of humanity and of human life, including human cultural life.
The doctrine of the covenant of works contains yet another important idea in connection with the imago Dei, namely, that Adam was not created alone. “As a man and by himself he was incomplete.”[11] Adam was created perfect, sinless, but incomplete. That is why God created Eve for Adam, or woman for man. On the sixth day God created both man and woman in union with each other in his image (Gen. 1:27). Upon both man and woman together God pronounced the blessing mandate regarding procreation and dominion (Gen. 1:28). This complementarity of man and woman constitutes the imago Dei. The image of God, the imago Dei, consists of the irreducible complementarity of man and woman.
On the sixth day, however, Adam and Eve together do not constitute the fully unfolded and developed imago Dei. Bavinck goes on to suggest, “Not the man alone, nor the man and woman together, but only the whole of humanity is the fully developed image of God, his children, his offspring.”[12] Stage one: man alone; stage two: man and woman together; stage three: all of humanity, the fully developed imago Dei. Note carefully this description of the comprehensive content of the imago Dei for Bavinck:
Belonging to that humanity is also its development, its history, its ever-expanding dominion over the earth, its progress in science and art, and its subjugation of all creatures. All these things as well constitute the unfolding of the image and likeness of God in keeping with which humanity was created. Just as God did not reveal himself all at once at the creation, but continues and expands that revelation from day to day and from age to age, so also the image of God is not a static entity but extends and unfolds itself in the forms of space and time. It is both a gift (Gabe) and a mandate (Aufgabe). It is an undeserved gift of grace that was given to the first human being immediately at the creation but at the same time is the grounding principle and germ of an altogether rich and glorious development. Only humanity in its entirety—as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation—only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.[13]
So, then, the covenant of works, and the place of the imago Dei in the covenant of works, involves considerations relating to culture, history, human activity, the unfolding and development of all of this into the full image of God.
That, then, is the first creative component in Bavinck’s teaching about the imago Dei.
The second creative component is what I am calling “the covenantal-nuptial-marital imago Dei.”
This creative emphasis is found in Bavinck’s book, The Christian Family, which begins with this sentence: “The history of the human race begins with a wedding,” and ends with this: “The history of the human race began with a wedding; it also ends with a wedding, the wedding of Christ and his church, of the heavenly Lord with his earthly bride.”[14] That is the theme not only of the book, but of all human history as well. It belongs to the nature of created reality.
From the introduction to Bavinck’s book on the Christian family, written by Bavinck scholar, James Eglinton, we read this:
Bavinck’s work is essentially one giant effort to develop a worldview centered on the Triune God: marriage and the family included. . . . The reality of God’s glorious, eternal coexistence as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was both the beginning and end of Bavinck’s theological enterprise. The Triune God is the single most important factor in Bavinck’s thought: it is the reality by which all others are measured.”[15]
Eglinton continues: “The organic ideas found throughout Bavinck’s perspective on the Christian family should all be read as part of Bavinck’s effort to see the world in the light of its Triune Creator. For Bavinck, an organic view of marriage and the family is a godly one.”[16]
Earlier we noted that Bavinck identified both man and woman together as the image of God. I am calling this “nuptial complementarity,” and I would claim that this constitutes the image of God; this irreducible, organic unity of man and woman was designed to reflect the communion and complementarity inherent in the divine Trinity itself. On this Bavinck says, “The creation story in Genesis shows this clearly in the fact that both [man and woman] together are said to have been created in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). Not merely one of them, but both, and not the one separate from the other, but man and woman together, in mutual relation, each created in his or her own manner and each in a special dimension created in God’s image and together displaying God’s likeness.”[17]
If we were to parse that sentence, it would become clear that Bavinck did not say, “Man is created in God’s image and woman is created in God’s image.” Such is true, of course. But the Bible is saying something different at this point. Both man and woman together are said to have been created in the image of God, not merely one of them, but both together. Not the one separate from the other, but man and woman together in mutual relation, each created in his or her own manner, each in a special dimension created in God’s image, but together displaying God’s likeness.
Bavinck continues to unfold this Trinitarian nature of the family:
The two-in-oneness of husband and wife expands with a child into a three-in-oneness. Father, mother, and child are one soul and one flesh, expanding and unfolding the one image of God, united within threefold diversity and diverse within harmonic unity.
This three-in-oneness of relationships and functions, of qualities and gifts, constitutes the foundation of all of civilized society. The authority of the father, the love of the mother, and the obedience of the child form in their unity the threefold cord that binds together and sustains all relationships within human society. . . . Authority, love, and obedience are the pillars of all human society.[18]
This can be illustrated from the poetic structure found in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:27:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them (ESV).
Careful analysis will disclose that the thematic words create and image recur in the verse.
