PERSONALITY AND WORLDVIEW, by J. H. Bavinck

A Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance 

by Kirsten Birkett 

 

About the Author 

Johan Herman Bavinck, Herman Bavinck’s nephew, was a Dutch pastor and missionary to Indonesia. He returned to the Netherlands in 1939 to teach missiology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the Theological School in Kampen. 

 

Contents 

Forward (Tim Keller)

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 Summary

Based on lectures given in 1927, the book explores the idea of worldview, and surveys some important worldviews and how they arise from yet fail to fulfil human personality.

 

Forward (Tim Keller)

“Worldview” is these days being dismissed as too rationalistic, simplistic, individualistic, and triumphalist. Bavinck addresses these concerns and gives a more nuanced understanding.

 

Editor’s Introduction

“Personality” has come to mean something discovered by a Myers-Briggs-type test. “Worldview” is a contested term in the US, often meaning a “grouping of basic, deeply held commitments,” easily outlined as a list of points. It is criticized as simplistic, a tool of power invented by Kant. It is less known in the UK, where (especially secular humanists) believe that the rightly educated can become “epistemologically neutral, unbiased, and presuppositionless.” Historically, America received “worldview-based thinking” through Dutch Reformed immigration, with the Heidelberg Catechism’s view that all knowledge is based in faith. American evangelicalism made it more deductive and restrictive, a “complete package,” not an ongoing exploration.

Herman Bavinck’s Christian Worldview showed that worldview is both “formative and … in a process of formation,” part of a “lifelong pilgrimage toward wisdom.” Personality and Worldview adds terms and concepts to explain how that pilgrimage starts, and why most don’t ever take it. All humans have worldvision – intuitions formed by family and culture (equivalent to Taylor’s “social imaginary”) – but few develop worldview, which tests and develops intuitions towards truth. Worldview building is in an Augustinian sense simultaneously seeking and fleeing from God. Only the gospel rebuilds disordered humans rightly. 

 

1. The Struggle for a Worldview

History shows a range of worldviews. Are we moving forward, or just tumbling? The number of different worldviews is actually small; they keep repeating. They are closely tied to personality and it is tempting to think that we “can never climb above the subjective,” but that “would mean the disruption of all spiritual and moral norms.” Relativism is dangerous, but can it be escaped? Is worldview merely the “revelation of the personality that created or received it”? 

The answer is neither that personality and worldview are one; nor that they are totally different. They are intertwined. We cannot avoid having a mindset, a vision of the world, presuppositions. We sometimes think them through and evaluate them, and our “vision objectivizes itself into a worldview.” Each worldview has two elements, intuitive (subjective vision) and objective (formal reason); a “revelation of personality” and an “attempt at conquering the self.” It will end with a practical demand, for metaphysics ends in ethics. Without worldview, we have no foundation or compass.

The gospel is “a worldview that smashes a person’s worldvision into pieces,” but also gives true stability. It is of a different order to other worldviews, which all show the discord in the human soul, both seeking and fleeing God. . . .

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