This article argues that Herman Bavinck's organic worldview allows him to use classical and modern thinkers in an eclectic yet theologically principled manner. To vindicate this claim, the article observes Bavinck's self-conscious comments regarding the task of Reformed catholicity, his use of Schleiermacher and Augustine to construct a theological account of self-consciousness, and his resituating of Thomistic motifs within an organic framework in his epistemology. In so doing, the article suggests that Bavinck's catholicity is broader than previously observed, thus generating a different way of interpreting Bavinck's use of thinkers who are often thought to be in tension.
Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that Kant had erected an epistemological boundary between mental representations and external reality that precipitates an anxiety in modern theologians about whether one can properly refer to God. As a way past this boundary, Wolterstorff's Reformed epistemology retrieves Thomas Reid's account of perception as an alternative to Kant, according to which knowledge of external objects is direct and immediate. Further, Wolterstorff points to the Dutch neo-Calvinist Herman Bavinck as one who bears many “reidian” elements in his epistemology, especially in the way in which Bavinck argues that the epistemic accessibility of the external world ought to be taken for granted. The thesis of this present paper, however, is that a closer investigation of Bavinck's account of perception reveals that he, unlike Reid, accepts the gap between mental representations and external objects, such that representations are those through which we know the world. Bavinck affirms that a correspondence between the two can be obtained by an appeal to the resources found in Christian revelation. In effect, what emerges in a close comparison of Bavinck and Reid is that Bavinck's account is an alternative theological response to the kantian boundary—one according to which mental representations correspond with external objects because both participate in an organically connected cosmos shaped by a Triune God.
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