Between the Beginning and the End

A Radical Kingdom Vision

J. H. Bavinck, Bert Hielema

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442008
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Radical, comprehensive vision of the kingdom of God in light of the new creation Twentieth-century Dutch missiologist and prolific author J. H. Bavinck was committed to confronting the world with the saving message of Christ. In this first English translation of the Dutch work published in 1946, Bavinck presents a cosmic kingdom vision and champions the coming of the kingdom of Christ as the basic message of the gospel. Bavinck eloquently challenges believers to live as kingdom people as he expresses a uniquely Reformed perspective on the eternal significance of our temporal world. His eschatological vision, which permeates the book, is now more relevant than ever as climate change, resource depletion, financial turmoil, and other issues increasingly threaten our world. With Bert Hielema's skillful translation capturing the beauty and power of Bavinck's original text, Between the Beginning and the End calls all Christians to consider anew the entire scope of the church and Christ's kingdom.

Chapter 1

The Eternal in History

The Concept of History

The people of the West have discovered history — perhaps their greatest discovery. With their far-­seeing telescopes they have pulled the heavenly bodies so close that they have had to give up their secrets. And they have split the atom into its basic components. They have penetrated the mysterious forces that keep the universe together. All these discoveries have been magnificent, but the most important one of all is that the human race has discovered history. It is this that has changed its own existence and has given life on earth a new and glorious perspective.

This does not mean that the ancient peoples did not sense something of the miracle of history. They definitely understood that the individual is part of the whole and that everybody is part of some great happening from birth until death. They also carved certain dates into granite and elevated kings into figures of glory. They depicted battles and kept records of how nations rose and perished. All this they noted, but what escaped them was the dramatic course of global happenings. They did not have a comprehensive view of history: that is, they did not perceive that all those battles, the mighty deeds of their kings, the rise and fall of nations, were mere footnotes in the momentous process of the life of humanity, a process that continues from generation to generation and from century to century. They did not bother themselves with the question of whether all these events made sense, whether anything was accomplished, whether there was anything substantial that was worthy of being carried forward.

The ancient Indians saw history as a rushing stream from one period to the next, until everything would disappear into emptiness, the cycle would repeat itself, and new worlds would emerge in which identical happenings would again occur. To them, history was a mad race, dragging everything with it in a senseless danse macabre, repeating the cycle time and again from here to eternity.

But that misses the essence of history. We today have realized that history must be more than deadly repetition. We have examined the question of why things unfold as they do, and we have tried to view global happenings in one all-­encompassing perspective. We have detected something of the drama of all this and have wondered what laws they obey and what thoughts they embody. And because we started to gain such a perspective, we have viewed the life of a single human being in a different context than that of those who preceded him.

After all, once we have experienced history, our own existence on earth is elevated to a new dimension. The people of old understood that individual lives run in similar pathways. In general, humans sail through their early years as in a dream: one moment elated and the next overcome with grief, sometimes moved by love and at other times consumed by hate. Later we are caught up in a never-­ending struggle for life, moved to tears of joy when for the first time we hold our own child in our arms, the child we will later coach carefully through the pitfalls of life. Then we become older and weaker, our eyes grow dim and our feet move more slowly, till death calls us home. That is the course of life for all of us, and that pattern depicts the essence of the existence of the untold millions, those now living and those who went before us. All of our lives display a similar path. We may differ in strength and ability, and we may go our separate ways in education and development; yet, despite all these dissimilarities, there is the universal human condition that is always the same, the reason why we forever belong to each other.

In all this I am still looking at human beings apart from history. We see them in their individual existence from cradle to grave. It’s a different matter, however, when we pay attention to them as part of history. Then we can picture them at a certain point in a dramatic process, where they experience the reality of their age and wrestle with the tensions so typical of their era. Then they help solve the problems of the age, or make them even more complicated, even more difficult to solve.

