Christian Worldview E-Book

Herman Bavinck

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 176

Beschreibung

For the First Time in English, a Foundational Work of One of the Church's Most Important Theologians As some point in life, we all wonder: Who am I? What is the world, and what is my place within it? Only Christianity offers answers to these questions in a way that meets our truest needs and satisfies our deepest longings.  In this important book, translated into English for the first time, Herman Bavinck provides a framework for understanding why the Christian worldview is the only solution to the discord we feel between ourselves, the world, and God. 

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Christian Worldview

Christian Worldview

Herman Bavinck

Translated and edited by

N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock

Christian Worldview

Copyright © 2019 by N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock

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 Christelijke wereldbeschouwing, first edition by Bos in 1904, second edition by Kok in 1913, and third edition by Kok in 1929. This book is a translation of the second edition, which is in the public domain.

Cover Design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are drawn from the author’s own translation of the Greek.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-6319-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6322-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6320-1 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6321-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bavinck, Herman, 1854–1921, author. | Sutanto, Nathaniel Gray, 1991–, editor.

Title: Christian worldview / Herman Bavinck ; translated and edited by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock.

Other titles: Christelijke wereldbeschouwing. English

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046329 (print) | LCCN 2018047966 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433563201 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433563218 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433563225 (epub) | ISBN 9781433563195 (hc)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC BR100 (ebook) | LCC BR100 .B37513 2019 (print) | DDC 230.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046329

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2021-04-30 11:27:57 AM

Contents

Acknowledgments

Editors’ Introduction

Herman Bavinck for the Twenty-First Century

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

 1  Thinking and Being

 2  Being and Becoming

 3  Becoming and Acting

General Index

Scripture Index

Acknowledgments

This project could not have come to fruition without the generous help of many. First of all, we would like to thank Jonathan Gibson for his enthusiasm for this volume and for putting us in touch with Crossway. Thanks are also due to Justin Taylor and Jill Carter at Crossway for overseeing this work and for their commitment to bringing this project to completion.

In addition to his often-difficult Dutch syntax, Herman Bavinck also lavishly adorns his prose with German, Latin, and other foreign phrases or citations. Hence, many others were consulted to aid in the translating process. For their help in this regard, we would like to thank Michael Bräutigam, Ulrich Schmiedel, Nicholas Adams, Dolf te Velde, Ekke Oosterhuis and Mathilde Oosterhuis-Blok, Bram van den Heuvel, and especially the abundantly patient Marinus de Jong.

Gray Sutanto: I would like to thank the session and staff of Covenant City Church for their patience and willingness to permit me the time to undertake this task—Tezar Putra, Elius Pribadi, Brett Bonnema, Jackie Burns, Emily Hendradjaja, and Tiffany Wijaya. It is a delight to labor with such a wonderful team. I am grateful, too, to my fiancée (at the time of writing), Indita Probosutedjo, for her patience, care, and love; to my parents, Leo Sutanto and Elly Yanti Noor; to my sisters, Novi, Mitzy, and Cindy Christina; and to my brothers-in-law, Aryo Kresnadi and Adriansyah Sukandar. God’s providence and care often become tangible by means of their presence.

James Eglinton: I am grateful to Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock for their invitation to join this exciting translation project.

Cory Brock: Thanks are due to First Presbyterian Church Jackson for allowing me time to complete this work in the early days of ministry there. And, for Gray and me, James’s expertise has been invaluable in the completion of the project, and special acknowledgment is due to him.

We acknowledge all mistakes and shortcomings as our own.

N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory Brock

Jakarta, Edinburgh, and Jackson

September 2018

Editors’ Introduction

Herman Bavinck for the Twenty-First Century

Since the recent English translation of his Reformed Dogmatics (2003–2008), Herman Bavinck (1854–1921)—the chief dogmatician of the Dutch Reformed tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—has gained a wide hearing among theologians in the twenty-first century. Bavinck was born into the orthodox Reformed tradition stemming from the 1834 Secession (Afscheiding) within the Dutch Reformed Church, a tradition committed simultaneously to Protestant orthodoxy and to the articulation of that orthodoxy in the rapidly changing cultural environs of the late modern Netherlands.

