Herman Bavinck - Reformed Ethics--Volume 2: The Duties of the Christian Life

This preface will be relatively brief. Since the editors preface to volume 1 provides details about Bavincks Reformed Ethics manuscript and the story of the translation project, we will not repeat that here. Our focus instead will be on the relation between the foundational content of volume 1 and Bavincks exposition of the Decalogue in volume 2.

The heart of Bavincks understanding of the Christian life in volume 1 is found in chapter 9 with its emphasis on union with Christ and the imitation of Christ. We must first believe in Christ; he is our Savior and Lord, our prophet, priest, and king. But, says Bavinck, he is more: He is also our example and ideal. His life is the shape, the model, that our spiritual life must assume and toward which it must grow.

Charges of decisionism and legalism accompany these critiques; it is important, so it is said, to get beyond rules and principles about right and wrong and focus attention on nurturing persons of character and virtue as people who do what is right by living the ethic of the kingdom of God.

John Howard Yoder sets this contrast clearly, asking whether the traditional use of the Ten Commandments for ethics really needs Jesus. He wonders if the natural moral law discernible by human intelligence added to the Ten Commandments would not be sufficient for most Protestants. After all, for them, the broad outlines of moral behavior are dictated by the orders of creationthe fact that the family, the school, work, and the state are instituted by God in creation and therefore binding upon us. He concludes with this: If there had been no Jesus, our desire or capacity to be good might be defective. But what God wills, what he asks of the person who seeks to please him, would be just the same if there had been no Jesus. Yoder raises a challenging question that must be answered by those who seek to be disciples of Jesus Christ, particularly now when Yoders general perspective is so popular among many Christian ethicists.

Yoders own answer is to set the ethics of Jesus and his kingdom as a contradiction to any ethics using divine command or principles: If, however, our ethics are to be guided by Jesus, then we reject the morality of common sense or reason or the orders of creation because of its content and not because of its Source alone. It is an inadequate moral guide because its standards are wrong and not because humans can understand it. The alternative, to put it starkly, would seem to be as follows: Christ or the Law; the imitation of Christ or divine command; the ethics of the kingdom or the ethics of Sinai supplemented by natural law.

Let us briefly explore each element of this frame.

T RINITARIAN

Bavinck regularly describes the essence of the Christian faith in trinitarian terms: The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God. It is a mistake, then, to repudiate creation order and law in the name of Jesus and the kingdom of God. In trinitarian terms, the work of the Son would then undo the work of the Father, and that simply cannot be true.

C OVENANTAL

Critics of command and duty ethics often seem to miss the covenantal character of Old Testament law, overlooking the prologue to the Decalogue: I am the L O R D your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Exod. 20:2).

But the oversight goes deeper and ignores the decidedly covenantal, legal character of Gods relationship with the original parents of the human race. Gods blessing to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over creation (Gen. 1:28) was framed by a stipulation and curse: You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die (Gen. 2:1617). This languagestipulation, blessing, and curseis legal and covenantal and gave rise within Reformed theology to the notion of a covenant of works. This doctrine has a number of important implications.