Calvinism for a Secular Age E-Book
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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian, pastor, and politician, was well-known for having declared that there is "not a square inch" of human existence over which Jesus Christ is not its sovereign Lord. This principle is perhaps best reflected in Kuyper's writings on Calvinism originally delivered as the Stone Lectures in 1898 at Princeton Theological Seminary. These lectures reflecting on the role of the Christian faith in a variety of social spheres—including religion, politics, science, and art—have become a touchstone for contemporary Reformed theology. How might the lectures continue to inform the church's calling in a secular age? In this volume, Jessica Joustra and Robert Joustra bring together theologians, historians, scientists, and others to revisit Kuyper's original lectures and to critically consider both his ongoing importance and his complex legacy for today.
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To Jacob
One generation commends your works to another
CONTENTS
PREFACE
JAMES D. BRATT
ON AUGUST 21, 1898, Abraham Kuyper boarded the Cunard liner Lucania for a six-day voyage to the United States. He had read a lot about America and thought about it even more, so he was eager for some firsthand experience of its people and places. His trip would last for nearly four months and take him around the whole northeastern quadrant of the country—from New York to Iowa, Connecticut to Maryland. His first objective, however, was to travel to Princeton, New Jersey, where he would receive an honorary doctorate from the university there and deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary.1
Kuyper was not shy about receiving the honorary degree. In his acceptance speech he recalled how he had been nominated for one such twenty years before back home in the Netherlands, only to see his political opponents block the measure. “The degree you now bestow upon me,” he told the assembly, thus provided “a little revenge upon my antagonists, and revenge with honor—why not admit it?—always offers something sweet to the human heart.”2 This little vignette offers our first glimpse into Kuyper as a person—a combatant yearning for respect, yet a sincere Christian remembering the virtue of humility. The ceremony also called on his sense of drama, for it took place in Princeton’s august Nassau Hall, named after the Netherlands’ royal House of Orange, with ex–United States president Grover Cleveland present in the audience.
Kuyper’s lectures at Princeton Seminary involved a quieter sort of drama. On the one hand, he was sure of a friendly audience since the seminary was the bastion of orthodoxy in the Presbyterian Church in the USA;3 his unabashed devotion to Calvinism would go down well there. On the other hand, he meant more by “Calvinism” than people at Princeton were used to. Yes, he assured them, the tradition did involve the uncompromising doctrine and system of church governance by which Princeton Seminary had long defined itself. But there was more to it than that, he continued. Calvinist history displayed a record of wide-ranging political and cultural activism, and Reformed theology mandated taking part in the affairs of the world in that believers were to act not just as citizens and neighbors but also as self-consciously Christian citizens and neighbors. Such holistic engagement, the dream of creating not just a pure church but a “holy commonwealth,” was associated in Princeton’s mind with the “New School” Presbyterianism that had drafted heavily on New England Puritanism, and against those two “News” Princeton Seminary had been keeping vigilant guard for nearly its entire history.4
If it was not enough to idealize the Puritans, as Kuyper did—he called them, in fact, the “core” of the American nation—he sounded two more themes troubling to the Princeton heart.5 First, his epistemology (his theory of knowledge) drew deeply on German Idealist models that Princeton always rejected. Such were the stakes innocently hiding in Kuyper’s notion of “world-and-life-view.” Kuyper’s approach opposed Princeton’s commitment to the philosophy of Common Sense Realism, derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, which held that reality comes to us objectively through our five senses, to be processed as “facts” by a neutral and dispassionate reason. On this understanding, Christianity is a rational system of convictions based on factual evidence and to be defended by logic and reason; in fact, it was ultimately the most (maybe the only) fully rational system. Kuyper insisted to the contrary that we all inevitably perceive and process our impressions of the world within a pre-rational interpretive grid—that the Christian intellectual enterprise is therefore to make sure that this grid is as faithful as possible to the testimony of Scripture and then to build within it by a consistent logic, defending the results against all comers. Similarly, Christians must pursue their work in culture and politics according to a consistent, self-critical program grounded in careful study of the Bible, theology, and history.6
To these twin challenges—his picture of a comprehensive and dynamic Christianity, and his concept of knowledge as a struggle among perspectives—Kuyper added one more. Charles Hodge, long Princeton’s foremost theologian, had once asserted that no fundamentally new idea had ever been broached at the seminary. Kuyper issued quite a different mandate. As he stated at the beginning of his final lecture, “Calvinism and the Future,” the need of the day was “not to copy the past, as if Calvinism were a petrifaction, but to go back to the living root of the Calvinist plant, to clean and to water it, and so to cause it to bud and to blossom once more, now fully in accordance with our actual life in these modern times, and with the demands of the times to come.”7 Moreover, this reflected no faddish desire for relevance but simply fleshed out Calvinism’s core commitment to the sovereignty of God:
The world after the fall is no lost planet, only destined now to afford the Church a place in which to continue her combats; and humanity is no aimless mass of people which only serves the purpose of giving birth to the elect. On the contrary, the world now, as well as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God, and humanity remains a creation of His hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation, here on earth, a mighty process, and in its historical development is to glorify the name of Almighty God.8
Kuyper was aiming these challenges well beyond Princeton Seminary; he was speaking to American Protestantism as a whole. We will review his relative success on this score later when considering where his lectures were received and how. First we need to fathom the program behind them. Kuyper saw great stakes at hand in the issues of his day, which helps explain the audacious language and grand historical sweep we encounter in the Stone Lectures. To our postmodern ears, so tuned to irony and suspicion, “audacious” can quickly become “outrageous,” and the grand, grandiose. For the times, however, neither the language nor the sense of historical sweep was that unusual. Just two years before, Americans had heard William Jennings Bryan accept the Democratic presidential nomination by warning the monied interests of the land, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”9 Likewise, Theodore Roosevelt said to his nominating convention in 1912: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”10 Such rhetoric could be heard Left, Right, and Center; it was the convention of the day.
