Personality and Worldview by J. H. Bavinck

J. H. Bavinck. 2023. Personality and Worldview. Translated and edited by James Eglinton. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. Originally published in Dutch as Persoonlijkheid en wereldbeschouwing (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1928).

A reader of the higher class of works in German theology—especially those that deal with the philosophy of religion—cannot fail to be struck with the constant recurrence of a word for which he finds it difficult to get a precise equivalent in English. It is the word “Weltanschauung,” sometimes interchanged with another compound of the same signification, “Weltansicht.” Both words mean literally “view of the world,” . . . denoting the widest view which the mind can take of things in the effort to grasp them together as a whole from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology. To speak, therefore, of a “Christian view of the world” implies that Christianity also has its highest point of view, and its view of life connected therewith, and that this when developed constitutes an ordered whole.

—James Orr, 1893^[1]

By the “higher class of works” in German theology, Orr refers to the writings of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), Rudolph Eucken (1846–1926), Isaak August Dorner (1809–1884), and Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922). In addition, in 1935, then Neocalvinist philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) wrote in the first volume of his magnum opus De wijsbegeerte der wetsidee (1935, 80–102; 1955, 120–29) about the influential Weltanschauungslehre (theory of life- and world-views) of German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), and Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915); the latter, says Dooyeweerd, had “proclaimed philosophy to be the science of the life- and world-view [Wissenschaft der Weltanschauung]” (Dooyeweerd 1955, 120–22; Windelband 1914, 19–24; Dilthey [1911] 1976, 133–54; Rickert 1921).

Sandwiched in between these higher-class works is the already cited work of the Scottish philosophical theologian, James Orr (1844–1913), The Christian View of God and the World (1887), Abraham Kuyper’s Princeton Stone Lectures, Lectures on Calvinism ([1898] 1931), Herman Bavinck’s Christian Worldview (1904, 1913, 1929), and J. H. Bavinck’s Personality and Worldview (1928). Orr, for example, appealed to the notion of Weltanschauung for two reasons. One, Christianity was under attack by modernism, but it wasn’t simply this or that Christian doctrine. Rather, he stressed, “It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.” Two, the Christian view of things, then, consists of an individual’s commitment

to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity. This forms a “Weltanschauung,” or “Christian view of the world,” which stands in marked contrast with theories wrought out from a purely philosophical or scientific standpoint. (Orr [1893] 1989, 4)

Orr’s appeal to the notion of Weltanschauung clearly influenced Kuyper; indeed, Kuyper refers to Orr’s work in the opening pages of chapter 1 on “life system” (1931, 11n1). For Kuyper, life and world view or, in short, life system, is fundamental not only to his hermeneutics of the dynamics of culture as a spiritual battle between life-systems, but also to his view that the great structure that we call “Calvinism is . . . [a unified and] an all-embracing system of principles.” It has a “peculiar insight . . . into the three fundamental relations of all human life: viz., (1) our relation to God, (2) our relation to man, and (3) our relation to the world” (1931, 19). Although J. H. Bavinck makes no mention of Orr or Kuyper in his 1928 study Personality and Worldview, there is clear evidence that these ideas are at work there.

For one thing, Bavinck states that “in worldviews, personalities—human souls—battle against each other. Each defends his own life, his own character” (27). Bavinck adds, “Precisely the fact that [worldview] is about his personality and that the actual combatants—the passions of the human soul—hide themselves behind their reasonable arguments is the fact that has given the age-old war of worldviews such depth and passion” (28). According to Bavinck, then, the battle here is not solely a battle of ideas, and who has the best arguments. He explains:

If the worldview one depends on is based only on a rational understanding, the only consequence would be a struggle of ideas, and then the struggle against the Christian faith would become incomprehensible. The reason the battle of worldviews is so often carried out with furious passion would not be understandable because everything would be a great and convivial discussion of proof against proof, one theory against another hypothesis. That, however, never seems to have been the case in history. (27)

Bavinck cautions us here about the danger of relativism, namely, “the conviction that each thought is relative [to the individual], that no truth exists that applies absolutely to all.” In this view, “we can never climb above the subjective to the objective truth. What I call truth is only true for myself; it only fits my character” (29; 175–76). He adds, “It appears to give equal justification to every worldview” (176). But then, Bavinck correctly notes, “In one fell swoop, all my investigations, contemplations, and proofs [arguments] are made worthless” (28). He adds, “Relativism is a deadly danger for each sincere and virtuous struggle for truth and right” (29). Furthermore, missing from this relativistic picture is that “there is a calling for the [objective] truth, for insight, for knowledge, in the world” (28).