The cultural experience common to modern Europeans—Bavinck included, by implication—was marked by constant social, intellectual, technological, cultural, and spiritual upheaval. T. C. W. Blanning memorably describes that generation’s ever-present awareness that “the ground [was] moving beneath their feet.”1 Bavinck, a professor of systematic theology at the Theological School in Kampen and then (at the time of writing this work) at the Free University of Amsterdam, wrote this treatise as a theologian addressing his constantly changing late modern world. The ideas found in this book were first aired in a rectorial address in Amsterdam in 1904. That address was immediately published and sold quickly. An expanded second edition was printed in 1913, with a third (posthumously released, otherwise unchanged) edition appearing in 1927. It is also worth noting that he intended his 1908 Stone Lectures, published as Philosophy of Revelation, to be a kind of sequel that further elaborated on the ideas in this work.2 This volume, Christian Worldview, is the first English translation of Bavinck’s address to a world in the throes of profound change on every front.

Contours of a Christian Worldview

In Bavinck’s context, the philosophy of Ernest Renan—with its spirit of scientific materialism—had dominated the late nineteenth century. Alongside this thinking, however, the youth of Zarathustra had failed: religion had not died, although the classic Christian religion was under suspicion and despised. In this milieu, Bavinck began his book Christelijke wereldbeschouwing, or Christian Worldview, by noting the consequence of this “modern” problem: “Before all else, what strikes us in the modern age is the internal discord that consumes the self.”3 The corrupted consciousness of the human personality in the prevailing world, he argued, derives from the “aversion to the common Christian faith” and to historic religion in general.4 While every human being is undeniably religious at heart, that era’s denial of objective religion gave way to the awakening of a sickness in body and soul: the discord of the disordered personality. There is, then, Bavinck wrote in 1904, “a disharmony between our thinking and feeling, between our willing and acting. There is a discord between religion and culture, between science and life.”5

The modern self, he argued, both disparages religion (feeling) at the hand of science (thinking) and desperately needs what it rejects. The modern will feels the weight of the moral order but acts in dissociation with its own deepest needs and desires. Herein, one finds a brief definition of worldview: it is an attempt to unify the self, the head and heart, on the ground of a primary agreement between religion, science, and philosophy. A world-and-life view means, in brief, faith seeking understanding. It is important to note that Bavinck’s preferred term is world-and-life view, rather than merely worldview. In a world-and-life view, the term world refers to the objective domain, reality outside the self; the term life refers to the human subject, the consciousness and its needs, desires, knowledge, and affections. A unified world-and-life view seeks justification for the unity between the subjective and objective. And at the dawn of the twentieth century, Bavinck argued, “A ‘unified’ [einheitliche] world-and-life view is lacking, and therefore this word is the slogan of our day.”6

For this reason, in a significant adaptation of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) notion of the Anschauungen (“intuitions”), Bavinck’s and Abraham Kuyper’s (1837–1920) wereldbeschouwing helped birth the contemporary use of the concept Christian worldview. The Christian wereldbeschouwing uniquely addresses several fundamental questions that all worldviews must face and offers a derivative thesis:

What is the relation between thinking and being, between being and becoming, and between becoming and acting? What am I? What is the world, and what is my place and task within this world? Autonomous thinking finds no satisfactory answer to these questions—it oscillates between materialism and spiritualism, between atomism and dynamism, between nomism and antinomianism. But Christianity preserves the harmony [between them] and reveals to us a wisdom that reconciles the human being with God and, through this, with itself, with the world, and with life.7

These questions are shorthand for substantial topics in the spheres of philosophy and theology, the types of questions that impose themselves on every thoughtful individual at some point. The first aforementioned pairing (between thinking and being), for example, concerns epistemology. How do I know that I see reality as it truly is? Or, more appropriately, how do I know that the reality I experience is trustworthy? The second pair (between being and becoming) is a veiled reference to how identity relates to change. How can we account for identity across time, or for a unity of essence in the midst of a multiplicity and even disparity of parts? Third, the pairing of becoming and acting refers to the questions of ethics. How should I live? What is good? Individuals seeking a coherence of head and heart combine questions like these, alongside the cosmogonic and teleological, to form a world-and-life view.