To this mix Kuyper added his own steeping in German Idealist notions of history, most memorably carved out by Georg W. F. Hegel.11 True, Kuyper decried Hegel’s translation of God into the World Spirit, but he shared completely the concept that world history proceeded by the dialectical play of leading “principles” as these were incarnated in various nations, systems, civilizations, and religions. Already as a young pastor in a quiet Dutch village in 1865 Kuyper saw this drama playing out in contemporary Europe; history had come down, he said, to a confrontation between the traditional theistic view of the world represented in Christianity and a stark, remorseless naturalism that was utterly materialistic in its philosophical grounding and in its prescriptions for human life.12 By the 1890s the foe had become pantheism, with traditional Christianity’s resources divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant. (“Calvinism” in Kuyper’s mind always represented the purest distillation of the spirit or “principle” animating Protestantism.13)
To this struggle Kuyper had devoted his life both as a thinker and a doer. Since the forces controlling history were ultimately spiritual, he saw culture (rather than politics or economics) as the front line of engagement and so focused his energies on the church and school. But as educational policy came to the fore in national politics in the Netherlands (as in many other countries) in the 1870s, he took a seat in the Dutch Parliament to advocate for a religiously pluralistic public school system. He took advantage of new provisions in Dutch law to publish a newspaper that knit together a nationwide community of committed, and now better informed, Calvinist citizens. To coordinate their action he founded a new political party; to provide leadership for what by now was emerging as a whole movement he founded a university.
All these were in place by 1880. He next undertook what he hoped would be a thorough reformation of the national Reformed church, but that plan fell short of his goal. So he turned his focus back to politics, and in the ten years leading up to his Princeton lectures his movement went from strength to strength. Two dramatic expansions of the franchise—in 1887 and 1897—benefited Kuyper’s party more than any other. The harsh depression of the late 1880s finally prompted his movement to start paying attention to economics, and in the great reform measures instituted in the 1890s the Netherlands laid the foundations for much better prospects in public health and prosperity. The same years saw Kuyper’s greatest successes as a scholar. He finished his three-volume Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology in 1894 and began the long series of magazine articles on his distinctive doctrine of common grace that would be published in three volumes in 1902.14
In short, for all the tones of foreboding and declension that run through the Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper came to Princeton on a rising tide. He had declared the same to his followers in a scintillating speech in 1896: “Brothers, I believe in the future, I believe in it with all my heart!”15 God was still sovereign over history and creation, and God had mighty works in mind for the faithful in the years ahead. One of those, perhaps, was Kuyper’s elevation to prime minister in 1901. With that a remarkable movement that he had birthed and led over a thirty-year course of innovation and development came of age. Kuyper arrived in Princeton to get American Calvinists to start thinking about something similar.
But the times proved not to be ripe on this side of the Atlantic. Kuyper’s Lectures would be remembered and honored but in places he largely overlooked rather than where he had hoped, and a fuller reach for his influence would only come much later. This outcome was forecast in two other lecture tours Kuyper took upon leaving Princeton. The first followed the chain of Dutch American immigrant communities across the Midwest, from western Michigan to Chicagoland and northwest Iowa. The other retraced the trail of the New England diaspora, from Chicago back to Cleveland, Rochester, and Hartford, then down to Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian citadels in New Jersey and Philadelphia.
To take the second trip first: these stops bore Kuyper along the axes of the northeastern Protestant establishment that still ruled America’s economy and culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Here lay the seed of the Puritan dream of a righteous society, mixed with Scots and Dutch Calvinist commitments to education and constitutional order.16 Kuyper affirmed all of it, but he worried that the churches of these tribes were too involved with their ethical fruits to pay attention to the disease of modernist theology threatening their religious roots. His message along this route consequently echoed the Lectures’ call for a critical scrutiny of the mixed spirits in the age and to separate the wheat from the chaff accordingly. But his audience either misunderstood or ignored his challenge. The powers in American Protestantism were poised on the verge of the great Progressive campaign to reform, revitalize, and reorder the country on a more stable basis. The division of the spirits would come only in the 1920s, after World War I had burned up crusading zeal, and neither the modernist nor the fundamentalist side in that clash had room for Kuyper’s initiatives.
