Christianity and Science E-Book

Herman Bavinck

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This Companion to Theologian Herman Bavinck's Christian Worldview Explores Christianity's Contributions to Higher Education After writing his well-known book Christian Worldview, Dutch Calvinist theologian and scholar Herman Bavinck focused his attention on how the Christian faith benefits higher learning, particularly religious studies, natural sciences, and the humanities. Christianity and Science explores the pros and cons of Christian science and features brief, informative sections on the natural sciences, the humanities, theological science and religious studies, the doctrine of revelation, the benefits of Christianity for scholarship, and what it means to develop a Christian university. Responding to the challenges of the modern age, Bavinck recognizes the significance of faith in education. Edited and translated in English for the first time by N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock, this fundamental work will inspire Christian teachers, practitioners, and seminarians in their pursuits.  - Foundational Text on Christian Education: Analyzes how faith shapes various disciplines of higher education, with a section highlighting the construction of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880 - Comprehensive: Each short section is packed with important information on the natural sciences, the humanities, and more - Ideal for Educators, Students, and Practitioners: Considers holistic ways to teach future generations in a world that's resistant to Christianity - Companion to Bavinck's Book Christian Worldview

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Christianity and Science

Crossway Books by Herman Bavinck

Christianity and Science

Christian Worldview

Christianity and Science

Herman Bavinck

Translated and Edited by

N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock

Christianity and Science

Copyright © 2023 by N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Originally published in Dutch as Christelijke wetenschap by Kok, Kampen, in 1904.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

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. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-7920-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7923-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7921-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bavinck, Herman, 1854–1921, author. | Sutanto, Nathaniel Gray, 1991– translator editor. | Eglinton, James Perman, translator editor. | Brock, Cory C., translator editor.

Title: Christianity and science / Herman Bavinck ; translated and edited by N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock.

Other titles: Christelijke wetenschap. English

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Originally published in Dutch as Christelijke wetenschap by Kok, Kampen, in 1904. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022056245 (print) | LCCN 2022056246 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433579202 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433579219 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433579233 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Religion and science—Netherlands—History—19th century. | Religion and science—Netherlands—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC BL240.3 .F5413 2023 (print) | LCC BL240.3 (ebook) | DDC 261.5/5—dc23/eng20230415

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056245

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056246

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-07-23 07:28:27 PM

Contents

Acknowledgments

Editors’ Introduction

1  Introduction

2  How the Concept of a Christian Science Emerged

3  Defects That Clung to Christian Science

4  Positive Science

5  Evaluation of Positivism

6  Consequence of the Verdict

7  The Concept of Science

8  The Natural Sciences

9  The Humanities

10  Theological Science

11  Revelation

12  The Blessing of Christianity for Science

13  A Christian University

Index

Acknowledgments

Gray Sutanto: I am grateful to my wife, Indita, for allowing me many mornings over the summer of 2021 to translate this work while overlooking a beach in Bali. At that point, we were still awaiting good immigration news so that we might relocate to Washington DC. This book is a product of that wait. As ever, I am also thankful for James Eglinton’s ongoing encouragement, help, and friendship. He is a reminder that one should always strive for improvement, not merely in the work of translation, but also in the task of theological scholarship itself. I am also grateful to continue to partner with Cory Brock, a wonderful collaborator and friend, on many projects. It was a delight to work with him on this as well.

James Eglinton: Once again, I am thankful to Gray and Cory for the invitation to join them in another Bavinck translation project, and for the opportunity this has provided to immerse myself in a richly rewarding text. Together, we are indebted to Justin Taylor and all at Crossway for their support of this work, for their own high standards in every regard, and above all, for their patience in awaiting the end result of our labors.

Cory Brock: It has been an increasing joy over the last number of years to work with James and Gray on numerous projects. We together share in the many benefits of learning from Herman Bavinck, and it is certainly so with this work. As always, we hope and pray that our work will be valuable to many. I am thankful to these two for our partnership and for James especially in his expertise in translation. It is a privilege I do not take for granted to get to do such work alongside my pastoral duties. I thus thank St Columba’s Free Church, as well, for seeing value in scholarship for the people of God.

