PERSONALITY AND WORLDVIEW
By J.H. Bavinck
Translated & Edited by James Eglington
Crossway. 185 pages. £23.99
ISBN 978 1 433 584 831
Stacks of books have been published on human identity recently. It is helpful to have a framework for understanding who we are and what we are here to be and do.
This book, that has been skilfully unearthed from another era by the dedicated translation and editorial work of James Eglington, approaches the subject from a fresh angle.
Another lens
Sometimes it is good for us to look at a contemporary question through the lens of a creative thinker from another time and place. J.H. Bavinck, who died in 1964, was a Dutch Reformed missiologist, who served as a missionary in Indonesia before returning to teach theological students in Holland. It is this rich breadth of experience that shapes his clear insight into how human personality and worldview is formed.
Eglington provides an impressive introduction to this work and then lets Bavinck speak. Bavinck begins by defining his terms, making it clear that we should be careful not to have too rigid a concept of worldview.
Worldview as a map
As Timothy Keller perceptively observes in his Foreword to the book: ‘A worldview … 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 work.’
In eight chapters, Bavinck explores how that map is formed in human beings and shows how this is intimately related to who they are.
Bavinck suggests in conclusion that the endeavour to be clear on this matter is urgent: ‘The emergency facing the Western world is its lack of a worldview. It has no life nourishing and life directing idea and therefore also no unity in living and thinking. On the basis of all that has been said, I may say more strongly: the emergency facing the our Western world is its loss of Christianity – the lack of true religion, of self-denial, of sacrifice, of faith, of trust, of a sense of shame, of hope in God. Our (Western) world could fall apart through that emergency. Our society will become disjointed and desolate when it is not borne up by life preserving norms’ (pp 177-8).
We can see how pertinent these words were when they were originally written in 1928, at the mid-way point between the First and Second World Wars, just under a decade before Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, unleashed the furious chaos of a national identity crisis and an idolatrous ideology of destruction. These words continue to be urgent for us at a time when Western society appears to be taking a journey without maps.