The trip through Dutch America proved more propitious, with a twist. That community was divided between two denominations: the Reformed Church in America (RCA), which descended from colonial New Netherland and so bore some establishment airs itself; and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), which prized the community’s roots in various secession movements from the national Reformed church back in the Netherlands. Kuyper had long corresponded with key Midwestern leaders in the RCA—in fact, he used them to gain an audience with President William McKinley during his visit to Washington, DC. McKinley proved a huge disappointment, and Kuyper’s anticipation of influence through the strategically situated RCA went a-glimmering as well. The few who followed his flame in these circles had a small audience and little legacy.17
That flame would burn longer and stronger in the more separatist CRC instead. Here a self-segmentation within American society against the common shibboleths of American culture gave greater room for Kuyper’s critical spirit. At the same time, here his call for positive Christian engagement with the world proved to be the very word of life for bright, ambitious youth who were reared under, and chafed against, the denomination’s sectarian spirit. Up through World War II the CRC centered its agenda on a zealous fight against doctrinal deviation and any form of “worldliness.” Kuyper gave orthodox reasons and a well-grounded method for getting beyond those strictures. One of the clearest results has been the string of national-class philosophers produced by the denomination’s Calvin University.18 More broadly symbolic, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, situated in the heart of this community, has kept the Lectures in print since acquiring its rights in 1931.
Kuyper’s influence broadened later in the century along two lines. First, post–World War II emigration from the Netherlands to Canada brought to North America thousands of people who had been reared under the full panoply of Kuyper’s institutions in their homeland and sought, with some success, to build likewise in their new land. Through their home in the bi-national CRC their influence spread in the United States as well.19 Second, a half-century after their traumatic shaming in the 1920s, many Protestant fundamentalists emerged to reengage the American scene as evangelicals. The anti-scientific and world-flight impulses of their heritage left them looking for resources fit for this enterprise, and Kuyper’s program offered a robust option. First, its perspectival epistemology made more sense than the outmoded rationalism of Common Sense Realism that fundamentalism had inherited from Princeton. Second, its mandate for world engagement under the promises of God for the future offered a positive alternative to the violent fantasies of dispensationalism, the other pole of the fundamentalist mind. This is the audience for Lexham Press’s new publication of a broad span of Kuyper’s volumes in public theology.20
So how should Kuyper’s Lectures be used going forward? His core insight will always remain valuable: that our faith involves not just Sunday but weekday; not just the spiritual but the material; not just theology and piety and personal behavior but science and politics, art and leisure, labor and business. This is not just a gospel mandate but simple reality: even apathy amounts to a commitment of sorts, and to flee the world is in its own way to affirm it as the best one possible, however far it might fall from the divine righteousness to which we are called to bear witness.
Another valuable legacy lies in how Kuyper pays attention to the interconnectedness of things. Our prime convictions do shape our knowledge and actions, just as social institutions and political policies and artistic productions bear out control axioms and desires. It is not hard to see power blocs embodying different ideals and value systems moving like tectonic plates beneath the landscape of our own times, and it is essential that we search these out and assess them by both the standards of Scripture and the wisdom of history. That is, we need Kuyper’s call for Christians to develop a deep and not superficial or merely emotional or simply reactive understanding of the world. That is a vital prelude for truly loving our neighbor.
Of course, we don’t have to see connections in the grand Hegelian way, which, as the Lectures demonstrate often enough, is prone to exaggeration and overgeneralization. We are rightly more aware of nuance and the ironic inconsistencies—even contradictions—in things. For instance, Kuyper brought to America the Continental European perception that supporters of the (French) “Revolution” will line up consistently against those of traditional Christianity. But in the United States that dial had to be twisted ninety degrees: both sides in the American Revolution numbered Christians and devotees of Enlightenment Reason. The opposition between good and evil, we have come to learn along with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, does not run between groups of people but right down the middle of every human heart.21 Thus, we first need to apply Kuyper’s critical mandate to ourselves before lowering on our opponents.
It is also important to consider our metaphors and tone. Kuyper favored political terms: authority, law, obedience, the lordship of Christ. We should attend to, and benefit from, other terms from the treasury of Scripture as well. How might politics, art, science, and economy appear under the image of Christ as a shepherd walking before us, a friend by our side, or a radiant Spirit within? What if we bore down into the peace that Christ promises us rather than, with Kuyper, just the war that the gospel will provoke? We should not think here in exclusive terms of either-or, but at least be mindful of the whole menu of terms and tones at our disposal.
All that said, however, Kuyper’s Lectures still serve as a model for how a Christian can—and how Christians together must—take on the whole world. If we differ from him in some points of method and language, if other incidents and examples and developments than his necessarily loom larger in our field of observation, we can nonetheless be summoned to engage our life and times with some of the energy, conviction, and brilliance that Kuyper shows in the Stone Lectures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE GREAT CHURCH HISTORIAN Jaroslav Pelikan calls tradition the “living faith of the dead.”1 Too much important theology, philosophy and doctrine has become what he calls a kind of traditionalism, the dead faith of the living. A tradition alive, as Alasdair MacIntyre would have it, must be in dialogue; debated, renewed, refined, and updated. Kuyper—and Calvin—would have preferred perhaps semper reformanda, always reforming.
