Bavinck 3: Creation, Humanity and Sin

The Meaning of “Angel”

The Hebrew word angel simply means envoy or messenger. The word was used for anyone in that position. p. 277

Providence and Secondary Causes

Providence, Christian theology teaches that secondary causes are strictly subordinated to God as the primary cause, but nevertheless remain true causes. p. 305

Humans Between Angels and Animals

Like the Angels, we can think about spiritual or heavenly things and exist without a body. Unlike Angels, our spiritual component is adapted to and organized for a body and is tied also for our intellectual and spiritual life to the sensory world. As sentient and material beings, we are related to animals; as rational spiritual beings, we are akin to Angels. We exist between angels and animals, related to but distinct from both. We unite and reconcile within ourselves heaven and earth. p. 325

Made in His Own Image

God could not have been able to become man if he had not first made man in his own image. p. 327

Adam as Head

Just as the fate of the whole body rests with the head, which thinks and judges and decides for all the organs, so also the fate of humanity was put in the hands of Adam. If we could not be subjected to condemnation in Adam without our knowledge, neither could we have been accepted into Grace in Christ without our participation. The covenant of works and the covenant of Grace stand and fall together. As human beings we all stand together, tied not only by blood but also by common participation in blessing and curse, sin and righteousness, death and life. p. 335

God Does Not Simply Permit

Sin is not cosmically necessary or eternal. It is not a lower or lesser degree of the good. Sin is parasitical and radically antithetical to God’s good creation. The good is necessary even for evil to exist, but the good does not need evil nor does Holiness need sin nor God Satan. Human sin and evil sometimes serve to bring the good to fuller disclosure and to glorify God’s attributes, but when this occurs, it’s against sin’s intent, not with its consent. Sin is forced to serve the honor of God and the coming of his kingdom against its own genius. It is God who brings good out of evil, light out of darkness. God, who not only in some sense willed the possibility of sin and created human creatures capable of sin, but also hardens and softens hearts, loves and hates. God does not simply permit the existence of sin; even permission for God is synonymous with his Willing. God, because he is God, never feared the way of freedom, the reality of sin, the eruption of wickedness, or the power of Satan. Because he knew he was absolutely able to control sin, he deemed it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist at all. p. 350

Sin as Privation

All being is per se good. All that is natural, to the degree that it is natural, is good. Evil can therefore only be something about the good. Sin is a defect. A deprivation, an absence of the good. Just as blindness is a deprivation of sight. Yet it is still an active and corrupting principle, a dissolving, destructive power. Having no existence on its own, sin is ethical spiritual in nature, though it always comes to expression in concrete terms. From another angle, it is not a thing or a substance, but in its being deprived of the good, it is an activity, just as the hobbling of a crippled dog is still an activity, a defect of walking. Sin and evil have no real right to exist, sin is a riddle, a mystery. An ethical antithesis of the good that has no independent being of its own. p. 373

Not Removed but Redirected

Sin is always a parasite of the good. It cannot create, neither can it destroy. Accordingly, neither the essential character of the Angels nor of the humans nor that of nature has been changed as a result of sin. Substantially, sin has neither removed anything from humanity nor introduced anything to it. It is the same human person but now walking not toward God but away from him. Human love, intellect, will, and freedom are not removed but redirected from God to the creature, from seeking the true, the good, and the beautiful to considering lies as truth, pursuing evil as good and accepting slavery as freedom. p. 374

The Moral Law

The moral law alone is the standard of sin. The violation of all other laws, aesthetic, social, political, ecclesiastical, and so on is sinful only in so far as it directly or indirectly includes a violation of the moral law. It is the moral law which is implanted in humans at their creation, had its post-fall effect in their consciences, was announced on Mount Sinai, and remains a binding rule of life for Christian believers as well. That is the source of the knowledge of sin. p. 375

The Will, Sin’s Showplace

The moral character of the law means that sin can only reside in a rational creature, that being endowed with intellect and will. More specifically the will is the true subject, sin’s showplace. What is morally good can only be realized by the will, what definitively passes by all influence of the will cannot be sin. Augustine was correct when he said, “In fact, sin is so much of voluntary evil that it is not sin at all unless it is voluntary.” p. 375