Personality and Worldview E-Book

J. H. Bavinck

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

An Examination of Worldview, Worldvision, and the Soul by Dutch Reformed Theologian J. H. Bavinck, Translated into English for the First Time Modern evangelicals differ on their concept of "worldview." Many have varying definitions of it and some even consider it to be a wholly unhelpful term in understanding the world around them. This volume by Johan Herman Bavinck examines the relationship between the soul, each human's unique personality, and worldview—acknowledging the importance of worldview while recognizing the dangers if worldviews are misapplied.  Personality and Worldview by J. H. Bavinck, nephew and student of Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, creates a distinction between a worldvision (which all people have) and a worldview (which only few have in a mature and wise way). Profoundly influenced by the works of St. Augustine, Bavinck challenges readers to allow the gospel to reshape their worldviews and their personalities as they pursue godly wisdom. Translated into English for the first time by James Eglinton, Bavinck's accessible prose, personal applications, and more will greatly serve pastors, students, and laypeople alike.  - Foreword by Timothy Keller: Keller writes, "I could not be happier that Johan Herman Bavinck's Personality and Worldview has been made accessible to the English-speaking world. It is an important work, perhaps even what we call a 'game-changer.'" - Edited and Translated by James Eglinton: An expert scholar and author on the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition  - Introduction by the Editor: Provides an overview of the book and a brief introduction to Johan Herman Bavinck's life - For Readers Who Enjoy Herman Bavinck: Works as a follow-up text to Herman Bavinck's Christian Worldview

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Personality and Worldview

Personality and Worldview

J. H. Bavinck

Translated and edited by

James Eglinton

Foreword by Timothy Keller

Personality and Worldview

Copyright © 2023 by James Eglinton

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Originally published in Dutch as Persoonlijkheid en wereldbeschouwing by J. H. Kok in 1928. Translated into English by permission of Maarten Bavinck, holder of the rights to the original book.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-8483-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8486-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8484-8 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-8485-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bavinck, J. H. (Johan Herman), 1895–1964, author. | Eglinton, James Perman, translator, editor. | Keller, Timothy, 1950– writer of foreword.

Title: Personality and worldview / J. H. Bavinck ; translated and edited by James Eglinton ; foreword by Timothy Keller.

Other titles: Persoonlijkheid en wereldbeschouwing. English

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2023] | Originally published in Dutch as Persoonlijkheid en wereldbeschouwing by J. H. Kok in 1928. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025603 (print) | LCCN 2022025604 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433584831 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433584848 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433584862 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Personality. | Soul. | Spiritual life.

Classification: LCC BF698 .B31925 2023 (print) | LCC BF698 (ebook) | DDC 155.2—dc23/eng/20221017

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025603

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025604

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-03-09 04:39:18 PM

To the memory of my late and dear friend

Dr. Javier Alejandro Garcia (1987–2021),

a Christian theologian who excelled in personality and worldview.

Contents

Foreword by Timothy Keller

Acknowledgments

Editor’s Introduction

1  The Struggle for a Worldview

2  The Essence of Personality

3  The Problem of Unity

4  Passive Knowing

5  The Power of Reason

6  The Reaction of the Conscience

7  Mysticism and Revelation

8  Personality and Worldview

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

I could not be happier that Johan Herman Bavinck’s Personality and Worldview has been made accessible to the English-speaking world. It is an important work, perhaps even what we call a “game changer.”

The idea that Christian beliefs constitute a unique worldview—through which we view all reality and because of which we work distinctly in every area of life—has been influential in the United States for at least a century, as James Eglinton notes in his introductory essay. But the concept of worldview has lost its luster for many in the US church. I’ve spoken to numerous young Christians who want to lay it aside. Why? Because they say it is

too rationalistic: It casts Christianity as a set of propositions or bullet points conveyed by argument in a classroom. The emphasis on worldview can give the impression that the work of the kingdom of God is mainly an intellectual or scholarly project. The role of imagination and story on worldview—or their function even as worldview—is simply not considered.too simplistic: The emphasis on the coherence of worldviews (“that these beliefs always lead to these outcomes”) does not account for the reality that people are happily inconsistent and seem to live out of a patchwork of somewhat incoherent beliefs and worldviews.too individualistic: “Worldview thinking,” at least as it exists now, seems to ignore the profound role of community and culture on us. It implies that we are primarily the product of our individual thinking and choices. In this the current concept of worldview may be more American than biblical. We don’t see that worldview is the product of communal formation and of the common stories that our community uses to make sense of life.too triumphalist: The emphasis on the antithesis of believing and unbelieving starting points, of foundational beliefs or presuppositions, can lead to a sense that we have all the truth and no one else has any at all. And in its worst usage, all sorts of contestable cultural and political opinions can be claimed to be simply part of the “biblical worldview” and therefore beyond questioning.

