Category: Apologetics

Although all share in the same salvation, the same eternal life, and the same fellowship with God, yet there will be all sorts of differences among them in rank and position, in gift and calling, in glory and radiance. There are many dwellings in the Father’s house (John 14:2). In proportion to how someone on the earth has been faithful, spent his talents, suffered and labored for Christ, he will receive in the kingdom of God a higher place and a greater honor (Matt. 5:12; 6:1, 6, 18; 25:14f.; 2 Cor. 9:6; Rev. 2–3).

This rich diversity will not distract from unity, for all will see God’s face and be like him (Matt. 5:8; John 3:2; Rev. 22:4).”. 

Herman Bavinck

We have now come to a time where the insistence on racial, ethnic, and national distinctions is now considered as heretical. As we see with this quote that has not always been the case in the Reformed Church. But having embraced a kind of creeping Gnosticism we find ourselves in the same place as those ancient Gnostics. Having denied the realness and goodness of material realities we have now lost the ability to defend or maintain the existence of very real God created distinctions and differences. There is now among us a virus that eats away at the notion of the goodness of created realities in favor of a termite theology that eats away at the distinctions that were laid down in creation. It used to be a byword that among the Reformed that “Grace restores nature,” but now the byword is “Grace destroys nature so that we can all sink into the great one.”

That this idea that is now embraced by the Reformed world as seen in its treatment of Michael Spangler, and as seen in many of the things that Doug Wilson is saying, and as seen in this interrogation of Rev. Hunter is indeed Gnostic in its ideological origins can be seen in a quote from an early Gnostic;

“According to Neander, the Carpocratian system sees in the world’s history one struggle between the principles of unity and of multiplicity. From one eternal Monad all existence has flowed, and to this it strives to return. But the finite spirits who rule over several portions of the world counteract this universal striving after unity. From them the different popular religions, and in particular the Jewish, have proceeded. Perfection is attained by those souls who, led on by reminiscences of their former condition, soar above all limitation and diversity to the contemplation of the higher unity. They despise the restrictions imposed by the mundane spirits; they regard externals as of no importance, and faith and love as the only essentials; meaning by faith, mystical brooding of the mind absorbed in the original unity. In this way they escape the dominion of the finite mundane spirits; their souls are freed from imprisonment in matter, and they obtain a state of perfect repose (corresponding to the Buddhist Nirwana) when they have completely ascended above the world of appearance.”

But this was not the way it has always has been as seen from the Bavinck quotes as well as sundry others. Here is another quote from a 19th century American that supports Bavinck’s original insight;

“Let it be noted that the Gospel does not dispense with any of the relations in human society. … And it is the vice of many of the systems of modern reform that they sweep across the web of natural associations in accomplishing their benevolent designs—and fail at last because they cannot succeed in this disintegration of society. Christianity, on the contrary, comes down into the world, not as a law, but as a life. … It seizes man in the midst of all the duties which he owes to his home, to the community, to the State, to the world. It does not relax any of these claims; but under their united pressure it consecrates him to a new service superior to them all. Thus does the Gospel, in its refusal to blot out any of our natural ties, respect the active feature in man’s nature.” p. 352.

Benjamin Morgan Palmer
‘Obedience, the Law of the Will’, (II)

Bavinck was consistent as he would write elsewhere;