Egocentricity,Organism,and Metaphysics: Sin and Renewal in Bavinck’s Ethics 1

Introduction

Two significant positive trajectories have been established recently in the studies of the Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian, Herman Bavinck (1854–1921). Firstly, in 2008, it was announced that a 1,100-page handwritten manuscript was found in archives located in Amsterdam and Kampen that turned out to be an unpublished work by him on Reformed Ethics, written between the years 1884–95. ² With this discovery in hand, a group of editors, led by Dirk van Keulen at Kampen and John Bolt at Calvin Theological Seminary, subsequently transcribed the work into a Dutch critical edition and translated it into English, with the first volume out of three of the English translations now published in the summer of 2019. ³ The second is the emphasis on the organic motif in Bavinck’s thought as the catalyst for unity. The organic motif was the means by which Bavinck negotiated the tensions between classical and modern modes of thought, the application of which allowed him to develop a self-consciously eclectic approach that sought to incorporate modern theological insights while standing on the grounds of Reformed orthodoxy. An organic vision of all things stems from a Trinitarian ontology according to which God is archetypally one-in-three. Creation, being an ectypal reflection of God’s triune self, thus displays multi-layered spheres of unities-in-diversities that organically cohere together. As a neo-Calvinist dogmatician, Bavinck was interested in the leavening power of Christian principles for thought and life, and argued that it was precisely Christianity’s organic vision that allowed it to oppose only sin and not nature or culture as such, and thus that Christianity can utilize the philosophical and ethical tools found in every century and intellectual milieu. ⁴

With these two recent trajectories in view, it is an ample opportunity to ask the question regarding the relationship between Bavinck’s Ethics and his organic outlook, while locating this discussion within some current conversations in theological ethics. This article will focus specifically on the relationship between his theological account of sin and renewal in his Ethics and that organic vision. The twin questions this article will be asking, precisely, are these: what is the logical relationship between Bavinck’s organic whole federalism, where ethical ties are ontologically constitutive, with his claim in the Reformed Ethics that sin’s organizing principle is the prioritization of the ego above all else? Further, how does that organic whole anthropology inform his vision of renewal and the subsequent ethical imperative that flow from the Spirit’s regenerative work? This article traces Bavinck’s logic through the Ethics on these twin questions, while being cognizant of the rest of his oeuvre.

Exposition of these aspects of Bavinck’s thought contributes to at least two recent discussions in theological ethics. Firstly, there is a growing scholarly recognition that past descriptions of Reformed ethics as metaphysically thin and focused on divine commands should be significantly nuanced, as much of the Reformed tradition is interested in grounding their ethics in a robust metaphysics of anthropology and creation. ⁵ One particular lively trajectory within this trend is the retrieval of Jonathan Edward’s virtue ethics, according to which the Spirit gifts God’s people with ‘virtuous dispositions’ that nurture ‘benevolence to Being in general’. ⁶ The retrieval of Bavinck on this point provides both a confirmation and nuance of this trajectory; in Bavinck one encounters an emphasis on the metaphysics of human nature that focuses on the social, corporate and holistic implications of that metaphysic rather than an emphasis on the formation of the individual’s virtuous dispositions in isolation, along with a rather tight-knit account of both divine command and Christian metaphysics as the ground of theological ethics. Indeed, though Bavinck prefers the language of ‘good works’ over virtues, arguing that the former is Spirit-grounded while the latter are at best ‘splendid vices’, ⁷ he still grounds his ethics on a robust understanding of human nature and its ends by way of his organic anthropology, providing a complement to the more individualist account that one might encounter in Edwards. ⁸ Hence, though Pieter Vos notes that ‘neo-Calvinists’ often regarded virtues with a ‘hostile attitude’, ⁹ one shall see that Bavinck’s organicism shares the same goal of the virtue ethicist: ‘Searching for the good for one’s own life, one asks at the same time: what is the good for humanity as such?’ ¹⁰