This technique in Hebrew poetry is called chiasm. Unfortunately, older versions of the Bible do not print Genesis 1:27 in poetic structure, so that the real point found in the concluding clause is obscured: “male and female he created them.” Assigning letters to the poetic elements, we find: “a-b-b-a-?-a.” It seems evident that the “?” is “b,” so that the last clause renders “male and female” equivalent to “the image of God.”
This is confirmed by Genesis 5:2: “Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” This means that the nuptial couple was called “Mr. and Mrs. Adam.” When we hear the name “Adam,” we often think only of the individual, the man, the first human being. But according to Genesis 5:2, “Adam” was the name given to both.
2. An elucidation of the covenantal-marital-nuptial imago Dei
By way of elucidating this second creative component in Bavinck’s doctrine of the imago Dei, namely, the covenantal-nuptial-marital imago Dei, we look first at the Christian family as a Trinitarian society. Concerning the human family Bavinck writes:
Upon this fellowship of love, then, God has bestowed his blessing in a special way. He is the Creator of man and of woman, the Inaugurator of marriage, and the Sanctifier of matrimony. Each child born is the fruit of fellowship, and as such is also the fruit of divine blessing. The two-in-oneness of husband and wife expands with a child into a three-in-oneness. Father, mother, and child are one soul and one flesh, expanding and unfolding the one image of God, united within threefold diversity and diverse within harmonic unity.[19]
Bavinck continues,
Within the psychological life of every integrated personality this triple cord forms the motif and melody No man is complete without some feminine qualities, no woman is complete without some masculine qualities, and to both man and woman, the child is held up as an example (Matt. 18:3). These three characteristics and gifts are always needed in every society and in every civilization in the church and state. Authority, love, and obedience are the pillars of every human society.[20]
In light of these words, the view that the man/husband has all the authority, the woman/wife expresses all the love, and the child renders all the obedience, is simply inaccurate. Bavinck is talking about leading characteristics, not exclusive characteristics. Our families, then, are called and designed to embody, to incarnate, the Triune God in our relationships, in our functions, and in our activities.
Secondly, we observe that the family is a human society. All the features of human society are present in the family, in the one-and-the-many. Bavinck devotes at least two chapters to explaining how economics and industry proceed from the home. In fact, the Greek word oikonomia is the word translated in the New Testament as “household” or “house”; from oikonomia comes our English word “economy” or “economics.” The science of economics originally was the science and study of human interaction in the home, not in the market. The polis, the Greek word for “city” or “state,” originated in the home, because what the state does is exhibited in the home in terms of authority, punishment of evil, and reward of the good, from which arises the practice of statecraft in society.
Finally, Bavinck observes that in the ideal (i.e., created) family each of the commandments is learned personally, daily, and immediately. Where do people first learn respect for authority? Respect for life? Respect for sexuality? Respect for property? Respect for truth telling? Respect for contentment? Where do they learn it—or not? In the family. It is not difficult, then, to imagine what the breakdown of the family represents in terms of our culture and our future.
3. Implications of Bavinck’s teaching for us today
By way of concretizing Bavinck’s view of the imago Dei as a covenantal-marital-nuptial reality, we would like briefly to apply it in terms of two pressing issues of relevance: women in military combat, and homosexual partnerships.
We begin by identifying a notion that plays a key role in modern metaphysical, political, economic, and social theory with respect to human nature: the notion of fungibility. Most often, the words fungible and fungibility function in legal and economic contexts, with reference, for example, to goods that are exchangeable or replaceable by other goods of similar nature or kind. Fungible goods are entities that are mutually interchangeable. Something is fungible if it is of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of a contractual obligation. Oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities.
Here is the point: in modern metaphysical, political, economic, and social theory, human beings are viewed as fungible. Today men and women are largely viewed individualistically, atomistically, separatedly, as fungible, or mutually interchangeable entities. This altered vision of the nature and essence of humanity as imago Dei is an alteration of metaphysical proportions with enormous consequences for all of human life.
One possible source of this revised metaphysics must surely be the Enlightenment emphasis on individuality, individual personality, and individuated personal identity. This metaphysics involves the age-old contest between the one-and-the-many, a contest whose temporary victors have pushed and pulled humanity this way and that, one time toward the supremacy of the many in terms of collectivism, another time toward the supremacy of the one in terms of individualism.
Many of our modern moral and social disruptions are directly related to the loss of understanding of the covenantal-marital-nuptial image of God. Bavinck had such an understanding, as we saw from the opening and closing sentences of his treatise on The Christian Family. All of society and all of history are rooted and grounded in the reflection of the Triune God imprinted upon the complementarity, the nuptiality, of humanity. God’s unfolding self-revelation is mirrored—and received—in terms of a history-long unfolding imago Dei. For Bavinck, all created reality, all history, all humanity is ordered and structured in terms of covenant, of marriage, of nuptiality, if you will. And the loss of this biblical view of this divine covenantal-marital-nuptial order has led to the result that most teaching on marriage and family inside and outside the church arises pervasively, if not exclusively, from the fields of sociology and psychology. This loss has also led to a reductionism of sexuality, to the bioticizing of sexuality, to the separation of sexual education from marriage education, because sexual expression is no longer viewed as essentially nuptial. All of this has led to the separation of sexuality from mutuality.