We are also grateful to Stephanie DiMaria for her thorough reading of this work, to Justin Taylor for his enthusiastic support of this project, to Thom Notaro for his careful editing, and to the entire Crossway team.

Editors’ Introduction

To what extent, if any, is Christianity directed toward the life of the mind? In the early twenty-first century, many popular antireligious tropes paint conversion to Christianity as a kind of deactivation of the thinking faculties. Christianity, we often hear, is a blue pill that confirms believers to lives of thoughtlessness and stupefaction. And, of course, it is true that much of evangelicalism is marked by a profound skepticism toward all things academic. For complex reasons, evangelicalism has a deep tendency to separate the life of the mind from the life of the heart. More starkly still, evangelical culture often pits these against each other, mistakenly starving the head in an effort to nurture the heart. A quarter century ago, Mark Noll memorably summarized this particular context in the quip that “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”1

In the years since Noll’s verdict, one point on the Protestant landscape—a branch of the Reformed tradition drawing inspiration from older Dutch neo-Calvinist sources—has been the scene of a notable renaissance in careful Christian thinking. At the forefront in that development stand the works of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), formerly professor of dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam, and author of the magisterial four-volume Reformed Dogmatics—a text that is now available in multiple languages and widely regarded as a modern classic in the Christian literary canon. Bavinck’s winsome combination of warm piety and intellectual depth has opened up a new vista for many current-day readers looking to move beyond the “heart versus head” impasse inherited from mainstream evangelical culture. In that context, in 2019, we published the first English translation of Bavinck’s Christian Worldview; a short book originally published in 1904 as an argument for the importance of Christianity to the livability of life in the fractured modern age. Now, we have prepared the first English translation of its companion volume, Christianity and Science; a book written in the same year and intended as a kind of companion piece to Christian Worldview.

In Christian Worldview, Bavinck wrote that without Christianity, modern people are unable to hold together the essential shape of human life in the modern age: Christianity equips us with a view of life and the world that unites a sense of who we are, what the world is, and what we are to do with our lives. Christianity yields holism. In Christianity and Science, we find Bavinck focusing the same set of ideas on the life of the mind.

That human beings exist to love the Lord with the entirety of heart, soul, and mind is uncontroversial: it is the explicit teaching of Jesus himself. In much conservative Christianity today, though, the question of what this looks like in practice is much more fraught with danger, particularly for those engaged in the perilous world of ideas that is higher education. Is it possible to inhabit that world to the glory of God? Bavinck wrote Christianity and Science for those whose calling in life was to cultivate the life of the mind in precisely that setting: the university and college students and professors who, in the language of his day, were engaged in the world of science.

It is important for the reader to know that the English term science functions differently in its Dutch counterpart. In Anglophone culture, science is restrictively tied to forms of knowledge based on the empirical method and occupies a distinctly privileged position within the academy: to most in that context, a scientist speaks with far greater authority than, for example, a professor of literature. In our world, English speakers imagine the term science in a way that is profoundly shaped by the history of positivist philosophy (as will be seen in this book). The equivalent Dutch term, wetenschap,2 is broader in scope and encompasses all higher forms of reflective, critical knowledge. As such, it refers to all that English speakers view as scholarship, while challenging the common Anglophone tendency to devalue the “nonscientific” sections of the academic community.3To Bavinck’s Dutch ear, the question of whether a scientist or a theologian speaks with greater authority would make little sense: to him theology is a science, belongs in the university of the sciences, and is practiced by scientists.