But Bavinck’s response to this danger is not to detach a worldview from the personality that created it. Otherwise, he says, “the ferocity of the struggle of worldviews would be incomprehensible. In that struggle, it does seem that the personality is indeed at stake” (30). In what sense, is the personality at stake in the struggle of worldviews, and how, then, do we ground our worldview in objective reality? In short, Bavinck refuses to choose between personality and worldview. Worldview “is just as much the revelation of the personality as it is an approach to the truth” (30; 174).

What, then, is personality? Personality is about the selfhood of the human being, of his soul. It is both a gift and a task (56). It is a gift because the “soul is independent, created by God, with its distinctive functions found in its entire nature and essence, with strivings, capacities that we see coming to the fore in the conscious life. . . . At the core, at the center in that soul, we call that which forms the foundation of all the psychical phenomena I” (42; emphasis original). Bavinck explains:

The human being is an I, which is to say, there is a unity within him that carries all these functions [intellectual, emotional or practical] and in which these tendencies [striving towards organization and self-consciousness] rest. That is the very deepest thing. It is his self. Despite all the contrast [within him], it is one I that lies at the foundation of everything. The unity of that I is the thing that works through all layers of his psychical existence, that wants to add all the phenomena together into a synthesis. Unity is given in the center. That unity of the center works outward from there toward the periphery. The human being is an I, and therefore, at the core is already a personality. (42; emphasis original)

It is also a task:

But now he must become this in his appearance, in his revelation to the external world. In potential, the human being is a unity, but he must now become this in actual terms—he must become it in practice, with all his contrasts. “Being a personality” is in a certain sense a Gabe [gift] insofar as the person is born as a potential unity, as an I, but in another sense it is an Aufgabe [predisposition] insofar as the person who must pursue it must also realize that unity in his life. The one does not shut out the other. Rather, it demands and assumes the other. (56; emphasis original)

Bavinck complicates this striving towards unity since the selfhood of the human person is embedded in a threefold dynamic: “toward himself, toward his neighbor, and toward God” (173).

This creational dynamic initially expresses itself in what Bavinck calls a “worldvision,” which is a pre-theoretical orientation, presupposition, intuitively influencing a man’s whole living and acting. The more he attains self-consciousness, he begins to reflect on his beliefs asking whether the intuitive grasp on things is also objectively justified (34). “Then he tries to climb up toward the objective. The [world]vision objectivizes itself into a worldview. He only conquers such a worldview through a great work of thinking, through quiet contemplation, through giving account of reality objectively.” That is, “A worldview is not just a loose, intuitive grasp. Rather, it is supported by arguments, by motives. It clothes itself in the form of reasonableness. It is supported by logical construction” (34). A worldview is a self-reflective comprehensive picture of reality attempting to make sense of human experience as a whole. As Dooyeweerd puts it, “necessarily inherent in it [a life- and world-view] is a view of totality” (1955, 128; emphasis original). What Bavinck called a “worldvision” Dooyeweerd, too, distinguishes from a worldview. He states, “An individual impression of life, fed from a certain sphere of convictions, is no ‘life- and world-view’” (1955, 128). For Bavinck, this objectification of a worldvision into a worldview involves self-denial, self-critique, freeing the self “from the sapping and errant powers that hide in a personality. It is the truth that the personality grabs onto to pull itself upward” (37). In other words, objectification involves transforming the self. “Yes, conquering the self—that is it. Each objectively founded worldview is a conquering of the self” (36; 139). In sum:

On the one side, every worldview thought up by a human is a revelation of the personality, of who the person is. The worldview is the revelation of the personality. Conversely, each worldview is an attempt at conquering the self, at freeing yourself from your subjective worldvision, and at basing your life on an objective foundation. (174)

Although Bavinck doesn’t make his theory of truth explicit, I dare say that he a realist, namely, a proposition is true if and only if what it asserts is in fact the case about objective reality; otherwise, it is false. Furthermore, he affirms an epistemic realism such that truth about reality can be known. Significantly, he explicitly rejects an anthropocentric relativism (29; 175–76), which limits reality to what is real for an individual, a culture, a community. He implicitly distinguishes between what objective reality is like and how we can know it—ontological and epistemological issues, respectively. Bavinck makes no explicit reference to general epistemic criteria used to judge whether one is justified in holding a proposition to be true, namely, criteria such as explanatory power, experiential adequacy, logical consistency, and coherence. He does explicitly refer to criteria of revelation.