This article also shows that Bavinck could be fruitfully related to a second discussion, namely, Jennifer Herdt’s recent critical retrieval of the Bildung tradition in post-Enlightenment German thought. Challenging the secularization reading of this tradition which interpreted Bildung as an antithetical response against a Christianity that inculcated passive formation, Herdt argues that Bildung could only be understood ‘in relation to theological reflection on humankind as created in the image of God and called, by virtue of that fact, to play a special role in the reditus of creation back to God’. ¹¹ The Bildung tradition can thus be reinterpreted as having a twofold purpose: (1) the task of ethical formation that has the maturation of humanity as a whole as its telos, and yet (2) that this telos does not mitigate but rather is achieved through the self-realization of free personalities. Bildung can thus be critically appropriated by a ‘Christian humanism that accepts the task of the formation of humanity through projects of individual and collective human self-realization as participation in the reditus of creation to a radically transcendent God whose life is overflowing self-gift and invitation into friendship’. ¹² As we shall see, Bavinck’s ethical outlook, written too in the wake of this post-Kantian tradition (though in a different, Dutch, neo-Calvinist context), has overlapping conceptual and formative concerns, even while he avoids some of the triumphalist tendencies of this German tradition. I shall return to these discussions in the conclusion of this article.

The rest of this article exposits Bavinck’s organic ethics with these discussions in view in three steps. Firstly, I show how Bavinck consistently develops this corporate and organic account of the image of God and original sin in his Reformed Dogmatics and Ethics, paying attention to the way in which he tethers a divinely instituted federalism to a corporate ontology of humanity. Secondly, I hone in on his identification of egocentricity as the organizing principle of actual sins, and relate this identification with his organic anthropology. More precisely, I argue that his identification of egocentricity with the organizing principle of sin fits well with his account of the image of God and the dissecting or loosening power of sin. Sin loosens that which is supposed to be together, and egocentricity thus separates and creates division within the organism of humanity and its relationship to God. Egocentricity is not just a violation of our ethical obligations but also our metaphysical make-up. Precisely because the organism of humanity is tied together by way of ethical bonds, egocentricity has ontological implications: it is the means by which the organism of humanity is torn asunder. Thirdly, I argue that his organic anthropology, along with his identification of egocentricity as a principle of actual sin, leads Bavinck to eschew an ethical account that focuses on individualist marks of piety and action and more toward the free reformation of ethical relations for the task of forming humanity. The Spirit’s work is thus that of renewing individuals for the sake of binding them together, thus refashioning state, society, culture, and ultimately humanity as a whole. Hence, as Philip Ziegler has recently noted, ‘there is a holism’ to Bavinck’s understanding of the image of God. ¹³ The Spirit causes renewed humanity not to separate from the world, but restores its shape as a unity-in-diversity of free personalities as part and parcel of God’s redemption of the entire cosmos, which is consistent with the neo-Calvinistic principle of grace renewing nature and of the Gospel as a leavening, transformative, agent. As we shall see, Bavinck would call this nothing short of an ‘organic reformation’.

Humanity and Original Sin in the Ethics

Bavinck’s Ethics makes claims concerning humanity and sin consistent with his dogmatic account. A summary of Bavinck’s claims on the matter from his Dogmatics is thus appropriate to provide the broader canvas in which his comments on theological anthropology from the Ethics is found. One of the most interesting aspects of Bavinck’s account of the image of God and original sin is his focus on the corporate and social unity of all of humanity. For Bavinck, the image of God is not just found in the organic unity of individual persons, but encompasses all of humanity precisely because human beings are image bearers of a triune God. We are not a collection of atomistic individuals but are singularly united together as an organism. Interestingly, however, Bavinck’s organic account of the image of God is not a realist one, which is often expected of organic theories. Following Thomas McCall’s recent discussion, an organic whole theory of theological anthropology is typically also an ‘organic whole realist’ account according to which humanity is somehow a single entity. ¹⁴ Tied to the doctrine of original sin, a realist account argues that human beings inherit Adam’s guilt or corruption because humanity really was, in some way, in Adam. Bavinck, however, was critical of a realist account, for reasons that would take us beyond the scope of the present article. ¹⁵ While he does identify the whole of humanity as a single organism, he does not argue that humanity was a singular metaphysical entity with individuals merely as extended parts of that single entity. Rather, human beings make up a unity-in-diversity, and what binds them is not that they share a metaphysical identity, as if they are numerically one thing, but their ethical relations. ¹⁶ This ethical unity that binds the diversity of individuals into a single organism is precisely why the covenantal representation of Adam and Christ are fitting: their federal representations are proper to the organic shape of the human race. A key passage here from Bavinck’s Dogmatics is the following:

The covenant of works and the covenant of grace stand and fall together. The same law applies to both. On the basis of a common descent an ethical unity [etische eenheid] has been built that causes humanity—in keeping with its nature—to manifest itself as one organism and to unite its members in the closest possible way, not only by ties of blood but also by common participation in blessing and curse, sin and righteousness, death and life. ¹⁷

In other words, Bavinck imbued an ontological significance to ethical relations. Human beings are those for whom ethical relations are ontologically constitutive. To be ethically related is essential to be a human being. Bavinck had opened the way forward to be organic whole federalists, where the covenantal administration represents not legal fictions but the triune design of human beings.