J. H. Bavinck’s Personality and Worldview addresses these concerns and provides a far more nuanced understanding of worldview that, in my opinion, largely escapes these critiques.

His emphasis on worldview’s relationship to personality shows that worldview is much more than a set of bullet points on a blackboard. This approach guards against seeing worldview as a mere intellectual framework passed on by intellectual means. Personality and Worldview casts worldview as not only something that forms but also something we deploy in becoming more thoughtful and “objective” in our formation.

His unique contribution—the distinction between a “worldvision” and a “worldview”—explains why so few people live out of a consistent and coherent worldview. The worldvision (or world “mindset” or “mentality”) is a set of basic intuitions picked up from our environment, consisting in simplistic and reductionistic ideas through which we view reality as through spectacles. A worldview, however, is more like a map, never fully finished in this life, in which we work out the implications of Christianity for every area of life in our time and place.

Bavinck’s emphasis on psychology entails community formation (though he often leaves that implicit). Personality and Worldview in many ways reflects the psychology of an earlier time, and yet it recognizes that our “personality” is not only, as Eglinton explains, the result of “the idiosyncrasies of [our inborn] temperament[s]” but “a set of intuitions about the world formed in all individuals by their family and home environment, their teachers and education, and the broad culture within which they live.”1 Here Personality and Worldview anticipates Charles Taylor’s concept of worldview as a “social imaginary”—the way a community of people learn to imagine the world.2

Finally, the Bavincks’ emphasis on worldview as what James Eglinton, Gray Sutanto, and Cory Brock have previously described as mapmaking is a crucial idea.3 Developing a worldview is an effort to transcend the limitations and reductionisms of our worldvision. If a worldview is something we painstakingly work out our whole lives, several things follow:

1. Worldview is not in this metaphor a finished weapon to be wielded against opponents—it guards against triumphalism in that regard.

2. It’s always somewhat unfinished and growing. That is humbling as well.

3. A Christian in Indonesia would not be developing the exact same map as a Christian in Scotland. If you are applying the Christian’s doctrines to all of life, the questions and issues one faces will differ in different places. As such, although Personality and Worldview doesn’t say this explicitly, it gives us the basis for the thought that there may be overlapping and noncontradictory but somewhat different Christian worldviews in different cultures. That also undermines triumphalism.

For these reasons and more, I am so grateful for James Eglinton’s translation of Personality and Worldview and his introduction. Read them both carefully, and think out the implications for how you are understanding and practicing your faith in the world today.

Timothy Keller

New York City

May 2022

1  See the “Editor’s Introduction”.

2  See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

3  Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 16–17.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to a number of people whose kindness made this book possible, not least several members of the Bavinck family itself. Professor Maarten Bavinck, a grandson of J. H. Bavinck, graciously granted permission for the work to be translated into English. My own first exposure to Personality and Worldview came about in 2010, when Wim Bavinck and Emelie Bavinck–van Halsema gifted me several boxes of books by their illustrious relatives. It was a joy to discover J. H. Bavinck’s lost treasure in the midst of those works. To each of you, van harte bedankt. I hope you are pleased with the English version of this book.

Once again, it has been a pleasure to produce a book with Crossway. I owe a debt of gratitude, in particular, to Justin Taylor and David Barshinger, whose enthusiasm, professionalism, vision, and patience have played no small part in keeping this project moving along toward completion.

I am also thankful to a group of fine PhD students—Hunter Nicholson, Terence Chu, Israel Guerrero, Chun Tse, Ray Burbank, Henry Chiong, Sebastian Bjernegård, David Meinberg, and Nathan Dever—and to my colleague Ximian (Simeon) Xu, who gathered week by week at the University of Edinburgh to read through the chapters together. My friends (and former PhD students) Gray Sutanto, Cory Brock, and Greg Parker each read the manuscript and provided valuable feedback. As ever, Marinus de Jong patiently answered queries about grammatical complexities and fine shades of meaning in the original text. Thanks to you all.

Finally, I owe a special word of appreciation to Tim Keller, a friend and mentor who provided the foreword and has been a source of constant encouragement at each stage of translation and production.

Editor’s Introduction

Personality and worldview. In the early twenty-first-century West, those words summon a range of ideas—some bland, others deeply controversial.