Bavinck raises the question regarding types of worldviews. Although Bavinck, unlike Dilthey, Rickert, and Windelband,^[2] has no theory regarding types of philosophical worldviews, he does hold that the number of worldviews is small and, like them, that there are recurring types (24–25, 164). The basic epistemic and ontological presuppositions of these types remain the same throughout these recurring types because only a few answers are possible to each of the following questions raised by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804):

What can I know [weten]? What must I do? What may I hope? Now in broad terms, only a few answers are possible to each of these questions. What can I know [weten]? Can I indeed know something (skepticism)? Does my knowledge [kennis] reach nothing beyond the phenomena, the externals (positivism)? Or can I proceed to the essential, the eternal, the idea, the very highest reason? In my knowing [weten], am I dependent, above all, on experience, sensation, perception (empiricism)? Or is it precisely understanding, thinking, reason that must be honored as the highest source of knowledge (rationalism)? May I accept that my consciousness, my representations, correspond to a reality beyond myself (realism)? Or must I believe that only those representations, those concepts and thoughts, exist and that there is no material reality that corresponds to them (idealism)? Does a God who brought all things into being exist? And if he exists, how and where must I conceive of him? Is he only exalted above the world, unknowable [onkenbaar], inaccessible (deism)? Or is he only in the world, a part of the world—that is, is the world itself God (pantheism)? Or is he both simultaneously in the world and also exalted far above it, immanent and at the same time transcendent (theism)? Or is there absolutely no higher power—that is, does everything boil down to matter and power (materialism)? (24–25)

Bavinck pairs empiricism, positivism, and materialism (79–99) with naturalism, namely, the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system (87). If naturalism is true, there is no responsibility, no freedom, no norms because “there is only one law, the law of nature, that holds everything tightly in its grip” (89). Furthermore, empiricism is the view that regards experience as the source of knowledge. We have perceptions that the radical empiricist Hume divided into impressions, which are the immediate data of experience, and ideas that are derived from impressions. The key point here is that we have no sense impressions, data, of both material substance in the external world and mental substance in the internal world, and of God, and of human freedom (89). Bavinck summarizes the problem with empiricism:

One of these [must be true]: either [we believe in empiricism, or] we keep on believing in the existence of things, of substances, of a material world. But then we must immediately recognize, along with this, that we do not know only by perceiving but rather with our intellect, our thinking, we posit, as it were the very thing that matters. If we do not want to follow this path, we [must] fall into skepticism. Does the world indeed exist? Do things exist? Is everything an illusion? (93)

Contrary to empiricism, reason is the source of knowledge for the rationalist (101–22). Bavinck takes Descartes as the chief protagonist of rationalism. “I think, therefore, I am—that is the basic premise of Descartes’s philosophy. My self-consciousness teaches me with immediate certainty that I exist.” Contained within the content of my consciousness are ideas, such as the idea of God and of the external world. Bavinck identifies the egocentric predicament of philosophical modernism in which the isolation of the self and the world from each other are taken as the epistemic starting point. In this view, the individual is an enclosed consciousness containing ideas in the mind that are the direct object of our conscious awareness and from which inferences are drawn about what the real world must be like. Bavinck pinpoints the great difficulty faced by Descartes. “He knew well that the great difficulty [faced by] our thinking is the leap from subject to object, from thinking to being. How can I deduce from my thinking that which I think also really exists? With the world, I cannot make that leap from thinking to being, from subject to object. I imagine a world, but whether that world also exists cannot immediately, clearly, and certainly be proved from this.” (107)

Bavinck also considers transcendental philosophy, particularly of Immanuel Kant (123–42). The focus of Bavinck’s standard but nonetheless valid interpretation and critique of Kant is the dualism between phenomenon, the world of appearance, and noumenon, the “thing in itself,” Ding an sich.^[3] Kant defends a transcendental phenomenalism. He is interested in the universally valid conditions that make experience possible. These conditions are the forms of sensibility of space and time, and the categories of the understanding of number, causality, substance (128–29n2). These universally valid conditions as “conditions of thought” (129) shape and form sense-data, the phenomena. Says Bavinck, “[T]hese concepts themselves far transcend the intellect because they do not limits themselves to the observation of factualities but to the laying down of necessities. They are [a priori] forms of our intellect, which is indeed first awakened, as it were, by experience but that is as such inherent to our thinking” (130). And here is the critique: these universal forms establish nothing about reality. He asks:

