Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Catholicity And The Imitation Of Christ: The Relationship Between Two Central Themes In Herman Bavinck’s Ethics
Author: Jessica Joustra

Catholicity And The Imitation Of Christ: The Relationship Between Two Central Themes In Herman Bavinck’s Ethics

Jessica Joustra

Jessica Joustra is Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology and the Director of the Albert M. Wolters Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. She earned a PhD in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. She is an editor and translator (with John Bolt, et al) of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics, vol. 1 and vol. 2 (Baker Academic, 2019, 2021). She is also co-editor (with Robert Joustra) of Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures (IVP, 2022).

Introduction

“The great question,” writes Herman Bavinck, “which always everywhere returns, is this: In what relation does grace place itself to nature?” In other words, “What is the relation between the creation and recreation, of the kingdoms of the earth and the Kingdom of Heaven, of humanity and Christianity, of that which is from below and that which is from above?”1

Beyond merely taking Bavinck at his word, that this is indeed his great question, there is wide scholarly consensus that the relationship between grace and nature, particularly his affirmation that grace restores nature, is a central theme within Bavinck’scorpus. From Jan Veenhof’s Revelatie en Inspiratie to Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto’s recent NeoCalvinism: A Theological Introduction, the prominence and centrality of this theme in Bavinck is uncontested.2

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Brock and Sutanto rightly claim that for Bavinck (and Abraham Kuyper), the “relationship between creation and salvation is one of the most prominent and tenacious matters appearing in the whole of theneo-Calvinist theological tradition.” As such, it is “central to their dogmatics.” Alongside Bavinck’s dogmatic works, the recent discovery of his Reformed Ethicsmanuscript, gives rise to an occasion to explore the import of this theme in Bavinck’s ethics as well. Given the significance of the theme for Bavinck, and the close relationship Bavinck identifies between dogmatics and ethics,3 one would expect that grace restoring nature would remain prominent in his ethical work as well. Such a hypothesis was immediately affirmed by Dirk van Keulen, who discovered Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics manuscript.4 In van Keulen’s 2011 essay “Herman Bavinck on the Imitation of Christ,” he concludes that the imitation...