Resting in God's Promises: The AntiRevolutionary Work of Reformation

Resting in God's Promises: The AntiRevolutionary Work of Reformation

In his 2020 book How to Reach the West Again, Tim Keller gives voice to some perennial challenges of our day: "Western society is becoming post-Culture," he writes. "Each generation is becoming less religious and less Christian. More than two-thirds of the churches in the United States have plateaued or are in decline."[1] Even if we didn't have the data, we feel this reality. Perhaps even in our own churches, as in the CRCNA, we hear about, and respond to, the challenges of membership decline.

Keller continues: "While religion was broadly seen as a social good, or at least benign, increasing numbers of people now see the church as bad for people and a major obstacle to social progress."[2] In my own Canadian context, a recent survey noted that nearly two-thirds of Canadians now believe we should "keep God and religion completely out of public life." Again, we might not have statistics at our fingertips, but we feel a shifting social and cultural reality: ours is, to use Charles Taylor's language, a secular age, where the conditions of belief, what is believable, have shifted, and all too often God is out of the self-conscious picture of our vision of social, cultural, political – and even individual – flourishing. Even if we don't have words for it all, we feel it.

We might wonder then, in this time, how we hold fast to not only the broad claims of belief, but the particulars of it: God's sovereignty, God as covenant maker and covenant keeper, the kingship of Christ, the renewing work of the Spirit. And how do we let them shape and direct our way now?

While the particular challenges of our day may feel – and even, in some cases, be – novel, this question is not.

Bavinck, Kuyper, and the Crisis of the Revolution

On the 25th anniversary of Abraham Kuyper's editorship of the De Standaard newspaper, Herman Bavinck gave a speech that celebrated the way Kuyper had stood strong against the "spirit of the age," concluding his remarks by inviting all the guests (5,000!) to join in this well-known hymn:

They shall not get it,
Our old Netherlands!
Through all the trials [of the just],
It remains our father's trust. . . .

Still, you shall not have us,
You gods of this age!
Even in decline, we remain
Devoted to our father's God.[3]

You can hear, in those stanzas, a sense of a crisis of the times. In a word, it was what Bavinck and his colleague Kuyper understood to be the crisis of the revolution, which according to Kuyper "proclaimed its unbelief in the cry of, 'No God no master.'"[4]

Theirs, they understood, was a troubled time, an anxious time, a time wrestling with unbelief. Even so, it was not a time abandoned by God. Kuyper was quick to point to the truth that undergirded Bavinck's speech, too: the success of De Standaard newspaper was through God's leading, by God's doing, and for his glory. God was at work.

As such, Bavinck and Kuyper were clear that the cure to their contemporary crisis must not be worse than the disease. To the ideology of the revolution, there must be a "radical alternative," but it must be "along anti-revolutionary, Christian-historical lines."[5] In such formulations, we can hear at least three central Calvinistic convictions: God's sovereignty, sin as ethical,[6] and the gospel as pearl and leaven.

Three Calvinist Convictions

First and foremost: the "root principle of this Calvinism," argues Bavinck, "is the confession of God's absolute sovereignty."[7] Bavinck's rich sense of this all-expansive sovereignty is an immense source of comfort and security for him: all things rest in God's "always wise and holy good"[8] sovereign hands. Because God is sovereign, we can be certain that he is at work throughout all times in history – including those that seem troubled and fraught.

But, of course, life post-fall is fraught on account of human sin. Here, too, Bavinck is specific. Sin is comprehensive; the effects of the fall reach all creation. But often, we can think of sin as this infecting substance, permeating creation. This is surely not the case. Why? If it were, "then it would either have God as its cause or else God would not be the creator of all things."[9] Rather, sin is a privation, a parasite. Unlike good, sin cannot exist on its own; it feeds on and clings to what is good, twisting it away from God's good intentions. Thus, it is "not a physical but an ethical phenomenon."[10] – rooted in our disobedience.

Thus, the gospel doesn't create something new; it restores God's good intent. The kingdom of heaven, Bavinck argues, is a pearl of great price. But it is not only a pearl; it is a leaven. It has a "permeating power."[11] The gospel makes a difference not only for our future life, but right now.

In other words, because God is sovereign, he is at work throughout all of history. Sin doesn't have the last word; change, crisis, anxiety, even seeming defeat don't have the last word. This is God's world, and he still holds it.

Reformation, Not Revolution

Upon these convictions, Bavinck and Kuyper assumed a particular posture in society: reformation, not (or anti-) revolution. Those who follow this path are neither revolutionary (seeking an entirely new start) nor repristinating (simply recreating what has been lost or maintaining status quo). Instead they

go in the new situations in state and society, of philosophy and science, of literature and art, of profession and business; they investigate everything and preserve the good. They are no praise-singers of the past times and do not wail idly about the miseries of the present, but they intervene and reform according to the ideal they face. Even though they know that on earth things will never be set right before the second coming of Christ, and though this protects them from superficial optimism, they still work and do not get tired and never despair. No repristination, no maintaining of the status quo, but reformation is their motto.[12]

God Has Not Abandoned the Work of His Hands

We may not face the same contextual challenges Bavinck and Kuyper did. Here at Calvin Seminary, thankfully, the challenges and changes are certainly not at such a scale. But even so, God's call of reformation beckons. We, too, rest in God's promises – that it is his work, that he will complete, and that he invites us into. We are called into that good work of not just looking back, but looking to present signs of God's goodness and faithfulness, and looking forward to the ways in which God now calls.

Our contemporary testimony Our World Belongs to God, aptly reminds us that God has placed us here. In this time, in this place – with its particular challenges – we live with the confidence that "God has not abandoned the work of his hands." This firm assurance rests on not our character, nor the promises of our time, but on God's character, and his enduring promises. As the old hymn reminds us: "Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet." And he is the one who "will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns" (Phil. 1:6).

Notes

[1] Timothy Keller, How to Reach the West Again (Redeemer: City to City, 2020), 3–4.
[2] Keller, How to Reach the West Again, 4.
[3] Translated by John Bolt in Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper's American Public Theology (Eerdmans, 2001), 67.
[4] Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Eerdmans, 1999), 34.
[5] Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer, Groen Van Prinsterer's Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution, ed. and trans. Harry Van Dyke (Jordan Station, Ontario: Wedge Foundation Publishing, 2017), 3–4; emphasis added.
[6] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2008), 410.
[7] Herman Bavinck, "The Future of Calvinism," 3–4.
[8] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3: God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2004), 386.
[9] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2006), 137.
[10] Bavinck, RD 3, 137.
[11] Herman Bavinck, "Christian Principles and Social Relationships," in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, ed. John Bolt, trans. Harry Boonstra and Gerrit Sheeres (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 140.
[12] Herman Bavinck, Christelijke en neutrale staatkunde, 30, trans. George Harinck, quoted in George Harinck, "Herman Bavinck on Antirevolutionary Politics," 269.