tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88341132023-11-16T10:25:55.665-05:00The KUYPERIANinformation about neocalvinismBaushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-1100121374353766132006-01-16T00:00:00.001-05:002018-03-01T14:50:31.492-05:00WelcomeThis site contains information about Abraham Kuyper and the distinctively Christian cultural movement, worldview and social philosophy known as neocalvinism or Kuyperianism.<br />
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There are several introductory articles posted on this site listed under <span style="font-style: italic;">archives</span>.<br />
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There are additional off-site articles on this subject under <span style="font-style: italic;">links</span>.<br />
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We also link to several <span style="font-style: italic;">books</span> and audio <span style="font-style: italic;">mp3</span> resources on this topic<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>.<br />
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Please send your suggestions and comments about this site to:<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">ideolog-AT-gmail-DOT-com</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Root Of Neocalvinism</span><br />
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As a sort of caveat to various articles here I want to clarify that the foundational principle of a truly biblical worldview elaborated in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper is <span style="font-style: italic;">the sovereignty of God</span>. Kuyper's burden was to demonstrate both "theoretically and practically" that genuine Scriptural religion provided the basis for a comprehensive understanding of the world. And the core of this particular religious outlook is found in the Calvinistic understanding of God's absolute sovereignty.<br />
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Those of a non-Calvinistic persuasion (so-called "Evangelicals" or generic Protestants) who are attracted to certain features of the neocalvinistic movement are often antagonistic to genuine Calvinism. However, any attempt to discard or modify the root of the Kuyperian perspective and yet preserve its fruit will inevitably result in a tragic distortion in both theory and practice.<br />
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Kuyper anticipated the objection. “It may be asked,” he said, “whether I do not claim honors for Calvinism that belong to Protestantism in general. To this I reply in the negative.” ... “[Non-Calvinistic] Protestantism alone wanders about in the wilderness without aim or direction, moving hither and thither, without making any progress.” ... “[A unified worldview] is never to be found in a vague conception of Protestantism winding itself as it does in all kind of tortuosities, but you do find it in that mighty historic process, which as Calvinism dug a channel of its own for the powerful stream of its life.”<br />
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“Our watchword must be,” said Kuyper, “Seek first the kingdom of God.”... In this regard, “first stands the confession of the absolute Sovereignty of the Triune God; for of Him, through Him and unto Him are all things. ...This is the fundamental conception of religion as maintained by Calvinism, and hitherto, no one has ever found a higher conception. For no higher conception <span style="font-style: italic;">can</span> be found. The fundamental thought of Calvinism [is] at the same time the fundamental thought of the Bible, and of [true] Christianity itself...”<br />
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Kuyper insisted that the “dominating principle” of a biblical worldview is “in the widest sense cosmologically, <span style="font-style: italic;">the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos</span> in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.” “Do not think it strange,” he said, “when I point to the Calvinistic dogma of predestination as the strongest motive for the cultivation of the sciences [i.e., 'academic' fields of all kinds].” ... “How can we prove that love for the sciences, which aims at unity in our cognizance of the entire cosmos, is effectually secured by means of our Calvinistic belief in God’s foreordination? If you want to understand this you have to go back from predestination to God’s decree in general... Belief in predestination is nothing but [the application of] God’s decreeing will (His Sovereignty) to your own existence.”<br />
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If Neocalvinism is to remain genuine and a vital movement, there can be no compromise with Evangelicalism or any other form of non-Calvinism. We must maintain with Kuyper that a more thorough development of the sciences and understanding of creation is “diametrically opposed to Arminianism [i.e., non-Calvinism], and in complete harmony with Calvinistic belief that there is one Supreme will of God, the cause of all existing things, subjecting them to fixed ordinances and directing them towards a pre-established plan.”<br />
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“I maintain,” Kuyper emphasized, “that Calvinism has neither invented nor conceived this fundamental interpretation [of our relation to God], but that God Himself implanted it in the hearts of its heroes and heralds. We face here no product of a clever intellectualism, but the fruit of a work of God in the heart.”<br />
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For futher study of the biblical conception of God's Sovereignty, which is essential to genuine neocalvinism and upon which it is founded, I recommend <a href="https://www.monergism.com/search?keywords=Sovereignty+of+God&format=All" target="_blank">this list of articles</a>.<br />
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<span style="color: rgb(255 , 255 , 255); font-size: 85%;">Christian Worldview, Christian thinking, Christian thought, Christian theory, Christian scholarship, Christian activism, Christian life, Christian living, Christian view, Christian philosophy, Christian politics, Christian political action, Christian political theory, Christian social thought, Christian social action, Christian social theory, Christian culture, Christian academics,<br />Reformed Worldview, Reformed thinking, Reformed thought, Reformed theory, Reformed scholarship, Reformed activism, Reformed life, Reformed living, Reformed view, Reformed philosophy, Reformed politics, Reformed political action, Reformed political theory, Reformed social thought, Reformed social action, Reformed social theory, Reformed culture, Reformed academics,<br />Calvinist Worldview, Calvinist thinking, Calvinist thought, Calvinist theory, Calvinist scholarship, Calvinist activism, Calvinist life, Calvinist living, Calvinist view, Calvinist philosophy, Calvinist politics, Calvinist political action, Calvinist political theory, Calvinist social thought, Calvinist social action, Calvinist social theory, Calvinist culture, Calvinist academics,<br />Neocalvinist Worldview, Neocalvinist thinking, Neocalvinist thought, Neocalvinist theory, Neocalvinist scholarship, Neocalvinist activism, Neocalvinist life, Neocalvinist living, Neocalvinist view, Neocalvinist philosophy, Neocalvinist politics, Neocalvinist political action, Neocalvinist political theory, Neocalvinist social thought, Neocalvinist social action, Neocalvinist social theory, Neocalvinist culture, Neocalvinist academics,<br />Calvinian, Reformational, Kuyperian, Protestant,<br />Dr. Abraham Kuyper, Dr. A. Kuyper,</span>Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-1137366545400794982004-11-22T18:05:00.000-05:002006-01-15T18:09:05.413-05:00Kuyper And Neocalvinist Political Questions<span style="font-style:italic;">Jim Skillen, 1995</span><br /><br />For years, Americans assumed that their special practice of separating church and state answered all the important questions: government is a public, “secular” business, and religion is a private, “sacred” affair. But at the start of the twenty-first century, this simple formula is no longer self-evident and seldom goes unchallenged. The vitality of religion, both for good and for ill, is at work in all facets of public life, and not only here in the United States.<br /><br />Citizens and their representatives in government and the courts must struggle day by day over particular legislative and legal details; such is the art and obligation of statecraft. But if the details are the only things that ever occupy our civic attention, then many of the most important, far-reaching and long-term questions about the deeper meaning of law and government will never be asked or debated in public. The truth is that political and legal affairs cannot be confined to government offices. Government and the law typically have to do with the health and well-being of a public order in which families, businesses, churches, schools, the arts and sciences, and many other institutions and activities exist and interact with one another. How then ought we to understand all of these together? In particular, how do we comprehend the public order from a Christian point of view?<br /><br />Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was an influential Dutch scholar-statesman whose many contributions to public life were defined by a creative Christian response to these questions. Kuyper believed that the Christian life cannot be confined to church life. Accepting Christ’s claim of authority over the entire world, he sought to follow the implications of that faith into politics, journalism, the university, and other human endeavors. Kuyper is not the only significant Christian political leader to have appeared in the last two centuries. He was certainly unusual, however, in the way he deployed his diverse range of talents to advance a Christian understanding of modern life while simultaneously giving political, academic and ecclesiastical leadership in his own country.<br /><br />Born and raised in a Reformed (Calvinist) Church family, the son of a pastor, Kuyper took strongly to books and learning. In 1867, he earned his doctorate in theology at the University of Leiden and then entered the pastorate. A few years earlier, as he was beginning graduate study, he suffered a severe emotional crisis that was resolved by an overwhelming experience of God’s grace. It was not until some years after completing his study at Leiden, however, that he had a personal conversion experience that reordered his sense of Christian calling.[1]<br /><br />Kuyper opened his public career in 1867 by publishing a tract in which he argued for the purity and proper government of the church. For the next two decades the “church question” remained a central concern. In 1870, after meeting the Christian historian and political leader G. Groen van Prinsterer, who became like a second father to him, Kuyper accepted the pastorate of a church in Amsterdam. From there, he followed Groen into politics and journalism, taking on the editorship of the Christian daily newspaper De Standard in 1872 and entering the national parliament at the age of thirty-seven in 1874.<br /><br />Seeking the reform of both church and politics made Kuyper more and more conscious of the need for distinctively Christian training of those preparing for service in these fields. Accordingly, he began to work for the reform of the laws governing schooling to permit equal treatment of religious schools while he took the first steps that would lead to the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880. For decades thereafter, he served the Free University in both professorial and administrative capacities.<br /><br />After Groen van Prinsterer died, Kuyper assumed leader ship of the fledgling political party that his mentor had found ed. During the 1870’s Kuyper brought it to a level of real organization on a popular basis, making it the first “Christian Democratic” party in Europe. Kuyper’s leadership of the party —named the Antirevolutionary Party because of its opposition to the secularist principles generated by the French Revolution —led eventually to his own brief stint as Prime Minister from 1901-04.[2]<br /><br />“By all accounts,” says James Bratt, “Kuyper was at his best as an orator, which requires that we Americans read him with the memory of a M.L.King, Jr. speech in mind.”[3] But, as Bratt points out, Kuyper’s many strengths were accompanied by significant weaknesses. “Critical genius, passionate<br />logic, spiritual depth, social sympathy, expansive architecture, wit, satire, and hope flood his pages, all encumbered with exaggeration and pomposity, cheap shots and quick generalization. Kuyper was a polemicist who little bothered to control his bias and never used two words when three would do.”[4]<br /><br />In 1898, Kuyper traveled to the United States at the invitation of Princeton Theological Seminary to deliver the Stone Lectures and to receive an honorary doctorate. The lectures he delivered on that occasion[5] show the scope of Kuyper’s learning and Christian concern. Reformed Christianity is a life-system, he argued, and it challenges other life-systems in every sphere of life—in politics, science, the arts, and more.<br /><br />The word “religion” is used most often in America today to refer to organized religious institutions and to the various activities they promote and coordinate. Religion in this sense is then typically placed alongside politics, business, sports, the media, and other efforts, as one among many human activities. As a consequence, politics and the rest of life come to be viewed as non-religious or secular in nature. But this is highly misleading. Christianity is a religion of the Scriptures, which speaks to all of life, not merely to the life of organized congregations.<br /><br />Moreover, and equally important, the ways of life that are followed by many people who may not call themselves religious are functionally equivalent to religious ways of life. Major movements and ideologies of the twentieth century, including nationalism, Communism, Fascism, individualism, socialism, and secularism, have functioned publicly much like the influential religions of the past. They require faith in certain basic principles; they organize all (or most) of life around their central aspirations; and they contend with one another for control over most, if not all, areas of life, including politics, education, science, technology, and the media.<br /><br />Religion, therefore, has not faded away or been sidelined, as many modernists believe. Instead, new religions —many of them thoroughly humanistic and this-worldly in character— have arisen to contend with one another as well as with more traditional religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. This fact is not always evident to us in the west, because Christians has often accommodated themselves to modernist movements in different ways. In some cases, Christians have, in practice, accepted a secular/sacred, public/private division of life that seems to mitigate the religiously deep conflicts.