Note: From Reformed Social Ethics (Baker, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
This section [“The Social Question”] is based on two primary [Herman] Bavinck sources: (1) “General Biblical Principles and the Relevance of Concrete Mosaic Law for the Social Question Today (1891)” and (2) “On Inequality.” Since the first was a paper prepared specifically for the First Christian Social Congress held in Amsterdam on November 9-11, 1891, a few observations about the historical context of the “social question” are in order.
The term “social question” belongs to the nineteenth century and was a response to the dislocations of European life brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Working people left rural areas and flocked into the urban centers of Europe as cottage industries gave way to factory production. The social upheaval resulted in growing numbers of urbanized working-class poor who often struggled to meet basic necessities of life. English poet William Blake put an indelible stamp on our imagination’s sense of this period of history with his famous reference to “these dark Satanic mills.” [William Blake, “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time”]
The social upheaval was obvious, and social thinkers responded with a variety of “fixes,” notably the secular socialist vision of Karl Marx and the Christian socialist visions of British Anglicans such as Charles Kingsley (1819-75) and Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-72), along with American Baptists Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and Francis Julius Bellamy (1855-1931). In continental Europe, a number of organized movements for social reform, called “Social Congresses,” were organized, usually at national levels. The Evangelical Social Congress, for example, was a diverse social-reform movement founded by German pastors in 1890.
The 1891 First Christian Social Congress was made possible by some thirty years of social group formation of workers in Europe more broadly and the Netherlands more particularly. After the world’s workers formed the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, later called the First International) in London on September 28, 1864, and the aborted revolutionary attempt by the Paris Commune to seize power in 1871, an increased anxiety about revolution and “socialism” grew in Europe. In the Netherlands, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-76) and, later, Abraham Kuyper initiated an anti-revolutionary movement, eventually forming the Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1879. In the decades leading up to the First Christian Social Congress, religiously neutral as well as expressly Christian – Protestant and Roman Catholic – worker groups and employer associations came into being. As the congress met in November 1891, the condition of workers and the “threat” of socialism were very much on participants’ minds. And it is this issue that is crucial for understanding Bavinck’s paper.
Bavinck acknowledges the reality of this social ferment and even highlights the economic disparities that gave rise to it. Elsewhere he speaks of
the many highly deplorable disparities that exist in real life. What is the reason and why is it necessary that a few may live in luxury and that many may live a fairly carefree life but that the mass of humanity has to earn a living through hard labor? Who or what accounts for the differences between those whose homes are furnished lavishly or comfortably and the many who have to endure living in stuffy rooms, narrow alleys, and dreary slums that lack light and fresh air? (ERSS, 147)
Nonetheless, Bavinck does not make the reality of inequality his starting point, and he differs from the revolutionary and socialist understanding of the problem by refusing to accept inequality as prima facie proof of injustice. Instead, he considers inequality to be “only one instance of a worldwide problem of multiformity” (ERSS, 147). We will see how he develops this, first in the context of the social and economic questions that framed the First Christian Social Congress, and then from a more philosophical perspective in his essay “On Inequality.”…
Bavinck’s “On Inequality”
Two decades after his presentation to the Social Congress, Bavinck once again addressed the question of inequality, but now in a more philosophical manner. The triggering impulse for this essay is not so much the “social question,” with its concern about the poverty and misery of the working class (though this is not absent), as it is the spiritual, moral and social chaos of the modern world leading up to World War I. Here is how Bavinck describes it:
If in these busy, stressful times we look beyond ourselves at world events, we are constantly deluged by an overwhelming mass of incidents that are impossible to categorize or understand. And when we look inside ourselves, we see a restless sea of impressions, emotions and moods, and we feel like a ship that is tossed to and fro. Sometimes in the vast restlessness of existing reality, we see things that weary us because of a certain monotony, but we also encounter things that move us and even bewilder us by their impenetrable mystery.
In both instances, questions arise: What accounts for such infinite variety and endless diversity in this one, vast universe? Might it be possible that this endless variety can be reduced to, or is derived from, one single source that might quiet our souls? (ERSS, 145)
This endless variety does evoke aesthetic delight since there is beauty in diversity. But seeing only beauty in diversity is superficial:
But this variety also hides a great many contradictions, for diversity is a pseudonym for a mysterious struggle between clashing powers. Just as nature has its days and nights, its summers and winters, so humanity faces good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and disgrace. (ERSS, 145)
Bavinck then proceeds to the biblical account of the fall and the divinely appointed enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The evidence for the fallenness of the world is obvious to all:
We recognize this all around. There is no peace or harmony anywhere; instead, dissonance and struggle are everywhere. People, social classes, nations, political parties and interests have clashed throughout the centuries, while inside each person the head and the heart, flesh and spirit, duty and desire, conscience and lust are constantly at war with each other. Is it perhaps possible that all these harrowing contrasts can be reconciled and brought together in a nobler synthesis that might satisfy us in our day and eventually conquer and destroy them? (ERSS, 146)
Speaking of this as “an all-encompassing problem,” Bavinck reduces all the efforts to bring about reconciliation to two basic types that “especially have become prominent”: monism and pluralism.
[There are,] on the one hand, the pantheistic or monistic systems that have tried to reduce variety to an appearance of reality with the slogan “variety is basically one reality.” Thus they treat variety either as modification of a single reality, or they see it merely as man’s imagination, which does not correspond to any objective reality. These are the views of the Greek Eleatic and Stoic schools of thought that, overlooking gnosticism and Neoplatonism, have become part of the more recent philosophy of Spinoza, Hegel and Spencer. They may even have found a more consistent voice in the philosophy of Buddhism, which views the entire world as maya, the representation of the one, unknowable and unutterable It. (ERSS, 146)
By way of contrast, the pluralistic visions of ancient pagan polytheism and polydaemonism have also remarkably resurfaced in the modern era:
On the other hand, there are also the pluralistic systems that despair of ever finding one single reality and that do not go beyond accepting an original multitude of gods or spirits, of powers or matter. [This vision also] holds true for the dualism of the Persians and Manichaeans, for the theosophical distinction of the dark and bright aspects of God. And it is remarkable that they have reappeared more recently in this form as a reaction to monism. Not only is the pluralism of William James proof of this, but also the dualistic representation of a morally good God next to the mysterious power of nature and the even more prominent superstition and magic that increasingly spreads to our centers of culture. (ERSS, 146)
If these two answers are the basic options by which “religious and philosophic systems have approached the gripping problem of unity and multiformity,” then, so Bavinck observes, “it is quite remarkable that in our day, more so than ever before, this idea of diversity has become a practical problem. The great diversity in our world is seen by many people today, especially in the social realm, as inequality” (ERSS, 146).
John Bolt, professor emeritus of systematic theology, Calvin Theological Seminary
