<\/span><\/p>\nAfter a brief biblical theology of catholicity, he concludes that acknowledging the temporal and spatial scope of the church is an encouragement to faith: \u201cThis catholicity of the church, as the Scriptures portray it for us and the early churches exemplify it for us is breathtaking in its beauty. Whoever becomes enclosed in the narrow circle of a small church (kerkje<\/em>) or conventicle, does not know it and has never experienced its power and comfort. Such a person shortchanges the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Spirit and incurs a loss of spiritual treasures that cannot be made good by meditation and devotion. Such a person will have an impoverished soul. By contrast, whoever is able to see beyond this to the countless multitudes who have been purchased by the blood of Christ from every nation and people and age, whoever experiences the powerful strengthening of faith, the wondrous comfort in times of suffering to know that unity with the whole church militant that has been gathered out of the whole human race from the beginning to the end of the world, such a person can never be narrow-minded and narrow-hearted\u201d (227). Catholicity is not only ecclesial expansiveness, but an expansiveness of soul.<\/p>\nBavinck sees a fateful shift in the development of nature\/supernatural schemes: \u201cCreation and re-creation (schepping en herschepping<\/em>) thus remain two realities independent of each other. Nothing remains but a compromise between the natural and the supernatural, between God and humanity, faith and knowledge, church and world, soul and body, religion and morality, quietism and activity\u201d (229). This necessarily changes the meaning of catholicity: \u201ccatholicity of the Christian principle that purifies and sanctifies everything is exchanged for a dualism that separates the supernatural from the natural by considering it as transcendent above the natural\u201d (229), as Christian faith becomes an \u201c\u2018add-on\u2019 or supplementary system\u201d (229). <\/span><\/p>\nThis is a truncated catholicity in which \u201cChristianity is exclusively church\u201d (230), and Bavinck sees this behind medieval Papal theology, which could only conceive of catholicity as an extension of the church\u2019s\u2014and the Pope\u2019s\u2014extension of \u201chegemony over everything\u201d (230). Thus \u201c<\/span>Rome thus maintains the catholicity of the Christian faith in the sense that it seeks to bring the entire world under the submission of the church. But it denies catholicity in the sense that the Christian faith itself must be a leavening agent in everything. In this way an eternal dualism remains, Christianity does not become an immanent, reforming reality\u201d (231). Bavinck, it has to be remembered, lived decades before Vatican II and may not have been aware of the ferment of early 20th-century Catholicism, which offered an internal critique that overlapped at significant points with Bavinck\u2019s own.<\/p>\nAs Bavinck sees it, the Reformation was not only a reform of the church but \u201ca radically new way of conceiving Christianity itself.\u201d In place of the \u201cdualistic\u201d Catholicism of the middle ages, the Reformers offered \u201ca truly theistic worldview\u201d (235). Thus the reformers \u201cattempted to free the entire terrain of the natural from the hegemony of the church\u201d (236). They supernaturalized the natural: \u201cThe natural order is not something of lesser worth or of a lower order as though it were not capable of being sanctified and renewed, but only suppressed and governed. The natural is as divine as the church even though its origin is in Creation rather than re-creation and derives from the Father rather than the Son. . . . In Protestantism the mechanical relation of nature and grace gives way to an ethical relation. The Christian faith is not a quantitative reality that spreads itself in a transcendent fashion over the natural but a religious and ethical power that enters the natural in an immanent fashion and eliminates only that which is unholy. The kingdom of heaven may be a treasure and a pearl of great price, but it is also a mustard seed and a leaven\u201d (236).<\/span><\/p>\nNot all the Reformers followed through on this outlook. Luther and Zwingli, he claims, shifted the emphasis of the medieval dualism, but remained within the dualistic frame. \u201cThe Gospel has nothing to do with worldly matters,\u201d Luther wrote. \u201cA Prince can be a Christian but he must not rule as a Christian\u201d (quoted, 237). Not surprisingly, Bavinck thinks Calvin got it right. His praise for Calvin isn\u2019t unqualified, but in Calvin \u201cthe Gospel comes fully into its own, comes to true catholicity. There is nothing that cannot or ought not to be evangelized. Not only the church but also home, school, society, and state are placed under the dominion of the principle of Christianity\u201d (238).<\/p>\n
