Reformed Ethics : Volume 1 , livre ebook

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by John Bolt
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic. com
Ebook edition created 2019
Ebook corrections 07.31.2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1444-4
Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2011
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Quotations of the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort are from the translations produced by the joint task force of the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church in North America and available at https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions.
Dedication
For Rimmer and †Ruth De Vries
in gratitude for your kingdom-minded generosity
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Editor’s Preface ix
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction to Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics by Dirk van Keulen and John Bolt xxi
Introduction 1
§1 Historical Overview of Christian Ethics 2
§2 Terminology 17
§3 Division and Organization of Ethics 23
§4 Foundation and Method of Ethics 25
Book I Humanity before Conversion 31
1. Essential Human Nature 33
§5 Human Beings, Created in God’s Image 35
§6 The Content of Human Nature 44
§7 Human Relationships 49
2. Humanity under the Power of Sin 77
§8 The Devastation of the Image of God in Humanity 78
§9 The Organizing Principle and Classification of Sins 100
3. The Self against the Neighbor and God 117
§10 Sins of Egoism in the Narrow Sense 118
§11 Sins against the Neighbor 129
§12 Sins against God 139
4. The Fallen Image of God 147
§13 The Image of God in Fallen Human Beings 148
5. Human Conscience 165
§14 The Conscience 167
6. The Sinner and the Law 215
§15 The Law 216
§16 Natural Morality 228
Book II Converted Humanity 237
7. Life in the Spirit 239
§17 The Nature of the Spiritual Life 240
§18 The Origin of the Spiritual Life 253
§19 The First and Basic Activity of the Spiritual Life 264
8. Life in the Spirit in the Church’s History 273
§20 Mysticism, Pietism, and Methodism 275
9. The Shape and Maturation of the Christian Life 315
§21 The Shape of the Christian Life: The Imitation of Christ 317
§22 The Growth of the Spiritual Life 341
10. Persevering in the Christian Life 361
§23 Security and Sealing 363
11. Pathologies of the Christian Life 415
§24 Diseases of the Spiritual Life and Their Roots 417
12. Restoration and Consummation of the Christian Life 461
§25 Means of Restoration 462
§26 Consummation of the Spiritual Life; Meditation on Death 493
Bibliography 495
Selected Scripture Index 528
Name Index 541
Subject Index 554
Back Cover 565
Editor’s Preface
The book you hold in your hands took a long journey to get there, an unlikely, unplanned, and uncharted journey. It is the first volume of a projected three-volume set that gives readers access to Herman Bavinck’s lectures on Reformed ethics, delivered to his students at the Theological School in Kampen, from 1883/84 through the fall of 1902. Though the work is methodologically identical to Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics , and there are hints that Bavinck may have intended eventually to publish it, he did not, leaving behind only a 1,100-page handwritten manuscript. After Bavinck’s death in 1921, the manuscript languished in the Bavinck Archives at the Historical Documentation Center for Dutch Protestantism (1800 to present) at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, until it was discovered by Dirk van Keulen in 2008. 1 Readers of this volume are, therefore, among the privileged first group to gain access to Bavinck’s systematic reflection on theological ethics since his own students who heard the lectures in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
History buffs love playing “What if?” parlor games, and the temptation is hard to resist when reflecting on the pilgrimage of this material from Bavinck’s own hand to this published translation. The word that comes to mind for me, with intentional bilingual wordplay, is “wonder.” In the Dutch language (German Wunder ) the word means “miracle.” I want to be careful not to devalue the word “miracle” with overuse, but it is accurate to say that I and the editorial team that worked on this project are filled with wonder and awe at God’s gracious, providential care and guidance as we make this work available for the worldwide church. Not only were we richly supplied by generous benefactors with ample provisions for a long and demanding journey, but so many unconnected events had to fall into place at just the right time for the project even to get started, much less brought to successful completion. All this feels like the inverse of the well-known proverb, “For want of a nail . . . the kingdom was lost,” 2 a series of connected events that positively and constructively accumulated to help publish this work. In remarkable ways, today has proved to be just the “right time” for this project.
This project is unimaginable without the preparatory project of translating and publishing the English version of Bavinck’s four-volume Reformed Dogmatics , completed in 2008. To commemorate this occasion, along with the centenary of Bavinck’s Princeton Stone Lectures, “The Philosophy of Revelation,” 3 in September 2008 Calvin Theological Seminary hosted a conference, “A Pearl and a Leaven: Herman Bavinck for the 21st Century.” In preparation for this conference, while researching Bavinck material for a paper on the imitation of Christ, Dr. Dirk van Keulen “stumbled on” the Reformed Ethics manuscript (along with others) in the Bavinck archives. After he presented his paper, reporting the discovery of his find, an international group of Bavinck scholars conferred and agreed that the manuscript needed to be translated and published. They also indicated the value of creating a network of scholars and students interested in staying informed about each other’s research and scholarship. The Bavinck Institute at Calvin Theological Seminary, the Bavinck Society, and the annual electronic journal, The Bavinck Review , were the result. 4 To sum this up: the Reformed Dogmatics project paved the way for these Reformed Ethics volumes by bringing together people (including a supportive publisher) who had demonstrated the competent ability to complete it; and the positive reception of the Reformed Dogmatics also created a large audience of students, pastors, and scholars eager to see this work on ethics become available.
In addition, to be able to speak of a “group” of Bavinck scholars in 2008 was itself quite remarkable. When I completed my dissertation on Bavinck in 1982, sixty years after Bavinck’s death, mine was only the fifth doctoral dissertation devoted to Bavinck’s theology; 5 there was no “community” of Bavinck scholars. However, since that time another nine doctoral dissertations have been defended, either focused entirely on Bavinck or making significant contributions to Bavinck scholarship by analyzing his theology and comparing it with others. 6 In addition, an international congress on Bavinck’s theology at the 150th anniversary of his birth was held in Kampen, the Netherlands, on October 28–30, 2004, and a collection of twenty lectures given there was published under the conference’s theme, “Encounters with Bavinck.” 7 And finally, a full-length biography of Bavinck in the English language has also appeared. 8
All this is to say that conditions were ripe for generating interest and support for translating and publishing Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics in English. But that is not all; we have to go back to the earlier and equally unlikely project of translating and publishing his Reformed Dogmatics . Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Dogmatiek was well known and appreciated in North America, and an early attempt was made to translate it into English. 9 William Hendrickson had competed the translation of the first part of volume 2 ( The Doctrine of Go d ) by July 1930, but had to wait until 1951 to see it published. 10 No additional volumes were translated, perhaps because during this same time the basic outline of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics was being introduced to North American Reformed students of theology through the writings of Louis Berkhof, professor at Calvin Theological Seminary from 1906 to 1944. 11 Berkhof published his own Reformed Dogmatics in two volumes in 1932, followed by an accompanying Introduction to Reformed Theology as a separate volume that same year. 12 However, in the preface to his Introduction to Reformed Theology , “Berkhof acknowledged that the general plan of his work was based on the first volume of Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Dogmatiek and that in a few chapters he followed Bavinck’s argumentation as well.” 13 Henry Zwaanstra concludes that “Berkhof’s theology was essentially the theology of Herman Bavinck.” 14 It was through Berkhof’s Systematic Theology that I was indirectly introduced to Herman Bavinck during my student days at Calvin Seminary. 15
With this popularity of Berkhof’s Systematic Theology in view, who co