But how so? How, for Bavinck, does worldview arise? The reader will find no single definition or singular thesis for worldview or worldview formation within this treatise. Rather, one must cobble together regular phrases, synonyms, and implicit explanations. In the first chapter, Bavinck helpfully parses the common route the individual takes to arrive at a worldview. One might begin there, with the path to knowing an all-inclusive reality, the physical and metaphysical. Also, similar terms to worldview do abound. Worldview is (at least) closely related to a “comprehensive wisdom”8 or, in the case of a particularly Christian worldview, to a “Christian wisdom.”9 Nevertheless, for Bavinck, wisdom and worldview are not mere synonyms: “Whoever rejects the word of the Lord cannot have wisdom.”10 (In that regard, this text provides an interesting counterpoint to the recent trend in Anglophone Reformed theology to pit worldview against wisdom, as though the former were a largely cerebral affair, in contrast to the wholesome embodied nature of the latter.)

Each individual, Bavinck argues, is first addressed by the world through means of sensation. These sensations birth concepts—concepts that correspond to the world of being. We experience, we judge, we learn, and we gather. These experiences beget the search for truth, for metaphysics. Metaphysical awareness, like wisdom in its most historical sense, does not arise a priori. The “results of science are and remain the starting point of philosophy.”11 Wisdom, or philosophy, aims above the sciences. It seeks the truth where it can be found. It unifies and “press[es] through” to the first principles.12 It traces “leading ideas” within the domains of philosophical thought and finds their common place.13 Wisdom seeks the “idea of the whole in the parts,” and when it discovers it, one finds there not only the unifying principle of philosophy but also the ground of religion.14Comprehensive wisdom seeks to know reality as a whole, as it truly is, and to know all that it demands. A world-and-life view arises here—where one obtains a vision for the final ground of all things, wherein all the domains of knowledge cohere, where the primary cause both explains and gives life, and where religion comes to bear on that comprehensive wisdom, unveiling the same primary cause for all life.

Worldview, for Bavinck, is neither apriorism nor a tenuous theory for separating public intellectuals into neat compartments. Rather, it is a controlling principle and posture that is first discovered when religion comes to bear on both science and wisdom (philosophy), discovering between them a unity—one which attempts to satisfy both head and heart. Citing Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Bavinck argues that wisdom stems from and leads to a worldview, “because it is indeed the ‘science of the idea’ [Wissenschaft der Idee].”15 Wisdom is possible because the world was first freely known by divine wisdom. Since religion is inescapable, in Bavinck’s view, even the materialist holds to a world-and-life view that is both religious and scientific, a matter of faith and fact. Even when considering nothing more than sense perception, the revelation of God speaks and says to the personality, “Look up and see.” It is only the Christian worldview that provides true harmony of self: true harmony between God and the world, God and the self, and the self and the world.

To put it otherwise, Bavinck offers a threefold frame for thinking about how we think. First, science in general arises from our observation and judgment making. We learn things about the real world. Second, based on our relation to this reality, we also make metaphysical judgments—we search for truth, both what is true and how to live truly, and this search is the discipline of wisdom. Finally, when wisdom, in search of a comprehensive unity, meets and bows to the demands of religion, in both its ontological and ethical demands, there is a world-and-life view. From there, one’s world-and-life view does not remain static. Rather, it rereads the cosmos, the sensations, and the metaphysical claims and makes ongoing adjustments, always seeking the satisfaction of head and heart. It strives for subjective and objective unity. 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 it 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 map making we must do. Aside from the metaphor, a world-and-life view means that, over time and in engagement with reality as it presents itself, one has arrived at a basic, primary answer to the fundamental religious and philosophical questions of existence: What am I? Where did I come from? How does my mind relate to the world outside me? Do I, and how can I, know? How should I act? And what is the point of life? To where am I going?

In the treatise that follows, translated from the updated (1913) edition, Bavinck explains why only Christianity has solutions for the discordant self in the modern world, paying special attention to epistemology, change, and ethics. On the ground that God’s grace restores and perfects nature, Bavinck argues that only Christianity can make sense of the deepest human needs while simultaneously “justif[ying]” the “presupposition[s]” from which we approach the objective world.16 This is so, he argues, because Christ is the steward of creation and re-creation, of both nature and grace.