<br /><br />But in many parts of the world, and now increasingly in the United States, this accommodation to secularizing tendencies, driven by non-theist substitute religions, is coming under severe criticism. Muslims in many countries are attacking outright all forms of secularism. In parts of the West, the battle lines are not always that sharp. But particular issues in public debate often reveal deeper levels of worldview conflict. These include debates over the sacredness or the mere utilitarian usefulness of the natural environment, over abortion and the sacredness of human life, and over the control of schooling due to disagreements about fundamental issues of human identity, human sexuality, and the origin of the universe.<br /><br />Kuyper was an astute critic of the idea that religion is only one among many human activities. He often criticized the belief, which took hold in the West following the French Revolution, that religion can be confined to a private sphere and that other areas of life can be treated as religiously neutral (or non-religious) and managed through a secular consensus. He well understood that the very idea of a radical division of life into sacred and secular compartments emerges from a comprehensive worldview at odds with Christianity.<br /><br />This Enlightenment notion functions as a religious driving force, which, when successful, takes control of human hearts and minds. The modern era, Kuyper maintained, simply cannot be understood without grasping the significance of the driving force of competing religions —religions both ancient and modern, both theist and secularist.<br /><br />“If everything that is exists for the sake of God,” Kuyper argued, “then if follows that the whole creation must give glory to God. The sun, moon, and stars in the firmament, the birds in the air, the whole of Nature around us, but, above all, man himself, who, priestlike, must consecrate to God the whole of creation, and all life thriving in it … The sacred anointing of the priest of creation must reach down to his beard and to the hem of his garment. His whole being, including all his abilities and powers, must be pervaded by the sensus divinitatis.”[6] This insight was not original with Kuyper, to be sure, but he is one of the few leaders to pursue its implications so persistently within many spheres of modern life.<br /><br />We might say that Kuyper, following Augustine, recognized that life is driven and shaped at the deepest level by competing “loves” that motivate and guide people. Christian faith made possible by the love of God through Christ is one such driving force, and Christians profess that the power of God’s love challenges all other religions —all other loves— with its light. What does this mean for a Christian understanding of our world today? How should the light of God’s love in Christ both illumine our interpretation of history and guide our actions in history?<br /><br />If the true way of life has been opened by the incarnate Son of God, then the implications of this dynamic movement must be as comprehensive as life itself. The apostles explain that all things were created in and through and for the one who became flesh in Jesus. Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension to the right hand of God as Lord of the whole creation stamp reality with the truth about its deepest meaning and ultimate destiny.<br /><br />Christianity, therefore, is more than the affirmation of a dogma, more than personal piety, more than an orientation of the soul toward unseen transcendence or an afterlife. Living by Christian faith is a way of life based on the conviction that God, in Christ, has created all things and is directing all things toward the day of God’s climactic revelation. Thus, everything has meaning and value in history. Political life, too, has its unique revelatory character and proper calling from God. Kuyper put it this way: “The son [of God] is not to be excluded from anything. You cannot point to any natural realm or star or comet or even descend into the depth of the earth, but it is related to Christ, not in some unimportant tangential way, but directly. There are no forces in nature, no laws that control those forces, that do not have their origin in that eternal Word. For this reason, it is totally false to restrict Christ to spiritual affairs and to assert that there is no point of contact between him and the natural sciences.”[7]<br /><br />No sphere of human life, as Kuyper saw it, “is conceivable in which religion does not maintain its demands that God shall be praised, that God’s ordinances shall be observed, and that every labora shall be permeated with its ora in fervent and ceaseless prayer.”[8] Kuyper emphasized the need for a comprehensive Christian worldview that would allow for an “architectonic” or structural critique of the creation’s disorder and lead to a multidimensional approach of human service to God and neighbors in all spheres of life. Each human responsibility has its own God-given characteristics and responsibilities. None can be reduced to the other. None can be ignored or discarded by Christians. All of them hang together in one creation order —in a single, natural-social “ecosystem”— before the face of God.<br /><br />“How ought human beings to act in the political arena?” To answer a question like this from a Christian point of view requires that our interpretation of government and politics be guided by a larger vision of the unity and diversity of life so we can see politics in its relation to other spheres of human responsibility in the single creation order. Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, is Lord of all. This confession has everything to do with political life on earth, and Christ’s relation to earthly polities and governments is connected with the truth about God’s entire creation, of which Christ is Judge, Redeemer, and Lord.<br /><br />The Christian quest for political wisdom sufficient to guide responsible action must be one that appreciates both the lordship of Christ over all things and the particular meaning of politics and government. Finally, if, as Christians believe, Jesus Christ is coming again for final judgment and the transfiguration of reality into a new heaven and earth, then the history of creation entails an eschatological orientation that must have a bearing on everything that happens here and now. What does it mean, therefore, to fulfill one’s civic responsibilities with a view to Christ’s second coming? In what sense should the Christian hope of final redemption give realistic shape to worldly politics, which often appears to be controlled more by sin than by redemptive hope?<br /><br />Ever since the apostle Paul began to preach the gospel to the gentiles, the international dynamic of the Christian community has been at work. Followers of Jesus Christ bear allegiance to someone higher than a family elder, a local dignitary, or a national god. The bonds of faith, hope, and love in Jesus Christ are fashioned by the work of the Holy Spirit, and they call believers into a kingdom that transcends all earthly boundaries. Moreover, biblical revelation conveys the promise that God’s kingdom will endure when all else fails. The final and complete appearance of this kingdom will mark the end of history as we know it and will usher in the glory of the Lord.<br /><br />This is Christian faith. This is the hope that compels and nurtures Christ’s followers. The bonds of Christian community are the bonds of faith —the same faith that Abraham had when “he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:19-10).<br /><br />Where and how in our day is the community of Christian faith growing, enduring, and remaining faithful in service to God? The bonds of sin and darkness remain strong, even among believers. The false religions of nationalism and materialism easily entrap us. Syncretism with other faiths weakens the faith of those who claim to be Christians. Our lack of discipline as a community of faith holds us back. Nevertheless, the vineyard keeper remains faithful, caring for the vines that bear fruit, grafting in new branches, pruning fruitless ones, and nurturing the whole vineyard.<br /><br />Without doubt, Kuyper was influenced by various nationalist and parochial spirits of his day. Not everything that he believed and taught should be heeded, and some of it deserves serious criticism. Nevertheless, Kuyper’s widest, deepest vision was the same one that has inspired Christians since Christ’s first coming —a vision of a Christian community bound together across all borders and nationalities, serving the Lord and neighbors in the power of the Spirit.<br /><br />“It is the precious comfort for the lonely heart,” Kuyper wrote in his book on the Holy Spirit, “that, in all the ends of the earth, among all nations and peoples, in every city and village, God has His own whom He has called out and gathered unto eternal life; and that I share with them the same life, possess the same hope and calling, and sustain to them, however imperceptibly, the tenderest and holiest communion… And therefore this glorious communion should no longer be otherwise than a small company. [The communion of the saints] is not exclusive, but inclusive. It is not an idea which closes the door and shuts the windows; but, throwing doors and windows wide open, it walks through the four corners of the earth, searches the ages of the past, and looks forward to the ages to come.”[9]<br /><br />What are the constraining spirits that keep us from working wholeheartedly to strengthen the bonds of international Christian community in our day? What are the parochial blinders that hold us back? What difference does the worldwide community of Christian faith make in the world in which we live? What difference should it be making, especially in the public realms of politics, commerce, industry, the media, science, technology, and the arts? If other religions appear to be exerting greater influence over world affairs, how should Christians respond? What can Christians of different nationalities and languages do to encourage one another? And what approach should Christians take to international law and politics to strengthen bonds of justice among the states and peoples of the world?<br /><br />These are important questions that Kuyper helps us answer.<br /><br /><br />------------------------------<br /><br />Notes<br /><br />[1] See James D. Bratt, “Raging Tumults of Soul: The Private Life of Abraham Kuyper,” The Reformed Journal (November, 1987), and R.D. Henderson, “How Abraham Kuyper became a Kuyperian,” Christian Scholar’s Review (September, 1992), pp. 22-35.<br /><br />[2] For an introduction to Kuyper’s public life, see James D. Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper’s Public Career,” The Reformed Journal (October, 1987); L. Praamsma, Let Christ Be King: Reflections on the Life and Times of AbrahamKuyper (Jordan Station, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1985); McKendree R. Langley, The Practice of Political Spirituality: Episodes from the Public Career of Abraham Kuyper, 1879-1894 (Jordan Station, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1984). Recent Dutch publications on Kuyper include: G. Puchinger, Abraham Kuyper: De Jonge Kuyper (1837-1867) (Franeker: T. Wever, 1987); R. Kuiper, Herenmuiterij: Vernieuwing en Sociaal Conflict in de Antirevolutionaire Beweging, 1871-1894 (Leiden: J.J. Groen en Zoon, 1994); J. de Bruijn, Abraham Kuyper: Leven en Werk in Beeld: Een Beeldbiografie (Amsterdam: Historisch Documentatiecentrum, Vrije Universiteit, 1987); J. Stellingwerff, Kuyper en de VU (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1987).<br /><br />[3] Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper’s Public Career,” pp 11-12.<br /><br />[4] Ibid., p. 11. An important speech that Kuyper gave at the opening of the first Christian Social Congress of 1891 has recently been retranslated and published as The Problem of Poverty, ed. James W. Skillen (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991). A wide-ranging collection of Kuyper’s speeches and essays, some of them translated for the first time, have been edited by James D. Bratt: Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Excerpts from two of Kuyper’s speeches can be found in Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society, eds., James W. Skillen and Rockne M. McCarthy (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1991), pp. 235-64.<br /><br />[5] Kuyper’s 1998 Stone Lectures were published as Lectures on Calvinism, 12th ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982). An excellent introduction to the lectures and Kuyper’s life and thought is presented by Peter S. Heslam in his Creating a Christian World View: Abraham Kuyper’s “Lectures on Calvinism” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).<br /><br />[6] To illustrate continuing, worldwide interest in Kuyper, I am deliberately quoting here from a recent Indian edition of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures, edited by Vishal Mangalwadi, The Crown of Christian Heritage (Landour, Mussoorie, U.P. India: Nivedit Good Books Distributors, 1994), p.53.<br /><br />[7] Kuyper, You Can Do Greater Things Than Christ, trans. Jan H. Boer (Jos, Nigeria: Institute of Church and Society, 1991), p. 74. This is the translation of a section from the first volume of Kuyper’s Pro Rege, of Het Koningschap van Christus (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1911).<br /><br />[8] Kuyper, The Crown of Christian Heritage (see note 6 above), p. 54. One of the best expositions of Kuyper’s understanding of the basis for organized Christian action in all spheres of life is S.U. Zuidema’s “Common Grace and Christian Action in Abraham Kuyper,” in Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation (Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1972), pp. 52-105.<br /><br />[9] Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri de Vries (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908), p.550.Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-1098476263595214742004-10-22T16:15:00.000-04:002004-10-22T16:17:43.596-04:00What Does It Mean To Be Kuyperian?<span style="font-style:italic;">Donald N. Petcher, April 1996</span>
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<br />I. Prefatorial Remarks
<br />Let me begin my talk by referring us back to the original question that led to this series of assembly talks: What does it mean to be “Kuyperian”? In this talk, I will attempt to uncover the central motivations behind Kuyper’s philosophical and theological directions, and then draw some attention to some themes he developed from his fundamental principles. I have chosen to focus on what I understand to be the foundation of what it means to be “Kuyperian,” that underlying all knowledge, there must be a faith, and that underlying true knowledge, is the faith in the Creator God. Central in this discussion is the question of what is common among men, relating to common grace, and the role of differing faiths in antithesis. I also find these themes important for any discussion of the academic enterprise, for it is exactly the question of understanding what we can accept from others and what we must reject that we need to decide. What I hope to accomplish in this talk is to present how Kuyper understood these questions, and to suggest how his perspective should be fruitful for all of us in our present academic context.