Personality: Context and Knowledge

To many, the language of personality is used to talk about an individual’s capacity for extroversion and fun. In that manner of speaking, a particularly dull person might be seen as having no personality at all, whereas a very outgoing person is assumed to have personality in abundance. In that sense, it is a superficial term.

Increasingly, though, personality is used with more depth by a generation that relies on Myers-Briggs tests and the Enneagram to decode the reality that we all have a personality of one sort or another. To this more savvy (mostly millennial) crowd, personality involves introversion as much as extroversion. Their more nuanced approach assumes that every personality is ordered in a particular way—and that the makeup of your personality is both innate and unchangeable. As such, the result of a personality test functions as a kind of self-revelation: it purports to tell you who you really are, what you are truly like, so that a newfound self-knowledge will somehow reconcile you to yourself. Pay enough attention to your preset personality type, we are told, and you can more intentionally build your life around it.

That view is unsettling to some and is certainly met with skepticism by many: How do I know the test is reliable? And what if I dislike the personality type it reveals?

Worldview: Contested and Neglected

Depending on where you are in the world, the term worldview is different. In North America, embattled and riven as it is by culture wars, worldview is a hotly contested term. For some in this setting, the notion of worldview functions as a source of stability. As a concept, it represents a grouping of basic, deeply held commitments that shape both a culture and the lives of those who inhabit it. Everyone has a worldview, the idea goes, for which reason it is important that you know which worldview you adhere to and whether yours is the right one.

As with the millennials whose personality tests serve to reveal who they truly are as individuals, worldview can also function as a source of self-revelation, albeit the revelation of who your group really is and what it is truly like. (And conversely, it reveals who the other groups are and what they are really like: those who have secular, humanist, Islamic, Buddhist, and so on, worldviews.)

In the context of culture-war America, the idea of a biblical worldview has a particular hold on the American evangelical imagination: there is no shortage of online “biblical worldview tests” that will quickly reveal the makeup of your own worldview and judge whether it is ade-quately biblical or of polls that assert a connection between worldview and lifestyle. In that culture, part of the allure of a biblical worldview is the apparent ease with which it can be attained. It lends itself well to a list of points on a whiteboard and to online videos that promise to equip the viewer with a biblical worldview in a matter of minutes. Assent to the key propositions presented, and you can confidently state that you “have a biblical worldview.”

In North America, of course, the notion of worldview also draws fierce criticism. Some see it as simplistic, reductive, and blinkered, arguing that its apparent transparency (in its emphasis on beliefs clearly projected outward) is an illusion. In that line of critique, worldview is perceived as something of a Trojan horse—a word that distracts the listener from hidden assumptions that serve the interests of the powerful white evangelical men who support worldview-based thinking. Critics of worldview commonly assert that the idea was invented by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)—who coined the German equivalent, Weltanschauung—and has no prior history to that, a claim flatly contradicted by supporters of worldview who acknowledge that while the label is a relative newcomer on the historical scene, its substance has a much longer lineage. In Worldview: The History of a Concept, for example, David Naugle describes a theologized way of interpreting life and the world as far predating Kant’s intervention, citing early-church figures such as Augustine (354–430) alongside medieval and early modern theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Martin Luther (1483–1546), and John Calvin (1509–1564) as older examples of those whose commitment to worldview-based thinking was identifiable in all but name.1

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, worldview is a largely unknown term that draws little to no reaction from most. In a culture profoundly shaped by the heritage of Anglophone philosophy, talk of worldview is far more likely to draw blank stares than heated debate. British culture is a distinct cocktail of common-sense epistemology and empiricism, and it rests on the belief that human beings are (or, if they learn to think properly, can become) epistemologically neutral, unbiased, and presuppositionless in their judgments. As such, the story goes, they are able to think with unclouded judgment about self-evident truths. As those who believe that their take on the world is both correct and obvious, most Brits feel no need for a worldview concept. Indeed, worldview is a strikingly un-British idea. It undermines the very notion of Britishness, recasting it as a kind of cognitive dissonance, a suspension of disbelief in the reality that all human life is grounded on a priori starting points that are often utterly arbitrary, unempirical, and in no way common or sensical to all peoples. The language of worldview did not grow naturally in British cultural soil, tilled for so long, as it has been, by the philosophies of John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776). Empires are not founded on admissions of arbitrariness or terms that point beyond themselves in the way that worldview gestures toward the heft of other worldviews. By necessity, an empire needs to be the only show in town.