In short, when we regard modern humans this way, we see them in their historic setting, as a sudden flash of lightning between past and future. We then begin to realize that the lives of such people are transit points through which this grand process continues — that is, we can then see those humans as part of history. At first glance, we might see some similarity between a merchant in the Roman Empire and a CEO of a commercial enterprise in our time. They both deal with problems that accompany the encounter with the laws of economic reality, which are valid for all ages. But when we investigate the two lives a bit more closely, we discover that the comparison does not hold water. They stand at different points in time, and this determines their entire life. History has advanced during those two thousand years, which is why the human problems are also totally different. It is simply not possible to lift persons out of their time frame and milieu; we must regard them within the context of the totality of the particular period of history in which their lives were anchored. Only then do we see humans in their totality. After all, mankind is history. History is not an aspect of being human; it is at the very core of a person’s life. This is the outlook that modern Western people have developed concerning history and the individual person’s relationship to it.

Yet this discovery, however great and remarkable it may seem, is not nearly as exceptional as it may appear at first glance. After all, the Bible, too, has shown us history, and it, too, describes the human being as a creature who stands in history. The animal does not know history: it stands outside what’s happening in its surroundings. Only we — men and women — have a place in history, and that place determines our life on earth.

In gripping visions, the prophets of old observed the dramatic course of world history, and they revealed for us something of God’s dramatic plan that pervades all of history’s phases. The Bible knows that we can never be regarded as “individuals” who are detached from all other realities, but rather that we are always, when seen in the right perspective, to be regarded within the totality of human history. That is where we stand, and it is what determines us: we are caught up in the web of history, and this connection rules our lives. Yes, we are part of God’s plan for the world, a plan that rushes all the way from Adam to that overwhelming finish when the reign of the Antichrist will be destroyed by the coming again of the Son of man. Long before Hegel wrote about the philosophy of history, and Spengler ventured to postulate the decline of the West, the Bible, in a few dramatic lines, showed the grand perspective that permeates all of world history.

Based on what the Bible says about these happenings, Aurelius Augustine, that great thinker of antiquity, opened up for us a new perspective regarding God’s plan for the human race in his book The City of God. Étienne Gilson, in his Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustine, says: “Perhaps it was then for the first time that a human mind ventured to search for a synthesis of world history, thanks to the light of revelation which revealed to him its origin and hidden end.” Augustine sensed the tragedy of what happens on our planet, but he also detected that all these happenings are not chaotic and senseless, but that God has a wise and holy meaning for all those goings-­on. Augustine realized that, even in an era when the Roman Empire teetered on the brink of collapse, the essence of human existence is that we stand in history and that this history is the revelation of God’s great plan. In his book Augustinus, Oepke Noordmans says of The City of God: “The pounding of the world’s history rumbles through the book from start to finish.”

This same Augustine also understood that our lives do not find their ultimate meaning in history. We are not mere creatures caught in the tempest of world events; we are not just thin strands along which the spark of global history is conducted from century to century. No, every living person also stands in a direct relationship to eternity. We have merit of our own, and God values our lives in themselves. Every human being, whoever he or she is, and wherever he or she is on the time line of history — all live in a constant relationship to God and can only be understood in terms of that relationship. Augustine, who expressed such lofty thoughts about the design of world history in his book City of God, says in one of his other writings: “I desire to understand God and my soul.” He understood that we stand before God’s face; that in the turbulent currents of the times we have to deal directly with God himself; and that eternity is an integral part of our existence. Augustine learned that from the Bible, and he lived his life fully conscious of that insight.

I would like to reflect on how the Bible sees us as human beings, seeking to understand how the Bible views us and what the Bible tells us about ourselves. One thing has already become clear: the Bible regards us both as being in history and standing before the face of God.

