Bavinck does not say that the divinity of Jesus the Messiah can be arrived at by means of neutral, historical research. Bavinck only says that such research can uncover the fact that the earliest Christians believed this to be so. But faith is required in order to accept Jesus as the Christ: “whoever wants to acknowledge Jesus as divine must be minded to do the will of the Father. ‘The pure of heart shall see God.’” (41) This is a “rigorously scientific statement,” which is to say that it is scientifically demonstrable that the only way to agree with the gospel of the church is to put one’s faith in Jesus Christ. Science leads us to the point of decision, but it does not decide for us. Scholarship and the personal faith of the scholar cannot be divided and kept in air-tight compartments. They inevitably affect one another.

In a 1906 article re-published in the volume, Essays on Religion, Science and Society, Herman Bavinck addresses the topic of “The Essence of Christianity.” Adolf von Harnack had delivered his famous lectures on this topic in Berlin in 1900 (ET What is Christianity? 1901). Bavinck sees the search for the essence of Christianity as arising in the eighteenth century as a result of the need to discover an alternative interpretation of Christianity to the orthodox Christianity seen in dogma, worship and the confessions going back to the beginning of the church. Although he does not say so explicitly, he strongly implies that the crisis of the Enlightenment caused a loss of faith in traditional Christianity, which in turn prompted a search for “a new kind of Christianity” that could be embraced by people whose primary commitment was to the ideals of the Enlightenment – above all the final authority of Reason.

Historical Misconceptions

Bavinck surveys Schleiermacher, Kant, Hegel and Schelling. Schleiermacher located the essence of Christianity in the “complete and unremitting God-consciousness” of Christ. For Kant, Christ is at most a symbol of a humanity pleasing to God. Comparing Schleiermacher to the Deists of the eighteenth century Bavinck damns him with faint praise “In Schleiermacher’s construction of the essence of Christianity, one finds at least this positive element: the person of Christ again came to the foreground.” (34) For Schelling, Christ was the highest revelation of God’s incarnation in creation and for Hegel Christ was the consciousness of the pre-existing unity of God and creation. But the main figure with whom Bavinck engages in this essay is David Strauss and the issue that arises with him involves the interpretation of Scripture by means of historical criticism. Strauss argued that the implication of Hegel’s philosophy is that the divine idea cannot be expressed in just one individual. So the relationship between the God-humanity union and the historical person of Christ is problematized. Who is Jesus? is a question that must be investigated by historical research, a study of the sources. It is presumed that the historical figure of Jesus will not be the “Christ of the congregation.” Schleiermacher’s Christ is the religious fantasy of the congregation and so the historical Jesus is not the Christ of faith.Bavinck notes that the ensuing search for the historical Jesus unearthed as many “Jesus figures” as scholars. When Harnack gave his famous lectures, he argued that the essence of Christianity is the experience [Erlebnis] that God is their Father and they are his children, which experience is derived from “the appearance, teachings, and life of Christ.” (36) Christianity proclaims the fatherhood of God and the nobility of the human soul, which two truths constitute the essence of Christianity. Jesus is not the object of faith himself, he is the first to have faith in God the Father; he is the first Christian.Is this New Interpretation Justified?

Bavinck takes this interpretation of Christianity and asks if it is justified by historical research into the origins of Christianity. For Bavinck, what Harnack is proposing is a new interpretation of the meaning and message of Jesus, an alternative to the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines enshrined in the creeds of the early church. The question is: “Is this new interpretation justified?” Bavinck points out that all the heretical versions of Christianity down through the ages from Anabaptism, Socinianism, rationalism and pietism, to Kant and Schleiermacher to Hegel and Schelling to Strauss and Feuerback and eventually to Harnack – all of these were not new but only revivals of views already proposed in the early church but rejected by the church for good reasons. Central to the church’s decision to reject such ideas of a human but not divine Jesus is history. Bavinck notes that the account Harnack provides of early church history in which a merely human Jesus is gradually elevated to a divine status by ecclesiastical authorities styled “early Catholicism” is a tale invented to justify a view of Jesus already arrived at on other grounds. In other words, the historical method has hidden within itself theological and philosophical presuppositions that determine the final outcome of the “search” a priori.

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