The book is dedicated to our son, Jacob Scott Joustra, but it is the fruit of our parents—Ray and Mary Joustra, and Scott and Renee Driesenga—and of our intellectual and spiritual parents, our “doctor fathers,” and our beloved friends and colleagues, many of whom joined us in this project. They, and others, such as Matthew Kaemingk, Justin Bailey, Stephanie Summers, Harry Van Dyke, and more, witness beautifully to the life of this tradition.
This book is also the fruit of institutions, of people organized together for common purpose, across generations. Redeemer University, our academic home, funded and supported this work through internal research grants and our very capable research office, administered by the indispensable Nicole Benbow. Johanna Lewis, our research assistant at Redeemer, did extraordinary work checking and correcting bibliographies and footnotes. The Reid Trust Foundation also financially supported the book and its authors, without which much of this would simply not have been possible. Cardus NextGen, Redeemer University’s Faculty Development Week, and Redeemer Presbyterian’s Center for Faith and Work all served as generous forums and inspiration for some of the book’s content. The Theological University of Kampen, which hosted Jess first as a postdoctoral researcher and then later as a research fellow, remains a home and harbor for so much excellence in research on neo-Calvinism and Abraham Kuyper. Its summer fellowship for doctoral students—the Advanced Theological Studies Fellowship—is one we highly commend to aspiring doctoral students reading this book.
We also think of other institutions, the consortium of organizations that host the European neo-Calvinist Symposium—Fuller Theological Seminary, the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Edinburgh—at which we met, as so many Calvinists do, at a conference in Rome on the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum and the Kuyper Conference hosted now at Calvin University, by Jordan Ballor and others, who have done so much to bring the archive of Kuyper (and others) into the English language.
Here, in short, is our note of thanks to this extraordinary cloud of witnesses, who are not deaf to the sins of our fathers and mothers, but who press on despite and in the midst of it, to find the good news, the good work, that the Lord has done. A tradition’s life is measured best not, probably, in its institutions or journals or ideas, but in its persons, and if that is so, the neo-Calvinist tradition is blossoming beautifully all around the world.
This book, like all Calvinistic projects, is fundamentally, therefore, a work of gratitude, first to the Lord our God, but then also to all of you above, and those unnamed, who pattern themselves—also—on this living faith of the dead.
INTRODUCTION
ROBERT J. JOUSTRA
ABRAHAM KUYPER (1837–1920), newspaper and university founder, pastor, church maker and breaker, and Dutch prime minister, was, truth be told, a troublemaker. Don’t get us wrong: he was a true Renaissance man as at least one slightly overly rosy biography has put it,1 a man of deep piety and a passionate follower of Jesus Christ, but he also had that quality of driven, singularly gifted men, of alienating those closest to him.2 His theology provoked spirited backlash in people like Klaas Schilder, who did not suffer from an inability to express his own feelings.3 In politics, Kuyper alienated rivals, allies, and even the Queen herself, especially after one incident in which Kuyper published Her Majesty’s private remarks in his newspaper. The consequences of Kuyper’s views on pillarization, the idea that modern society should not erase difference but create distinct, meaningful space for difference, created a Dutch education system still much in debate today and, of course, also became a rallying call for racial segregation in former Dutch colonies like South Africa. Its specter is very bleak and has led some to conclude that Kuyper’s ideas are irredeemably colonial and racist.
Why look at such a person, then? He was sensational, to be sure, but sensational in a kind of small historical way, in his own little context of the Netherlands, itself a sleepy little low country in the north of Europe and a one-time global power, long past its zenith. Maybe we could justify this tiny exploration if we lived in Holland, if we were all Dutch boys and girls learning our parochial history. But it might seem like an odd choice for an English-language introduction intended for Christians of faith in North America, a hundred years later, wrestling with questions that seem far removed from Kuyper’s world.
We want to make at least four arguments for why Abraham Kuyper is for “such a time as this” in our initial orientation: one biographical and three more conceptual (that is, about the content of what Kuyper thought and taught). Kuyper is hardly the panacea for faithful Christian cultural and political engagement today in North America, but he is a very solid signpost, a guide, to help us in the increasingly turbulent and treacherous waters of polarized politics and tribal religion.
A CASE FOR GETTING TO KNOW ABRAHAM KUYPER
Kuyper’s Holland was a Christian nation, or at least that’s how they saw themselves. Europe was Christian too; they certainly saw themselves that way, as a center of civilization, education, and morality. And at the end of the nineteenth century there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove it: a mass industrialization driven by scientific innovation that quickly overwhelmed and dominated the ancient empires of China, India, and Mesopotamia. European technical and scientific knowledge vastly outstripped their contemporaries, until they were without rival and until, in fact, they dominated the entire world in an age of empire, of which the Dutch were early and successful enthusiasts. This was the world Kuyper was born into.
