Overall, this work, now accessible in English, will be a great service to both the psychology community and the Reformed theology community. Bavinck’s presentation of a holistic biblical human anthropology adds depth to the discussion of how to integrate ideas of the Christian faith into psychology, particularly in the areas of applied theology, as well as academic, philosophical, and educational psychology.

Herman Bavinck, 2024. Biblical and Religious Psychology. Translated by Herman Hanko. Edited by Gregory Parker Jr. Jenison, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association.

Biblical and Religious Psychology is a recent English translation of Herman Bavinck’s Bijbelsche en Religieuze Psychologie (1920), translated primarily by Herman Hanko with the help of Annemarieke Ryskamp and Gregory Parker Jr., with the latter also editing the volume.

The book is a compilation of essays that Bavinck wrote for a Christian education journal from 1912 to 1920, the year before his death, when it was published as a single volume. Overall, it presents the ideas Bavinck wanted to put into the hands of parents and educators about how Christianity impacts human psychology. He does this from two angles that make up the two main sections of the volume: “Biblical Psychology” and “Religious Psychology.”

The first section, Biblical Psychology, contains eight chapters and focuses on how Scripture explains the general, non-salvific aspect of our human nature. Bavinck submits that Scripture is more than just a path to salvation when he asks, “Is Scripture alone a light on the path to heaven, and is it in no respect a lamp for our feet as we walk in the paths of this earth?” (8). He argues that Scripture contains a biblical psychology because its principles apply to all people of every “sex, language, nation, and culture” (13) and that this psychology is of “excellent theoretical and practical value” (75). However, it is limited in scope and is “not suitable for, nor intended to be, a textbook or a scientific handbook” (16). Secular psychology, therefore, because of common grace, may offer some good insights into human nature.

In setting the historical context, Bavinck observes that psychology was relatively new as a science. It branched out from two secular starting points: First from Wilhelm Wundt, who started the first psychology laboratory in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany, and founded the experimental psychology journal, Philosophical Studies, in 1881; second from the clinical psychology of Sigmund Freud from Vienna, Austria, whose ideas were first articulated widely via the publication of his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis in 1909. When Bavinck wrote these essays, both branches were in full swing providing a “scientific psychology that is constructed by man himself from the investigation of human nature by itself” (6).

Bavinck puts this new science in the proper context. He writes that psychology is ultimately “no matter how empirically studied … [still] a philosophical science” (16). In this framework Holy Scripture “yields a threefold benefit” (16) for psychology by 1) teaching us the origin, essence, and destiny of man, coming from the prophets and apostles as opposed to the view of man put forward by non-Christian Greek (Plato and Aristotle) and European (Kant, Herbart, and Wundt) philosophers; 2) introducing us to man’s “soul-life” describing, by God’s living and active word, what changes are produced in us by sin and grace; and 3) showing us in non-abstract ways what life is like through a gallery of personal narratives culminating in the example of Christ who is “the only one among men, full of grace and truth” (16).

After laying down this roadmap in the first chapter, Bavinck expounds these benefits in the subsequent six chapters and summarizes them in this first section’s last chapter. Bavinck begins by articulating the biblical foundation that humans are created in the image of God with both a material body and a spiritual soul, neither essence pre-existing the other (20), and that “the scriptures stand in flat opposition to materialism on the one hand and to spiritualism on the other” (21) but that “man forms an organic unity” (20).

The next four chapters present nuanced discussions about our human essences of body, soul, and spirit and bring out helpful biblical definitions of what each is and is not. He even makes a biblical argument for animals having a type of soul; however, he clarifies that the human soul is distinct from that of an animal as it is the origin of all “individual existence and life” comprised of all our affections, mental states, wishes and desires (37). It is this human soul that is the source of our psychology. As John Bolt eloquently states in his introduction to this volume,

The term “psychology” is Bavinck’s shorthand for the entire apparatus of the human capacity for knowing and coming to know. It includes human consciousness, self-consciousness, and human capacities for perceiving, knowing, willing, and feeling. It includes our sensory perception of the external world, the representations we form of that world in our mind, the emotions that are aroused in us by it, and the way in which our wills are exercised in the choices we make. (xxiv)

Bavinck finishes the first section by focusing on many of these aspects which he calls the various faculties of the soul. He highlights biblical passages that address our inner “psychical life” of our ideas, affections, feelings, desires, and will being correlated to the functioning of our inner most parts like the heart, kidneys and bowels (68). To summarize the first section, Bavinck argues that Holy Scripture presents a holistic human anthropology that explains our human origin, essence and destiny, giving us an understanding of what he calls biblical psychology.

In the book’s second section, Religious Psychology, Bavinck says in the introductory chapter that he plans to move beyond the more abstract ideas he presented in the first section and look at the main emphasis and teachings of Scripture as it addresses the relationship between man and his creator God. Having established the biblical psychology of what man is, he now examines the religious psychology of “what man was originally like … the influence that sin exercised on the life of the soul … and… the transformation that the word and Spirit of Christ brings about in the heart and the life of man” (89). Bavinck accomplishes this new focus in the last nine chapters of the book.

Chapter 2 lays the groundwork for the relationship between God and man by discussing how Scripture defines man as made in the image of God which is his essence. He argues that the Reformation abolished platonic dualism by reemphasizing the biblical declaration that “the spirit, but also matter has a divine origin. Not only the soul, but also the body is holy” (94).

In chapters 3 and 4 Bavinck discusses how Scripture describes the origin of sin and its continued influence “on the soul-life of man.” First, he outlines how Scripture elucidates the doctrine of sin, contrasting a fundamental difference between the divine perspective (110)—sin was and is a volitional act by free humans choosing to disobey God’s law—and the perspectives of human philosophy that excuse sin as merely a necessary and natural process (100). Bavinck describes the moment when sin enters creation by the Fall of Adam and Eve and highlights the human will and desire that underlies the act, and addresses the psychological consequences of nakedness, guilt and shame that follow. He claims that the transgression of God’s law is both moral and religious because the law, as explicitly given to Israel, directs man how to behave toward God and other humans respectively, which none can accomplish.

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