Do time and space exist? Do causality and substantiality exist? Do they exist outside myself? The intellect can never reach a verdict on these [questions]. We can never go further than to establish that our intellect must necessarily apply itself—according to these forms of viewing [Anschauungsformen] and categories—to all the impressions that flow toward us from outside [ourselves]. Each question about the reality that is external to me is inadmissible. (130)

The intellect with its categories is bound to the horizon of experience, but “Reason is driven by a natural tendency to go beyond the use of experience, and, by means of mere ideas, dares venture beyond the extreme limits of all knowledge. . . . And we stride towards metaphysics . . . of God, the soul, and the coherence of the world” (131). But Kant rejects traditional metaphysics, for example, natural theology, theistic arguments, and, for that matter, even the atheistic arguments of Hume, among others. From Kant’s epistemological standpoint—given the dualism between the phenomenon and the noumenon—“it is equally impossible to teach that there is no God and that there is a God. Both claims are equally ‘dogmatic,’ equally inadmissible. We do not have sufficient grounds for one conclusion or the other” (132).

Bavinck also deals with Kant’s moral philosophy and the concepts of freedom, immortality, and God at the root of the moral life.^[4] He asks, “How do I come to have certainty regarding these concepts?” (138). Bavinck concludes that there is no objective foundation for these concepts. We postulate them as practically necessary. This brings us to Kant’s philosophy of God. According to Bavinck, Kant is a deist. God is not only unknowable, being out of reach, but there is also “no divine voice that reaches the world” (142). The God within the Kantian system does not speak, does not act, does not live. Both theoretical reason and practical reason postulate him as “an idea, a necessary wish. Kant stretches his hand out toward him, but when he approaches him, he pulls that hand back” (168). This conclusion about God brings us to the worldview of mysticism (143–162).

What is mysticism, according to Bavinck? (see J. H. Bavinck 2013, 303–411). The concept of mysticism is about people “[in search of] union with God, that it is ‘striving for complete union with God’ [J. Zahn]” (145). Bavinck asks,

How should one conceive of that union? Should one think of it as an absolute “becoming one” with divinity, so that one’s own existence is given up? Is it then not to be seen as becoming conscious of the unity with God that in actual fact already exists? The human being as a part of, a moment in, God? A tiny wave in the ocean of divinity? (146)

Mysticism, as Bavinck considers it, hopes to find unity at the level of mystical experience. This experience is ineffable and beyond all concepts, beyond affirmative propositions such that no determinate truth claims are made about God. “[Mysticism] sees God as no mere idea that one affirms or denies on the basis of all sorts of arguments but as a reality that one experiences.” Bavinck refers critically to “the poverty of this mysticism.” He explains, “In the first place, this regards its ideas about God. God is impassive peace, eternal stillness. The human being seeks him, but he does not seek the human being. He is airy, elusive. He evades all description. He has evaporated into a haze, a twilight. He is sometimes called a light because approaching him is to approach pure glory, but he is also often called darkness because he withdraws himself from all being known [kennen].” A strongly negative or apophatic motive drives mysticism. “Ultimately, you cannot pray to this God. There is no comfort in him, no help, no salvation. One can only worship him in deep devotion. . . . God is no living, real power. He neither speaks nor acts. . . . Mysticism stretches out its hand toward him, but when it approaches him, it pulls its hand back” (152; 168–69).

Bavinck draws a sharp contrast between the mysticism that I just described and Christian mysticism. For one thing, Christian mysticism conceives of “that union as a form of fellowship in which the human being continues to exist as an individual, as a human being, but, as it were, meets divinity, comes into contact with divinity” (146). Indeed, Christian mysticism affirms “the nearness of God, that assumes the immanence of God, that emphasizes fellowship between God and the human being. Christianity also speaks of becoming one with God, a becoming one not in the sense of sinking into the abyss of divinity but in the sense of moral, spiritual fellowship, as a gift, full of rich promises” (152–53). For another, Bavinck emphasizes that Christianity, through its worldview, “sees and preaches God and the world, life and death, norms and sin, differently” (153). Unlike the apophatic mysticism described above, the Christian worldview emphasizes “that God is a God who speaks. . . . He is the one from whom an overwhelming power proceeds, who speaks and acts [throughout the history of redemption].” He is there and He is not silent. Jesus Christ is the center of this history. “At the end [of this speech] stands Jesus Christ. He is the Word who says who God is and how we must know [kennen] him.”