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<br />My talk will begin with a brief biographical sketch of Kuyper, providing some idea of the beginning of his wrestlings. From there I will move on to a discussion of his faith in the organic unity of all creation, followed by a somewhat closer look at the role of this faith. This naturally leads to the question of what is common among men in the doing of ‘science’ (Kuyper uses this term to mean all areas of academic investigation). Then I will show how Kuyper saw the subject of the antithesis arising naturally from within the common scientific enterprise, a division that ultimately arises because of the differing faiths which motivate at the foundational level. Next I will make a few remarks about Kuyper’s heritage, and in particular about the place of Dooyeweerd in his line of thought. Finally I’ll close with some comments suggesting our direction forward in the Kuyperian tradition. There is so much more to Kuyper than I could possibly present in a talk of this nature, so I hope this is only a beginning of our investigation of his contribution to our Reformed tradition.
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<br />II. Biographical Notes on Kuyper
<br />In a very brief and concise paragraph, B.B. Warfield sums up Kuyper’s achievements this way: For many years he has exercised a most remarkable influence in his own country. Leader and organizer of the antirevolutionary Party; editor-in-chief of De Standaard; founder, defender and soul of the Free University of Amsterdam; consistent advocate of spiritual freedom in the church, and of the rights of the confession and the principles of the Reformed truth, to which the Dutch people owe all that has promoted their greatness; teacher of religion who feeds thousands of hungry people with his instruction in De Heraut, his weekly, and whose lectures at the Free University have shaped a generation of theologians who are well versed in historical and systematic theology - in short, a power in Church and State . . . (Praansma 125-6)
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<br />This is indeed a remarkable set of achievements. No less are those mentioned in Louis Praansma’s summary of Kuyper’s work in his brief biography of Kuyper, Let Christ be King: When Kuyper appeared on the scene, the Dutch nation, in its leadership and majority, had lost contact with its glorious past. Some liberals tried to revive that past by pointing to the great cultural achievements of the ‘golden age.’ Kuyper emphasized the Calvinistic character of the nation and appealed to the energy, fearlessness and faith of the Reformation era. When he died, free Christian schools were to be found from north to south. Believers were applying Christian principles in their homes, churches and associations. Christian men of science were demonstrating that belief in the Bible was not antiquated but up-to-date. The face of the country had been renewed. (186)
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<br />Abraham Kuyper was born on October 29th, 1837 to the family of a Dutch minister in the Reformed State Church. In 1855, he enrolled in the University of Leiden, where he studied mainly literature, and received a B.A. in classical literature. After his B.A. he took up the study of theology. During this time he decided to become a minister himself and came under the teaching of J.H. Scholten, a modernist theologian who is referred to as “the grand master of Dutch Modernism” by Praansma. Scholten was deeply influenced by the successes of the science of his day; and consequently he had ceased to hold to the “faultlessness” of scripture, replacing it with an inner authority based on reason. During these years of university training, Kuyper lost his childhood faith. Of these days in Kuyper’s life, Praansma records:
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<br />In his student days, Kuyper had been an enthusiastic disciple of the proponents of the Modern theology. The Moderns, as their name suggests, wanted to be men of the present, not of the past. . . . The Moderns lived in an age when natural science could point to great triumphs. Historical criticism of the original biblical sources became a project of theology. . . . In such a time, a problem that had confronted Schleiermacher was knocking with new power at the door of the church: Is there still a little corner left for faith? What is the relation between faith and science? Is it possible for us to be men of our time and men of the Bible, to be living and active men of our age and loyal, faithful members of the church? (36)
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<br />These were indeed pressing questions that Kuyper also wrestled with after his conversion. In all his teachings and cultural activities, he was concerned to demonstrate the depth and the extent of the relevance of the Reformed principles of Calvinism for the modernism of his day. Kuyper himself later reflected back on Scholten’s theology thus: . . . Scholten’s modernism was deterministic, starting from an idea of God, whereas real Reformed theology was Scriptural, starting and continuing with the living God.A genuinely Reformed theologian should not set up a system, but should listen to the Word, as Mary did at Jesus’ feet. (Praansma 136)
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<br />Kuyper’s Conversion
<br />Kuyper’s conversion took place partly through the reading of a novel The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Yonge, in which he identified with a main character whose pride led to his eventual downfall. This self-recognition apparently brought Kuyper to his knees as he was confronted with his own pride and misdirection. Kuyper, when looking back on this episode, realized that there are two directions, two paths, open to everyone. Each has its own principle and in the systematic development from that principle, the one necessarily flows forth out of the other,. . . [marking] it as a life direction. . . starting from a. . . spiritual orientation of the human heart. (Henderson 31)
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<br />Subsequently, he took a pastorate at a church in rural Beesd, where contact with traditional Calvinists eventually led him away from the path of modernism. Another influence also had a profound effect on him as well. Roger Henderson explains in his article, How Abraham Kuyper became a Kuyperian, that during his time at Beesd, Kuyper came across an article of his former professor, J.H. Scholten, which stated his opinion that the apostle John did not write the Gospel of that name. Kuyper was quite shocked at this, having remembered vividly numerous lectures he had heard as a student in which Scholten had given multiple reasons why John had indeed written this Gospel.
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<br />What had caused the change? According to Scholten’s own admission, the change came about because of a shift in world view; he moved from a Platonic to a more Aristotelian perspective. (33) Kuyper then recognized that Scholten had identified “an a priori as the guiding star of his criticism.” (34) Of this, Henderson comments:
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<br />Kuyper does not conclude from this, however, that Scholten is a poor scholar doing substandard work. Quite to the contrary, he concludes that Scholten has candidly, if inadvertently, disclosed something of vital importance about every scholar, namely that he or she is dependent upon a worldview. A worldview influences and helps the scholar to conceive and work out new theories and ideas. This recognition of what he calls the “a priori,” the central role that worldviews play in scholarly activity gave Kuyper the courage he required to disagree with an older, more learned scholar like Scholten. By breaking with him he broke with “modern” theology as such. Kuyper’s discovery helped him to resist the powerful influence of the intellectual trends of his day. (34)
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<br />In this way, Kuyper came to that understanding which became so central to his thinking, that faith at the root level of the heart’s commitment precedes knowledge in every form, and that this is the major factor separating the Modernist from the traditional Calvinist.
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<br />Kuyper as Reformer
<br />From this point on, Kuyper began to develop into a strong reforming influence in Holland, first in the church, and then reaching out to the culture at large. He also became a prolific writer, starting as editor in chief of the weekly paper De Heraut in 1871, and of the daily De Standaard the following year. He used these two papers over the years to formulate and spread his Reformational thinking throughout the land.
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<br />Among his political achievements are his victory in getting the state to grant to Christian and other sectarian schools equal status with public schools, and the establishment of the Free University (of Amsterdam) as a higher educational institute which is not subservient to the state. His involvement in politics led him to serve in the Dutch parliament and ultimately to the Prime Ministership of Holland. In this role he vigorously pushed a social agenda that avoided such extremes as revolutionary action on the one hand (he helped to establish the “Anti-Revolutionary Party”), and absolute property rights on the other. He saw all human activities as subservient to God, and vigorously defended the rights of the various social and scientific spheres from domination by the state. In this sense he saw the need for balance among the many structures of society.
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<br />However, we must leave all of these interesting chapters of his life and their implications for another day. Today we have only time to look into the foundational level. Let us now return to the question of what it means to be Kuyperian.
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<br />III. The essentials of “Kuyperianism”
<br />Kuyper as a Calvinist
<br />When we come to Kuyper’s theological foundations, two main things need to be said. The first is that he held solidly to the teachings of Calvin. At a time when many Dutch ministers of his day had turned to liberalism, Kuyper rediscovered Calvinistic orthodoxy and saw that the way ahead for the church in Holland lay in recovering the energy and strength and directions which Calvinism still had to offer. At the same time, he had a keen awareness of the necessity to adapt and apply this teaching to the times in which he was living. His dedication to the principles of Calvinism was not that of a longing for a return to a stronger historical past. Rather it emerged as an insistence on making those doctrines apply to the spirit and the conditions of his own age and times.
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<br />1. “Soteriological Calvinist”
<br />Let us start with a quote that illustrates Kuyper’s thorough commitment to an orthodox view of the Word of God as recorded in the Holy Scripture: Our human race, once fallen in sin, can have no more supply of pure or sufficient knowledge of God from the natural principium [general revelation]. Consequently God effects an auxiliary revelation for our human race, which, from a special principium of its own and under the necessary conditions, places a knowledge of God within the reach of the sinner which is suited to his condition. It took many centuries to accomplish this central Revelation, until it reached its completion. The description of this action of God, i.e. the providing of this central Revelation for our human race, is contained in the Holy Scripture. He who would know this central Revelation, must seek it therefore in the Holy Scripture. And in that sense the question, where the special principium with the central Revelation to our race as its fruit is now to be found, must be answered without hesitation as follows: In the Holy Scripture and in the Holy Scripture alone. (Principles of Sacred Theology 361-2)
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<br />This and other similar quotes, reveal that Kuyper held very strongly to the absolute necessity of the scripture as God’s central revelation for providing knowledge for salvation. Beyond accepting the Holy Scriptures as direct revelation from God, Kuyper affirmed the Calvinistic system of doctrine, with an emphasis on the sovereignty of God in all things. More importantly, Kuyper penetrated to the cultural significance and implications which lie within the heart of this system of doctrine, perhaps more so than many before him. Thus he ascribed to Calvinism, a critical role in understanding and shaping culture.
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<br />Witness, for example, what he says of Calvinism in his famous “Lectures on Calvinism” given as the Stone Lectures at Princeton University in 1898. In the context of discussing World Views, or “Life Systems” as he sometimes calls them, Kuyper suggests that Calvinism alone has understood man’s relation to God rightly. Further he says . . . Calvinism has neither invented nor conceived this fundamental interpretation, but that God Himself implanted it in the hearts of its heroes and its heralds. We face here no product of a clever intellectualism, but the fruit of a work of God in the heart, or, if you like, an inspiration of history. This point should be emphasized!(24)
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<br />Without belaboring the point further, we can say that Kuyper was a thoroughgoing Calvinist in the very same soteriological sense that we mean it today. He had all the petals on his TULIP. And he exalted Calvinism as a system of thought given by God, rather than invented by man. What we are more interested in here today is the implications that he drew out of this system for life and culture.
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<br />For Kuyper, Calvinism as a Life System had something unique to say to every time and every culture. So while pointing the church back to its confessions, he also warned against mere traditionalism. Emphasizing the old motto “ ‘ecclesia Reformata, quia semper reformanda’ (a Reformed church because we never stop reforming [sic]).” (Praansma 61) He was keenly aware that every age in history has its own set of problems and unique conditions so that it is necessary to assess anew the problems of his own day, in order to apply to them the principles of Calvinism. His activism for the church in Holland in the last century should be understood in the light of these two points: his firm commitment to Calvinist principles and confessions on the one hand, and his understanding of the need to assess each situation anew, on the other.
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<br />2. Calvinism as “Life System”
<br />In the first of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures entitled “Calvinism a Life System,” he used the term “life system” roughly the way we use the term “World View” from the German “Weltanschauung.” A life system, says Kuyper, had to be governed by a principle strong enough to embrace the whole unity of life and to guide further cultural development. In view of this, he says that in his time, two such life systems, Christianity and Modernism, were in a struggle for the minds and hearts of the people of the day, “wrestling one another in mortal combat.” (11) In order to determine the character of a life system, Kuyper offers three criteria: what does the system say about man’s relation to God, man’s relation to man, and man’s relation to the created world? (19)
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<br />Perhaps not surprisingly the first two of these echo Calvin’s opening words in the Institutes, where he says Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes, and gives birth to the other. . . . it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. (I.1-2)
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<br />The inextricable connection between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of ourselves is stressed by Kuyper when he lays out his own theory of knowledge. But in terms of identifying the character of a life system, Kuyper adds a third test: our understanding of our relation to the creation around us. This third concern comes across strongly throughout much of Kuyper’s writings. Perhaps this is partly due to the emphasis of science at the time, in which Kuyper had a great interest, but nevertheless it is an important addition, because it focuses part of the discussion squarely on issues of ontology in the philosophical realm and issues of culture in the practical realm. The Stone lectures are largely written to flesh out these ramifications of Calvinism for all our cultural activities.