Yet something was clearly wrong.
These Christian empires were invested less in the fraternity of humankind under the gospel than in scrambling for territory, resources, even slaves. The rise of so-called Christian Europe was marked by an uneven piety, to put it kindly, and the results of these Christian nations and their rivalry would be a global cataclysm from which the world would not soon recover. Its story and its collateral carnage would, in fact, dominate the entire century.
There was, in other words, a simultaneous and breathtaking expansion of technology, political power, and economic growth and a kind of moral and spiritual hollowing out of the family and the nation, a growing disconnect between what people said they believed and what they did, between what people knew they ought to be and how they really lived.
The (European) Christian church served as poor respite. Wrote Kuyper in his early years, “Church life was cold and formal. Religion was almost dead. There was no Bible in the schools. There was no life in the nation.”4 Or again, “People had been satisfied with [Christian] appearances alone and failed to bring the gospel to the heart,” and connecting this directly to the catastrophe of the Great War (1914–1918), he concludes that “the sad outcome was that in Europe the torch of division and discord was set alight.”5 But were Europeans not blessed nations under God? Was not Christian Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century, a chosen people to bring light to the nations? Hardly, wrote Kuyper in disgust on the eve of that war: “The genuinely devout in every one of them [Christian nations] had not lagged a bit in baptizing their country’s cause as the Lord’s,”6 the result of which, in Kuyper’s mind, was a moral and material collapse that would consume the world.
Sound familiar? If you’re American, it should. The globe is getting awfully crowded for America’s superpower ambitions, which have run unchecked since the end of the Cold War and the “rise of the rest,” as Fareed Zakaria puts it.7 America has stumbled economically, geopolitically, and politically, and all the while massive new powers are pulling huge populations of people into the global economy. Even (especially?) if you are an evangelical Christian in the United States today, the fissure running down the center of what was once American evangelicalism is now a chasm so wide it is doubtful it can be crossed even by its own people. To say that traditional religion in America is in crisis borders on cliché.
Yet you could go read your European history at the turn of the twentieth century and find in it the same ideas and language as you would about America at the turn of the twenty-first: a chosen people, blessed by God, bringing light to the nations. All the while, the evidence of its decline mounts. All the while the world holds its breath as new, bellicose powers arise and we hope to avoid the worst of our history and inclinations.
“You cannot step in the same river twice,” the ancient Greeks knew. This historical analogy is far from perfect, but the point is simply that Abraham Kuyper matters for such a time as this because the crises of our times are, in a perennial way, reminiscent of the crises of Kuyper’s. He, too, lived through the turn of a very violent century marked by extremely radical change. Our attitudes of history can run so narcissistic sometimes that we forget that as significant as the digital revolution, space flight, and iPhones may be, the telegram, the internal combustion engine, the electric light, and fixed nitrogen transformed a world at a speed and in a fashion that would take the breath away of even the most ambitious Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Abraham Kuyper, in other words, was not just a man of uncommon insight, piety, and ambition; he was also a product of his time, maybe in the most crucial sense a time of massive upheaval and global change. And in that time, he founded newspapers, churches, schools, and served as prime minister of a minor European state, all the while clinging to his passion for his Christian religion. We would expect such a wide-ranging man to have made mistakes, maybe bad ones, but we might also want to sit at his feet to see how he held Scripture in one hand and his times in the other, how he read them together in pursuit of this same Jesus we call Lord today.
WORLD- AND LIFE-VIEWS: “EVERY SQUARE INCH”
Abraham Kuyper loved Calvinism. We might even characterize his passion for Calvinism as unusual; most Calvinists today try to appear as nonthreatening, beer drinking, bearded hipsters. Kuyper was none of those things. His passion for Calvinism as “a true world and life system” is the first of his Stone Lectures that Richard Mouw discusses in this book, lectures that would eventually become Lectures on Calvinism.
Kuyper loved Calvinism not for some special genius of John Calvin but because he thought that in Calvinism the truest teaching of the Christian gospel came through. For Kuyper, Calvinism represented the fullest meaning of a catholic gospel—universal good news. The “promiscuity” of this gospel, as one of Kuyper’s favorite confessions, the Canons of Dort put it, is universal because it calls us to obedience in every area of life, and the good news itself is not just for humankind but for all of creation. His lectures on Calvinism are basically just working this out: What does the good news of Jesus Christ mean for art? Or science? Or politics? And what would a consistent Christian foundation for these areas look like? Might we call such consistent Christian foundations something like a “worldview”?
With this concept of worldview, Kuyper captured that people really do believe things and that, while we may not even be aware of what those beliefs are, these function in a real way to control our behavior, attitudes, and ultimately the whole of our lives. Kuyper is sometimes criticized here for being too intellectual, as though beliefs are just ideas, concepts, things educated people read about and debate. But this reads Kuyper and his blue-collar theology wrong: beliefs are about what’s in our hearts, about what we love, not just what we think. A belief is really only proper and basic if it gets to the heart of how we think things really are, if it shapes and is shaped by the things we would give our lives for.
