Relocating To Elfland

I got quite a chuckle when a friend recently suggested RTE should be renamed “blogvinck.com.” In my own defense, it just so happens that I started this thing the same year I’m reading through the Reformed Dogmatics. 

But speaking of Bavinck, I want to go back today to my earlier entry on Christ as Savior of the world. I suggested there that a full-orbed doctrine of Christ must take account of His relationship not only to sinners (which scripture certainly addresses) but also to the cosmos (because this, too, scripture addresses, and with great profundity). Those who insist on giving individual soteriology “priority” over the cosmological implications of the gospel (or vice versa) must consider whether these are not equally ultimate in the Christology of the Bible. It is simply not the case that Christ is busy saving sinners now but will worry about the cosmos later. The One by whom thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities were created (Col 1:16) has now been raised from the dead and seated far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:20–21), and this has implications far beyond His overcoming the enmity of individual hearts. The cosmos is not the same since Jesus rose from the dead; that’s a broader issue than sinners getting saved. Salvation of the sinner is never abstracted from Christ’s taking His seat and His inheritance now as the Last Adam, even as Christ’s position with respect to the cosmos is intimately connected to what He is doing in the midst of redeemed sinners. The two cannot be separated, precisely because Christ is the fullness of who He is. 

Okay, but then I read something in Bavinck that made me think the root of all this does not lie, strictly speaking, even in Christology. Christology must (no surprise to Trinitarians) be placed in proper relationship to pneumatology; and when we get into the doctrine of the Spirit, it is even more obvious that the cosmological cannot be separated from the soteriological. Here’s Bavinck: 

“When in Scripture and in the church the revelation of God that appeared in Christ has become a constituent of the cosmos, a new dispensation begins. . . . For the special revelation in Christ is not meant to be restricted to himself but, proceeding from him, to be realized in the church, in humanity, in the world. The aim of revelation, after all, is to re-create humanity after the image of God, to establish the kingdom of God on earth, to redeem the world from the power of sin and, in and through all this, to glorify the name of the Lord in all his creatures. In light of this, however, an objective revelation in Christ is not sufficient, but there needs to be added a working of the Spirit in order that human beings may acknowledge and accept that revelation of God and thereby become the image of the Son.” (Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 1.347–48)

Bavinck’s thesis, as I understand it, is that world history is divided into two great dispensations (“two great periods,” as he says elsewhere, p. 1.382). The first dispensation is that of the Son: in this period, God prepares the way for His own coming to “tabernacle” among men in the Person of Christ Jesus. But once Christ has arrived, the “dispensation of the Son then makes way for the dispensation of the Spirit” (p. 1.383). Here Bavinck brings forward a magnificent metaphor: 

“Objective revelation passes into subjective appropriation. In Christ, in the middle of history, God created an organic center; from this center, in an ever widening sphere, God drew the circles within which the light of revelation shines. The sun as it rises covers only a small area of the surface of the earth with its rays, but at its zenith it shines brilliantly over the whole earth.” (p. 1.383) 

We are living in the second great period, the dispensation of the Spirit, in which God is bringing forth not the revelation of the Son (He has already done that) but rather the appropriation of that revelation by the power of the Spirit. This age “belongs” (if we may so express it) to the Spirit, whose task it is to take the things revealed in the Son and bring them to fruition in all the earth. Through the working of the Spirit, the rays of the Sun of Righteousness will fill the world as the waters cover the sea. Does this involve the salvation of individual sinners? Of course it does. But does it also have tremendous cosmological implications? To ask the question is to answer it: are we really prepared to say that the Spirit’s new creation work in history will amount to snatching a few souls from the flames of hell, while the world as a whole remains “without form and void” (Gen 1:2) until it is destroyed and the “real” new creation begins (cosmologically speaking) at the parousia of the Son? Such a view not only dishonors Christ as the Last Adam, it also dishonors His Spirit. 

I appreciate that caution is in order in “predicting” just how the Spirit will fill the earth with the glory and knowledge of the Lord. But surely scripture will not permit us to think of new creation as deferred until after the Second Coming; and we must be very careful not to diminish our hope in the prospects for new creation in the meantime. The reason for this lies not only in our doctrine of Christ but also in our doctrine of the Holy Spirit.