None of this is to say, of course, that British culture has no need of a worldview concept. In the early twenty-first century, and due in large part to the history of immigration facilitated by Britain’s colonial past, the United Kingdom is increasingly diverse in terms of culture, epistemology, religion, and ethnicity. Sustained immigration from the non-Western world has challenged typically British claims to neutrality, common sense, and obviousness. Seemingly universal ideas like neutral and common now look awkwardly parochial and untenable. To some, these are the words that distract the listener from hidden assumptions that serve the interests of those who claim to look on the world without bias or presuppositions.

Despite this cultural background, one segment of British society continues to cling tightly and loudly to the tenets of Anglophone philosophy: the secular humanists. Elevating the natural sciences into a form of scientism, secular humanism deals exclusively in the currency of nonsubjective thinking, universally self-evident truths, and claims to the obviousness of an antireligious life. As a movement, it is as British as can be. Faced with this philosophy, British Christianity—in some quarters, at least—has begun to turn to the language of worldview in an attempt to articulate the sense in which secular humanism is not self-evident to those who are not secular humanists. The British church’s efforts, however, are tentative. Worldview may be easier to pronounce than Weltanschauung, but in saying it, Brits are still learning to speak a foreign tongue.

The Americanization of a Dutch Idea

In comparison to this, it is all the more interesting that a large section of American Christianity speaks the language of worldview with ease. I describe this as noteworthy because, for the most part, American culture rests on the same bedrock of Anglophone philosophy. In complex ways, American evangelicalism is also influenced by the same philosophical tendencies. Why have British and American cultures been so different in their receptivity to worldview?

In the melting pot that is American culture, worldview-based thinking arrived through the sustained immigration of Dutch Reformed Christians to North America. Their Old World (Continental) philosophical heritage was shaped by a distinct breed of philosophers: the likes of René Descartes (1596–1650) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who eschewed supposedly neutral starting points and instead spoke of presuppositions as universal but also as arbitrary and varied. From Spinoza, the Dutch imagination had learned to appreciate that all human thinking begins with untested assumptions. From Descartes, the Dutch mind learned to subject even those assumptions to critical scrutiny. On the path to his famous dictum “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes argued that everything—even the a priori presuppositions that steer our most basic intuitions—can and must be subject to radical doubt.

Alongside this philosophical heritage, Dutch Reformed immigrants brought with them a habit of instruction in the theology of the Heidelberg Catechism. That catechism’s epistemology is far removed from the commonsense, evidentialist, empiricist philosophy (and theology) that emerged in the English-speaking world. Rather than addressing its readers on the basis of unaided human reason, it begins (as similar catechisms by Luther and Calvin do) with an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. The Heidelberg Catechism inducts its readers into an idiosyncratic message (“the holy gospel”), which is the source of knowledge of the Christian faith as summarized in the creed, which is itself confessed by an idiosyncratic community: the church of Christ.

The Heidelberg Catechism assumes that all knowledge—Christian and non-Christian—is based in faith and thus that Christianity provides a distinct view of life and the world that proceeds from this faith. As worldview implicitly nods in the direction of worldviews, the Heidelberg Catechism’s induction into the Christian faith acknowledges that human beings can also pursue a different view of life and the world that is not informed by the gospel. The Heidelberg Catechism treats Christianity as true but not as obviously true to all people. That distinction is both subtle and inestimably important to the kind of theology that developed in the Netherlands and that was then imported to North America.

Although the catechism does not contain the term worldview, its epistemology played no small part in the later growth of worldview-based thinking that would blossom in the Netherlands from the late nineteenth century onward. In that period, the Dutch Reformed church became the scene of an effort to articulate the historic Reformed faith in a way that was recognizably orthodox and modern: the neo-Calvinist movement. Led by the theologians Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), the neo-Calvinists spoke often and explicitly of the reality and inescapability of different worldviews. They shunned the idea that the human being was a blank slate capable of neutrality or freedom from presuppositions. That kind of typically Anglophone view, they thought, was hopelessly naive and a culture-wide delusion of sorts. The concept that best expressed those denials of commonplace Anglophone tendencies was worldview.

On the one hand, to a neo-Calvinist, worldview entailed an acceptance that human life cannot be lived without a faith-based acceptance of a priori starting points. On the other, it also accepted that those starting assumptions were disordered by sin and thus would vary dramatically across the human population. Echoing their catechism, the neo-Calvinists believed that the truth of Christianity was powerfully compelling, without assuming this to be obviously or self-evidently so to all people. In contrast to their catechism, however, they employed the language of worldview to make precisely this point.