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<br />Organic Unity of all revelation: special and general
<br />In understanding Calvinism to be the central principle on which we build our life system, an important tenet of Kuyperian thought is the organic unity of all that is revealed, including both realms of revelation: general (“natural principium”) and special (“special principium”). The German Idealists also were looking for such an “organic unity” and some might think that Kuyper is merely “Christianizing” this notion, but this appears to be far from the case. For Kuyper the case for the organic unity of all knowledge rests on the Calvinistic principle of the sovereignty of God, and on the fact that He is the origin of all that is revealed.
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<br />This concept of the organic unity of the world and of knowledge gave Kuyper a basis for the Christian’s involvement in the sciences and led him to work out an extensive doctrine of common grace. Because he believed in a common grace that allows non-regenerate people to have genuine insights in knowledge, he was not shy about using insights from other thinkers who were formulating similar ideas. On the other hand, he also criticizes the German Idealists strongly concerning their starting points, recognizing appropriately that their formulations of organic unity would end with a form of pantheism. Kuyper would not allow God to be collapsed into the creation. Instead he saw the necessity for God as the starting point of our knowledge when we approach science. We see this in the following quote concerning the relationship between man the knower and the world as the object of his knowledge:
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<br />And since the object does not produce the subject, nor the subject the object, the power that binds the two organically together must of necessity be sought outside of each. And however much we may speculate and ponder, no explanation can ever suggest itself to our sense, of the all-sufficient ground for this admirable correspondence and affinity between object and subject, on which the possibility and development of science wholly rests, until at the hand of Holy Scripture we confess that the Author of the cosmos created man in the cosmos as micro-cosmos “after his image and likeness. Thus understood, science presents itself to us as a necessary and ever-continued impulse in the human mind to reflect within itself the cosmos, plastically as to its elements, and to think it through logically as to its relations; always with the understanding that the human mind is capable of this by reason of its organic affinity to its object. (Principles 83)
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<br />In his book, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, Kuyper examined quite intensively the idea that all things in creation and hence all parts of human knowledge are interrelated to each other in an organic unity. Here the notion of “encyclopedia” represents to Kuyper a comprehensive and unified treatment of knowledge in which all of the different sciences are brought together in their interrelations and reflected on as a whole. This is in contrast to our present notion of encyclopedia as a compendium of facts organized in an alphabetical order, but with no other relation among themselves.
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<br />In this work, Kuyper laid out his perspective on a comprehensive approach to the study of the sciences, including what we call the natural sciences, but also including what Kuyper calls the “spiritual sciences,” psychology, sociology, economics, and so on, as well as theology. He did this in order to lay the groundwork for treating theology as a legitimate part of the whole enterprise of human knowledge, in fact an indispensable part of a university and to all seeking after knowledge. What is implied in this is that theology is related to all the other sciences and has a role in formulating human knowledge as a whole. Some quotes from the early parts of the Encyclopedia will give us an idea of his focus:
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<br />Since now that the world of our knowledge and that world of phenomena are not chaotic but organic, our thinking cannot rest till in the treasure of our knowledge it has exhibited such an Encyclopedic order as will harmonize with the organic relation both of that world of our knowledge and of that world of phenomena. Thus our human spirit is not to invent a certain order for our knowledge, but to seek out and to indicate the order which is already there . . . This necessity alone imparts to Encyclopedic study its scientific character. (Principles 28)
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<br />Here we see Kuyper emphasizing what flows from his ground principle that if God has created both the world and the means by which we obtain knowledge, we are not inventing order, but uncovering the unity which already exists. Similarly Kuyper says, . . . If from this the necessity arises for man to begin a scientific investigation of himself as a thinking being and of the laws which his thinking obeys, then there follows from this at the same time the demand that he shall make science itself an object of investigation and exhibit to his consciousness the organism of science . . . Science is distinguished from general knowledge by the fact that science puts the emphasis upon the order in that knowledge. Science is systematic, i.e. it is knowledge orderly arranged . . . the dilettante-Encyclopedist asks merely after the knowledge at hand, while the Encyclopedist who is a man of science interprets that knowledge as a system, and understands it consequently as science. (Principles 29)
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<br />Kuyper is therefore not so much interested in the contents of the particular sciences as he is in the system of science as a whole, or the system of investigation of knowledge. It is in the context of such an idea of the organic unity of creation and of knowledge that he can talk about how one’s faith and the principles one accepts on faith affect knowledge and one’s whole view of reality. This brings us to Kuyper’s emphasis on the role of the centrality of faith in all of life.
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<br />Centrality of Faith
<br />One might wonder at this stage how Kuyper could escape the Kantian problem of the inability for our rational thought to be assured that it is embracing experience of phenomena that actually reflects what exists. For this Kuyper appealed to the revelation of the transcendent God and to faith. For, he explains, “if there were no other way open to knowledge than through discursive thought,. . . because of the uncertainty . . . which is the penalty of sin, and [because of] the impossibility [of having therefore an objective method to decide] between truth and falsehood,” skepticism would reign. (Principles 123)
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<br />Here we see a remarkable foreshadowing of post-modernism. Kuyper continues,
<br />But since an entirely different way of knowledge is disclosed to us by wisdom and its allied common sense, which, independent of scientific investigation, has a starting point of its own, this intuitive knowledge founded on fixed perceptions given with our consciousness itself, offers a saving counterpoise to Skepticism.
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<br />Thus he agrees that knowledge cannot come through scientific investigation alone, but we have an entirely different source of confidence which rests in the wisdom disclosed to us through faith. This wisdom results in what Kuyper calls a “relative certainty” which does not depend in any way on scientific investigation, but which is constantly confirmed through practical experience. Such knowledge would not be possible apart from the revelation of a transcendent God and the faith that accompanies it.
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<br />In order to understand how faith plays an important role in all of life, Kuyper talked not about the specific contents of man’s faith but of faith as a general human function by which man finds certainty for his life and actions. Thus by faith, Kuyper says, he “does not mean the ‘faith in Christ Jesus’ in its saving efficacy for the sinner, nor yet the “faith in God” which is fundamental to all religion, but that formal function of the life of our soul which is fundamental to every fact in our human consciousness.” (Principles 125)
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<br />Further he explains
<br />Heb.xi.1 anticipates our wish to restore faith to its more general meaning. There we read that faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen.’ Thus faith is here taken neither in an exclusively religious sense, much less in a soteriological significance, but very generally as an ‘assurance’ and ‘proving’ of objects which escape our perception, either because they do not yet exist, or because they do not show themselves.. . . There is no objection, therefore, to the use of the term faith for that function of the soul by which it obtains certainty directly and immediately, without the aid of discursive demonstration. This places faith over against ‘demonstration”; but not of itself over against knowing. This would be so, if our knowledge and its content came to us exclusively by observation and demonstration, but, as we tried to prove . . . this is not so. (Principles 127-9)
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<br />Thus in contrast to the Kantian view, which essentially gave up on certain knowledge as it was then sought, Kuyper clearly understood that knowledge is based on faith, and that no knowledge can be gained apart from the knowledge of God, for knowledge ultimately depends on the revelation of God, the transcendent creator of the universe. True knowledge, through true faith, is therefore ultimately a gift of God.
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<br />But what of the twin pillars of rational thought and empirical investigation upon which knowledge is supposed to have been built? Of these Kuyper says that ultimately both of them depend on faith. He first sets the stage by explaining that our human self-consciousness is necessary for investigation, and that this is the ultimate starting place for doing science. However, we can never have any certainty of the existence of our self-consciousness apart from faith; faith now being taken “merely as the means or instrument by which to possess certainty, and as such needs no demonstration, but allows none.” (Principles 131-2)
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<br />He then argues that every act of thought or observation proceeds from the certainty of the existence of our ego, and therefore these can also only be established by faith. He points out that this is equally true of the starting point for our perceptions, and of our rational thought. For to have any certainty about our perception, we (our ego) must believe in our senses, and to have any certainty of the conclusions of our rational arguments, we must believe in the axioms on which we base our reasoning. So no matter where we turn, faith is ultimately at the bottom of every attempt at certainty.
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<br />I find it remarkable that Kuyper understood all this as early as he did, for it took another seven decades or so before philosophers in general began to understand the bankruptcy of trying to ground the search for certainty of knowledge in our own abilities. To the extent that they do not believe in the creator God, they are thus forced to skepticism. In this, we see Kuyper as the precursor both to van Til and to the post modern age. Kuyper goes on to argue that even to search for laws in science from particular data (inductive reasoning) you have to have a faith that there is indeed a general pattern to be found. (Thus those who deny the creator, act as if they do not deny Him when they are doing science.) He concludes by pointing out that as faith provides a starting point for both rational and empirical investigation, it also provides a “motive for the construction of science. . . .” (Principles 137)
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<br />Thus for Kuyper, faith is absolutely essential as the foundation for any particular life system. Furthermore, he goes on to say that for a faith to be worthy of its name it should generate an interest in an investigation of the world around us. In his later books, Common Grace and Pro Rege, Kuyper went on to plead the case for how the Christian faith provides the basis for cultural engagements and scientific investigations. For Kuyper our faith relation as finite creatures to an infinite God is the central unifying point in our human existence from which all our diverse creaturely activities flow. In the depths of our hearts, where we confront God, lies the existential focus from which we all live out our different paths in life. Of this Kuyper says:
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<br />Hence the first claim demands that such a life system shall find its starting-point in a special interpretation of our relation to God. This is not accidental, but imperative. If such an action is to put its stamp upon our entire life, it must start from that point in our consciousness in which our life is still undivided and lies comprehended in its unity,. . . This point, of course, lies in the antithesis between all that is finite in our human life and the infinite that lies beyond it. Here alone we find the common source from which the different streams of our human life spring and separate themselves. Personally it is our repeated experience that in the depths of our hearts, at the point where we disclose ourselves to the Eternal One, all the rays of our life converge as in one focus, and there alone regain that harmony which we so often so painfully lose in the stress of daily duty. . . . (Lectures 20)
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<br />Common Grace, Antithesis, and the Academic Enterprise
<br />1. Science
<br />As a foundation for science, Kuyper asserts that our faith in the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in the temporal development of the creation should lead us to expect that humans can and will discover patterns or laws associated with different aspects of creation. He deduces that because God sustains all his creation according to one fixed plan, this would result in the existence of various “laws” or regularities of creation pertaining to the different sciences which exhibit a “unity, stability and order of things.” (Lectures 115)
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<br />In the Stone Lectures, he says:
<br />What now does the Calvinist mean by his faith in the ordinances of God? Nothing less than the firmly rooted conviction that all life has first been in the thoughts of God, before it came to be realized in Creation. Hence all created life necessarily bears in itself a law for its existence, instituted by God Himself. There is no life outside us in Nature, without such divine ordinances, — ordinances which are called the laws of Nature — a term which we are willing to accept, provided we understand thereby, not laws originating from Nature, but laws imposed upon Nature. So, there are ordinances of God for the firmament above, and ordinances for the earth below, by means of which this world is maintained, and as the Psalmist says, These ordinances are the servants of God. Consequently there are ordinances of God for our bodies, for the blood that courses through our arteries and veins, and for our lungs as the organs of respiration. And even so are there ordinances of God, in logic, to regulate our thoughts; ordinances of God for our imagination, in the domain of aesthetics; and so, also, strict ordinances of God for the whole of human life in the domain of morals. (70)
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<br />So for Kuyper as for Calvin before him, the notion of science is much broader than what we normally think of today; it includes not just the “hard” sciences, but all the humanities as well. Thus he declares that “laws” are to be expected in every area of life. Indeed, for Kuyper the faith which accompanies Calvinism does provide the motivation for science; to be engaged in scientific activities is to discover the order which is already placed in nature by God Himself.