Let us turn now to the Ethics. Under the section of the essential human nature, Bavinck emphasizes that image bearers are individuals in relationship with God. Humanity, however, cannot be divided up and merely considered individualistically as ‘atoms or numbers’, ¹⁸ but collectively as a unity. Though individuals truly are made in God’s image, individualism, Bavinck argues, is a product of revolutionary and anti-theistic thought.

This atomistic view was the error of the French philosophers like Rousseau and is the fundamental error of revolutionary thought. The term ‘individual’ belonged to the revolution and expressed its all-consuming character. Our fathers did not know the word ‘individualism’ because for them there were no more individuals; to be human was always to be the image of God, a member of the human race. For the revolution, humanity is an aggregate mass of individuals who can be arbitrarily combined, like the random collision of Epicurus’s atoms, into state, society etc. The revolutionary view is false. We have to be understood in the relations in which we stand, naturally and historically. ¹⁹

Humanity’s eschatological perfection, then, is not displayed by exhibiting virtues or good works individually, as if one’s character can be properly developed or adjudicated in isolation. ‘The highest good is not individual moral perfection but the moral perfection of humanity. In fact, the one cannot be achieved without the other’. ²⁰ In short, humanity exists as a single unity, a diversity of individuals united together as a single organism. Humanity, ‘in its successive generations is a unity, an organism to which we are related’. ²¹

What, precisely, ties the organism of humanity together? Crucially, and in accord with his Dogmatics, Bavinck unites the diversity of individuals together not merely by the physical connectedness that binds them but also in the ethical relations that obtain between them. In distinction from animals, human beings have ethical responsibilities, ties and obligations, and these consist precisely in, with and toward relationships. ‘Animals form no family, society or state’, Bavinck wrote. ²² By way of contrast:

For people, the physical, natural relation is also the first, and also passes away; but ethical [ethische] relationships develop out of and on the basis of the physical. Although the natural relationship is first, the moral and spiritual relationships follow. People remain in relationship to each other until the end of their lives. Those ethical ties are many and manifold. ²³

We are created as social and ethical creatures, made dependent upon the families, societies and cultures from which we come, and hence we have responsibilities toward one another. Human life is thus an essentially ‘moral life’. ²⁴ Hence, to be moral is never an issue of mere individual piety but to live in accordance with this corporate reality. Bavinck writes in no uncertain terms: ‘people are moral when they live according to the human standard—or, somewhat more profoundly, according to the notion of humanity—in all these relations’. ²⁵

After sketching the essence of humanity—as whole individuals and as a corporate unity as a single organism—Bavinck turns to humanity under sin. At the outset of his discussion, he reminds readers that it would be a mistake to include the entire doctrine of sin under ethics. ²⁶ He presupposes his discussion of the ‘origin, essence, and nature of sin . . . [and the] guilt and punishment of sin’ in the Dogmatics and notes that what must be discussed under ethics is ‘what we have become because of that sin’, that is, ‘the effect of sin on humanity in all areas of life’. ²⁷ Here, I suggest that Bavinck is drawing upon the classical distinction between originating sin and the sin originated as the twin aspects of original sin. ²⁸ Originating sin refers to that first sin by the first human beings, while originated sin refers to the impact or effects of that first sin on the rest of humanity. Under Ethics, then, Bavinck argues that what needs to be discussed primarily is the sin originated rather than originating sin.

For Bavinck, then, the sin originated is nothing short of pervasive. It impacts every faculty of the human being. It signifies not merely the loss of original righteousness (contra Rome) but the distorting of the human nature. It is an animating principle that turns the whole self against God and neighbor. The heart, the I, the ‘very core’ of our being is ‘corrupt’, and ‘this is why all human capabilities are also corrupt’. ²⁹ The sin originated thus impacts not merely the human’s ‘spiritual life, our fellowship with God (Rome’s view). But precisely because of that loss, the natural life in all its forms and dimensions is corrupted as well’. ³⁰

This corruption takes the form of a division within one’s internal life, as the faculties now war against each other instead of working together in harmony. ‘The mind has been loosened from the will through sin; it has become immoral, one capability alongside others rather than within them. It is torn loose from life; the heart that is dead also kills the mind’. ³¹ Sin is an atomizing force; it detaches the faculties from one another. ³² Analogously, and as a consequence, sin blinds us such that we now grasp only partial, isolated truths rather than the whole: ‘Thus, we do have some knowledge of individual verities, but we do not know the truth, the system, the unity of all truth in God’. ³³

