7. Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck logicized God’s order for the creation
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
The Reformed thinkers Kuyper, Woltjer, and Bavinck, contrary to their starting point, indeed logicized God’s order for the creation. What brought them to this was the “ideal-realistic” twist that they gave to the Kantian critique of knowledge. Taking a stand against Kant’s notion that all law-governed relations are subjective and transcendental-logical in origin and nature, they enlisted the services of the traditional scholastic theory of the logos in order to escape Kant’s subjectivism.
In so doing, however, they failed to attack Kant’s critique at its root. They made no change in Kant’s view that all law-governed relations without exception are logical. Instead, they located the origin of these relations not in the human, but in the divine Logos, the divine Reason with its unity of “logical thought” and “word” that had already been spoken of by Philo.
Thus they viewed the relationships in knowing things not as subjectively logical, but as objectively logical; and they thought that this logical nature was what allowed them to be grasped by our logical thought. For these thinkers maintained that in the process of gaining theoretical knowledge, as Aristotle had taught, a union takes place between the subjective logical function of thought and the objective logical ontic forms of knowable things.
To some extent one can appreciate this attempt to evade Kantian subjectivistic epistemology by appealing to a rational divine plan of creation. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to notice that this entire logicistic view of the divine creation ordinances conflicts flagrantly with Kuyper’s religious understanding of God’s law, in which he put his finger on the very heart of the Reformed position. This religious understanding, which is worked out particularly in Kuyper’s Stone Lectures on Calvinism, accepted Augustine’s and Calvin’s starting point in the absolute sovereignty of God’s will as Creator. God stands above the laws He has imposed on His creation. Nevertheless, these laws are not a product of arbitrary despotism; for they are in complete harmony with God’s holy nature.
It was precisely Kuyper, in fact, who took the first step toward making this religious understanding of the law fruitful for Christian philosophical thought. In the second Stone Lecture, which deals with “Calvinism and Religion,” Kuyper’s confession of God’s sovereignty as Creator is immediately worked out in his theory of the distinct spheres of laws or ordinances:
“Everything that has been created” [Kuyper writes] “was, in its creation, furnished by God with an unchangeable law of its existence. And because God has fully ordained such laws and ordinances for all life, therefore the Calvinist demands that all life be consecrated to His service, in strict obedience. A religion confined to the closet, the cell, or the church, therefore, Calvin abhors.” (second Stone Lecture: “Calvinism and Religion”).
These words of Kuyper completely rule out the metaphysical theory of the logos. They express an understanding of God’s law for His creation that is purely religious and Scriptural. Note how Kuyper developed this thought further:
“What now does the Calvinist mean by his faith in the ordinances of God? Nothing less than the conviction firmly rooted in man’s heart [Dooyeweerd inserts: nota bene, not in his “reason.”] that all life has first been in the thoughts of God, before it came to be realized in Creation. Hence all created life necessarily bears in itself a law for its existence, instituted by God Himself. There is no life outside us in Nature, without such divine ordinances, – ordinances which are called the laws of Nature – a term which we are willing to accept, provided we understand thereby, not laws originating from Nature, but laws imposed upon Nature. So, there are ordinances of God for the firmament above, and ordinances for the earth below, by means of which this world is maintained, and, as the Psalmist says, These ordinances are the servants of God. Consequently there are ordinances of God for our bodies, for the blood that courses through our arteries and veins, and for our lungs as the organs of respiration. Similarly there are ordinances of God for logic, to regulate our thoughts; ordinances of God for our imagination, in the domain of aesthetics; and thus also, strict ordinances of God for the whole of human life in the domain of morals.” Kuyper, Stone Lectures).
No doubt, this is not yet a truly philosophical and scientific conception of the law-spheres that govern temporal reality. Nevertheless, in its popular form, it is a religiously rooted guideline for philosophical inquiry that contains a great, profound thought: the unity of the divine law lies above logic, in the central religious relation to God’s sovereignty as Creator. Within temporal reality this central religious unity of the law is refracted into a great multiformity of law-spheres, each of which retains its own nature and within which the logical sphere is merely one among many. There is no warrant, therefore, for reducing the other spheres of ordinances to the logical sphere. Kuyper himself elaborated on this latter thought with great acuity in his Stone Lecture on “Calvinism and Art,” where we find the following remarkable passage:
“Intellectual art is no art, and the effort put forth by Hegel to draw art out from thoughts, militated against the very nature of art. Our intellectual, ethical, religious [ie pistic] and aesthetic life each commands a sphere of its own. These spheres run parallel and do not allow the derivation of one from the other. It is the central emotion, the central impulse, and the central animation, in the mystical root of our being, which seeks to reveal itself in the outer world in these four branches. . . . If, however, it be asked how there can arise a unity of conception embracing these four domains, it constantly appears that in the finite this unity is found only at that point where it springs from the fountain of the Infinite. There is no unity in your thinking save by a well-ordered philosophical system, and there is no system of philosophy which does not ascend to the issues of the Infinite. In the same way there is no unity in your moral existence save by the union of your inner existence with the moral world-order, and there is no moral world-order conceivable but for the impression of an Infinite power that has ordained order in this moral world. Thus also no unity in the revelation of art is conceivable, except by the art-inspiration of an Eternal Beautiful, which flows to us from the fountain of the Infinite and elevates us to the Infinite.” (Kuyper, Stone Lecture on “Calvinism and Art,”)
What is most striking in this quotation from Kuyper is his profound emphasis on the religious unity of God’s law, both in its Origin and in its central fullness of meaning. Kuyper’s understanding of the law here corresponds perfectly to his Scriptural conception of the heart as the religious concentration point of all the temporal functions of human existence. And from this follows, as a matter of course, the idea of sphere-sovereignty, that is, the notion that the law-spheres that Kuyper expressly mentions are mutually irreducible by their very nature.
The metaphysical logos theory, which ultimately reduces all laws to logical relations that originate in the divine Logos, thus has been cut off at its religious root. There also is no room in Kuyper’s view for the theory that there are greater or lesser degrees of reality, depending on proximity to or distance from the ideas. Woltjer, in particular, had elaborated on this Neoplatonic twist in the logos theory at length in his Ideëel en Reëel. Kuyper’s understanding of the law, however, which he unfolded in his Stone Lectures as a direct fruit of the basic Scriptural, religious position of Calvinism, was diametrically opposed to any such theory.
What Kuyper implicitly discovered here is the true point of contact between religion and philosophy, and in this he performed a lasting service for Reformed philosophy. For there can be no doubt that the view of the law that I have set forth briefly above by itself entails a radical transformation of philosophy’s whole outlook upon the structure of reality.
It is true that Kuyper did not carry this view through consistently in his scientific works. Alongside this purely Scriptural line of thought, he also adhered to traditional scholastic thought patterns. This, however, in no way proves that both viewpoints have an equal right to exist in an intrinsically Reformed philosophy. It only shows that Kuyper lacked the opportunity to carry through his basic Reformed conception in the internal course of scientific inquiry. Kuyper himself, in fact, described this on many occasions as a great shortcoming that held forth a huge task for the next generation.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 83-86)
The above book is available HERE
——————————————————————————
Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
