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.
2. Bavinck (mis)appropriates the concept of “organicism” to the divine life [2],
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 thin tension into a thick 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.
Moreover, the effect of Darwinian mechanisms of common descent (with organismic change through time) and paleontology's series of species change attendant to "organicism" makes the assignment of organic to divine metaphysics a most severe category mistake, whereby the human telos is turned into a homeostasis-seeking absolute of form.
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. There is signifying rupture--a disincarnation--in normative systematics that estrange those who belong to the people of God by refusing to open cognitive structures into the wider horizons of a Christological gnoseology—one that enacts and extends poiesis rather than preserves form and system.
Bavinck's continuing popularity is tied to his attempt to maintain a superannuated Protestant scholastics of transcendence that squelches the open horizon of Spirit-led conation. This contrasts with the anthropology of divine immanence that is covenantal rather than categorical; improvisational rather than abstract; participatory by virtue rather than through ritualism's spectacle or reactionary spread of formalism.
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 dogmatic reserve 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, emph. added. Baker.
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