The Primitive Understanding of the Past

Before I elaborate a bit more thoroughly on the matters mentioned above, it would be helpful to focus for a moment on what the ideas of the so-­called primitive peoples were concerning the origin and development of the universe. Their ideas coincide in the main with what we deem impor­tant today. One of the significant aspects concerning the thinking of some of the tribes in Asia and Africa is that they believe in an Urzeit, primordial time, the primeval period that preceded the time when humanity began life on earth. Urzeit was the time when all things were put in place. What happened, then, became the measure for everything that would happen afterwards. In that era the basis was laid on which all subsequent events rest. The concept of Urzeit appears in various forms. It is the time when the myths took place, those stories that play such an important role in the religious life of these tribal peoples. During that period, according to the Hindus, the world came into being through the sacrifice of a thousand-­headed, thousand-­footed giant, out of which arose sun and moon, heaven and earth, animals and plants. The different castes also originate from this giant. In other words, behind the existence of this well-­ordered world appears a sacrifice in the Urzeit. Every sacrifice, even one offered by a priest in our time, is a repetition of what took place in prehistoric times. Everything that happened in the Urzeit predetermines what exists in our present world and what has taken place earlier. In the primeval time, according to the Aztecs of North America, the mother deity became pregnant. Her daughter, the moon goddess, and the four hundred stars ridiculed their mother and wanted to kill her. However, the child in her womb consoled and encouraged her, and when the moon goddess and the stars kept on pushing their mother to abort the child, the radiant sun god was born. With one blow he cut off the head of the moon goddess and expelled all four hundred star gods. All this happened in the Urzeit, but even now every year, when the days shorten and darkness prevails, the moon and the stars boast of their preeminence for a while, until, with the summer solstice, the sun again reappears in full force. Whatever happened in the time before history explains what now takes place every year.

When we strip these ideas of what, to our way of thinking, sounds rather childish, we are left with the core idea that the time in which we stand, the time in which history takes place, can never be understood in terms of itself. If we want to understand that — if we want to grasp the sense of history — we must go back to primeval times, to the events that took place before the ordering of this world. It was precisely then that the foundations were laid on which the structure of history rests.

It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the Urzeit is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end-­time. The gods and the powers at work in primeval times fashioned our world as we now experience it. However, the existence of this world is no more than a brief flash between two abysses of deep darkness. Soon, at the arrival of the end-­time, our world will descend to the state it was in before, and everything will revert back to what existed in the Urzeit. Just as death is close to birth, so the downturn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end-­time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.

There truly is something very appealing in all this. Why does the sun come up every morning? It is because in the Urzeit some god caused its birth from the mother-­womb of the East, and so the same thing happened and happens every morning from then on. Why does this particular mountain have such a bizarre shape? It is because in prehistoric times that same mountain took its shape as we now see it. Why does this particular river originate from that high mountaintop? Because in primeval time the gods or giants hit the mountains so hard with their powerful fists that water burst forth. Why is it that Hindu society has four castes? Because in the Urzeit four castes were born out of the giant who was sacrificed by the gods: the Brahmin caste came from his head, and the other castes from his arms, shins, and feet. Nothing in the world is there by chance; everything is there because it must be that way since it originated in that form in the Urzeit. And beyond the horizon lies the end-­time, in which all cosmic reality shrinks away into the mistiness of the one Being that existed before all things came to be. History is a small strip of land between the two oceans of Urzeit and end-­time. Our being in the world is but a short moment: behind us we have the horizon of primeval time and before us the horizon of the end-­time, and these two are one and the same.

The vision offered by these old myths is not without merit for us. That we exist as we do can only be explained from the events that occurred in the period preceding our time. If we are to understand the hidden mainsprings of our lives, we must not look at ourselves in our existence here and now, but we must go back to what happened in prehistory. All of history is preceded by the mystery of the Urzeit, which gives meaning to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• A Tribute to Johan Herman Bavinck by a Former Student
• A Brief Biographical Sketch
• 1. The Eternal in History
• 2. The Language of the Old Testament Symbols
• 3. The Kingdom
• 4. Christ, the Central Focus of Scripture
• 5. Christ’s Arrest
• 6. The High-Priestly Verdict
• 7. “I Don’t Know the Man”
• 8. The Sentence of the Governor
• 9. The Death of Humanity
• 10. Born Again
• 11. The Road to Life