Word-to-word: a constructive account of speech between God and humanity in the theologies of Herman Bavinck and John Webster

Abstract

Modern theology and philosophy have often concerned themselves with questions of the knowability of the divine, questions that gravitate around the nexus that is the concept of revelation. Questions such as the ability of a transcendent God to communicate his will to finite creatures and, conversely, the ability of creatures to both know that will and express concurrent theological concepts through the finite means of human speech have been variously debated from antiquity into the present. This thesis will attempt to posit a constructive theological model that approaches these issues from the perspective of a synthesis of the thought of two similar-yet-distinct theologians, Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and John Webster (1955-2016), both of whom were writing to address the issues pointed at Christian theological claims reaching into and (in Webster’s case) past modernity. Drawing on Bavinck’s organic conception of the relationship between Creator and creation and Webster’s concept of sanctified speech considered within the context of their broader theologies, this constructive study within a Reformed theology proposes a threefold paradigm of God-humanity-language that focuses on the nature of verbal speech, first in its theological aspect related to divine communicability, and next in its anthropological dimension related to the imago Dei and a prelapsarian concept of verbal revelation that presents a non-conflicting view of the relationship between human speech and divine language, with verbal revelation in Scripture as the renewal of the original integrity speech for theological communication. Within this scheme, Scripture’s ability to both manifest and adequately convey divine communication with certainty is thus tied to the innate quality of verbal language as theological, a part of the imago Dei in humanity that reflects the communicability of the Trinity and which assumes the need for both cataphatic expression and special revelation. A number of key sources will be brought in by way of synthesis to demonstrate this quality of language, with gestures made toward potential avenues of philosophical, historical, and apologetical application.