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<br />In the Stone lectures as a whole, Kuyper provided a rough outline for cultural involvement, first by demonstrating the extent of Calvinism as a life-system, and then by discussing how this can be worked out in the areas of politics, science and academics, and the arts. Specifically dealing with science, he argued in his lecture on “Calvinism and Science” that Calvinism uniquely fosters a love for science, that it restores science to its proper domain — the domain of Christ, and that it frees science from bondage under other spheres such as the church or the state. Furthermore, he said that Calvinism provides a solution for the “unavoidable scientific conflict.”
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<br />Here Kuyper is not speaking of a conflict between faith and science as it might be supposed, but rather he is speaking of the inevitable antithesis between the conclusions of two faiths that are fundamentally at odds with one another; in particular the Calvinist faith in the Creator God, and the modernist faith in naturalism. How does Calvinism “solve” this conflict? What Kuyper apparently means here is Calvinism reveals the nature of the conflict between the two different camps in science by identifying the conflict as stemming ultimately from the commitment of the heart of man. Before addressing this important topic of antithesis we should first investigate what we can have in common with unbelievers under the subject of common grace. For according to Kuyper, antithesis is not set off against common grace, but antithesis flows out of common grace.
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<br />2. Common Grace
<br />There are two directions from which to approach common grace. The first is the theological side, within which one would ask such questions as what are the grounds of common grace, what is its relation to special grace and to Christ as mediator of creation and of redemption. There has been considerable controversy about these questions, and it is not even clear that Kuyper himself was consistent and settled in his formulations. However, it does appear that Kuyper was the major proponent who brought this whole issue to the fore. For our purposes, let us not delve into the theological questions, but rather let us turn to those more pertinent to the exercise of our academic enterprise.
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<br />This second direction is to approach from the the practical side, leading us to ask such questions as how much do we really have in common with unbelievers for approaching our academic disciplines, and how do we take their insights and investigations. Can we really work together, and if so, how do we know how far to go? We have already touched on the common role of faith. To relate this to the present topic, let us look at a quote from the Stone Lectures in which Kuyper summarizes the common role of faith in doing all science:
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<br />Every science in a certain sense starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not. Every science presupposes faith in self, in our self-consciousness; presupposes faith in the accurate working of our senses; presupposes faith in the correctness of the laws of thought; presupposes faith in something universal hidden behind the special phenomena; presupposes faith in life; and especially presupposes faith in the principles, from which we proceed; which signifies that all these indispensable axioms, needed in a productive scientific investigation, do not come to us by proof, but are established in our judgment by our inner conception and given with our self-consciousness. (131)
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<br />Here Kuyper points to faith as the common foundation for doing science and in so doing he lists those common areas which all human investigators presuppose in their work: a functioning selfhood, a reflecting mind, our physical senses, the laws of logic, objects of investigation, existence of something universal behind the particular phenomena, etc. These areas of commonality apply to both the natural and the ‘spiritual’ sciences, i.e. to both the hard sciences and to the humanities. Further, . . . it is a matter of pre-assumption that there is a God, that a creation took place, that sin reigns, etc., we grant this readily, but in the same sense in which it is preassumed in all science that there is a human being, that that human being thinks, that it is possible for this human being to think mistakenly, etc., etc. He to whom these last named things are not presuppositions, will not so much as put his hand to the plough in the field of science, . . . ” (Principles 175)
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<br />Indeed, Kuyper maintains that our being born again, or palingenesis as he calls it, does not affect our faculties of sense, or of reason, and therefore we can use these faculties to guide us in identifying those data and knowledge which we share in common with unbelievers: This must be emphasized, because it is in the interest of science at large, that mutual benefit be derived by both circles from what is contributed to the general stock of science. What has been well done by one need not be done again by you. It is at the same time important that, though not hesitating to part company as soon as principle demands it, the two kinds of science shall be as long as possible conscious of the fact that, formally at least, both are at work at a common task. . . . The formal process of thought has not been attacked by sin, and for this reason palingenesis works no change in this mental task. There is but one logic, and not two . . . (this one logic) contributes in two ways important service in maintaining a certain mutual contact between the two kinds of science.
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<br />In the first place, from this fact it follows that the accuracy of one another’s demonstrations can be critically examined and verified, in so far at least as the result strictly depends upon the deduction made. By keeping a sharp watch upon each other, mutual service is rendered in the discovery of logical faults in each other’s demonstrations, and thus in a formal way each will continually watch over the other. And on the other hand, they may compel each other to justify their points of view over against one another. (Principles 159-160) Thus when it comes to gathering data and to logical reasoning in our scholarly work, it is possible for believers and non-believers to hold each other accountable, since these judgments proceed within a sociological framework which we all share, a framework which has ontological grounding.
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<br />Kuyper goes on to identify different stages of scientific investigation. The first he calls the “simple observation” which is the primitive point of departure for all scientific investigation. Then comes the stage of inferring from data in order to find and express the regularities observed in the data in more general laws. These two stages relate more directly to simple observation and reasoning, and can for the most part be held in common by all. But Kuyper says that stopping at this level cannot satisfy our “highest scientific need.” Here he says that. . . the thinking mind cannot rest . . . [until] It searches also after the relations among the several kingdoms of nature, between earth and the other parts of the cosmos, between all of nature outside of us and man, and finally after the origin of nature and of the tie which binds us to it, even in our body. These are the points of connection between the faculty of Natural Philosophy [Natural Science] and the other faculties. (Principles 209)
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<br />At the highest stage of scholarship, we are concerned with the significance and the meanings of the various phenomena studied for the whole picture of human reality. It is here, according to Kuyper, that our directions radically differ, and our foundational faith will reveal itself most clearly. It is in the light of this resulting divergence between the two sciences that we must sift through the preceding data and facts we share. When this divergence appears at the higher stage of science, it also bears testimony to the fundamental difference at the root of our differing faiths. Kuyper recognizes this also when he says, Everything astronomers, or geologists, physicists or chemists, zoologists or bacteriologists, historians or archaeologists bring to light has to be recorded,—detached of course from the hypothesis they have slipped behind it and from the conclusions they have drawn from it,[my emphasis]—but every fact has to be recorded by you, also, as a fact, and as a fact that is to be incorporated as well in your science as in theirs. (Lectures 139)
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<br />This ability of the non-believer to investigate and to discover things that are (more or less) true about the world has historically been included in the notion of common grace, that grace which allows the world to continue in the present age without falling fully into utter wickedness. Kuyper did not want to use the term “general grace” as Calvin did, because he wanted to emphasize that it is grace common to all God’s earthly creatures, after the fall. (Praansma 141) He also emphasizes that it is temporal grace, which sets it apart from the grace which leads to eternal life. (Klapwijk 172) In that sense, common grace is only a kind of clemency for unbelievers, but grace for believers, in order that all of God’s purposes will be fulfilled before the final judgment. As Kuyper continually reminds us, if it were not for God’s grace, all mankind would have been destroyed already, so it is certainly due to grace that men are able to arrive at any insight into life.
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<br />Kuyper was concerned not only about justifying the significance of common grace for Christian cultural involvement but he was also concerned about showing the interrelations between common grace and special grace. These concerns resulted in two main works – the first one called Geemene Gratie (Common Grace), and the second called Pro Rege (For the King). Of these works, Kuyper said
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<br />I had made an effort, in my three-volume work Common Grace, to draw a systematic picture of the meaning of the work of God in the life of the nations and in societywithout- Christ. But this was not the end of my investigation. Too often believers imagined that until the day of Christ’s return, two separate parts of our human race would exist, the one part to be found in the society of Christians, and the other part in society outside Christianity. Furthermore, such believers suppose that Christ reigns as King over the Christian segment of the population but exerts no influence on the other segment. Therefore Pro Rege had to be written as a sequel to Common Grace. In Common Grace it was demonstrated that all that was beautiful and noble in the life of the nations before and after Christ’s coming was solely due to the grace of God, who had been merciful to the nations. The purpose of Pro Rege, however, was to demonstrate how the kingship of Christ also dominates the total course of human life.” (Praansma 155)
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<br />Kuyper’s doctrine of Common grace is never meant to push aside the antithesis or the necessity of particular grace and of special revelation. He liked to use the metaphor of the grafting of a new branch into a wild tree to illustrate the relationship between natural revelation and special revelation: The wild tree is the sinner, in whose nature works the natural principium of the knowledge of God as an inborn impelling power. If you leave this natural principium to itself, you will never have anything else than wild wood, and the fruit of knowledge does not come. But when the Lord our God introduces from without, and thus from another principium, a shoot of a true plant, even the principle of a pure knowledge into this wild tree, i.e. into this natural man, then there is not a man by the side of a man, no knowledge by the side of a knowledge, but the wild energy remains active in this human nature, i.e. incomplete knowledge; while the ingrafted new principium brings it to pass, that this impelling power is changed and produces the fruit of true knowledge.
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<br />The special knowledge is, indeed, a new and proper principium, but this principium joins itself to the vital powers of our nature with its natural principium; compels this principium to let its life-sap flow through another channel; and in this way cultivates ripe fruit of knowledge from what otherwise would have produced only wood fit for fire. (Principles 375-6) Thus out of common grace, by the mercy of God, particular grace brings forth true knowledge. It is also within the realm of common grace that the antithesis springs.
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<br />3. Antithesis
<br />Kuyper saw that while common grace provides a context for Christian cultural activities, it can be used by the unregenerate against the Kingdom of God as well. In his words, . . .we see that common grace serves both the coming of the Kingdom of God and the coming of the Antichrist. By conserving humanity, it prepares a place for the gospel, but it also serves as a foundation for the development of sin, which will culminate in the appearance of the man of sin. (Praamsma 142)
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<br />Thus in regard to doing science, he spoke of “two kinds of people” who, because of their different faith commitments gave birth to “two kinds of science.” It should be clear from the metaphor of the wild tree that he did not mean the methods of scholarly investigations used were completely different; what he meant was that the two sciences arrived at different interpretations even from the same data, and that these interpretations were at odds with one another. This is illustrated well in the following passage from his Stone Lectures.
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<br />Hence it follows that the conflict is not between faith and science, but between the assertion that the cosmos, as it exists today, is either in a normal or an abnormal condition. If it is normal, then it moves by means of an eternal evolution from its potencies to its ideal. But if the cosmos in its present condition is abnormal, then a disturbance has taken place in the past, and only a regenerating power can warrant it the final attainment of its goal. This, and no other is the principal antithesis, which separates the thinking minds in the domain of Science into two opposite battle-arrays.(Lectures 132)
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<br />That these two perspectives are radically different is undeniable. However, that does not do away with the common constraints that creation imposes upon us. At the level of data, these faith commitments may not have much consequence. However, at every other level the antithesis will come into play - it affects our selection of the kind of theories to look for, it determines what sort of experiments we do; and most important of all, our interpretation of the meaning of the data can be radically different. Two quotes from Kuyper here will show how differently the believer and the naturalistic non-believer would approach science. Of the believer he says:
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<br />He . . . who himself lives in the palingenesis, or who at least accepts it as a fact, has eo ipso an entirely different outlook upon himself and his surroundings. Palingenesis implies that all existing things are in ruins; that there is a means by which these ruins can be restored, yea that in part they are already restored. He neither may nor can, therefore draw compulsory conclusions from what exists outside of palingenesis; there can be no question with him of an evolution process; and for him the necessity of all science does not lie in what presents itself to him, but in the criticism of existing things by which he distinguishes the abnormal from the normal. (Principles 219-220)
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<br />Of naturalism, Kuyper says: All prosecution of science which starts out from naturalistic premises denies the subjective fact of palingenesis, as well as the objective fact of a special revelation, which immediately corresponds to this. (Principles 224) For Kuyper this antagonism between the two kinds of sciences should not deter the Christian from scientific and cultural engagements but should only spur him into active investigations from his own principles.