Egocentricity and Organism

With the basic framework now canvassed, we can now turn to Bavinck’s identification of the organizing principle (beginsel) behind every sin. With some qualifications, he argues that the ‘organizing principle [beginsel] of sin is self-glorification, self-divination; stated more broadly, self-love or ego-centricity [zelfzucht]’. ³⁴ This does not mean, he later clarifies, that all sin ‘subjectively proceeds from egocentric motives’. ³⁵ But he does mean that ‘objectively all sins may be traced back to egocentricity’. ³⁶ To be more precise, then, there is thus a subjective and objective organizing principle for sins; while the former is as diverse as the circumstances at hand and the individuals responsible, the latter is egocentricity. Furthermore, this egocentricity is identified with ‘covetousness or concupiscence and accompanies our birth . . . and is itself sin and the root of sin’. ³⁷ Bavinck emphasizes once again that this identification is ‘[c]ontrary to Rome’. ³⁸ Egocentricity manifests itself in both sensuous and spiritual sins, sins directed against God and neighbor.

Right after he first identifies egocentricity as the organizing principle of actual sin, however, Bavinck strikes a familiar note concerning the dissecting and atomizing power of sin. Sin, he notes, does not just create divisions within the individual self, nor does it just mean a turning away from God and unto the self. Sin affects the whole order of humanity as a singular whole by loosening it:

Humanity not only surrendered its true center but also replaced it with a false center. On the one hand, sin is a decentralization of all things away from God, a loosening, an undoing of bonds with God—atomism, individualism. On the other hand, it is at the same time also a concentration of everything around the human self, an attempt to subjugate everything to an individual ‘ego’. Thus sin is not only a matter of turning away from the existing order—in effect, undermining order—but also an establishing of another order, which actually is a disorder. Sin produces not only an alternative or counterorder but an anti-order; in a word: revolution. ³⁹

This significant passage bears a few reflections. Notice that sin replaces the center not of mere individuals but of the entirety of humanity. ‘Prior to this, God was the center of all human thought and action; now it is the person’s “I”’. ⁴⁰ Every individual’s ego is now that substitute. But the ego cannot carry the weight of humanity’s center; it is a ‘false’ center that does not produce unity within the human race, but rather of ‘disorder’. God is not only the appropriate ethical center of the human race; he is the only one with the metaphysical clout that can bear the weight of humanity, uniting it into a single ordered organism. ⁴¹ An undoing of the bonds with God, therefore, and substituting the center of humanity with the countless egos of each individual human self is nothing short of catastrophic. Echoing van Prinsterer’s words, it is nothing short of a revolution that creates not an alternative reality but an unstable anti-order that is bound to collapse under its own weight. In Bavinck’s words in an earlier essay: ‘Sin dissolves . . . sin propagates atomism and individualism to the extreme. Sin is a disorganizing power possessing no reason for existence and thus no purpose in itself’. ⁴² If sin is not only a disorder within the self but the breaking apart of the organism of the image of God as a singular unity, then, it follows that redemption demands nothing short of the renewal of ‘not only individual, isolated human beings but humanity as an organic whole’; it is a redemption of ‘the whole world in its organic connectedness’ from ‘the power of sin’. ⁴³

Where, however, does egocentricity fit in all this? What is the relationship, in other words, between egocentricity as the organizing principle of actual sin and the inherently atomizing character of sin that tears apart humanity as an organism? Bavinck does not actually render this relationship explicitly, but I believe we can draw out the implicit logic that underlies Bavinck’s thought.

Here, it seems, is the pattern of reasoning. Egocentricity is not just a distortion of the self, nor is it merely an ethical violation that breaks a command. Precisely because humanity is a single organism, and ethical ties are those through which human individuals are united as a unity-in-diversity, egocentricity is an ethical misdirection with strongly ontological connotations. Egocentricity is precisely the misdirection through which the organism of humanity is torn asunder. If sin is a dissolving and loosening power, egocentricity is the precise and concrete manifestation of that dissolve and the instrument that loosens the bonds that bind humanity together. Egocentricity destroys the ethical ties that bind together marriages, families, states and cultures; it is the means of revolution and the catalyst of atomization.