If Christian Worldview was meant to be a sketch of the positive contributions of the notion of a Christian worldview as a whole in contrast to the modern worldview, Christianity and Science was meant to explore the more particular ways Christian faith can be generative for the academic disciplines. The book was composed of brief sections—here formatted as chapters—that concisely explore these areas. It begins by defining what is meant by the idea of Christian science—exploring both positive and negative examples of its emergence in the history of Christian thought—before moving into a critique of positivism. It then dives into the natural sciences, the humanities, theological science and religious studies, the doctrine of revelation, and the benefits of Christianity for scholarship, before finally providing a sketch of what it means to develop a Christian university. In the original version, Bavinck covered all that in a brief 121 pages. Like Christian Worldview, Christianity and Science is a succinct text providing dense, but never turgid, reflection on an important subject.

Why do we think an English translation of this book is necessary? In his introduction, Bavinck himself offered four reasons that we believe continue to be resonant today. First, he argued that the impulse for the work went hand in hand with the construction of a new, modern, and explicitly Christian university: the Free University of Amsterdam, founded by his colleague Abraham Kuyper in 1880. Against those who claimed the modern age had killed any meaningful claim for Christianity as a religion at the cutting edge of human knowledge, Bavinck argued the opposite: modernity had set the stage for Christian scholarship to outshine its secularized rivals. The text is a kind of manifesto for this project that will continue to inform Christian educators in higher learning today—both Christian scholars in the mainstream academy and those who work in Christian higher education.

Second, Bavinck argued that Roman Catholicism had progressed much further in this area than its Reformed counterpart. “Logic and psychology, metaphysics and theology, history and literature, jurisprudence and sociology are practiced in such a way by them that the opponent must reckon with their work.”4Ever since Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical canonized a systematic philosophy for life based on the work of Thomas Aquinas, Roman Catholic higher learning had advanced with a united force that caused both admiration and trouble for Bavinck. In response, he argued that Protestants should learn from Catholicism’s confidence and labors and provide a Reformed education that constitutes both a dialogue partner and an alternative to its Roman Catholic counterparts. A century on, it seems little has changed: Roman Catholic higher education (and in many contexts, Roman Catholic primary and secondary schooling) continues to operate with an intellectual rigor and intentionality that few Protestants can match.

Third, Bavinck believed that empiricism and logical positivism were losing their ground, and that immaterialist views of science were making a comeback in the modern age. He saw this in the growing influence of idealism and pantheism, which were winning the day over atheism and materialism as the prevailing worldviews within which the natural sciences were to be explained. In his view, this was an opportunity to showcase Christianity’s insight on the “cause and essence of the things above,” over these immaterialist alternatives.5

Finally, then, Bavinck reasoned that the modern age manifests the undying human need for metaphysics and theology, as was also seen in the growing presence of “Buddhism and Islam” within Western culture in his day.6 The previous century’s faith in pure humanitarian progress had given way to a faith in a more cosmic power. Consistent with the current narratives that challenge the secularization hypothesis, history has vindicated Bavinck on this point. The world is not becoming less religious but more. A century on, while many secularized Westerners continue to ponder the place of religion in a scientific world, Bavinck’s text challenges us to invert this perspective and learn, instead, to ponder the place of science in a religious world.

These four reasons—the challenge for Christianity to show its intellectual merits, the challenge set by Roman Catholicism’s own example of tradition-specific scholarship, the demise of materialism, and the persistence of religious faith in a secularizing age—provided Bavinck with a clear impetus to argue for the benefit of Christian faith for higher education. A century later, Bavinck’s cultural moment remains easily recognizable: Christians in the academy often hear that their faith is irrelevant to high-octane scholarship; Roman Catholicism continues to set an educational bar that Protestants struggle to clear; empiricism and positivism are a largely spent force, despite the presence of those who still cling to naive Dawkinsesque scientism; and both Islamic and Buddhist approaches to the life of the mind continue to make inroads in the West. For this reason, this text represents yet another first-generation neo-Calvinistic resource that continues to speak to Christians engaged in higher learning, and to those interested in exploring the benefits of Christian faith for all areas of life.

With the impetus for the work in view, we now turn to three observations that introduce the text: the hope, definition, and necessity of Christian science.

