Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy

TROWEL & SWORD

Ray Hoekzema

Whilst Kuyper was a person of his own time, with all the limitations of that context, he did leave us a legacy, be it a mixed one. This is well born out by a new book from Eerdmans Publishing Co: Religion, Pluralism, and Public life – Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for the Twenty First Century (Luis E. Lugo, Editor 385p).

Kuyper raised important issues that transcend time and place. That is immediately obvious from the insightful ‘Preface’ by Max Stackhouse, Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. He also hosted the Kuyper Centennial Conference held at the same Seminary in February 1998.

The book is a collection of essays delivered at this conference by a range of authors that cover expertise in religion – systematic theology – economics – political history, science, psychology and philosophy – Christian social and economic ethics – law – and public justice, all grouped into five major areas of interest. It is like a goldmine with so many theologians giving a researched summation of a particular aspect of Kuyper’s life and work.

This book is a rich and veritable smorgasbord of reflections on Kuyperian thought and perspective. We need to be aware that Kuyper was a preacher, a journalist and editor who founded a national Christian daily paper, an educator who founded a Christian university and was a leading light in founding Christian education, a church leader who founded the Calvinist Church of Holland and a politician who founded a Christian political party and became Prime Minister.

As a theologian and political commentator, he had his opponents but they found him hard to pin down, accusing him of playing politics in the church and theology in political life. This was exacerbated by the contradictions and paradoxes in Kuyper’s own character, sometimes sarcastic, polemic but at other times pastoral with great fervour. He underwent a significant change in his 30th year when he was attracted to Calvinism by the “power of the absolute”. It was to give his life direction on which he could rely and offered, he thought, a cure for the ills threatening the Victorian world. He considered the 17th century golden age the most important part of Calvinism, a Puritan strand he yearned to recover.

Peter Heslam, who authored “Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham’s lectures on Calvinism”, reckons that Princeton and the 1898 Stone Lectures have given us the essential Kuyper, because the Stone Lectures crystallise and make explicit a notion that had antecedents in his earlier work, and that is of profound importance to understanding the core of his intellectual legacy.

Kuyper’s comtemporary, theologian B.B.Warfield, was instrumental in inviting him to Princeton and being involved in the translation, publication and distribution of Kuyper’s work was chiefly responsible for his international fame. Warfield’s enthusiasm for all that Kuyper stood for seem unbounded when at one time he stated that Kuyper displayed “a systematising genius that is rare.” It is worth noting that for nearly fifty years, Kuyper’s editorials in the daily newspaper he founded helped to influence and shape public opinion.

We may often be dismayed with the present secular and political scene but a century ago this world famous Dutch theologian was disappointed with the ways in which European, and especially Christians in his own country were adopting the secularising ideologies of the French revolution, particularly as these were being spread by socialists and anarchists among urban and rural workers. Many thought that the Enlightment’s revolutionary ideology held more promise for the future than the faith of their forebears. They abandoned what Kuyper believed to be the wider, deeper, longer and higher insights, especially of the Reformed version of the Christian tradition. Are we seeing history repeating itself?

Kuyper advocated an intellectually rigorous, biblically based, re-Reformed perspective that sought to bring a “Christian-worldview” to bear on personal piety, church polity, cultural and economic life, and a pluralist public square. He believed that a profound Reformed Christian faith would be the best cure for the negative results of a latent paganism masking as faith. The well-being of the soul, the character of local communities, the fabric of society at large, and the fate of civilisation are intimately related and cannot be separated from theological and moral issues. His famous declaration that “every square inch” belongs to God was part of a compound sentence whose first half insisted that “no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest.”

Another contemporary of Kuyper, Scottish theologian James Orr, argued that Christianity’s only defence against attack from the modernistic (and dare I say post-modernistic) worldview, was to develop, expound and apply an equally comprehensive worldview of its own. By the time you read this hopefully Reformation Forum 2000, held only a week or two ago, will have left a legacy from which the immediate and future generations may benefit, in as much that those who were part of it will influence their particular sphere by living and reflecting all that is encapsulated in a “Christian worldview”.

With a pamphlet published in 1874 entitled Calvinism, the Origin and Safeguard of our Constitutional Liberties, Kuyper introduced the principle of “sphere sovereignty”, limiting the power of the state, righting social wrongs, imposing restraints on unbridled capitalism, and safeguarding the freedom of education so that responsibility for bringing up children lay with parents, not the state.

Though some negatives evolved from this, the challenge for Kuyper’s descendants will be to take his valuable concept of sphere sovereignty and work out its implications for a post-industrial and post-modern society. For instance, it must acknowledge that the cultural mandate is a human mandate, not to be subdivided by ethnicity, class, generation, or gender, but shared in all respects by all who share the image of God. In another essay, Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, also airs some valuable reflections on sphere sovereignty.

Kuyper understood the people’s need for bread but also their need for vision and ideals, meeting this need by pointing them upward. Bob Goudzwaard, Professor of Economics at the Free University of Amsterdam conjectures that Kuyper would have loved to be around to debate such current issues as globalisation in the light of his “sphere sovereignty” in which either a sovereign church or sovereign state could threaten the independent existence of all other spheres of life. However, it is not the presence of these institutions, but far more their absence, that now sets the tone. Thus we need a renewed understanding of “sphere sovereignty” tracing it back to its Christian roots in order to recover some aspects of its lasting significance. This essay gives one a valuable insight into the various aspects of globalisation.

For Kuyper the spheres are realms of God’s rule, governed by living and binding commandments as radiations of the one lordship of Christ. Gerbrandy, Prime Minister of the Netherlands during the Second World War espoused that the principle of sphere sovereignty is pre-eminently Christian and pre-eminently Reformed. It cannot be characterised in terms of human goals, its primary concern is that the ways of God be followed. Max Stackhouse says: “what is needed in our time is a vision of holy plenitude. The spheres that God made are under threat and need re-reformation and be examined with every family on earth in mind and be re-grounded in the plenitude of Christian love.”

James Skillen, in summing up, asks the question: “Why Kuyper now?” He says: “We are still mining his work with value.” Though Kuyper’s flaws in the aspects of racism and chauvinism have been rigorously exposed and critiqued, the question is whether we can learn something from him that might help us critique and reform some of the deformities of our day, e.g. individualism, collectivism, and secularism. Many of the essayists provide ample evidence that the answer is yes. Kuyper’s allegiance to biblical authority and to Christ provided the basis for his conviction that God is never finished reforming us. Truly, Kuyper stood in the Reformed tradition of semper reformanda.

Skillen says that nothing could be more timely or urgent than a discussion on the meaning of sphere sovereignty (observing and clarifying the differences between spheres) and subsidiarity (recognising decentralised patterns within a sphere) for our complex societies, which are increasingly recognising the limits of individualism. Those who seek Christian insight and motive for action in today’s world will find much in Kuyper to inspire and provoke them. In the light of prevailing humanistic thinking, this book has plenty to show how fruitful Kuyper can be as a resource and catalyst for Christian thinking.

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