A worldvision is a set of intuitions about the world formed in all individuals by their family and home environment, their teachers and education, and the broad culture within which they live. It is also closely bound to the idiosyncrasies of an individual person’s temperament. That particular combination provides a workable (albeit limited) frame of reference with which to live from day to day. Indeed, it is possible to spend the entirety of your life only looking at life and the world through the single lens that is your worldvision.

In the same sense, it is possible to spend an entire life navigating the streets of New York City only in a first-person perspective, never seeing a map of the city (and all that lies beyond it) or climbing a skyscraper in order to move from the limitations of your individual vision of each street to a more capacious view of the whole city. Worldview relates to worldvision in that sense. It elevates the limitations of first-person vision to the breadth of a bird’s-eye view. An individual vision within the world is a necessary starting point, certainly, but it should not be confused with a capacious view of the world. Every individual has a worldvision, but few have a worldview ...

To adapt one of J. H. Bavinck’s own illustrations, a worldvision is like a map of the world that has been crumpled up into a paper ball. Although that ball now feels manageable in your hand, and while its visible parts offer you some tools for navigation (and a limited degree of truth about the world depicted), it nonetheless must be uncrumpled. The map’s potential far exceeds whatever the crumpled ball can offer.

As a complement to that cartographical picture, Johan Herman adds a further useful illustration: if a worldview is a map, a worldvision is a compass. Those who have no wish to make a map, who reject the struggle to cultivate a worldview in order to remain grounded in whatever worldvision life happens to have given them, have something far more basic—a tool that orients and directs them, albeit without offering any grand view of the world in which they move.

In Personality and Worldview, neither worldview nor worldvision is inherently bad. In fact, quite the opposite is true. A person’s worldvision is a necessary starting point in life, a location in God’s good creation, a set of home coordinates somewhere in nature and history. As such, we must all begin with a worldvision and should see it as a basic good. It is by God’s kind providence that no one starts off nowhere.

Despite this, worldvision nonetheless becomes problematic when it is made a permanent abode rather than a starting point. A worldvision shows you one way to live in the world on the basis of all manner of untested assumptions, and as such, it is utterly subjective. It is an assumption—but not the truth—about the world.