An ‘Organic Reformation’: Organism and Ethics

This, indeed, leaves us with an incisive, though bleak, diagnosis of the human condition. Let us take stock. Human beings cannot be considered as individuals in isolation, but rather as members of the organism of the entire human race. What binds the organism together are the ethical ties that obtain between us. To be is to be in relationship. Bavinck’s account is thus an organic whole federalist account. When sin entered into the world through Adam, an atomizing force created disorder within the faculties of the self and within the organism of humanity. Sin loosens and atomizes. Egocentricity, as the organizing principle of actual sins, is thus the means by which the organism of humanity is torn apart; it has ontological significance.

It is appropriate, therefore, to attend to how Bavinck describes the spiritual life and answer the second question: how does Bavinck’s organic vision of humanity inform his ethical outlook? Indeed, his discussion of the spiritual life corresponds to the sinful life that the Spirit renews. Fittingly, regeneration produces a reuniting of one’s self into a harmonious whole and a renewal of one’s fellowship with God and others; it produces a life force that redeems the self and necessarily turns us toward others, restoring the spheres of state, science, art, culture and family. The human individual is filled with gaps and disharmony; our wills conflict with our minds, our deeds with our conscience, and so on, but the spiritual life gives us a new, organizing principle of life:

For the foundational principle of the spiritual life is the love of God in Christ poured out through the Holy Spirit . . . and this principle now flows into all of life, into all the thoughts and deeds of the spiritual person. Love of God gives stature and form to the spiritual life; it organizes and inspires it, turning it into one beautiful organic whole which functions as the foundational life-force. ⁴⁴

If sin loosens and atomizes, then, the Spirit renews and rebinds. This life force, crucially, is an outward-looking one. It drives one’s self into fellowship with others and thus reverses the atomizing powers of egocentricity. The spiritual life manifests itself precisely in the new bonds that are recreated with fellow believers precisely as believers are drawn toward God: ‘Because love for God is its foundation, spiritual life itself consists of fellowship with God, with Christ, and with fellow believers. Love strives after and is fellowship, a fellowship that is only possible through and in love. Hatred separates; love binds’. ⁴⁵

Fellowship, too, has ontological significance. When Christians reconcile and bind ourselves in ethical ties with one another, we are not only obeying God’s commands; we are becoming more whole. Indeed, we are witnessing to the work of God which renews and reconnects together the organism of humanity. Love binds the organism of redeemed humanity together, uniting it under a single head, and maturing it toward an eschatological telos. Crucially, Bavinck specifies egoism and isolation as twin dangers against the organism of spiritual life, and cooperation as an essential part of it:

The genuine, normal condition—that is, the health, of an organism consists in the following: (a) A vital principle animates from its center and controls and regulates everything. (b) no organs, parts, or members of an organism, animated from that center, isolate themselves from each other; rather, they cooperate with each other. This should happen in such a way that each member confines itself to being what it is supposed to be and actually is what it is supposed to be, arrogating nothing to itself (egotistically) [egoïstisch] but also not withdrawing itself (isolation) [isolement], such that the hand is the hand and nothing more, the foot is the foot, etc. (c) All members together, through the one vital principle, work toward one goal and consider themselves instruments for achieving the one task of life. ⁴⁶

More precisely, then, the organism of humanity does not deny the real individuality of each person, but rather recognizes that renewed humanity is a unity of diverse individuals and personalities. It embraces diversity and refuses one-sidedness, refusing to privilege one temperament, faculty, or attribute for another. Bavinck argues that this is already signified by the differing personalities of the apostles: John, Peter, Paul and James each have differing modes of expressions, emphases and strengths, yet neither overrule the others and they work complementarily. ‘Indeed, variety must continue so that humanity may be a single organism in which one member is different from and complements the other’. ⁴⁷ Once again signaling a consistency with his Dogmatics, Bavinck’s emphasis on the whole of humanity as the image of God is not meant to eclipse a proper expression of individuality. ⁴⁸ The imitation of Christ, likewise, means following Jesus with our own uniqueness intact: ‘we must imitate him in everything, albeit in our own way, with our own individual personality, status, social class, and calling’. ⁴⁹

Here Bavinck complements Herdt’s criteria concerning a proper Christian humanism that seeks to preserve the individual personality’s self-expressiveness even while its goal is the Spiritual renewal of all of humanity: ‘the realization of humanity as a way of participating in a cosmic process of diversification and harmonization, the finite expression of the image of God’. ⁵⁰ This is expressed with greater clarity in Bavinck’s essay on the Kingdom of God, in which one finds a ‘noncontrastive’ immanent transcendence according to which human self-realization does not compete with the divine summon: ⁵¹