The Hope of Christian Science

Although many today would see the conditions of modernity as fundamentally unfavorable to a notion like Christian science, Bavinck’s own vision of it was resolutely hopeful. He hinted at such in several remarks: “After the thirst for facts is initially quenched, hunger for the knowledge of the origin and goal, for the cause and essence of the things above, resurfaces.”7 In contrast to the antisupernaturalist drive that marked much nineteenth-century intellectual culture, he noted that the twentieth-century person was returning to the childlike longing for things unseen, for life behind the curtain. This was seen, he thought, not in a return to childish immaturity but in a longing for a proper sense of wonder. In that light, Bavinck cited one common way of marking the maturation of the modern person in the nineteenth century: “Just as, according to sociological law, a human being is a theologian in infancy and a metaphysician in youth, and then a physicist in adulthood, so humanity has passed through these three periods in science.”8But now, having abandoned the transcendent and the metaphysical en route to the truly scientific, he or she changes tack, climbing back up the ladder to the things above. For Bavinck, this ascent is necessary because a person is driven toward facts by an investigatory instinct and, as such, is always compelled by the desire for unification by way of causation and value.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Bavinck thought, believers were jolted from their intellectual slumbers by the extent of the power of positivism and the fundamental challenge it posed to their supernaturalistic faith. Once again, believers had begun to take their place in that which was formerly neglected: the cultivation of the life of the Christian mind. Why? Supremely, Bavinck’s “impression” was that “the banner of the gospel must also be displayed over the world of science.”9 What difference does the gospel make to the academic community? In both Christian Worldview and Christianity and Science, Bavinck portrays a human nature that is desperately thirsty for holism as a response to the sense of self fractured by empiricism. Again, there is a hunger after knowledge of the origin and goal, after the essence of things. The childlike desire for unity of the self in a unified existence proves inescapable and even necessary.

If Immanuel Kant10 had undermined the nineteenth-century mind’s confidence in the existence and knowledge of God, immortality, and the soul, while replacing knowledge of these with an existential label of necessary illusion, then “modern culture” and its science, wielded by the likes of Ernest Renan11 and Charles Darwin,12 abolished even the need for that illusion in the hopes of progressivism—whatever that might mean for the modern individual. In Christian Worldview, Bavinck argues that while scientific materialism enjoyed a moment of dominance, the “youth of Zarathustra”—a new generation of atheists in the shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche13—failed. Contrary to that generation’s expectations, religion failed to die, and the desired revaluation of older Christian values was seemingly ignored by most. And yet, the nineteenth century bred confusion: “Before all else,” Bavinck notes, “what strikes us in the modern age is the internal discord that consumes the self.”14The modern person was characterized by the denial (or perhaps more accurately still, the suppression) of the internal religious consciousness, which Bavinck sees as a sickness of soul producing a “disharmony between our thinking and feeling, between our willing and acting. . . . between science and life.”15

Against that backdrop, “worldview” comes into focus as an inductive enterprise that describes the totality of the endeavor of the human consciousness to put philosophy and science within the boundaries of a map outlined by religion (with particular focus on epistemology and ethics). Alongside this, Bavinck’s vision of Christian science focuses in particular on the relation between religion and the empirical sciences, between facts and metaphysics, and issues a call for their partnership.

The most obvious hope of Christian science, then, is the existential satisfaction brought about in the unity of metaphysics and observed facts. For “the metaphysical need lies too deep in human nature to be silenced in the long run.”16 In the early twentieth century, the resurgence of old and new religions was proof enough of this fact. Bavinck noted the growing number of his contemporaries, former scientific materialists, who had converted to spiritism, theosophy, Buddhism, and Islam. Reflecting on this, he wrote that “humanity is tired of doubt and uncertainty.”17 How should Christians respond in that setting? The return to positive Christianity had already demonstrated a return to dogmatics and church, history and liturgy. In that setting, Christian science had also arisen, Bavinck argued, so that the mind and heart could live together in peace, so that a foundation of truth could be established, and so that places like the university—so deeply fragmented by modernity—could be whole once again. In the emergence of the Christian religion and its love for science, he suggested: “Christianity was the true philosophy, and Christians were the real philosophers. They knew reality in truth, they knew who God was, and now, equipped with this knowledge, they also had a different and better insight into the essence of the world, of nature and history.”18