One issue related to this biblical teaching is the somewhat modern endorsement of women warriors, or women in military combat. For the most part, this is an issue that is being largely ignored by the church, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic. Concerning this matter, one very thoughtful Roman Catholic scholar, Donald Keefe, provides this diagnosis:
In that elitist view [of those replacing the biblical vision], society is composed of fungible citizens, man and women indifferently indistinguishable, eminently replaceable each by each, lacking legally significant intrinsic intelligibility, and therefore available to any imposition of meaning which the modern mind, personified by the courts and the justices, may decide. . . . Underlying the familiar feminist and libertarian rhetoric is the doctrinaire denial of the existence of any intrinsic, personal, and therefore ineradicably significant difference between men and women. . . . This denial is bolstered by a doctrinaire resolve that such differences as manifestly exist shall be regarded as nullities.[21]
In this modern phenomenon of “women in combat,” we see clearly how human beings are being treated as fungible. This is one of the most radical, reality-denying, state-sponsored examples of human fungibility imaginable. Women and men are seen as mutually interchangeable fighting automatons. By legal permission, daughters and wives and mothers are now fighting and killing to preserve the life and liberty of men, their husbands, fathers, and sons.
In this context, sexual differentiation is seen as culturally insignificant, an accidental matter of physiology. Atomized, isolated persons are viewed as asexual, their gender having become irrelevant to their function.
As Reformed and Presbyterian churches commanded by God to nurture the flock and pastor the sheep, we must address this issue from the Scriptures, from the Reformed confessions, for the protection of our daughters and of our mothers and of our wives, and for the protection of our sons and our husbands, our fathers, and our sons.
An issue that receives far more attention today is that of homosexual partnerships.
For a variety of reasons, discussing this issue with the requisite biblical care and sensitivity seems very difficult for Christians. So we must begin with the exhortation that for every criticism we level against ungodliness in society, we must look in the mirror to examine the church in terms of her faithfulness and fidelity, in terms of her theology and practice. The church must be honest in acknowledging, for example, that the testimony and practice of the Christian church with regard to heterosexual conduct, including marriage and divorce, have rendered much of its public criticism of homosexual partnerships ineffective and irrelevant.
Part of the problem involves terminology. Because accurate language and terms are essential for proper description, it is inappropriate, within the church and among Christians, to speak about “homosexual marriage,” because such a thing simply does not exist. To employ the phrase is to concede the issue at stake. Scripture teaches that marriage is created and defined by God to be the covenantal-personal-sexual union of a man and a woman in life-long loyalty and fidelity to each other alone as husband and wife, with a view to displaying Christ’s covenant relationship to his blood-bought church. There is no such thing as so-called “same-sex marriage,” and we must exhort each other not to use that phrase in the current debate. [22]
What Bavinck is teaching us about the family in terms of the Trinitarian covenantal-marital-nuptial order of reality, of history, and of society is directly relevant to the church’s analysis of and response to the phenomenon in our culture known as homosexual partnerships.
We conclude this essay with three recommendations.
First, the church must recover the Bible’s teaching about the covenantal-marital-nuptial order of reality and of history as part of its doctrine of the covenant. We must expand our fervent defense of the biblical doctrine of the covenant—whether the “covenant of works” or the “covenant of grace”—to include teaching about covenant reality, about the covenant family, and about the covenant people. All of us are encountering views of a moral and social order that are antithetical to the gospel and the church, so that the church needs desperately to invest in teaching and in cultivating a moral and social order that is truly “alien” to our culture, in the sense of a pilgrim alternative culture.
Secondly, the church must recover the Bible’s teaching about the covenantal-marital-nuptial order of reality and of history in terms of its own practice and discipline (a word that means, first, discipleship). It is a tragedy beyond words how the phenomenon of divorce and remarriage has enervated and emasculated the church’s testimony in our generation. The currently graying generation has lost this battle, having largely surrendered, being far too accommodating on the matter of divorce and remarriage. I would plead, on the basis of the covenantal-marital-nuptial nature of created reality, as part of the Bible’s teaching about man-and-woman as the imago Dei, and as a matter of Christian testimony and Christian living, that the church would preach the gospel unto repentance from that evil.