In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll described the relationship between Dutch Reformed immigrants and the broader culture of American evangelicalism. Like American evangelicals, the Dutch Reformed held a high view of the authority of the Bible and were committed to the notion of active personal piety. That proximity allowed for an exchange of ideas in both directions: the immigrant Dutch Reformed faith underwent a general process of Americanization (and evangelicalization), while American evangelicalism gained a taste for the Dutch legacy of “serious academic work and experienced philosophical reasoning.”2

That evangelical exposure to Dutch thought also included the notion of worldview. In that context, though, the neo-Calvinist concept of worldview also seems to have undergone a distinct kind of Americanization: subject to the conditions of American evangelicalism, the term remained the same, while the content changed somewhat. For example, when introducing our translation of Herman Bavinck’s Christian Worldview (first published in Dutch in 1904 and released in English in 2019), Cory Brock, Gray Sutanto, and I described how Bavinck’s early twentieth-century idea of Christian worldview was an essentially inductive thought process quite unlike much of the evangelical “biblical worldview” movement today:

A worldview is a map, drawn over time from careful research, derived from actual knowledge of the geography, from pious religion, from the desire for truth, and is amenable to updating. After all, maps are made from research—some careful, meticulous, and true and some not. Some maps account for the details as they are presented, and some are false. But mapmaking we must do.3

For Bavinck, the task of making such a map was question driven: What am I? Where did I come from? How does my mind relate to the world beyond my sense of self? Do I know? If so, how can I know? How should I act? What is the point of life? What is my life headed toward? As such, it is a thoroughly inductive way of thinking and living in pursuit of godly wisdom. Viewed in this way, a Christian worldview expands with time. It is open ended and has a gaze that is as wide as the world itself.

By contrast, much American evangelical worldview thinking is deductive and by nature restrictive. It is often an exercise in list writing and in agreeing to the contents of those lists, rather than a slow process of exploration and cartography. It arrives as a complete package and, as noted earlier, in some forms at least, can apparently be acquired through a five-minute YouTube video. Although the term worldview diffused from Dutch America into the evangelical mainstream, it was not left untouched by the process. As a result, to read early twentieth-century neo-Calvinists and twenty-first-century evangelicals on worldview can be a jarring experience—almost as though we are left to deal with faux amis (false friends). As Timothy Keller has noted in the foreword to this book, from a neo-Calvinist perspective, the American evangelical rendition of worldview is often overly rationalistic (in approaching the world via a series of propositions rather than as a way of imagining the world through community and story), simplistic (in drawing tight connections between beliefs and outcomes, as though people generally lived consistently with their beliefs), individualistic (in neglecting the role of community and culture in shaping us and in treating us as though we are the product of our own individual thinking), and, as a consequence of all this, triumphalist.

For that reason, when we released the first English translation of Herman Bavinck’s Christian Worldview, our goal was to show the English-speaking world that the neo-Calvinist tradition approaches worldview quite differently from much of current-day evangelicalism. Our hope was to make a sparkling—but otherwise forgotten—text on worldview available to a larger audience. The same hope undergirds the effort to translate this book, Personality and Worldview, by Herman Bavinck’s nephew and former student, the theologian, psychologist, and missiologist Johan Herman Bavinck.

Johan Herman Bavinck

Johan Herman (1895–1964) was the son of Herman Bavinck’s brother Coenraad Bernardus (“Bernard”) Bavinck (1866–1941), a Christian Reformed pastor and noted Augustine enthusiast. J. H. Bavinck studied under his uncle at the Free University of Amsterdam (1912–1918), where his circle of friends included Hendrik Kramer (1888–1965) and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977)—contemporaries who would later be noted for their own respective contributions to missiology and philosophy. After his studies in Amsterdam, J. H. Bavinck moved to Germany to begin doctoral studies at the University of Erlangen (1918–1919), where he wrote a thesis on psychology and mysticism in the medieval German Dominican Henry Suso (1295–1366).

Doctorate in hand, Bavinck moved to Indonesia (1920), where he spent six years pastoring congregations attended by Dutch expatriates and Westernized locals. Returning to the Netherlands in 1926, he pastored a congregation in Heemstede for three years—publishing Personality and Worldview4 in that period—before heading eastward again in 1930. This time, his work took a strikingly different shape. Rather than ministering to expatriates, he became something of a neo-Calvinist Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), first working as a missionary youth pastor before becoming a teacher of local pastors in Jogyakarta. He took on a Javanese name (Kjai Martawahana) and began to publish theological literature in the local language. In this second period, he gained the nickname “the white Javanese.”5 Eventually, in 1939, he returned to the Netherlands, where he spent the rest of his life teaching missiology at the Free University of Amsterdam and at the Theological School in Kampen.6