The Definition of Christian Science

In Bavinck’s view, positivism was marked by a naive belief that empirical science is somehow neutral, objective, and presuppositionless—for which reason, positivists saw their approach to science as uniquely authoritative. It had somehow been freed from the bias and subjectivity that clings to our humanness. In response, Bavinck offered an alternative presentation of science, one that neither rejects the centrality of the empirical nor makes light of the metaphysical assumptions with which all humans proceed into scientific research. Bavinck made this case by arguing that Christianity enables the scientist to hold the empirical and the metaphysical together: ergo, Christian science.

What does the adjective Christian mean for the scientific pursuit of knowledge? In Christianity and Science, Bavinck first invites his reader to consider the basics of science, in its essence and goal. Science begins with “normal empirical knowing.”19 The foundation upon which all science stands is the assumption of the unity of subject and object in normal empirical knowing (which, he argues, positivism fails to reckon with). Within normal knowing, there are degrees of certainty. While we may refer to many different propositions as objects of knowledge, we also know the implicit differences in knowing, believing, and assuming, all of which Bavinck sees as aspects of knowledge. For example, “believing stands beneath knowing [weten] not in subjective assurance but in objective obviousness.”20 Believing is so important, Bavinck argues, because most of what we know in life is not the product of objective obviousness. Rather, we receive much of our “knowledge” by way of trusted authority. When human beings arrive at a place where their daily needs are met, they desire to move beyond “normal empirical knowing” toward methodological knowing—a product of careful, controlled, systematic research and reflection on what is. This move from untested received knowledge toward a tested refinement of knowledge is the next move in the development of science. But again, humans are not satisfied with a systematic presentation of what is (only according to the senses). Such endeavors do require the uncovering of causes and natures, but a person also wants to know why. An exclusive diet of what answers leaves the stomach empty. While certain investigations might produce some immediate, obvious answers to the questions like for what purpose? empirical knowing remains ultimately inadequate in binding the truth to the realm of the ideal. It cannot posit final causes. It has no word to the ultimate, existential questions of why.

For this reason, Bavinck argues, science and philosophy are bound together as “physics” and “meta-physics.” From such desire and necessity, institutions like the university arise. Bavinck explains this relation in this lengthy yet helpful quote:

What now belongs under the rubric of scientific research and, as such, has a right to the name science is not decided by us a priori, but is rather provided in the passage of history [historie] and produced by its events [geschiedenis]. Slowly, investigation, the remit of science, the extent of the university, stretches out. Scientific thinking began in Greece with the question of the final ground of things, and from there, all the problems that present themselves to the human mind [geest] were developed in good order. The universities were not set up artificially in the Middle Ages, according to a previously established schema but, rather, were first planted as a small sprig, from which they grew like a living organism. In the present day, the technical subjects are gradually elevating themselves to the highest point of the university’s sciences, and these are constantly subject to a powerful evolution. In one word, there has been a development of science in the events of history [geschiedenis] that does not happen outside of human thinking and willing, but that also cannot be explained from these, and that points back to a driving idea, to an organized thought.21

Thus, while there is a difference between “normal” and “scientific” knowing, the two exist in the same continuum: “Empirical knowing [weten] knows [kent] the particular, independent phenomena, but scientific knowing [weten] seeks the universal, the law, that masters them all, the idea that animates them all.”22 And if science seeks the universal, the idea, then it is quite possible to speak of “Christian science.” What is Bavinck trying to accomplish by the use of this adjective? As he puts it, “The end goal of science can be none other than the knowledge of the truth—of the full, pure truth.”23

