"A Perfect Socinianism"

Bavinck & Bonaventure, Part Two

Dear Friends,

Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

This is Part Two of “Bonaventure’s Revenge?” Part One is here.

Perhaps I should give a bit more context for why all this arcane wrangling about theological and dogmatic method in the 13th century interests me or why I think it important.

My theological upbringing and education has been in the Reformed tradition broadly, and in the Neo-Calvinist stream particularly. From a very young age I have been reading thinkers associated to varying degrees with Westminster Theological Seminary (my alma mater). First, it was Francis Schaeffer at about age 14. Then, it was Cornelius Van Til. Then I personally studied philosophy for a brief time with Van Til’s most brilliant student and popularizer, the late Greg Bahnsen, shortly before his untimely death. Van Til, you may know, has been a controversial figure, pioneering a unique approach to apologetics that is sometimes termed “presuppositional.” Critics have claimed, again and again (and again and again), that Van Til was an aberration, a decided departure from Reformed orthodoxy and the “classical” approach to apologetic method—by extension, a “classical” approach to theological method, too (since apologetics will inevitably be governed by theological foundational principles).

Then I “discovered” Herman Bavinck, the 19th century Dutch theologian who exerted great influence on Van Til. What I found in the course of completing a PhD thesis on Bavinck (although not the topic of the thesis at all) is that Van Til was hardly the radical innovator his critics (and sometimes his fans!) made him out to be. His “presuppositional” outlook—defending the faith by starting with faith in the “self-attesting Christ of Scripture”—that is, reasoning as a Christian in terms of Christian foundational principles grounded in the Word of God—was something he received from, more than anyone else, Herman Bavinck. For a survey of the extent of just how dependent Van Til was on Bavinck, see my chapter in this book.

What I am now discovering and appreciating more and more is that Bavinck was not an innovator or “aberration,” either. In my lengthy reply to Keith Mathison’s criticisms of Van Til, I set forth quite extensively how it is Mathison who has misunderstood the early Reformed approach to faith and reason, natural and supernatural theology. And there was no need to take my word for it: alongside Bavinck’s own assessment, Richard A. Muller—the world’s foremost expert in Reformed scholastic theology—positively and emphatically affirms this.

Bavinck could easily trace his own “presuppositionalism” directly to Calvin and the early Reformed tradition. My present essays or “musings” (or “visits over a pipe and dram”) represent me following the “vein” deeper and deeper into the trunk of the tree that is the Christian tradition. Thus far we have discovered that Van Til did not make it up; Bavinck did not make it up; and Calvin did not make it up. It goes back much further, at least to the 13th century. It so happens that St. Thomas Aquinas, the great fountainhead of what developed into “natural theology” (the so-called “classical” approach opposed by Van Til, Bavinck, and, yes, Calvin) had a contemporary. A classmate. A colleague. A … rival? St. Bonaventure, a long-neglected figure.