Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Review Of "Biblical And Religious Psychology"
Author: Michael R. Carlino

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 136

Review Of Biblical And Religious Psychology

Michael Carlino

Michael Carlino is Operations Director for CBMW and Adjunct Professor of Christian Theology at Boyce College.

Bavinck, Herman. Biblical and Religious Psychology. Jenison, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2024.

Herman Bavinck On The Duty Of Christian Parents And Educators In View Of Children’s Defects And Development

In his superb introduction to the newly-translated-in-English Biblical and Religious Psychology (BRP), John Bolt helps today’s reader see what animates Bavinck’s design in writing this book a century ago. Bavinck claims there are “precious few books on biblical psychology” for Christian teachers, and in BRP he is attempting to help “Christian educators…be more attentive to children’s psychological makeup and development, what the Bible says about their nature, their faculties, and abilities” (xvi). Reading with this contextual backdrop in mind amplifies the book’s pastoral and paternal nature.

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 137

Bavinck seeks to equip Christian parents/teachers with a biblical rationale for understanding the psychological, moral, and religious development of children. And he does so after establishing a broader biblical psychology of humanity (in the first half of book), before focusing on how Christian parents/educators need to think about the development of children as humans into greater depths/experience of their human personality (in the second half of the book).

The debate surrounding psychology in Christian circles was not all that different in Bavinck’s day than it is ours, and he is a significant figure in the Reformed tradition as it relates to engaging empirical psychology dogmatically. In BRP, we encounter the thinking of the mature Bavinck. This two-part book was published between January 1912 and April 1920, meaning this was one of the last works before his death on July 29, 1921 (xv). He was aware that his teaching on “human nature” in his magisterial Reformed Dogmatics was somewhat lacking, as evidenced in a letter written to William Kuyper on September 20, 1897, where he claims: “The doctrine of man is incomplete [from Reformed Dogmatics]. Therefore, in a couple of months I shall publish a small, separate work: Beginselen der Psychologie [Foundations of Psychology].”1 In the author’s preface to the second edition of Foundations of Psychology, dictated by Bavinck over twenty years later on his sickbed in 1921, he writes, “The foun...