If one has found the full, pure truth by faith, then it is impossible and even wrong, he supposes, for this ideal to be disallowed once that person steps into the arena of science. A Christian practitioner of science must not be expected to imagine he or she is some other sort of person simply by virtue of the scientific task. Indeed, an expectation that a believer will somehow ignore or deactivate his or her most basic world-and-life-view commitments has profound anthropological consequences: it is an expectation that denies the unity of human self-consciousness. Pushing against the agreement and organic unity that the soul and body constitute together, and within which the intellect, will, and feeling cooperate as the one person, it asks the Christian scientist to practice a form of cognitive dissonance. In Bavinck’s view, the needs of the heart cannot be arbitrarily separated from the insights of the intellect. After all, the development of a world-and-life view means a person takes on philosophical and religious boundary-identifying ideas, which themselves become presuppositions—the very foundations of one’s practice of life as a human. On account of this, it is neither just nor possible to shed such metaphysical commitments in the act of inductive investigation. As such, someone who is a Christian and a scientist must allow science the freedom it needs to discover without neglecting the authority of God’s speech in God’s world. This is the case “because all science is the translation of the thoughts that God has laid down in his works.”24 Although “pseudoscience can lead away from him, true science leads back to him. In him alone, who is the truth itself, do we find rest, as much for our understanding as for our heart.”25 There are a number of ways of speaking about Christian science that follow.

First, Bavinck states that “science owes to this gospel . . . the reality of an eternal, incorruptible truth.”26Truth is not a mere subjective idea but rather is objective in God. Christianity supports science by rejecting skepticism in this regard. Further, it provides the presuppositions of both religion and science, namely, the creation of the world by the Godhead.

Second, Christian science, then, is a habitus of knowing that proceeds from the faith-knowledge of special revelation. It is science that “accepts special revelation”:27 “If God has communicated knowledge of himself in a special way, then it goes without saying that science must reckon with that, and failing to do so, it is guilty of disobedience and error.”28 The acceptance of special revelation is a question not of science but of religion, he argues. That means that Christian science proceeds on the basis of a world-and-life view whose boundaries are drawn by religion. For Bavinck, then, science either is biased against God or is for God, depending on its stance toward religion. And for a person who believes in the revelation of God and in the creation by God’s hand, it would be sinful to remove such faith from the judgments of scientific determination.

Third, science informed by Christianity understands that “religion and science . . . purity of heart and clarity of head . . . immoral life and ungodly doctrine are indubitably connected with one another.”29 The connection between religion and science is very close. For this reason, Christianity preserves both the religious and scientific personality of humanity and unifies the act of knowing.

Fourth, Bavinck argues, Christianity saves the sciences from positivism. It preserves the scientific nature of “literature, history, law, religion, and ethics, which together form the highest goods of humanity.”30 In this, the logic of the university is also preserved as a domain of organic knowledge.

Fifth, Christian science has the power both to make explicit that science proceeds on metaphysical assumption and to do so with precise claims about metaphysics itself.

Recall but once that all science, including that of nature, rests upon metaphysical presuppositions and proceeds from general, self-establishing truths; . . . the reliability of the senses, the objective existence of the world, the truth of the laws of thinking, and the logical, ideal content of perceptible phenomena.31

Christianity and Science is a prime example of Bavinck’s long-standing view that for the Christian, the Logos is the ground of certainty in any act of scientific research. This, in turn, provides a basis for understanding the sciences as a single organism, with each field of science occupying one part of the organism that cannot be separated from the whole.

Sixth, Christian science allows the humanities to speak in more than simply a descriptive sense. It enables humanities to be treated as sciences, with objects to know and a power to speak prescriptively: “Everyone expects of these sciences that they will say what should count as religion, ethics, and law, for every person.”32Positivism is a destructive force for ethics as a science, for example, necessarily reducing it to all manner of subjective constructs or a mere history without precept.

