Nielsen’s Nook

An Unraveling Mystery

It was as if living in Russia (2000-2002) had provided the snag in my garment the fabric of which began to unwind at increasing rates. We arrived in Russia believing that it was only an exceptional case for a Russian Orthodox person to be a Christian. We left having met many Russian Orthodox who were irrefutably beautiful Christians, reveling the anemic nature my own Christian faith. Now we were presented with the possibility of weaving a new and more beautiful garment out of the same golden thread.

Herman Bavinck has a well known quote that begins the second volume of Reformed Dogmatics, which nevertheless has resonated with me since the first moment I heard it quoted by Rev. Dr. David McWilliams at WTS:

Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics. To be sure, the term “mystery” (μυστηριον) in Scripture does not mean an abstract supernatural truth in the Roman Catholic sense. Yet Scripture is equally far removed from the idea that believers can grasp the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense. [1]

At that time, it was precisely my modern enlightenment approach to Christianity that explicitly and implicitly attempted to reduce the faith to the confines of a mental spreadsheet. While I’m not convinced that modern Roman Catholics, particularly Thomists, would recognize themselves in Bavinck’s description of their own approach to mystery; it is the balanced sense of wonderful mystery represented in this quote that imbibed a way forward for me in autumn of 2002.

[1] Herman Bavinck, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, 3 vols., Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), 29