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Wednesday, February 04, 2015

More Bavinck on General Revelation

… Christ is the center and content of the whole special revelation, which starts in Paradise and is completed in the Apocalypse. Now special revelation has recognized and valued general revelation, has taken it over and, as it were, assimilated it. And this is also what the Christian does, as do the theologians. They position themselves in the Christian faith, in special revelation, and from there look out upon nature and history.

And now they discover there as well the traces of the God whom they learned to know in Christ as their Father. Precisely as Christians, by faith, they see the revelation of God in nature much better and more clearly than before. The carnal [non-Christian] person does not understand God’s speech in nature and history. He or she searches the entire universe without finding God. But Christians, equipped with the spectacles of Scripture
(Calvin, Instititues 1.6.1), see God in everything and everything in God. For that reason we find in Scripture a kind of nature poetry and view of history such as is found nowhere else.

With their Christian confession, accordingly, Christians find themselves at home also in the world. They are not strangers there and see the God who rules creation as none other than the one they address as Father in Christ. As a result of this general revelation, they feel at home in the world; it is God’s fatherly hand from which they receive all things also in the context of nature.

From “Reformed Dogmatics”, Vol 1, pg 321.

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