But in the Kingdom of God all of those [faculties of the self] are once again pure instruments of the personality, arranged in perfect order around the personality as its center . . . Everything moves outward from the center of the personality and returns there. All powers exist in the full light of consciousness and are fully included in the will. All compulsion is excluded since it is a kingdom of the spirit and thus of freedom. In this kingdom the natural and the visible are placed completely under the perspective of the spiritual and eternal; the physical is a pure instrument of the ethical even as everything, including our own body, which belongs to our persons and yet is not identical to our persons, stands completely in the service of our personality and is glorified precisely as an instrument of the dominion of the Spirit. ⁵²

This is a point reiterated in Bavinck’s Ethics: ‘Everything becomes the agent of the believer’s I, of the spiritual life as it finds its goal again in the glory of God’. ⁵³ The organism of renewed humanity, then, does not come at the cost of the free personality nor of its absorption into passivity by way of divine formation, but is rather realized by its organic, voluntary expression and creative actualization by the Spirit:

So the Kingdom is a kingdom of free personalities where each personality has reached its full development. But it is a kingdom of free personalities who do not live separated from each other, like individuals, but who together constitute a kingdom and are bound to each other in the most complete and purest community. The Kingdom of God is not an aggregate of disparate components, not even an entity bound together accidentally by a communal interest. ⁵⁴

These comments on the free expression of the personality and their communal direction should be kept in view when Bavinck’s critiques of other ethical movements within Christianity are considered. Bavinck’s critiques of individualism do not come at the cost of denying personality. Indeed, this focus on the freeing and horizontalizing effects of the Spirit’s renewing work, I argue, informs and undergirds Bavinck’s critiques of various ethical schools in the history of Christian thought. Surveying Bavinck’s analyses of these ethical movements, one comes to the impression that he was most critical of those Christian traditions that identify progress in the Christian life narrowly with self-cultivation, self-introspection or marks of individualistic virtue. ⁵⁵ This is signaled in his criticisms, for example, of Pietism, Methodism and asceticism, which revolve around the claim that they end up compromising a holistic anthropology according to which unity and diversity are equipoise and every sphere of interconnected human life is renewed. Hence, a Bavinckian ethic pushes toward a reformation of every sphere of relationships.

‘Mysticism and Pietism’, Bavinck writes, ‘put the seat of faith in feeling and thus do not embrace the fullness of our humanity’. ⁵⁶ As such, Pietism emphasizes that true conversion requires walking through specific experiences and stages of internal growth, creating a division within the church between those who were truly converted and those who lack the internal marks:

Pietists want to express the divine in their lives always and everywhere; pietism sinks away into the self and does not rest in God but pays attention to the subject, who has to appropriate the divine and has to display this in his daily walk . . . Mystics lose themselves in God and become quietists; pietists lose God in themselves, always consider themselves, but are also active, engage in mission work, in teaching, in education of the people; in one word; philanthropy. ⁵⁷

As such, despite bringing some necessary corrections to rationalist and intellectualist tendencies within the church, Pietism loses sight of the covenant idea that brings together the corporate reality of the church, giving way to a ‘pernicious group (club) mentality. The converted separate themselves, live apart, and leave family and world to fend for themselves. They are salt not within but alongside the world’. ⁵⁸ Likewise, ‘Religion is limited to being busy with the things of God (reading, praying). Daily work becomes a matter of necessity alone rather than a holy calling. Sunday stays disconnected from the rest of the week; faith is not tested in the world. Christians become passive, quietistic’. ⁵⁹ Assuming that the standard of piety is precisely this kind of walk, the pietist lacks an appreciation for the individuality of each person: ‘By constantly attending to self-contemplation, people make their experience the norm for everyone else’—a pathology hence enters the organism. ⁶⁰ Pietism, in effect, pushes Christians to separate from others in isolation, on the one hand, and depreciates the diversity of the members of renewed humanity by making specific character traits and practices the norm for every Christian.