That is what Kuyper meant by worldview, and it is not something only religious people have.
Conforming such a worldview to the Christian gospel was one of his lifelong tasks. The task for Kuyper was not creating a worldview ex nihilo but rather discipling our already existing worldviews to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We all have such basic beliefs and desires long before we get into the business of theorizing or praying about them. Christian worldview, for Kuyper, was an extension of the psalmist’s prayer—to test our hearts and see if there is any offensive way in us. In this respect, Kuyper anticipated nearly half a century early the postmodernist impulse that there is always some belief system or desire underneath knowledge, that there can be no neutral way of knowing.
But he also went beyond the clever deconstructions of the postmodernists. Kuyper not only argued such belief systems and desires persisted but also that love, trust, and obedience to some principle or power was fundamental to the human condition. We trust and love either God or some created thing, ourselves included. For Kuyper this was no mere intellectual project; it was a matter of faith. Calvinism, he thought, was the most consistent and faithful Christian world- and life-view, concerned with all of life and all of what God is owed. H. Evan Runner, a later twentieth-century disciple of Kuyper, would simply say in his favorite phrase, “life is religion.”
CONFIDENT PLURALISM: LOVING FAITHFUL INSTITUTIONS
A radical kind of social project emerges from the logical conclusions of Kuyper’s worldview argument. If knowledge and desire are never neutral, and if all of life is claimed by Jesus Christ—intellectual, emotional, blue collar, white collar, and so on—then how can the church go about discipling people under this radical kingdom vision?
Here is the worldview that has launched a thousand Christian institutions, of which Kuyper and his heirs built many. By far, the most enduring and all-encompassing Protestant Christian social, educational, and political organizations have been built with this worldview, working to integrate the kingdom of God with the work of their hands. Other Christian social visions exist, to be sure, but they usually either elevate some form of work and ministry (pastoral ministry, for example) or subsume the Christian work of business, art, or politics as a means to the conversion of hearts and minds. The cosmic scope of Kuyper’s theology meant Christian farmers praying about how to sow and reap under the call of Christ (as in the Christian Farmers Federation) or Christian laborers praying and practicing steel-form construction as obedience to Christ and his kingdom (as in the Christian Labour Association of Canada).
It was a key argument of Kuyper that all vocations, trades, and practices have buried within them habits and beliefs that either conform to or react against the kingship of Jesus Christ (thesis or anti-thesis). The usual complaint is the so-called neutral work of science or math, where to the modern mind it is unclear how a faithful Christian’s work on linear algebra differs meaningfully from the hedonist atheist. The math, as they say, is the math. Bringing worldview into it doesn’t change it one bit, or if it does, not for the better. What is missed in these complaints is the already persisting worldviews behind modern mathematics and science: presumptions about the knowability of the universe, the logical, repetitious, and discoverable nature of reality, none of which are the natural or necessary conclusions of a randomly generated universe. Laws like “do not steal” seem religious in a way that laws like those of thermodynamics are not. But that is only because we are busy trading off the religious past of the great scientific minds of history, who bequeathed to us a scientific method charged with trust in a kind of universe suspiciously laden with wonder, goodness, and discoverability.
So if, as Kuyper said, “not one square inch” (not even math!) is unclaimed by Christ, then we must get busy building the kind of institutions and intergenerational conversations that will foster the discipleship Christ demands. We must have a public faith, as some have said8—one that is not simply about the piety of prayer closets and Sunday mornings but a faith as cosmic as the redemption of Jesus Christ.
And so we must also practice what legal theorist John Inazu might call confident pluralism,9 a public practice of faith that deliberately and unapologetically advances our understanding of Christ’s kingdom: a faith lived out loud, in public, and with others who may not necessarily share it.
Inazu does not come to his term accidentally, and it elicits the third and final area we think makes the study of Kuyper necessary for our day: the problem of living together amid deep difference. If Christians are living their convictions out loud, what happens when Christians disagree, or (more to the point) what happens when Christians, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and so on, of all tribes and persuasions, live their faith out loud? Pluralism in Kuyper’s day looked like Protestants and Catholics having separate school systems. Pluralism in our day looks like Muslims and Jews having family courts, libertarian capitalism and radical ecology, and the now ever-present Muslim headscarf.
Are we still so sure about all this pluralism?
CAN WE LIVE TOGETHER? THE POINT OF KUYPER’S PLURALISM
Kuyperian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff writes that it is “often said, for instance, that everyone has a ‘set of presuppositions’ or a ‘perspective on reality’ to bring to a theoretical inquiry. That may be true. But saying such things cannot be the end of the matter. It must at best be the beginning.”10
Like Wolterstorff, we in the twenty-first century are probably more aware than most in human history of the huge array of rival presuppositions, or perspectives on reality, that people and cultures bring. But also, like Wolterstorff, we know that such diversity is at best a beginning, a context, within which we live, not an end in itself. How to evaluate this potpourri of pluralism, some of which seems dangerous and unsettling? How, to put it to the point, can a Christian live amid the kind of wide diversity it would simply call sin in its own home? Can such a peaceful settlement really exist between religious rivals that, especially under a Kuyperian system, we know are not simply at odds about a piece of life but, in a sense, all of life?