Some of J. H. Bavinck’s works are relatively well known outside the Netherlands: among others, his books An Introduction to the Science of Missions, Between the Beginning and the End, The Church between Temple and Mosque, and The Riddle of Life have all been available in English for some time and have their own devoted following.7 Among his writings, though, Personality and Worldview is a uniquely important text. Biographically, it stands between his two (distinct) periods in the East and functions as a bridge that connects these phases of his life and thought. As such, it shows us a careful Christian thinker learning to develop categories that would enable him to serve as a Reformed missionary among non-Western people, while also sharpening his own view of the cultural shifts that affected twentieth-century Westerners. Beyond that, it is perhaps the most useful text in positioning him in relation to his uncle. Personality and Worldview can be read as an effort to advance and further nuance Herman Bavinck’s own contribution to the conversation on Christian worldview.

Worldview and Worldvision

If Herman Bavinck’s Christian Worldview opened a new vista to Anglophone conversations around worldview, it was to show that the neo-Calvinist tradition construes worldview not as a rapid information dump—like Neo learning kung fu in The Matrix—or merely as a process of assent to a list of propositions. Rather, it showed that worldview is both something that is formative and something that is itself in a process of formation. It showed us Herman Bavinck’s account of how worldview takes time. Properly speaking, of course, Bavinck presented a “world-and-life view” (wereld- en levensbeschouwing): an account of a lifelong pilgrimage toward wisdom about God, the world, and one’s life within it. It encompasses both the truth about the world and about human life—your life and mine. That kind of thing cannot be rushed.

In Personality and Worldview, J. H. Bavinck adds to that vista considerably and in important ways. Above all, he does this through a creative effort to supply working terms and concepts to explain every human’s starting point on the path that eventually leads toward a rich and mature worldview, while also offering an account of why most people are happy never to take a single step forward on that path. While cultures might be driven by grand worldviews, Bavinck argues that most individuals are not. To borrow the language of Isaiah 44:19 (NIV), “no one stops to think” about worldview, despite the pervasive influence worldviews have on whichever culture they inhabit and the haphazard glimpses of those worldviews that can be seen in people’s lives. That kind of claim offers scope to nuance the worldview conversation considerably, and as such, it merits our detailed attention.

Advocates of worldview tend to emphasize its ubiquity (which is to say, in effect, “Worldview matters because everyone has one”). With that in mind, it is perhaps surprising that in Personality and Worldview, J. H. Bavinck makes the paradoxical claim that worldview is both everywhere (“Everyone has a worldview”) and nowhere (“Almost no one has a worldview”).

How can both these statements be true? How is it possible that while all people live on the basis of a priori starting points (which are generally taken to be the basic building blocks of worldview), worldviews—or at least, worldviews truly deserving of that name—are nonetheless as rare as hens’ teeth? J. H. Bavinck’s answer lies in a novel conceptual distinction between worldvision (which all humans have, by necessity) and worldview (which drives entire cultures, while being possessed by very few people).8 In this book, we see that while we all begin life with a worldvision, a proper worldview is a momentous achievement. Few individuals move from one to the other.

To provide the reader with a short, preparatory introduction to this distinction, a worldvisionis a set of intuitions about the world formed in all individuals by their family and home environment, their teachers and education, and the broad culture within which they live. It is also closely bound to the idiosyncrasies of an individual person’s temperament. That particular combination provides a workable (albeit limited) frame of reference with which to live from day to day. Indeed, it is possible to spend the entirety of your life only looking at life and the world through the single lens that is your worldvision. In the same sense, it is possible to spend an entire life navigating the streets of New York City only in a first-person perspective, never seeing a map of the city (and all that lies beyond it) or climbing a skyscraper in order to move from the limitations of your individual vision of each street to a more capacious view of the whole city. Worldview relates to world-vision in that sense. It elevates the limitations of first-person vision to the breadth of a bird’s-eye view. An individual vision within the world is a necessary starting point, certainly, but it should not be confused with a capacious view of the world. Every individual has a worldvision, but few have a worldview.

In that setting, J. H. Bavinck’s provocative claim is that each worldvision is, in essence, no more than a set of untested presuppositions about life imbibed within our home communities. (Viewed as such, worldvision functions as an equivalent concept to Charles Taylor’s notion of the “social imaginary”—the claim that humans “imagine” the world in an unconscious, pretheoretical way and live within it on that basis more so than on the basis of calculated, abstract reasoning.)9 A worldvision is made up of utterly subjective working assumptions about the world and nothing more. It provides a means of functioning in the world but in no way offers the truth about that world.

