Bavinck says that, in order to distinguish the “knowledge” that was essential to saving faith from the “assent” of Catholic definitions of faith, the Refoemrs insisted that “the knowledge of saving faith [is] a matter of the heart rather than of the intellect.”
On this point, then, Pietists are doing nothing more than recovering the Reformation when they protest the re-Catholicization of Orthodoxy. Bavinck’s comment also suggests an internal conenction between the Reformation and Romanticisms of various kinds. Plus, he implies that the Reformation had a richer grasp of human knowing than the Catholic church, which tended to restrict knowing to the intellect.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations
“Hope,” wrote the German-American polymath Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “is the deity of youth.” Wholly dependent on adults, children…
Still Life, Still Sacred
Renaissance painters would use life-sized wooden dolls called manichini to study how drapery folds on the human…
Letters
I am writing not to address any particular article, but rather to register my concern about the…