Protestantism\u2019s catholic vision was not, however, realized. Medieval Catholicism didn\u2019t bring \u201ceverything under the hegemony of the church,\u201d as Bavinck claims it intended. But the Reformation \u201cwas even less successful in Christianizing life. Art, science, philosophy, political and social life never fully incorporated the principles of the Reformation. Although dualism was theoretically overcome it remained a practical reality in many areas of life\u201d (243). Surveying the landscape, he grimly concluded that \u201cthe catholicity of Christianity and the church\u201d has ended up with the \u201cobscurantism\u201d of the Jesuits and the \u201cother worldly pietism of Protestantism\u201d (244). Bavinck knows that Pietists and other modern Protestants get a lot done. What they don\u2019t get done is the fulfillment of the catholic vision of the Reformation: \u201cWhether withdrawing from the world in Pietist fashion or attacking it and seeking to conquer it by force in Methodist fashion, what is missing here is reformation in the genuine, true, full sense of the word. Instead, individuals are rescued and snatched out of the world\u2014the world that lies in wickedness\u2014there is never a methodic, organic reformation of the whole cosmos, of nation and country\u201d (246).<\/p>\n
Instead of what should be \u201ca mighty, imposing conflict between the entire church militant and the world,\u201d we have a series of guerrilla skirmishes that hit at symptoms instead of attacking the root causes: \u201cThe conflict is characterized by a struggle against individual sins while the root of all sins is often left untouched. The unbelieving results of science are rejected, but there is no inner reformation of the sciences on the basis of a different principle. Public life is ignored and rejected\u2014often as intrinsically \u2018worldly\u2019\u2014while no effort is made to reform it according to the demands of God\u2019s Word\u201d (246). We can cite John 3:16 all we want, but the way Protestants have gone about mission is \u201ca denial of the truth that God loves the world\u201d (246).<\/p>\n
Along with this is a failure of catholicity and unity in its more common sense. Many \u201cwith one fell swoop condemn all churches as false, call all believers to secession and frequently elevate separation itself to an article of faith. Church discipline is then made subject to this vision; its goal become the purity of the group itself rather than restoring the erring and fallen to Christ. The baptism of the existing churches is rejected or acknowledged only with the greatest reservations\u201d (247). This perpetuates the \u201cdark and negative\u201d sectarianism that was already evident at the beginning of the Reformation. Consumer preferences triumph over churchmanship: \u201cthis sectarianism leads to the erosion and disappearance of church consciousness. There is no longer an awareness of the difference between the church and a voluntary association. The sense that separation from the church is a sin has all but disappeared. One leaves a church or joins it rather casually. When something or other in a church no longer satisfies us, we look for another without any pangs of conscience. The decisive factor turns out to be our taste\u201d (247).<\/p>\n
Bavinck is aware of the social and ideological forces that would keep the gospel and the church in confinement. To accept that confinement would be a denial of the gospel: \u201cThe Gospel is not content to be one opinion among others of the lie but claims to be the truth, the truth that by its very nature is exclusive in every area. The church is not just an arbitrary association of people who wish to worship together but something instituted by the Lord, the pillar and ground of the truth. The world would gladly banish Christianity and the church from its turf and force it to a private inner chamber. We could give the world no greater satisfaction than to withdraw into solitude and leave the world peacefully to its own devices. But the catholicity of Christianity and the church both forbid us to grant this wish. We may not be a sect, we ought not to want to be one, and we cannot be one, without denying the absolute character of truth\u201d (248).<\/p>\n
(Bavinck, \u201cThe Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,\u201d Calvin Theological Journal<\/em> 27 [1992] 220-51.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology,\u201d wrote the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck in an essay translated by John Bolt in the Calvin Theological Journal. How we relate grace to nature, re-creation (herschepping) to creation (schepping), determines whether our ecclesiastical vision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1387,120,659],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bavinck","category-catholicity","category-ecclesiology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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