Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020) p. 141

Book Reviews

Christian Worldview. By Herman Bavinck. Translated and Edited by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, James Perman Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock. Wheaton: Crossway, 2019, 140 pp., $24.99.

Reviewing one of the great theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be a daunting task, especially as the questions raised in this work line up perfectly with our modern debates over philosophical and moral issues. Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) was one of the chief dogmaticians of the Dutch Reformed tradition of theology and philosophy. He succeeded Abraham Kuyper as professor of systematic theology at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1902. Bavinck’s profile has risen in recent years due to the popularity of his monumental Reformed Dogmatics and the newly released Reformed Ethics.

Published in English for the first time in 2019, Bavinck’s Christian Worldview is another monumental work in of itself as he provides a rich, theologically informed, and robust foundation for Christian philosophical and ethical thought in opposition of the popular philosophies of the day—a scientific materialism that dominated the nineteenth century, but is still very much alive and well in the twenty-first century. Bavinck divides this work into three parts with each section focusing on a certain aspect of philosophical inquiry, as he seeks to dismantle the scientific materialism of his day seen in the works of Ernest Renan. It should be noted that Bavinck prefers the term “world-and-life view”, which emphasizes a key aspect of what he sees lacking in worldview discussions—namely the full orbed nature of our system of beliefs and how they encompass the entire objective domain outside ourselves as well as the entirety of the human subject.

Bavinck argues clearly that there are certain fundamental questions that every worldview must answer such as “What am I?”, “What is this world?”, and “What is my place and task in this world?” (29). He argues that “autonomous thinking finds no satisfactory answer to these questions ... but (that) Christianity serves the harmony and reveals to us a wisdom that reconciles the human being with God, and through this, with itself, with the world, and with

SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020) p. 142

life” (29). Opposed to the materialism of the day and the prevailing notion of the separation of faith and reason, Bavinck seeks to show the reader how Christianity and the meaning of reality fit together like “lock and key” (28).

His argument is broken into three sections that follow the main sub-sections of philosophy: “Thinking and Being” in which he addresses the epistemological foundations of knowledge and truth, “Being an...