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<br />A few more words from his Stone Lectures are appropriate here:. . . the energy and the thoroughness of our antagonists must be felt by every Christian scholar as a sharp incentive . . . also to go back to his own principles in his thinking, to renew all scientific investigation on the lines of these principles, and to glut the press with the burden of his cogent studies. If we console ourselves with the thought that we may without danger leave secular science in the hands of our opponents, if we only succeed in saving theology, ours will be the tactics of the ostrich. To confine yourself to the saving of your upper room, when the rest of the house is on fire, is foolish indeed. Calvin long ago knew better, when he asked for a Philosophia Christiana, and after all, every faculty, and in these faculties every single science, is more or less connected with the antithesis of principles, and should consequently be permeated by it. (139)
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<br />Kuyper would thus urge upon us the obligation to get involved in all areas of life in order to further the principles that support our Calvinistic roots. In any realm where we are silent, we will give it over to the devil and his kingdom. So sharp is the distinction portrayed here, that one might wonder whether we will be able to have any dialogue whatsoever between the two camps. After all, with such radically different starting points, how can we hope to communicate? For the Kuyperian, this brings us back full circle to common grace.
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<br />As S. Zuidema points out, it is the areas which we have in common which make Christian action possible: Common grace supplies the believer with the material for fulfilling his calling to be culturally formative and to fight the battle of the Lord in the world of culture. The sphere of common grace is the sphere of action for people who are blessed with particular grace and now seek to administer the blessings of particular grace. It is the area where Christian scholarship, Christian politics, Christian social action and individual Christian activity are to be developed. Common grace provides the platform, as it were, on which all these cultural tasks are to be acted out. Common grace is the presupposition of the possibility of Christian cultural activity. Common grace makes the activity born of particular grace possible. Common grace makes the antithesis, makes Pro Rege action possible. (Zuidema 57-58)
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<br />We are thus confronted with the full complexity of doing science or scholarship in our present dispensation. Common grace provides both the ground for cooperation between the believer and the nonbeliever in their quest for knowledge as well as the ground for antithesis between them. Again in Kuyper’s words:
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<br />. . . this practice of giving each other an account at the point of intersection effects this very great gain, that as scientists we do not simply walk independently side by side, but that we remain together in logical fellowship, and together pay our homage to the claim of science as such . . . However plainly and candidly we may speak thus of a two-fold science, and however much we may be persuaded that the scientific investigation can be brought to a close in no single department by all scientists together, yea, cannot be continued in concert, as soon as palingenesis makes a division between the investigators; we are equally emphatic in our confession which we do not make in spite of ourselves, but with gladness, that in almost every department there is some task that is common to all, and, what is almost of greater importance still, a clear account can be given of both starting points. (Principles 161-2)
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<br />We see here a recipe for Christian scholarship emerging. We are to understand the methods of investigation, as to their reliability as generally accepted, and at the same time we are to bring critical attention to the places where faith commitments creep in. Thus separating the two, however imperfectly (for our ability to do so will be no less successful than that of the unbeliever), we will be able to promote a dialog concerning both what can be concluded, and what the fundamental assumptions are behind the conclusions. Such a dialog in and of itself will not convert people to our point of view, but at least it will remove the unjustifiable certainty upon which they rest, leaving them without excuse.
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<br />IV. Dooyeweerd
<br />Since I have tried in this talk to bring out those elements in Kuyper’s work which make significant contributions towards doing science and a distinctively Christian scholarship, I would like just to point to the legacy he left to his followers. In this regard I want to bring up briefly Herman Dooyeweerd as a notable heir to the Kuyperian tradition. Herman Dooyeweerd was a professor of jurisprudence at the Free University of Amsterdam. Although his background was in law, he became primarily interested in philosophy, and in particular, in the possibility of a distinctive Christian philosophy. Subsequently, Dooyeweerd’s writings on Christian philosophy have been used by some followers as a “system” of thought which we “apply” to our disciplines. Actually I don’t think this is the essential Dooyeweerd. If I would choose the most important contribution Dooyeweerd made, it is his transcendental critique of theoretical thought.
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<br />Motivated by Kuyper’s realization that all knowledge is based on faith, Dooyeweerd saw that this is not the usual way philosophy has been viewed in our cultural tradition; so he set out to re-examine philosophy in the light of its faith commitments. Following Kuyper, he saw that the heart plays a central role in guiding our thinking, and this led him to identify the main motives of the human heart or “ground motives” as he calls them as the foundational principles of philosophy. His major work, laying all this out, is the New Critique of Theoretical Thought, in four volumes.
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<br />As I become better acquainted with the thought of Kuyper, I am amazed at how much of Dooyeweerd’s thought was already either explicit or implicit in Kuyper’s writings. Other themes which play a large role in his work are Kuyper’s notion of laws in every sphere of human scientific investigation (giving rise to the Dutch title of Dooyeweerd’s Critique, Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee, or literally, “the philosophy of the law idea”) and the notion of the antithesis.
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<br />In general, I would characterize Dooyeweerd’s work as an attempt to work out in a systematic way the Kuyperian framework and its implications for scholarship. I find his works significant from the perspective of a scientist because it addresses the foundations of science from a Reformed perspective. There are very few Christian thinkers besides him who have chosen to work on the subject of ontology. For this reason, I am very thankful for Dooyeweerd’s efforts. Even if one does not subscribe to his ‘system’ in its entirety, there is still much that we can learn from him both in what he failed to achieve and what he did achieve.
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<br />V. Kuyperianism in our own setting
<br />As we come back to the question, “what does it mean to be Kuyperian?” let me read from the summary given by Louis Praansma of Kuyper’s Inaugural address for the opening of the Free University of Amsterdam, as I find these remarks particularly pertinent for an institution such as ours. Of Kuyper’s address, Praansma says:
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<br />His title was ‘Sovereignty in the Distinctive Spheres of Human Life.’ His main thesis was (1) that God Almighty is solely sovereign over all His creatures, (2) that He turned all power in heaven and on earth over to His son Jesus Christ, and (3) that the sovereignty of Jesus Christ must be recognized in every distinctive sphere of life.. . . In His wisdom, God created several distinctive spheres of life; in His grace He kept and restored them after they were corrupted by sin. They can function properly only by being subject of Jesus, the King of kings. Let Christ be King! This should be the motto of the statesman, the businessman, and also the man of science. The Free university should therefore be free from the authority of the secular state and also free from the arrogance of secular science. The University should be subject only to the One in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid. . . . The university should be free from wrong principles and founded on the Word of God - the Word found in Holy Scripture and sealed by the testimony of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. (76)
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<br />In view of these remarks, in conclusion, I would like to add a few suggestions for consideration as to the future direction of scholarship among us. As I see it, one focus that seems to bring together all the different sides of the Kuyperian discussion is the work of Christ in His creational role, His sustaining role and in His redemptive role. Christ is indeed the metaphysical center of all earthly existence in a very deep sense. He is a mediator not only between God and man in redemption but also between God and creation as creator and sustainer. We already adhere to a Christocentric view of theology, and of history. It seems to me that we should also work towards the development of a Christocentric view of ontology.
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<br />Kuyper seems to hint at this in many places without pursuing it directly. In this regard, let me quote what Klapwijk says of Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace, With this doctrine Kuyper wanted to express the fact that in spite of human sin and self-will, God does not forsake the work of his hands. He upholds the world by his ‘creation ordinances’. In his grace he is and he remains the sovereign law-giver and meaning-giver. Yet, . . . Kuyper did not adequately stress that God does all this for the sake of Christ. Kuyper stated that the earth (common grace) bears the Cross (particular grace); he often did not see that in a deeper sense the reverse is true: the Cross bears the earth. (183)
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<br />Interestingly, he goes on to say that Dooyeweerd’s contribution has been to re-formulate Kuyper’s view of common grace on such a Christocentric basis. The doctrine of common grace can be kept unsoiled by the stubborn tradition of the two realms theory on condition that it be anchored Christocentrically alone. Only then, furthermore, is it able to offer the possibility of evaluating non-Christian thought correctly. (183)
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<br />Since our own college bears the motto, “In all things, Christ pre-eminent” it would certainly behoove us to work out the implications of this leading principle in all of our academic enterprise. Kuyper helped to set the stage for doing this by pointing to the central roles of faith, of common grace and the antithesis in shaping our cultural and academic endeavors. These are insights we can use and sharpen as we work out their dynamics in our respective disciplines.
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<br />Finally let me return to the emphasis from Kuyper’s work of the interdisciplinary direction regarding our academic endeavors. For Kuyper the destination of the various academic disciplines is not to remain only within our disciplines but to arrive at a unified view of the whole of human knowledge. He had the faith to believe in the possibility of such an ‘encyclopedic’ project because of his faith in the sovereignty of God. At the same time, he was aware that such a project offers no closure and is always tentative in its findings. In his spirit, I see much more that we Christian scholars can do to work towards a more unified view of creation by bringing to this common task the insights from our respective disciplines. This interdisciplinary cooperation would certainly express the spirit of what it means to be Kuyperian.
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<br />Works Cited
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<br />Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry Beveridge. 2 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972.
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<br />Henderson, R. D. “How Abraham Kuyper Became a Kuyperian.” Christian Scholar’s Review XXII:1 (1992): 22-35.
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<br />Klapwijk, Jacob. “Antithesis and Common Grace.” Bringing Into Captivity Every Thought.
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<br />Ed. Jacob Klapwijk, Sander Griffioen, and Gerben Groenewoud. Lanham: United Press of America, 1991: 169-190.
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<br />Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953.
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<br />- - -. Principles of Sacred Theology. Tran. Rev. J. Hendrik de Vries. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954.
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<br />Praansma, L. Let Christ Be King. Jordan Station: Paideia, 1985.
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<br />Zuidema, S. U. “Common Grace and Christian Action in Abraham Kuyper” Communication and Confrontation.Toronto: Wedge, 1972: 52-105.