Life is livable, to a degree, on the basis of a worldvision in the same way that life in the Matrix works for those who never ask, “What is the Matrix?” Some, however, desire to ask precisely that question. They become conscious that their working assumptions might not correspond to the truth, and as such, they want to put them to the test. In J. H. Bavinck’s terms, that kind of person has begun a pilgrimage from the realm of the wholly subjective (a worldvision) toward the truly objective (a worldview), which is most profoundly a pilgrimage from the finite to the infinite, from the creature toward the Creator as the only one whose view of the world is exhaustive in knowledge and perfect in wisdom.

With this distinction, J. H. Bavinck tries to provide tools with which to understand Herman Bavinck’s account of worldview as a slow process of mapmaking. To adapt one of J. H. Bavinck’s own illustrations, a worldvision is like a map of the world that has been crumpled up into a paper ball. Although that ball now feels manageable in your hand, and while its visible parts offer you some tools for navigation (and a limited degree of truth about the world depicted), it nonetheless must be uncrumpled. The map’s potential far exceeds whatever the crumpled ball can offer.

Although Herman Bavinck did not use the language of worldvision, his later interpreter Lolke van der Zweep (1891–1970) argued that J. H. Bavinck’s worldvision-worldview distinction was nonetheless present in his uncle’s thought in all but name.10 Commenting on Herman Bavinck’s statement in Christian Worldview that the modern age lacked a “‘unified’ world-and-life view,” van der Zweep claimed that this comment referred not to each individual lacking a coherent take on life and the world but rather to a problem that beset modernity more generally. The modern world was not able to unite what Bavinck’s nephew would term the ordinary person’s worldvision and the refined thinker’s worldview but instead set them in opposition. Modernity cast the untutored mind and the expert intellectual as mortal enemies.11

Despite that insight, however, Herman Bavinck did not provide an imaginative set of terms and concepts to articulate the complex process of worldview formation that would hold together worldvision and worldview. His work presents us with a form of mapmaking, certainly, but leaves us with important questions: What exactly does the process of cartography involve? And what of those who have no wish to consult that map as they go about their lives? In what sense is a worldview ubiquitous in such cases?

These questions are answered in Personality and Worldview. As a complement to the earlier cartographical picture, for example, Johan Herman adds a further useful illustration: if a worldview is a map, a worldvision is a compass. Those who have no wish to make a map, who reject the struggle to cultivate a worldview in order to remain grounded in whatever worldvision life happens to have given them, have something far more basic—a tool that orients and directs them, albeit without offering any grand view of the world in which they move. In that regard, the worldvision-worldview distinction is useful in building on Herman Bavinck’s earlier contributions. (The careful reader will also notice that Johan Herman also pairs Herman’s concepts of a world-and-life view with the terms worldvision and lifevision. Just as a world-and-life view deals with a true, objective knowledge of the world and human life, a world-and-life vision deals with an assumption-based, subjective knowledge of the world and one’s own life in it.)

In Personality and Worldview, Johan Herman also addresses his uncle’s criticism of the modern tendency to set worldvision and worldview in a posture of mutual antipathy—where the sophisticated thinker looks down on the ordinary person and his rudimentary worldvision as though the intellectual person had never relied on any such thing, and where the “ordinary” person views his intellectually sophisticated neighbor with all manner of bad faith assumptions because of her education. In Personality and Worldview, neither worldview nor worldvision is inherently bad. In fact, quite the opposite is true. A person’s worldvision is a necessary starting point in life, a location in God’s good creation, a set of home coordinates somewhere in nature and history. As such, we must all begin with a worldvision and should see it as a basic good. It is by God’s kind providence that no one starts off nowhere. Alongside this reality, the pursuit of a worldview is a noble thing. Quite strikingly, J. H. Bavinck praises this exercise of virtue in the lives of thinkers—fellow mapmakers—as diverse as Kant, Confucius (551–479 BC), and Lao-tzu (fl. 6th c. BC).

Despite this, worldvision nonetheless becomes problematic when it is made a permanent abode rather than a starting point. A world-vision shows you one way to live in the world on the basis of all manner of untested assumptions, and as such, it is utterly subjective. It is an assumption—but not the truth—about the world. It is life lived on autopilot by a passenger who as yet sits passively and unquestioningly. When a person remains in this state forever, worldvision changes from good and limited to life limiting. That person’s unwillingness to ask, “What if my assumptions aren’t true?” is, in effect, a self-imposed house arrest. His home coordinates become his prison because he lives without hunger for the truth about life, the world, and God. In light of that position, Personality and Worldview equips readers to think in deeply appreciative but also profoundly critical ways about worldvision. It offers a creative and somewhat experimental attempt to improve the conversation around worldview.