Note on the Text

The original Dutch text includes untranslated terms and phrases in German, Greek, Latin, and French. Instead of simply translating these phrases into English, we have indicated every instance in which Bavinck uses these foreign terms, since they often signal important sources for Bavinck. In that light, we present two classes of bracketed foreign terms in our translation: Dutch terms and non-Dutch foreign terms. First, we use brackets for Dutch terms because the original Dutch may prove helpful to English readers or may communicate a nuance that might otherwise be missed if the original were not provided. For the English translation of Dutch terms, we omit quotation marks to retain the sense that these terms were native to the original reader. Second, we bracket other foreign language terms and set the English translations for these in quotation marks, which signals that these terms were foreign to the original reader. In a few cases, the foreign terms seemed important enough to keep in the main text, so in those instances the English translation (rather than the foreign term) appears in brackets.

We have sought to maintain precision and to preserve the original meaning without sacrificing smoothness of English prose in this translation. In some cases we have added words where we felt that sentences, when rendered into English, would not make sense without them. Our goal is to make the text as accessible as possible, while also encouraging scholarly readers to study the original text in conjunction with this translation.

1. T. C. W. Blanning, introduction to The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, ed. Blanning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1.

2. Herman Bavinck, Wijsbegeerte der Openbaring (Kampen: Kok, 1908), 275n31. For a modern English translation, see Philosophy of Revelation: A New Annotated Edition, ed. Cory Brock and Gray Sutanto (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2018), 23n61.

3. See location below. In this editors’ introduction, quotations from Bavinck’s Christian Worldview are cited by page number within this volume.

4. See location below.

5. See location below.

6. See location below.

7. See location below.

8. See location below.

9. See location below.

10. See location below.

11. See location below.

12. See location below.

13. See location below.

14. See location below.

15. See location below.

16. See location below.

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this Christian Worldview, which appeared in 1904, has been sold out for some time, and the publisher was of the opinion that a second edition would still be well received. For this reason, I meticulously read the treatise through once more and introduced some changes. In 1904, this work also served as a rectorial address, but because of its length, only a small segment was actually delivered; now [in its written form], all that would bring that address [in its shortened form] to memory is omitted. There are indeed changes here and there; in the text and especially in the notes, some clarifications and additions are included. Finally, to elevate the usefulness of this little book, I included a table of contents and an index at the end. May its reading greatly strengthen you in the faith, unto the truth and beauty of the Christian worldview.

H. Bavinck

Amsterdam, May 1913

Introduction

With the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, many people of renown made daring attempts to determine the character of the centennial era that had just ended.1 Although providing only an approximation, they attempted to do so in order to offer their opinion regarding the direction that the current of life was flowing.2 But this field they were to survey was so extensive and the phenomena that drew their attention were so diverse, important, and complex that no one has been successful in summarizing that rapidly advancing century under a single formula or in defining the direction of the future with some singular character trait. While one person was looking for the character of the previous century in the awakening of the historical or natural sciences, others gave attention to the development of commerce, to the significance of the creation of the machine, to the desire for emancipation, or to the development of democracy. And while some believed we were living in a time marked by neomysticism or neo-Romanticism, others decided that psychologism or relativism, autonomy or anarchy were better descriptions of the direction in which we were moving. Although truth may indeed be found in all these designations, none of them expresses the fullness of modern life.

This is so because, before all else, what strikes us in the modern age is the internal discord that consumes the self and the restless haste that drives it. The fin de siècle [“turn of the century”] is characterized as a period of dramatic change—although this is a designation that says little, because every time is a time of change. But the peculiarity of this moment is that everyone feels an epoch of change, when all people realize they cannot remain the same, and that some long for this moment to pass by more swiftly than others.3There is a disharmony between our thinking and feeling, between our willing and acting. There is a discord between religion and culture, between science and life. A “unified” [einheitliche] world-and-life view is lacking, and therefore this word is the slogan of our day.4 The search for this concord is the work in which all who follow their era with interest participate.

Now that the “period of Renan” (with its scientific materialism, its religious modernism, its moral utilitarianism, its aesthetic naturalism, and its political