Nature, Grace, and Herman Bavinck

The relationship of nature and grace is a key theme in the Reformed Dogmatics of Herman Bavinck.  For Bavinck, "grace restores nature".  This is, according to his editor, "the fundamental defining and shaping theme of Bavinck's theology".  It leads Bavinck to a robust doctrine of creation, and a holistic vision for discipleship and the Christian life.

So far so good.  But I can't help feeling that the way this plays out in Bavinck's thought is rather skewed.  Consider this (from volume 4, 395):

The gospel of Christ never opposes nature as such.  It did not come into the world to condemn but to save, and it leaves the family, marriage, and the relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, and governments and people intact.  The gospel, finding nothing reprehensible in itself and everything created by God as good if it is received with thanksgiving and consecrated by the word of God and by prayer, allows everyone to remain in the calling in which one was called... Still, while averse to all revolution, it is all the more committed to reformation.  It never militates against nature as such but does join the battle - always and everywhere, in every area of life and into the most secret hiding places - against sin and deception.

So Bavinck takes an extremely conservative social position, on the grounds that nature is good, and grace does not come to overturn nature but to restore it.  The gospel will slowly "reform and renew everything", but it will not be revolutionary; it will not upset the apple cart, so to speak.  I am not sure this fits with the more apocalyptic strand of the New Testament - with the teaching of Jesus, for example, that seems to dramatically relativise the natural family (e.g., Luke 14:26, Matt 12:48-50), or with the teaching of Paul about marriage and singleness.  The gospel seems, in Bavinck's view, to sanction human authority, but I am missing something of the radical question mark which it also puts to all human authority.  Consider the Magnificat, and the upending of human society which it envisages.  Is Bavinck's conservatism really compatible with this vision?

Earlier in the volume, Bavinck argues that the practice of infant baptism "maintains the bond between nature and grace".  That is to say, in the baptism of infants a close link is displayed between the natural family and the spiritual family, between natural birth (into the covenant community, as Bavinck would see it) and spiritual birth into the family of God.  As a baptist, I found reading this section alternately humorous and painful, as Bavinck tries very hard to square this with the New Testament.  Suffice to say: the church is not a natural family; grace is not tied to nature in this way.  That is the whole point of Romans 9-11, alongside many other passages.  Grace disrupts the natural order of things - the Lord Jesus came to divide families, to turn children against their parents, etc.

Some slightly disconnected reflections:

1. Bavinck sees very strong continuity between the world as originally created and the world as it exists now.  "Substantially and materially the creation after the fall is the same as before the fall". (436)  I'm not sure we can be so confident as that.  I tend to think that Bonhoeffer had a better understanding of the natural.  That is to say, there is much about what appears natural to us which does not necessarily reflect created design.  Nevertheless, the natural is good, in that it preserves creation at God's will.  I just don't think it's as absolute as Bavinck seems to think it is, perhaps because I see it as one step removed from creation per se.
2. I worry that for Bavinck the gospel seems to be merely an episode in the restoration of creation.  It is creation he is really excited about, it seems to me, and the natural life; the gospel seems to function as a necessary response to sin, but not as the highpoint of created purpose.  "The gospel is temporary;" Bavinck writes "the law is everlasting and precisely that which is restored by the gospel."  He means that "in heaven all its inhabitants will conduct themselves in accordance with the law of the Lord" - and the gospel seems to just be the means to get them to that state.  I do not agree.
3. I wonder whether Bavinck's position at the tail-end of Christendom (not that he knew it was the tail-end, of course) allowed him to see lots of things as 'natural' and as open to natural reason which in fact spring from the gospel and its long influence on European culture.  I wonder whether he is in some ways able to draw such a tight connection between nature and grace because he lived in a culture which had been so saturated with the gospel.  I wonder whether we can do that today.
4. Connected to this, it interests me that Bavinck's social positions seem quite radical today - in an anti-authoritarian, even anarchist, age, the idea that the gospel legitimises the family, the state, etc etc. is very appealing.  But as I try to read it with late 19th century glasses on, it seems rather bourgeois.  I worry that people who are appealing to Bavinck and others like him are actually sometimes missing the radical nature of the gospel and focusing on social implications of nature instead.  There is a lot of talk about the family from those who identify Christian ethics with conservative social positions, but less talk about the way in which the New Testament radically relativises the family!

I have more thoughts that I can't quite make choate right now.  Bavinck feels very alien to me, compared to most of the theology I've read, and uncomfortably at home in this world.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding him?  Or maybe I just don't agree.