In what sense is the notion of worldvision experimental within this book? Although it is introduced as a prominent new concept early on, worldvision more or less fades into the background as the book proceeds. Once the reader has been given a clear sense of what the author means by his awkward neologism, he substitutes it with “mentality,” a conventional term that has now been loaded with new meaning. Rhetorically, then, J. H. Bavinck prioritized the thinking that undergirds the idea of worldvision far more than he cared for the cumbersome label itself—a fact that might provide comfort to those who wish to explain his ideas in, say, Spanish or Portuguese, whose established terms for worldview (cosmovision and cosmovisão, respectively) already look and sound uncomfortably like worldvision.12 Despite these limitations, J. H. Bavinck’s worldvision concept remains a valuable one. It explains why so few people live out a comprehensive, consistent, and coherent worldview, while also reminding us that each person’s worldvision is complex and highly individuated. Although it attunes us to the simplistic, inadequate, and reductionistic slogans that many people live by, the worldvision notion itself helps us guard against simplistic takes on the people who parrot them.

An Augustinian Critique of Worldview

Personality and Worldview also equips its reader to think of the notion of worldview with the same blend of appreciative critique. J. H. Bavinck was profoundly influenced by the theology and psychology of the African church father Augustine of Hippo. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to describe the broad shape of his work (in missiology and psychology) as a modern exploration of the paradox laid out in Augustine’s Confessions: that every human life is spent simultaneously running toward and away from God. That psychological paradox plays a central role in J. H. Bavinck’s understanding of worldview building, which he understood to be a very human attempt to move toward and evade God. In the same paragraph, for example, he writes that “all seeking for a worldview is, in the deepest sense, always a seeking after God” and that “every worldview . . . is a fleeing from God, a pulling back from God, a not daring to accept God.”13

That kind of Augustinian reminder about human worldviews is a humbling one, and it bespeaks Johan Herman’s own capacity for profound psychological insight. It also provides the backdrop to his account of the Christian gospel as a worldview unto itself, as something that rebuilds each uniquely disordered human being from the ground (which is to say, worldvision) up. As a worldview, the gospel remolds but does not destroy individual personality. By setting both concepts—personality and worldview—in relationship to the gospel itself, J. H. Bavinck aimed to show that worldview is much more than a list of bullet points to which one must assent. Rather, it is almost a synonym for sanctification. It lays hold on us, and we press on toward it. Worldview has a formative power over us, while also being something we deploy in learning to become more thoughtful and closer to the objective truth, as we live coram Deo in the world.

Theology for Life in the World

Thus far, this introduction has said far more about worldview (and worldvision) than personality. Why did J. H. Bavinck write a book that attempted to deal with both? The contents of this book first saw the light of day as public lectures given to engineering students at the Delft University of Technology in the winter of 1927. Its original audience, then, was not made up of pastors or theologians. In fact, the clarity and originality of the talks meant that as his series progressed, the regular audience grew beyond the student community. He gradually found himself speaking to a broad and general public—which soon began asking for the lectures to be published in book form (and they were the following year).

In those lectures, he primarily addressed a group of young Reformed Christians who had grown up in a culture dominated by neo-Calvinistic worldview thinking and within which Abraham Kuyper’s own example had created a widespread tendency to reduce people (and their personalities) to whatever worldview they supported. In their youthful eyes, worldview seemed to quash the very thing that their lived, modern experience pointed toward: individuality. Although Bavinck’s lectures were given decades before the outbreak of the revolutionary individualism of the 1960s, he was addressing precisely that mid-twentieth century context, albeit at an earlier developmental stage. The same sort of antiworldview critiques now heard in American evangelicalism were heard in the Netherlands in the 1920s: worldviews are facades, illusions, Trojan horses that subjugate us to the personality types of the men whose names they bear, whereas human life is spontaneous, free, and unbound by abstract worldview claims. To be sure, these critiques are neither unimportant nor foolish. As humans, we experience agency. We do not seem to be machines, despite the reality of our place in a cosmos that operates on the basis of cause and effect. Why shouldn’t personality trump worldview?

In response to these criticisms, J. H. Bavinck believed that a livable philosophy must strive to hold to that particular paradox—the twin poles of freedom and boundness, of acting and being acted on—rather than invest everything on one side. His response to “personality versus worldview” was to write Personality and Worldview. Of course, he was certainly not the first thinker to demonstrate such harmonizing instincts. We might think of Kant’s denial of the skeptical philosopher