Later on, under the section on the pathologies of the Christian life, Bavinck argues that Pietism’s separatist character lacks a sense of holism:

[T]he Pietist is always a separatist. Whatever lies outside is ‘the world’. It follows that such a person has no eye for the whole, for history, not even for the history of Christianity, whose history of dogma the Pietist rejects entirely or fails to appreciate, nor even an eye for the church, whose value the Pietist does not see . . . Next, having no eye for the whole, they set their hope on converting single individuals, through direct contact. ⁶¹

Methodism, locating the seat of faith in the will rather than in the emotions, likewise, ironically falls into similar pitfalls:

Methodism has an aggressive character, seeks only conversion, and looks for the seat of faith in the will (Pietism in feelings, rationalism in the intellect). But it regards conversion as a sudden, momentary, and immediate act. Therefore, it also misunderstands the church, baptism, and Christian nurture. In addition, it runs the risk of allowing sanctification to be absorbed entirely in the task of converting others. This is the reason for blind zeal without understanding, for all those committees, and for penitential sermons. Everything must be geared toward missions; children, young men and women, must establish societies, evangelize, and mobilize all efforts to make converts, and with tracts and Bibles to conquer the world by storm. The natural consequence of all this is the Salvation Army. The result is that all secular areas, science, art, literature, politics, are abandoned to the world. It is important to abstain from smoking and drinking, among other activities, because they all belong to the world. By putting the will in the foreground in order to oppose quietism and predestination, Methodism lacks a harmonious anthropology of the whole person. ⁶²

Methodism’s focus on exclusively spiritual matters, revivalism and conversion, while initially seeming like an emphasis on corporate humanity, is actually individualistic and nonholistic. It focuses on mission work as causing conversions rooted in a decision of the will, and leaves behind the large nexus of natural human social relations to themselves; it does not see the renewal of humanity as involving the reworking of all human connections in state, science, society, and so on.

These themes come into an even sharper focus in Bavinck’s rather scathing critique of asceticism—a form of Christian piety that claims to be most like Christ but actually is inwardly far from him; while Jesus lived for humanity, the ascetics live inwardly for themselves. In his own words:

After all, Jesus lived for humanity, suffered and died for them; the monk and the martyr who seek death live for themselves, are preoccupied with themselves. This view thus leads to externalism, to superficiality, to outward conformity without inner relationship. The imitation of Christ is not limited to the religious even through during his travels on earth it often consisted of a specific forsaking of family and occupation, following and preaching Jesus; this cannot be everyone’s calling. Christ wants not only renunciation of the world but also to conserve the world, to save the world (John 3:17). Asceticism is only one exercise of virtue, an exercise that has no content other than the exercise itself. ⁶³

These vignettes into Bavinck’s critique of these various movements is not meant to suggest that his characterization was wholly fair. Rather, the point here is that Bavinck’s understanding of humanity as a singular whole as the object of God’s renewing work into the image of God, on the one hand, and his identification of self-glorification or egocentricity as the principle behind actual sin on the other, inform his account of the shape of the Christian life and thus of the disorder within past descriptions of that life. Consistently, his account eschews individualistic and one-sided moral piety for the holistic renewal of all human relations. The imitation of Christ is reflected differently in every person according to their personalities, social location, and culture, and the Gospel renews and leavens our relationship to God and all of natural life. Humanity in all of its relational connectedness is the object of God’s rebinding power. In short, the kingdom of God is both a pearl and a leaven, and the Gospel’s transformative effects are both vertical and horizontal. Indeed, a summary form of Bavinck’s critique of Pietism, Methodism and asceticism is found in his writing on the Catholicity of Christianity and the Church, which links all three of these movements to a lack of an ‘organic’ view of reformation:

Whether 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 . . . there is never a methodic, organic reformation of the whole cosmos, of nation and country. ⁶⁴

The upshot is clear: an organic anthropology and thus an organic soteriology requires a rejection of ethics that focus on inward-focused piety, individualist conversion and separatism from the world. The renewal of the Spirit is a binding power, and as such binds societies, nations and humanity together once again. Hence, Bavinck’s call for an organic spiritual reformation of humanity does not result in the valorization of one particular nation, but rather of a single kingdom of God which unites a diversity of nations achievable only in the eschaton—a conviction that led him presciently to critique the rising German nationalism in the early twentieth century as being inattentive to the unity of humanity. ⁶⁵ It was thus to be expected that Bavinck was planning to devote his unfinished fourth volume of the Ethics to the spheres of the family, society, state, and so on. ⁶⁶

Conclusion

Having Bavinck’s organic ethical outlook in view, we do well to conclude by relating the above exposition to the two scholarly discussions surveyed in the introduction that suggest the ways in which Bavinck could be a fruitful conversation partner in current ethical discourse.