To be sure, the Bible clearly teaches that divorce is not the unpardonable sin. We need not adopt the attitudes and approaches where divorced people starve for grace, hunger for forgiveness, languish in isolation. But we must recognize the problem as a gospel problem, one where the church risks the loss of gospel-dynamic, of gospel-power, and of gospel-principle. We must recover both sides of the gospel, namely, that God hates sin and that God forgives the penitent sinner. Both of these declarations belong to the essence of the gospel, and we must dare to declare both sides of that gospel to ourselves.
We must be aware of our capacity for preaching two messages—to say to the world, “No, no, you’re wrong, you’re sinning,” but to say to one another, “God loves you, and God wants you to be blessed.” We must beware of preaching two messages, one for insiders and a different one for outsiders. We must put both aspects of the gospel back together, first in the church, where we tell God’s people, “God hates sin,” and “God forgives penitent sinners.” Both “God hates what’s going on in your family if you’re not honoring the Trinitarian nature of the family,” and “God forgives the penitent sinner.”
Thirdly, we must commit ourselves, for the sake of our doctrine and life, to meditating on and celebrating the church. The church of Jesus Christ, the bride of Christ, is an object not of sight, but of faith. “I believe a holy catholic church.” That is to say: we don’t necessarily see the holy catholic church, but we believe it. We preachers preach to the holy catholic church who is the beloved bride of Christ. We elders are called to lead and disciple the church in ways that suit the church as a matter of faith. All of us must celebrate the church’s nuptial identity, her relationship as bride with her Bridegroom, a relationship being reflected in godly marriages among us. And we must celebrate in a way that honors marriage while refusing to exalt marriage in a way that isolates those not married.
Finally, we must commit ourselves to practice marital and familial hospitality as a form of Christian show-and-tell. As we welcome in the church those who are young in the faith, as we befriend people who are investigating Christianity, and as we minister to people with dysfunctional homes, familial hospitality serves as a powerful blessing. Where are first-generation Christians going to learn family worship, if we who are more experienced don’t show them? How will first-generation Christians practice tithing if we don’t teach them? Ask people: “Would you like to know how Christian families interact? Come over for dinner, and watch me and my wife. Come to our home and watch how we do family worship. Watch how Dad interacts with the children. Watch his tenderness, coupled with loving firmness. Watch mother exercise her organizational authority in our home. Come see what the gospel does in terms of restoring the imago Dei, the covenantal-marital-nuptial imago Dei, in our lives, in our homes, and in our church.”
[1] This essay is a significantly expanded and revised version of a lecture delivered on 14 March 2013 at the spring conference of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The author serves as Executive Director and Ethics Consultant for Worldview Resources International, and labors principally in translating and editing theological works from Dutch to English, as well as in speaking and teaching internationally.
[2] C. Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (n.p: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974), 43. For an extended analysis of Van Til’s appreciation for Bavinck’s theology, see Laurence R. O’Donnell III, “Neither ‘Copernican’ nor “Van Tilian’: Re-Reading Cornelius Van Til’s Reformed Apologetics in Light of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics,” The Bavinck Review 2 (2011): 71–95 (available at http://bavinck.calvinseminary.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/TBR2_ODonnell.pdf); as a pedantic aside, O’Donnell is to be commended as one of very few writers (including most academics) who correctly employs and spells the adjectival form of a Dutch surname, viz., “Van Tilian.”
[3] Benjamin B. Warfield, “Review of Herman Bavinck, De Zekerheid des Geloofs (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1901),” The Princeton Theological Review 1, no. 1 (January 1903): 148.
[4] Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family, ed. Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian’s Library Press, 2012).
[5] In addition to The Christian Family, the main sources for this essay are Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 2: God and Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004; abbreviated RD), and Brian G. Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny: Eschatology & the Image of God in Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
[6] Bavinck, RD, 2.511.
[7] Bavinck, RD, 2.532; the term microtheos appears on 531.
[8] Bavinck, RD, 2.526.
[9] See his excursus, “The Concept of the ‘Organic’ and Its Sources,” Restored to Our Destiny, 47–54.
[10] Mattson, Restored to Our Destiny, 49–50.
[11] Bavinck, RD, 2.576.
[12] Bavinck, RD, 2.577.
[13] Bavinck, RD, 2.577.
[14] Bavinck, The Christian Family, 1, 161.
[15] Bavinck, The Christian Family, x–xi.
[16] Bavinck, The Christian Family, xii.
[17] Bavinck, The Christian Family, 3.
[18] Bavinck, The Christian Family, 8.
[19] Bavinck, The Christian Family, 7–8.
[20] Bavinck, The Christian Family, 8.
[21] See Donald J. Keefe, “Women in Combat,” The Dunwoodie Review 23 (2000), 101–117; see also Donald J. Keefe, Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996 [revised edition]).
[22] The same point about language and terminology holds true for the phrase “the single-parent family,” when in reality people are really referring to “the single-parent household.”
