While contending that dogmatic theology is a science, it also has a personal character. The revelation of God which communicates knowledge about himself, generates faith in our hearts. This knowledge is not abstract and theoretical, as other sciences, but is vital personal knowledge. Hence faith is imperative for dogmatic theology. (p21) Faith however is not the source of knowledge, but rather the instrument that receives the external Word of God which is then testified to us internally by the Holy Spirit. So the purpose of believers is to take the thoughts of God laid down in scripture and testified in our conscience and understand them rationally.
So if dogmatic theology is going to be done scientifically, with a personal faith, then what is the methodology? Bavinck suggests a method which he calls the synthetic-genetic method. By starting with the source, one then demonstrates how dogmas have risen organically from scripture. Scripture is that source, it is the foundation of theology (pincipium theologiae) for which dogmas are developed. This broad foundation provides a way of understanding scripture not as single isolated texts, but rather each verse in context of the whole. The synthetic-genetic method brings the word of God in the context of Redemptive History together in such a way that not only conveys facts, but clearly illumines those facts themselves. (p23)
Through the history of the Church a systematized approach has been developed and improved upon from Origen and Augustine (Early Church), to Lombard, Bonaventure and Thomas(Middle Ages), to Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin(Reformation). But along side this development the church came under attack by philosophies of the enlightenment which through a variety of approaches wanted to put autonomous man and his reason as the principia for knowledge. The most influential philosophy from this period to impact the church was that of Kant. In his published works he attempted to demonstrate that God was unknowable, and man has no access to God other than a faith based upon the feeling of moral duty. This of course gave birth to the subjective piety of “feeling of absolute dependence” , which is foundation of the theology of Schleiermacher. This robbed the Church of its dogmatic starting point of God’s revelation to man in the Holy Scriptures. The Bible no longer was the absolute authority and foundation for knowledge.
The ghost’s of the philosopher’s from the enlightenment continue to linger like a musty smell in a damp basement. Even today reformed theologians begin their work elsewhere other than the Word of God. When theologians attempts to prove and find reasons for believing in the God of the bible from nature, or reason apart from scripture, they have forsaken the starting point. The foundation of faith, and the source of the articles of faith are one in the same. (p26) The foundation of the Christian faith, and the content of the Christian faith both arise from the Holy Word of God. God speaks, and we believe trust and obey. It is not as if God speaks, and then we go about to determine if it was really God who spoke. If we could prove that God spoke from some other source than the Bible, then that source would have authority over the bible, because the bible would be dependent upon that source.
As Bavinck so well notes, the content of dogmatic theology is the knowledge of God as he has revealed it in Christ through his Word. (p27). The synthetic-genetic method uses God’s revelation in the beginning, middle, and end. I will end this post with a quote from the last page of chapter 1 (p28). “Dogmatic Theology is the system of the knowledge of God as he has revealed himself in Christ; it is the system of the Christian religion. And the essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that what the Father has created, 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. Dogmatic Theology shows us how God, who is all-sufficient in himself, nevertheless glorifies himself in creation, which, even when it is torn apart by sin, is gathered up again in Christ (Eph 1:10)”
No comments:
Post a Comment