We come full circle now to the relation between “personality and worldview.” Now, here are three summative theses that capture the main emphasis of Bavinck’s understanding of this relation in his book’s concluding chapter.

1. Although not all men have a worldview, that doesn’t mean that they “never actually have to deal with the questions [of God, life, and the world]” (165). Indeed, all men’s thought and life reflect the “seeds” of a fully articulated worldview in their “worldvision,” or “mentality,” or “unconscious presuppositions of life,” such that some are empiricists, mystics, and Kantian moralists without consciously knowing it. Man is a truth-seeker. Man may be defined, says John Paul II, “as the one who seeks the truth” (1998; emphasis original). In this, he echoes St. Augustine who wrote, “What does the soul desire with more strength than what is true?”^[5] This dynamic of the truth-seeker is at work in Bavinck’s view regarding the movement from pre-theoretical worldvision or mentality to worldview. As I said above, “A worldview is not just a loose, intuitive grasp. Rather, it is supported by arguments, by motives. It clothes itself in the form of reasonableness. It is supported by logical construction” (34). Without a worldview, the personality loses a firm foundation in objective reality, and therefore “the personality becomes its own norm.” The result is that people are left “rudderless and without meaning.” In sum, the dynamic of the truth-seeker is such that he has a “great common task [to] seek the truth because only the truth can set us free—from ourselves” (171).

2. Two contemporary worldviews are commonplace among the masses, but they are also in conflict: Christianity and atheistic materialism, or modernism. Modernism is the worldview that “nothing really matters, that we can do whatever we want, that there is no God to whom we must give an account” (167). The chief proponent of modernism in the early twentieth century was Bertrand Russell. He expressed his worldview in his modernist manifesto, “A Free Man’s Worship” in 1903 (Russell 1985, 62–72). Man is only the chance product of matter-in-motion. Russell states, “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way” (1985, 72). At its core this worldview leaves man’s existence, as Bavinck puts it, “normless and goalless” (171). People, then, “do not look at life with the happy smile that comes with a [sense of] vocation. They go [into life] like drifting ships that do not know [weten] which course to take. . . . Normlessness in business and industry, in marriage and morality, normlessness produced by the complete lack of an [objectively grounded] world-and-life view. The West’s crisis is that it knows [kent] no worldview, no religion” (171). In particular, Bavinck holds that it is not merely any religion or worldview that is “life-nourishing and life-directing,” providing a “unity in living and thinking” (177). Not just anything goes. Rather, “the emergency facing our Western world is the loss of Christianity—the lack of true religion, of self-denial, of sacrifice, of trust, of a sense of shame, of hope in God” (177).

3. Man is also a truth-twister. Bavinck states, “Standing in our way on the path toward the truth is sin, the slumber and darkness that descends on our soul through sin.” He adds, “Sin’s delicate poison has sunk into all his [man’s] powers and desires” (39; 55). But there is a reason why man is a truth-seeker. “[Truth] alone can set a person free” (174). Bavinck’s fundamental intuition about truth is that truth is not the work of man, but the revelation of God in creation and redemption (173). God’s word is revelation, propositional revelation, of the self-revealing God, and therefore it is objective and a guiding standard (176). He explains:

The truth can only be thought of by God and can only be given to us. The human being cannot create it, cannot produce it. Rather, he can only receive it. And even when he receives it, he still feels that this truth is not “according to man”, does not correspond to his own secret will, and that it compels him to the most complete self-denial. For this reason, he cannot receive it from himself. . . Man is created by God and for God, and hence man’s desire for God is written on his heart such that the “power of God [is] within him that binds the human being to the truth, that makes him submit to the truth.” (173; 177)

Bavinck’s Christian transcendence standpoint regarding the truth of existence is grounded in an objective revelation, and it cuts through relativism. “If there is revelation,^[6] however, as soon as God speaks [and acts] and breaks human darkness, everything changes. The human being gains a firm place to stand” (176). This is the message of Bavinck’s book that makes it all worth reading. The debt of gratitude is owed to James Eglinton who gave us this superb translation.