<br />Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-1098456710646766432004-09-22T10:45:00.000-04:002007-09-02T21:24:40.258-04:00Relevance Of Neocalvinism For Today<span style="font-style: italic;">Craig G. Bartholomew, October 2004</span><br /><br />INTRODUCTION<br /><br />Neo-Calvinism is a particular Christian tradition. It originates in Dutch Calvinism and is brought to expression through Groen van Prinsterer, Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper among many others, and has been given particular philosophical expression in the last century in the Reformational philosophical tradition of Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven and their colleagues and students including Evan Runner in North America.<br /><br />In this inaugural I suggest that neo-Calvinisms time has come. There are a multitude of ways in which it offers what so many analysts are saying the church needs at this time and place. In the time available to me I will:<br />- revisit the contours of the neo-Calvinist tradition<br />- indicate why its time has come<br />- ask how we/neocals may best serve the church in our day<br /><br />THE GEOGRAPHY OF NEOCALVINISM<br /><br />During the second half of the 19th century, the reformed churches in the Netherlands experienced a revival. This took the form, not only of large numbers of personal commitments to Christ, but also of a vigorous social movement intent on proclaiming and advancing the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life. For neocalvinists, Christianity is world-formative , it provides a worldview, a way of understanding all of reality, with radical consequences for every part of our lives. Participants in this movement believed it to be a <span style="font-style: italic;">faithful revival of authentic Calvinism</span>, and easily appropriated the label stuck on their movement: neocalvinism. Several characteristics or distinctive contours of this tradition can be discerned which distinguish it from other Christian traditions:<br /><br />(1) Neocalvinism insists on a comprehensive and integrated understanding of creation, fall and redemption.<br /><br />The whole world belongs to God. At the same time, all of reality is under the curse of sin - and all of reality lies within range of redemption in and through Jesus Christ. In Kuyper's justly celebrated words: "There is not a square inch of the entire world of which Christ does not rightly say, That Is Mine." Or as Zylstra says, "The covenant is as wide as creation. There is a good creational structure for everything, but with the fall serious misdirection is opened up. Neocalvinism does not recognize any conflict between gospel and creation. Neocalvinists understand the gospel to be the healing power which re-directs fallen creation, in line with God's original design, and towards its originally intended consummation."<br /><br />Bavinck articulates this beautifully when he asserts that:<br />"The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God. Dogmatics shows us how God, who is all-sufficient in himself, nevertheless glorifies himself in his creation, which, even when it is torn apart by sin, is gathered up again in Christ (Eph. 1:10). It describes for us God, always God, from beginning to end God in his being, God in his creation, God against sin, God in Christ, God breaking down all resistance through the Holy Spirit and guiding the whole of creation back to the objective he decreed for it: the glory of his name."<br /><br />(2) Neocalvinism emphasizes God's good and dynamic order for creation.<br /><br />O'Donovan rightly asserts that the order for kinds of things and the means by which things can be distinguished from other kinds of things comes from this wise order embedded in creation. God establishes the possible structure and distinctive identity of created things: linden trees, cigars, human beings, states - everything. The order of creation is constant, grounded in the covenantal faithfulness of God. There is a close connection for neocalvinists between creation and the rich diversity of things in this world. God not only brought reality into existence, but brought it into existence as an extraordinarily rich, complex and diverse order of distinct kinds of things.<br /><br />As Bavinck notes:<br />"The world is a unity, but that unity manifests itself in the most magnificent and beautiful diversity. Heaven and earth were distinct from the very beginning; sun and moon and stars each received their own task; plant and animal and man each have their own nature. Everything is created by God with a nature of its own, and exists and lives according to a law of its own."<br /><br />Kuyper developed this sense of ordered diversity in relation to society in his doctrine of sphere sovereignty, and argues that, for instance, the family has sovereignty in its own sphere in the face of both the state and the church, and should not be internally made subject to these other relationships. The authority of mother and father does not require the rubber stamp of a party commissar or the holy water of a parish priest - it is received out of the very hand of God. But all human authority, every human relationship, is subject to the sovereign rule of God, This view does not deny historical development in society, but rather emphasizes the possibilities given in creation which provide room and set limits for the emergence of a wide range of different relationships in society.<br /><br />(3) Neocalvinism affirms the historical development or differentiation of creation.<br /><br />Neocalvinism has a deep appreciation for the historical development of human cultures and societies. The development of technology, the advances of the sciences, the building of cities, and the disentanglement of various distinct relationships in society (often referred to as 'differentiation') - these are all fundamentally appropriate human responses to God's command to realize the possibilities of creation, the cultural mandate (see Genesis 1:28 and 2:15). It is the responsibility of Christians to affirm normative differentiation in the context of the coming of the kingdom of God - while opposing all misdirection away from the glory of God.<br /><br />(4) Neocalvinism recognizes an ultimate religious conflict: the antithesis, in all of life.<br /><br />There is a battle going on at the deepest level in every society and within every human person - a struggle between the inclination to submit to God and the inclination to rebel against God. This personal and public conflict between the kingdoms of light and darkness neocalvinists call the antithesis. This struggle is not relegated to some spiritual realm above, or alongside, or in paradox with everyday, common life. Rather, it is a spiritual struggle for everyday life itself. The antithesis issues forth a clarion call for Christian cultural activity in opposition to every manner of idolatry. Glorifying God in everyday life is what neocalvinists mean when they speak of "redeeming" or "transforming" culture and societal spheres. It is a transformation from various ways of life that are sinful or at odds with the truth, to ways that are lawful and according to the truth, by the sanctifying power of Christ's Spirit.<br /><br />A tradition is always much more than its distinctives, and it is important to remember that neocalvinism is a Christian tradition . Thus it is inter alia also Trinitarian, but of course I have not emphasized that here because it shares such fundamental Christian doctrines with all other orthodox traditions.<br /><br />WHY GIVE AT LEAST THREE CHEERS FOR NEOCALVINISM?<br /><br />All humans are "traditioned." Part of being human is inhabiting a tradition/s that describes and directs our understanding of life. The neocalvinist tradition, the differentiating features of which I have described above, is one such tradition. Of course, you may reject it as the tradition you choose to inhabit, but one should remember that rejection of a tradition never means that you stand outside of every tradition. To reject one is to adopt another. Neocalvinism is certainly not the only tradition calling itself "Christian." Think only for a moment of the Anabaptist tradition (eg. Amish, Mennonite, etc), or of the Romanist ('Catholic') tradition. Why then should we take particular note of the neocalvinist tradition?<br /><br />A major reason is that...<br />Neocalvinism has devoted considerable energy over the past few centuries to developing a "public theology" and there is widespread recognition that this is what the church urgently needs today.<br /><br />Acknowledged as probably the greatest missiologist of the 20th century, David Bosch attends to our postmodern Western culture in his 1995 posthumous publication, <span style="font-style: italic;">Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture</span>. He explores what an appropriate missiology for Western culture today will look like. In his final chapter before his conclusion, Bosch poses the question, "What is it that we have to communicate to the Western post-Christian public?" His answer is noteworthy: "It seems to me that we must demonstrate the role that plausibility structures and worldviews play in peoples lives."<br /><br />Bosch rejects the Christendom model of mission, but equally warns against a withdrawal from public life. It belongs, he says, to our missionary mandate to ask questions about the use of power in our societies, to unmask those that destroy life, to show concern for the victims of society while at the same time calling to repentance those who have turned them into victims, and to articulate God's active wrath against all that exploits, squanders, and disfigures the world for selfishness, greed and self-centered power. Neocalvinists, holding to the principle of sphere sovereignty, do not believe it is the mission of the institutional church to address herself outside her appointed ministry of Word and Sacrament, the diaconal care of her members, and such ordinances. But it remains for Christians who are also members of various other societal communities to involve themselves <span style="font-style: italic;">Christianly</span> in the varying matters of those communities.<br /><br />The great myth of the standard narrative of modernity was neutrality and progress. Many Christians felt compelled to acquiesce to this and to work hard at accommodating Christianity with modernity. The outworking of modernity in postmodernism has however made it clearer that there are fundamental differences between modernity and Christianity so that accommodation is exposed as a futile task . And for the West, philosophically at least, modernity has splintered into a myriad of fragments, so that the tenuous glue left holding the West together is, perhaps, consumerism. This is not good societal glue, neither for the West nor for the "developing world," and in this context it is urgent, as Bosch indicates, that Christians declare The Faith as all encompassing and demonstrate theoretically and practically that the gospel is glue sufficient for individual and communal life.<br /><br />Bosch, Newbigin, and many others have come to recognize the development of a public theology as one of the great needs of the day. We need to know in depth how the gospel relates to all of life today, at this time in this place.<br /><br />If this is an accurate reading of our times then few traditions are as well positioned to answer this call as the neocalvinist tradition. For the neocalvinist tradition is firstly Reformed, and (as Charles Taylor explains in a wonderful chapter called "God Loveth Adverbs" in his monumental <span style="font-style: italic;">Sources of the Self</span>), the Reformation challenged the synthesis between Platonism and Christianity. As a result, certain of the original potentialities of Christian faith, which tended to be neutralized in the amalgam with ancient metaphysics and morals, were allowed to develop. The crucial potentiality here was that of conceiving the hallowing of life not as something which takes place only at the limits, as it were, but as a change which can penetrate the full extent of mundane life. The Lutheran and Puritan idea of vocation stems from this biblical understanding of our world. Perkins thus asserts that "Now if we compare work to work, there is a difference betwixt washing of the dishes, and preaching of the word of God: but as touching to please God none at all."<br /><br />Within the Reformed tradition no group has taken up this imperative towards public theology as strongly as the neocalvinists. Kuyper's extraordinary range of activities exemplifies the creation-wide concern that has fired the neocalvinist vision. It is instructive in this respect to remember that while Spurgeon, a well-known Calvinistic Baptist, was preaching in London, Kuyper was busy not far away in the Netherlands. And it was Warfield and Vos in the USA who invited Kuyper to come and give the Stone lectures at Princeton. For all Spurgeon's social concerns and for all Warfield's and Vos' Reformed orthodoxy, none compare when it comes to public theology and the commitment to giving expression to Christianity in all area of life.<br /><br />In 20th century theology there has been an impressive flowering of "Trinitarian" theology emerging out of the work of Karl Barth and Jurgen Moltmann, Colin Gunton and others. Much of this has been refreshing in its concern for a <span style="font-style: italic;">Christian</span> starting point in our thinking and in the recognition that we need a public theology. But, in my opinion, it has generally failed to deliver a conceptual apparatus able to do the analysis required, largely because of an inadequate or erroneous doctrine of creation. In this century, Evangelicalism has also worked hard to recover a sense of the importance of all of life, as seen particularly in the Lausanne Congress (and Covenant) of 1974 . Since then, social issues and concerns with worldview have steadily gathered momentum in Evangelical circles. But by and large, really hard work on public theology is only beginning to get going in Evangelical circles whereas neocalvinists have a tradition of some 200 hundred years of focused work in this area. And the neocalvinist tradition connects with many of the best contemporary concerns in public theology. Take the renaissance of Trinitarian theology, for example. The theme that shapes Herman Bavinck's entire theology is the trinitarian idea that grace restores nature.<br /><br />According to Bavinck,<br />"The thoughtful person places the doctrine of the Trinity in the very center of the full-orbed life of nature and mankind. The confession of the Christian is not an island in mid-ocean but a mountain-top overlooking the entire creation. The mind of the Christian is not satisfied until every form of existence has been referred to the Triune God and until the confession of the Trinity has received the place of prominence in all our life and thought."<br /><br />I do not have the time to explore many of the rich ways in which neocalvinism has constructed a public theology. One would have to take note of its highly relevant work on pluralism, exemplified in the Center for Public Justice's remarkable work in recent years on welfare policies in the USA. One would have to note the Christian Labour Association of Canada with some 30,000 members and the affiliated Work Research Foundation. And there are other examples. Are these perfect? No, far from it. But they are real, tangible, and substantial. In the orthodox, Reformed tradition we have, with all its imperfection, a head start on what the church desperately needs today. Surely that is good reason to give thanks, receive it with grace, and work at Reforming it biblically to be a blessing to our neighbors for God's glory today.<br /><br />BUT HOW MIGHT WE DO THIS?<br /><br />1. We should hold fast to the main contours of the tradition.<br /><br />I recall hearing Gore Vidal give the European lecture some years ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in the UK. He was cheered wildly before his lecture. In it he described Christianity as "crude" monotheism. He was cheered wildly after his lecture. I doubt he would have said or got away with saying that sort of thing about Islam, but of course it has become fashionable in the West to ridicule the Christian tradition while finding room for alternative more exotic species. Exposure to a tradition confronts one with its warts and weaknesses and neocalvinism surely has those. I would plead that we don't, however, despise it.<br /><br />Indeed, our strategy will be deeply influenced by how we read the times in which we live. To attempt an answer we have to firstly discern the question. Viewing every contemporary societal question in terms of "postmodernism's" broad label often strikes me as trying to do cultural analysis with a club whereas one actually needs a scalpel. However, at least it is a way into the debate about what constitutes our time and place.