Here Kuyper advanced what his students have come to call principled pluralism, a kind of constitutional arrangement for politics that places principled and procedural limits on pluralism but does not demand we all agree “on why” (as Jacques Maritain famously put it). This is also the cornerstone of what has been called Christian social democracy, or what Kuyperian political philosopher Jonathan Chaplin calls the Christian diversity state.11 It is probably ironic that this has ended up being one of Kuyper’s more enduring legacies, a way to imagine peaceful politics amid radically diverse world- and life-views, when he was himself such a passionate champion of Calvinistic politics and religion as the only sure path of obedience and prosperity. But it is not accidental, because while Kuyper, like others after him, would not give “one inch” on what they owed to Christ, they also recovered and rearticulated a Christian vision for political life beyond tribal polarization and toward an overlapping set of principles and procedures for the common good. And Kuyper did so for specifically Calvinist reasons—a pattern of theology and philosophy that we could do much worse than study to understand and apply in our own day. Ultimately, Kuyper believed that the vitality of a nation and its common life was very much a reflection of its inner spiritual life—a two-way street out of which either renewal or decline would surely come.
FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS
Abraham Kuyper can seem very contemporary when we read him, and it is our argument that he is a wonderful model for us partly for that reason. There is a great deal we could cover in talking through the work and life of the man Kuyper, not least because of the many new English-language translations of his primary works like Common Grace, Pro Rege, On the Church, On Islam, and so on.12 He was an uncommonly productive man in writing, speaking, and movement and institution building.
But perhaps his most famous work, certainly in America, is his slender Lectures on Calvinism, which shows so much of the energy and vision of his theology and politics. We confine ourselves to these lectures in this introductory guide, not because we do not endorse the rest of his work (we do!) but because we think this is the right way to understand his intent and influence in truly interdisciplinary areas (you could say all) of human life. These were lectures intended for a North American audience, delivered at Princeton for non-initiates, like us, to help introduce them to the breadth and depth of Kuyper’s Calvinistic program. Each of our experts therefore begins with explaining Kuyper’s context and argument with each lecture (“What Did Kuyper Say?”) but then also gives us a “biography” of each lecture: What kind of influence in North America has it had (“What Did They Do?”)? What did the people who heard it think of it, and what sorts of ripples do we see, even now, more than a hundred years later, in North America? Finally, they will also name some blind spots, weaknesses, and areas where later students of Kuyper either found mistakes or brought improvement (“What Should We Do?”). At least one key area is an additional chapter in this guide, which at Princeton in 1898 Kuyper did not address but which today we must: race. No small amount of work has been done on this topic by Kuyper’s students, and it is undoubtedly a set of areas in which Kuyper’s Christian worldview was dangerously incomplete or in some cases simply wrong.13
As we read Kuyper’s best intentions out of his Lectures on Calvinism in the pages ahead, we must therefore also remember that as contemporary as he may sound, he is also—for us—a man out of time. And he was also a Calvinist, and so all too aware that his best efforts were often marked with the depredations of sin. We will see those echoes too.
The point, at the end, is to paint a portrait not of a saint but of a man, a sometimes crank, who nonetheless worked with “fear and trembling” to bring the whole of life, including his own, under the lordship of Jesus Christ. In that effort, he was far from perfect, but then, so are we. And so, in that project, and in that work, we are all colaborers in “the fields of the Lord,”14 and it is in that spirit that we invite you to explore the life and legacy of Abraham Kuyper.
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KUYPER AND LIFE-SYSTEMS
RICHARD J. MOUW
WHAT DID KUYPER SAY?
One of my students once thanked me for assigning Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism in the course he had taken from me. Reading these lectures, he said, was a great experience for him. But then he added a mild complaint about the first of Kuyper’s lectures. “I think there should be a ‘warning label’ right there at the beginning. There is a bit of an arrogant spirit in the way he makes Calvinism look good and the other perspectives—including the Christian ones—look bad. And then he makes you wade through a lot of technical stuff as he is making his points. I was glad to get on to the next chapters, which I really liked!”
I was not surprised by his complaint about getting started in reading the Stone Lectures. I have gone through them many times over the years, and even though I understand the points that Kuyper is making, I don’t find it easy reading. And like the student, I find some of Kuyper’s references to other Christian traditions to be a bit too polemical in tone. Kuyper gets more interesting for me when he turns to specific areas of cultural engagement in the subsequent chapters, showing how Calvinism can help us understand why God cares about religious beliefs and practices, politics, science, and the arts.
Still, important topics are covered in these early pages, and it is good to get a sense of why Kuyper finds it necessary to contrast Calvinism with these other perspectives before he moves on to more specific areas. And it also helps to know why his tone is a bit strident as he sets up his overall framework.