First, then, Bavinck’s work contributes in interesting ways to the conceptual trajectories that arise from the recent retrieval of Edwards’s moral theology, especially on the relationship between divine commands and ontology as a way of grounding theological ethics. This is seen, for example, in the tension in Cochran’s emphasis on Edwards’s rejection of grounding morality in ‘an arbitrary divine fiat’ and Crisp’s rejoinder that Edwards’s account in Original Sin bears a distinctly voluntarist character. ⁶⁷ Bavinck interestingly offers a third way through this tension. While Bavinck does place a heavy load on the divine love commands, these commands arise out of the organic ontology of human nature as a singular unit. Bavinck suggests that ethical relations are no mere legal fictions that lack a basis on the metaphysics of human nature, thus resisting narratives that locate Protestantism as a source of metaphysical suspicion. ⁶⁸ Precisely because humanity mirrors the nature of the triune God, ethical relations are ontologically constitutive for us: we were created in, for and toward relationships. This organic whole federalism, I argue, pushes toward a reconciliation of metaphysical commitments and a social ethical vision, and between realistic and federalist accounts of humanity’s unity.

Hence, one might also begin to relate Bavinck’s account here more explicitly with Oliver Crisp’s claim concerning Edwards and Augustine: ‘The beauty or excellency that is true virtue is, according to Edwards, benevolence to Being in general . . . In Edwards’s nomenclature, benevolence to “Being in general” has to do with all existing beings . . . Like Augustine, Edwards regards love to God and to all existing beings, as the heart of true virtue’. ⁶⁹ While Edwards was concerned to characterize true virtue as love of God and thus a source of unification between the moral agent and other beings, this trajectory of reasoning leads Edwardsean ethics not to discussions of those corporate relationships themselves, but rather on the habits and dispositions of the self that lead towards corporate unity. In distinction, Bavinck gives a more thorough-going account of the importance of corporate solidarity and social relationships, while remaining rooted in an organic metaphysic. In my view, this distinctive need not be set in opposition to the virtue ethics of Edwards, but rather as a complement, for both seek to give an account of how human beings can grow in love of the other in order to forge a great bond within humanity as a single organic unit.

Secondly, we have seen that Bavinck’s view theologically overlaps with Herdt’s recent description of the Bildung tradition as a partial recovery of a proper Christian humanism, which canvassed corporate humanity as ‘those creatures made to the divine image, capable of responsibility, of responding to God on behalf of creation, of accepting God’s offer of friendship and extending it to others, to strangers and enemies. Human beings do not execute this task in a space evacuated of divine agency but as empowered by grace’. ⁷⁰ Like this tradition, Bavinck sketched a non-competitive relationship between the individual and the social, and between the human and divine. Bavinck argued that the renewal of the Spirit brings about the awakening of the ego from self-love, into a free, willing personality who seeks fellowship with God, thus becoming a part of the organism of redeemed humanity as a whole. One sees in Bavinck the same desire not to contrast human agency and corporate formation, or ‘of divine agency as competing with human agency’. ⁷¹

This does not mean, however, that the Bildung tradition could be appropriated without critique; its particular manifestation within the German intellectual milieu, as Herdt shows, is tethered to strands of nationalism and triumphalism that easily fed into the racist horrors of the twentieth century. Here, Herdt finds an ally in Karl Barth’s critique of Kant and the Bildung tradition as ‘fundamentally monological’. ⁷² With Barth, Herdt argues that discerning what is salvageable from the Bildung tradition must involve a proper account of humanity’s need to listen to the Word of God in a dialogical encounter, ever aware of humanity’s limitation and tendency to see itself as self-sufficient. This dialogical focus thus aids the task of cultivating humanity not as a nationalist endeavor but to see it as an invitation of grace that allows us to attend to those in the margins. One possible fruit of the exposition of Bavinck’s ethics above is to suggest that he, too, might be invoked as a fruitful dialogue partner in this task, as he shared in the vision of conceiving humanity as a corporate task, undergirded by the summons and renewal of the Spirit, and as he evades, within his own Dutch and late nineteenth-century context, the dark and imperialist overtones of the Bildung tradition by attending to the organic and cosmological dimensions of the Kingdom of God. Precisely against the emerging nationalism of twentieth-century German social thought, Bavinck argued that it is by attending to divine revelation that one can begin to appreciate the greater unity that underlies us, and to thus pursue the strengthening of those ethical bonds by which we are united: ‘This revelation is the starting point (uitgangspunt) of the unity of nature, the unity of the human race, the unity of history, and is also the source of all laws—the laws of nature, of history, of all development’. ⁷³ We do well, therefore, to be attentive to this divine word.