Finally, Christian science includes all the sciences and treats theology in particular as science. Bavinck’s view is no less bold or provocative than this: Christianity is a blessing to science.33 If science is defined exclusively by the empirical method, dogmatics is necessarily disallowed its scientific character. Yet, “a God who can in no sense be known is, in practical terms for us, the same as a God who does not exist.”34 If God cannot be known, then God cannot be served. Bavinck contends that those who have embraced the modernist (which is to say, empiricist) definition of science, and who treat religion and theology as merely historical or literary subjects, often assume that which they are disallowed to know: the existence of God. Further, as in his criticisms of positivism above, he argues that it is foolish for the modern scientist to suppose that theologians are dogmatic and proceed on the grounds of faith whereas science is scientific, open-ended, and proceeds on the ground of evidence. Both, he argues, are dogmatic and proceed from deeply ingrained intuitions. Bavinck makes an existential appeal on this front, that the religious person who says, “Whom have I in heaven but you?” cannot simply give up on faith because empiricist science declares God to be unknowable. “None who value religion and find their highest blessedness in fellowship with God can be neutral and objective regarding all that science is pleased to declare.”35 Rather, Bavinck writes, “[In response to] the science that is fashionable today, I call upon the science that has endured through the ages.”36 For Bavinck, then, Christian science assumes that the religious person who believes in the knowability of God must strive to unify head and heart, “faith and science.”

At this juncture, it is important to note that Bavinck distinguishes the possibility of Christian science from religious science in a generic sense. Christianity does not view religions as mere gradations of the same revelation but claims to be independent of all other religions. It claims knowledge of the triune God; of Christ as God and man, the messianic hope of the world; of the resurrected Christ in space and time. And so the Christian religion stands and falls on the confession of this special revelation. This particularity draws some boundaries for knowing. “If each religion is accompanied by a certain view of the world and humanity, of nature and history—which it always is—then through this it binds the whole of a person’s life and also, specifically, [his] science.”37 There can be no “double truth” for the believer. Science and religion cannot walk side by side without touching. All faith, positivism included, brings religious ideas to bear on scientific conclusions. For the Christian, it is Christian godliness that is profitable for all things.

The Necessity of Christian Science

Finally, because faith aims toward knowledge—or, we might state differently, because faith seeks understanding—the emergence of Christian science is not merely a novel response to modernist positivism. Rather, it is a historic Christian practice, and a necessity of life in a fallen world. Without sin, Christian science would be wholly unnecessary. There would be no breach in the consciousness between religion and knowledge apart from the rupture-induced act of denying the word of God in the egocentricity of becoming like God in knowing good and evil. Sin damaged the self to the extent that knowledge of a fact no longer coincides with knowledge of God. For this reason, Bavinck offers the reader both an argument for the necessity of faith in doing science and a narrative of the emergence of Christian science in Christian history.

With regard to the emergence of Christian science in Christian history, Bavinck makes the magisterial claim that the apostles of Christ “planted the banner of truth in that world of unbelief and superstition.”38 He suggests that in the first century, skepticism and mysticism displaced the former highly ordered orientation toward systematic investigation (here he likely has Aristotle in view). Against that backdrop, in its unparalleled sweep of the Roman Empire, Christianity offered the world a religion of truth. While Christianity proved distinctively attractive because of the grace it offered (alongside its claim of a resurrected Messiah), Bavinck’s account also makes the striking point that Christianity is a religion of grace precisely because it is first a commitment to truth. If the one God is truth, and his revelation in Jesus Christ is the unveiling of the truth, then all God does and says is truth. Christianity seeks not only to unveil truth but to make the first-order claim that God defines all truths, because God is truth and the author of essences. Thus, by the Spirit, “whoever believingly takes hold of this gospel is of the truth, is reborn through the truth, and is sanctified and freed [by it]. They are in the truth and the truth is in them.”39

Bavinck’s historical narrative then turns to focus on how this approach to truth broke through a culture of superstition in the “world of the Gentiles.” The patristic fathers proved, as quoted above, that “Christianity was the true philosophy, and Christians were the real philosophers. They knew [wisten] reality in truth, they knew who God was, and now, equipped with this knowledge, they also had a different and better insight into the essence of the world, of nature and history.”40Eventually, a positive approach had to be found with respect to the knowledge produced by the schools of the time, one that eschewed both the extreme of Tertullian’s denial of the good of pagan philosophy and the Alexandrian exaltation of pagan philosophy.