Kuyper was well aware that the Presbyterian folks who attended these lectures at Princeton—mainly pastors and professors—were feeling beleaguered by attacks on the traditional Calvinism that had long characterized the theology at Princeton Seminary. And Kuyper himself had recently gone through some theological struggles back home in the Netherlands, resulting in a serious division in the ranks of the Dutch Reformed there. So, he wanted to offer words of encouragement to his hearers. He wanted to assure them that the defense of Calvinism is no lost cause—indeed, Calvinism provides a very exciting overall perspective on how we are to live our lives as people who want to serve the Lord in all things.
To make his case, Kuyper explained to his audience that he was going to explore some new dimensions in Calvinism, ones that often were not given adequate attention by those who, over the past centuries, professed loyalty to the theology of John Calvin. Kuyper made it clear that his intention in discussing Calvinism in these lectures was “not to restore its worn-out form”; rather, he was going to show how Calvinism, as a system of thought that flows from a deep “life principle,” fulfills in an exciting way “the requirements of our own century.”1
It may not have been the wisest thing for Kuyper to talk about not wanting to rehabilitate Calvinism in “its worn-out form.” He certainly wasn’t meaning to reject the Calvinism of the past, and it probably would have been better to assure his audience about that. Kuyper clearly endorsed the basics of the Calvinist portrayal of how an individual can get right with God. We were created to live in an obedient fellowship with God, but in rebelling against our Creator we have become deeply stuck in our own sinfulness. If we are to be rescued from our depravity, it has to happen from God’s direction. And God did move toward us by sending Jesus into the world to take our sin on himself. So we are saved by grace alone.
Kuyper firmly believed in all of that, including all of the traditional Calvinist formulations about election and predestination and the “eternal security” of the believer. His intention in these lectures was to show how Calvinism offers us all of that—but also a lot more. Yes, God saves us from our helpless sinful condition. But what does he save us for? And here is where the bigger Calvinist picture begins to unfold. We are saved—as members of a community of believers—to show forth the lordship of Christ over all things.
To put it in simple terms, in these lectures Kuyper wants to portray Calvinism as a big-picture perspective on the Christian life. This is why he gives so much attention in this first lecture to the importance of seeing Calvinism as a “life-system.”2 If all we have is a theology about individual salvation, we can easily be taken in by the answers to the broader questions about human well-being generated by what he sees as the four other life-systems providing influential guidance for human living at that time: paganism, Islamism, Roman Catholicism, and modernism. To resist these competing influences, he argues, we must be clear about what Calvinism has to teach us about what he identifies as the “three fundamental relations of all human life”: how we human creatures relate to God, how we relate to our fellow humans, and how we relate to the larger world in which we find ourselves.3
Foundational to all of this for Kuyper is our understanding of who God is. The supreme authority of the God of the Bible is basic to Kuyper’s understanding of reality. As the Creator of all things, God is distinct from all he has called into being. God did not have to create a world in order to be fully God. That view stands in stark contrast to the pantheistic understanding, which equates the divine with the “all” of the universe. Kuyper was passionate about that classical conception of the Wholly Other-ness of God.
The denial of this vast “being” gap between the Creator and his creation is at the heart of human sinfulness. God alone is worthy of our ultimate trust, and when we put that trust in something less than God—something creaturely—we are engaged in idolatry, and this is the root of all sin. By turning our ultimate allegiance toward something within the creation, we mess up those “three fundamental relations of all human life.”4 By refusing to honor God’s authority, we cut ourselves off from the blessings of living in fellowship with our Creator, and this in turn disrupts our relations with our fellow humans as well as with our ways of relating to the nonhuman world.
What’s at stake in all of this for Kuyper is the insistence that Christian faith is more than a purely “personal” matter. It is not less than that, of course. We human beings got into the mess that we are in because our first parents made the very personal decision to trust the serpent’s promise that if they would disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, they themselves would “be like God” (Gen 3:5). But that personal act of rebellion has wide-reaching consequences for human life—which is why Kuyper goes on in these lectures to explain how restoring our personal relationship with God through Christ’s atoning work has profound implications for how we view church, politics, science, and artistic endeavors.
Before getting into the details of those specific areas of Christian service, though, Kuyper wants us to see how the life-system he sets forth differs from other major life-systems that are at work in the world. He is especially concerned about one of these in particular. In present life, he says, it is modernism and Christianity that “are wrestling with one another, in mortal combat.”5 He sees a close connection in this regard between the modernist life-system and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century.
Two decades earlier Kuyper had founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party, of which he had served as the party’s leader in the Dutch Parliament. In choosing “Anti-Revolutionary” for the name of his political party, he signaled his conviction that the ideology of the French Revolution was diametrically opposed to Christian life and thought. The revolutionaries in France were committed to abolishing everything associated with belief in God. Central to their thinking was the insistence on the radical supremacy of the independent human self. In that sense, the ideology of the French Revolution was the philosophical expression of the serpent’s promise that human beings can be their own gods, with human reason functioning as the ultimate source of meaning and value.
