Three Disqualifications of Bavinck’s Ethics: 

A Theological Critique

Douglas B. Olds

June 1, 2025

1. Bavinck treats the Reformation as a systematic culmination rather than a contextual intervention with developing kinesthetic import. While he does acknowledge historical development, his deployment of it ultimately serves the construction of a Protestant doctrinal system presented as complete and culminating. This mischaracterization universalizes what was in fact an historically specific protest movement, transposing its responsive, ethical stance into a dogmatic ontology: The classical Reformation, in contrast to the Enlightenment, turned to the revelation of God and in unfortunate cases systematized the moral law in scope, clarity, and divine dignity by the unknowable person of Christ alone [1].

The result is a historically premature systematization—one that occludes the Reformation’s ongoing, semper reformanda task: local, virtue-shaped, and prophetic rather than top-down and strategic. By portraying a 19th C Reformation moment of theology as the apex of doctrinal synthesis, Bavinck neutralizes its kinetic and historicist character and recasts its activation of discernment as instead finalized, doctrinal orthodoxy. This displaces reforming as a lived, ethical posture of repentant investigation and meeting historical challenges, replacing it with scholastic closure assuaging the conscience.

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2. Bavinck misapplies the concept of “organicism” to the divine life, importing a metaphysical model derived from creation into the being of the Creator. This move threatens to totalize the infinite--what may be termed a “Protestant analogia entis”—which rationalizes divine relationality among infinite possibles as systemically unified and comprehensible to all finite times and places.

In doing so, Bavinck’s organic metaphysics misappropriates divine freedom and human ethical initiative, reducing their tension into a theodicy of structural harmony. This leads to an ethically disqualifying view of God as self-justifying totality, in which rupture, lament, and protest become theologically irrelevant if not incoherent.

Rather than a conative, participatory aesthetic—in which the Trinity invites and intends creation into repair through the Spirit—Bavinck’s “organicism” proposes a rationalized unity that denies humanity a role in redemptive formation. The dynamic of covenantal inscription and taxis becomes subordinated to a metaphysical formalism, even bounded determinism.

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3. Derivatively from the above, Bavinck cuts humanity off from co-creating the eschaton, assigning the work of repairing the Fall exclusively to divine origin and initiative, thereby implicitly denying Romans 9-11 and inferring replacement theology (its omission from consideration in tandem with his premature systematizing closure). In this, he vitiates the theological imperative for historical responsibility, covenantal collaboration, and regenerative poiesis.

The consequence is theological quietism: a framework that sanctifies passivity under the guise of reverent Christocentrism, but that in effect suppresses the virtue of accountability to justice. Without a theology of human participation in the eschatological unfolding, no thick account of humanity's ecclesial agency, prophetic witness, or historical transformation can be sustained.

Conclusion: Bavinck's Self-Reinforcing Theological Enclosure

Taken together, Bavinck's three flaws comprise a self-reinforcing theological enclosure:

• A formalist metaphysics of human/divine relationship through rationalist awareness of organicism,
• Rooted in a misread tradition of historicism (Reformation as dogma rather than intervening kinesthetic poiesis),
• Leading to practical inertia from inwardness (eschatological passivity, misdirected mission, and ethics unfocused from deontological virtue activated in community).

This structure displaces ethical agency, deactivates ecclesial and Pentecostal witness, and establishes stasis—often consecrated as liturgical participation—under the guise of divine sovereignty. What results is a theological system that appears reverent but ultimately forecloses responsibility, both theological and moral. Systematic foreclosure is remedied by ethical theology's extensibility--not procedurally or conceptually, but by the practical openings of immanence to new contexts and new demographics.

Notes:

[1] 

Only Jesus was perfectly healthy, for in him was full harmony; inspiration and manifestation were one; there was no domination of the mind, of reason, of the will; he did not lack the capacity for reason but knew its proper place and did not succumb to intellectualism;  he was not a fanatic or Methodist.  He cannot be classified as belonging to any category of person; all classes of people find in him an aspect that they place in the foreground. He is “everyman” in the best sense of the word; to apply to him one of our labels, such as Reformed, Lutheran, or Pietist, would be to disregard his universality and the “dignity” to which Jesus personally lays claim.

--Bavinck, Herman. 2019. Reformed Ethics: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, vol. 1, ed. John Bolt. Chap. 11 text accompanying footnotes 7-9. Baker.