<br /><br />Christian thinkers are somewhat divided over how to respond to postmodernism, and I cannot explore the nuances of that debate here so let me make a few comments about my own approach. It seems clear to me that there are different elements to postmodernism: there are social, cultural and philosophical dimensions and it is important to distinguish these. Philosophically, for example, postmodernism represents a radical questioning of modernity, but culturally we are witnessing, by comparison, the triumph of a sort of global capitalism in the guise of our consumer culture. Philosophically, I think that postmodernism represents the outworking of historicism that is inherent in modernity. As Harvey says in his <span style="font-style: italic;">The Condition of Postmodernity</span>, modernity rejected tradition and religious authority but held on to the hope that reason alone would lead us to truth. Postmoderns have given up on the illusion that reason alone will lead us to truth, but they have not recovered tradition and authority.<br /><br />If this analysis is close to the truth, then it has significant implications for a Christian strategy today. It would mean, for example, that the last thing Christians should do is to capitulate to the historicism endemic in Western culture. Historicism means that everything is adrift, relative to the moment, and that there are no sure guides to how to live. As O'Donovan notes in relation to marriage, a historicist account "must argue that this natural good is not given transhistorically in nature at all, but is the product of cultural development peculiar to a certain time and place." By making marriage an item of cultural history in this way, historicism necessarily raises a question about it. Historicism makes all created goods appear putatively outmoded. So that if there are currents of dissatisfaction evident in a societys practice of marriage, such as might be indicated by a high divorce rate or an open homosexual culture, they will be treated with great seriousness as signs of the evolution for which the institution is destined.<br /><br />Historicism has no transcendent norm; the best you can do is to support one element of culture against another. To criticize the culture as a whole is unthinkable; one can only speak for the culture against the culture, as the representative of a new strand in the culture which will fashion its future.<br /><br />In a fascinating book on Islam and the West, Gellner points out the Western tendency for its scholars to disembowel its own core traditions, and how unhelpful this is in relation to contemporary Islam . Indeed, the answer to historicism is a robust, biblical, dynamic doctrine of creation, and this needs to be a cornerstone for Christian thought and activity in our day. As H.H. Farmer says, "If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters," and we need to hold on to this insight.<br /><br />In our day there have been tough debates in Reformational circles about the neocalvinist tradition in this respect. This perspective I have outlined should help us at least to see why those debates are crucial from my perspective we make a fatal error if we move in this direction at precisely the time of all times when the church at large needs our insights into public theology. Evan Runner stresses in this writings that the Reformational movement is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> firstly a Dutch movement: But then, he writes, it is extremely important "that we make clear by our actions that we are not interested in the first place in extending Dutch ways of thinking and Dutch customs and institutions, and that we clearly lay the accent on our faith and our principle."<br /><br />The treasures we hold through this tradition of "Dutch" Calvinism, must never, never be ethnically restricted. God's gifts to us are for the world as a whole, especially at such a time as this. The church international needs a public theology, and in that context we need to offer our loaves and fishes. Our loaves are crumbly, a bit mildewed at places, not always fresh and bursting with goodness, but they are loaves and most of the church hasn't yet got a recipe. And this church is increasingly located in the developing world, in developing nations like the Philippines, China, and in large swathes of Africa. If our eyes are lifted up to that ready harvest and is in places already reverberating back into the West and renewing Western churches then, I suggest, we will want to cast our bread upon the waters.<br /><br />Please note that I am not suggesting that postmodernism is all danger. The Scripture and Hermeneutic Seminar, which I direct, is premised on the belief that this is a time of danger <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> great opportunity, which needs to be seized with both hands. Jacques Derrida, and others, have for many dismantled the fortress of rationalistic consciousness that is so fundamental to modernity and for this we ought to celebrate and give thanks. Levinas, and others, have alerted us to the indispensability of the Other in our lives, ethics and theories. Yes, we should critically affirm and reformingly build off various common grace insights in our culture. But I suggest that we will only be well positioned to do so if we have a strong doctrine of creation which will enable us to discern these moments amidst the idolatry of our age.<br /><br />2. We should work to renew the neocalvinist tradition in our day.<br /><br />If the neocalvinists tradition is as relevant and significant as I think, then we should work hard to maintain, develop and renew this fertile tradition. Tellingly, at a colloquium in the UK in June 1996 Lesslie Newbigin commented that the Gospel and Our Culture network has hardly begun to answer the questions of mission in the public square and that the Reformational, Kuyperian tradition has obviously been at work long ago spelling out concretely in the various spheres of society what it means to say Jesus is Lord. He continued to say that, unfortunately, this Kuyperian tradition is almost unknown in Britain and expressed his fervent wish that it would become a powerful voice in the life of British Christianity. Sometimes I fear that the neocalvinist tradition faces a double whammy: those who know it have become a bit jaded and over-familiar with its insights into worldview and culture, while simultaneously it is not substantially understood by those outside the tradition.<br /><br />In conclusion let me reflect on what I think we need to do to renew the tradition.<br /><br />a. We need to recover a strong sense of neocalvinism as rooted in Scripture and the Christian tradition.<br /><br />When I teach on a Christian worldview I love to turn to 1 Corinthians 12:1-3, where Paul masterfully sets out that the mark of the Spirit is the confession Jesus is LORD. <span style="font-style: italic;">Kurios</span> is a rich term which evokes Jesus superiority to Caesar, and his status as Living God in an Old Testament context. This passage thus tells us that worldview-ish Christianity is normal biblical Christianity and not the hobby of an eccentric few. Neocalvinism understands this well. From this passage it is equally clear that biblical Christianity is Christocentric and communal. Those who make this confession have been baptized into the body of Christ by the Spirit and the head of that body is Christ.<br /><br />Healthy Christianity will always therefore have a good sense of catholicity. Bavinck articulates the catholicity of Christian thought well when he says of the theologian that, "He therefore stands on the shoulders of previous generations. He knows he is surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and lets his witness merge with the voice of these many waters. Every dogmatics ought to be in full accord with and part of the doxology sung to God by the church of all ages."<br /><br />And not just theology. All Christian thought and practice will take Scripture (and the Reformed confessional tradition) with the utmost seriousness. Runner rightly says, "But that Word, though the church as institute carries the responsibility for its faithful proclamation, is Rule for the whole of life, and every other, also limited, administration must each in its delegated sphere and with its bestowed right and responsibility, preserve and give orderly form, according to that Words light. Christ is the author of life and Gods Word is for all of life."<br /><br />There has been a worrying tendency in UK Evangelical circles and, if I may say so, in some Reformational circles for renewed interest in "culture" to lead away from a strong attachment to the authority of the Bible so that one ends up aping the culture with a "Christian" veneer. We so urgently need deep immersion in Scripture as God's Word leading us to profound cultural engagement which enables us to bring the gospel <span style="font-style: italic;">critically</span> to bear on our time and place.<br /><br />In this we do well to emulate the church fathers. Robert Wilken, in his wonderful book, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Spirit of Early Christian Thought</span>, notes that when the first Christian thinkers took the Bible in hand they were overwhelmed by it. It came upon them like a torrent leaping down the side of a mountain. Clement's writings, for example, embody a conceptual framework drawn from the Bible. And in his struggle with Marcion and the Gnostics over the unity of the Bible, Irenaeus articulates the unity of the Bible as a single story. Two histories converge in the biblical account, the history of Israel and the life of Christ, but because they are also the history of God's actions in and for the His people, they are part of a larger narrative that begins at creation and ends in a vision of a new, more splendid city in which the Lord God will be their light. The Bible begins, as it were, with the beginning and ends with an end that is no end --life with God, in Irenaeus's charming expression, "a life in which one is always conversing with God in new ways." Nothing falls outside of its scope.<br /><br />Wilkin speaks of the omnipresence of the Bible in early Christian writings. This is a characteristic that we need to recover to a greater degree in the neocalvinist tradition. Of course we must avoid a sort of fundamentalism or otherwise bad hermeneutic that seeks proof texts where they are not to be found. So too must we avoid a discourse which starts to control Scripture rather than the other way round. The big question is of course the hermeneutical one: how do we read Scripture for public theology? And in our tradition there are already some good signposts.<br /><br />Runner was much enamored of a Redemptive-Historical reading of Scripture, and that is why he and his wife translated De Graaf's three volumed <span style="font-style: italic;">Promise and Deliverance</span> into English. He was quite right to see that we need covenantal Biblical Theology to help us have the Scriptures themselves speak on their own terms. Mike Goheen and I have tried to update this concern in our forthcoming <span style="font-style: italic;">The Drama of Scripture: Finding our Place in the Biblical Story</span>. Scripture, we argue, is the story of the world, and we must immerse ourselves in it, indwell it and think and live out of it.<br /><br />In terms of our scholarship I find Oliver O'Donovans work fascinating in this respect. He is no fundamentalist and knows that to do scholarly work you need concepts and not just the bare story of the Bible. However, as his concepts take hold, he does more and not less exegesis. The church fathers and O'Donovan remind us too that Christian scholarship and the development of a public theology also require intimate knowledge of the Christian tradition. We short-change ourselves if we think we can do without historical theology.<br /><br />The neocalvinist tradition has rightly, in my opinion, discerned the need to develop Christian insight in philosophy so that we now have an embarrassment of riches in this area. We have the Reformational philosophy of Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven and their students. Sadly, the sort of creative theological work such as that by the late Gordon Spykman has been the exception rather than the norm, and there has been a dangerous tendency in some neocalvinist circles to underplay systematic theology. Indeed, for some, there still seems to be considerable fog around the crucial issue of their interrelationship.<br /><br />b. We need to work consciously in relation to the needs of the day.<br /><br />Martin Luther noted how useless it is to fight where Satan is not attacking and to ignore where he is. I love the title of Dooyeweerd's <span style="font-style: italic;">Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular and Christian Options</span> in this respect. Here is this tremendous insight that neither the gospel nor Satanic attack can be trivialized, to be reduced to ninja turtles, or Harry Potter, but that demonic activity manifests itself across the whole vista of culture and we need to work hard to read our culture aright. As Cranfield notes in his commentary on Mark, it is hard when confronted with realities like South African Apartheid to summarily dismiss the manifestly demonic as shown in the Gospels.<br /><br />All this requires unpacking and nuance, which I cannot provide here. But I do want to assert strongly that we need to relate the resources of our tradition to the great needs and issues of the day. Within Evangelicalism, there is, for example, a growing sense of the importance of a Christian worldview. Within our Reformed circles, where such analysis has been around for a while, it is too easy to say well we've been there, done that and got the T-shirt, we want to work elsewhere! We may be way beyond the ABC's of popular Evangelical thinking, but we must be willing to serve the Lord faithfully in every circumstance.<br /><br />Let me return to consumerism. If postmodernism represents the triumph of consumer culture, in the absence of any other unifying metanarrative, consumerism fills the vacuum. As Susan White notes, if there is any overarching metanarrative that purports to explain reality in the late 20th century, it is surely the narrative of economy. In the beginning of this narrative is the self-made, self-sufficient human being. At the end of this narrative is the big house, the big car, and the expensive clothes. In the middle is the struggle for success, the greed, the incessant getting-and-spending. Most of us have made this so thoroughly our story that we are hardly aware of its influence . The result is, as Wendell Berry so aptly puts it, "The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators."<br /><br />In some neocalvinist circles I fear that in the name of transformation, or perhaps simply a work ethic, we have become at ease in consumer culture, so that we need a good dose of our own critique to alert us to the idols staring us in the face on a daily basis. I do not wish to fudge the complexity of tackling such issues, nor do I want to opt for a Leftist (anti-free market or pro-statist) position, but I use this as an example that we have to work contextually. It is what makes the work of someone like Goudzwaard so very important.<br /><br />c. We need to work at, and out of, a cruciform spirituality.<br /><br />The practice of public theology, like all of the Christian life, involves spiritual warfare and taking up the cross. And if we are to go this route then we need to ensure that we weigh the costs and have adequate resources. Several years ago I heard speak a young Christian doctor who went to serve in Chile. There she made the "mistake" of treating a government opponent. She was arrested and gruesomely, brutally tortured and sexually violated. In her talk in Cheltenham she made the point that we need an understanding of God that is adequate to the journey of life.<br /><br />Neocalvinists require the development of a prayer life that sustains, nurtures and is the ground for all our public theology. Neocalvinism is effective at spotting reductionist worldviews and philosophies, and we must not ourselves become reductionist at this point. There is danger if our social activism is formed on the presumption that God is superfluous to the formation of a world of peace with justice; if we think it is all up to us. And as Nicolas Berdyaev says, "There is something morally repulsive about modern activistic theories which deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle."<br /><br />This is not to say that the neocalvinist tradition lacks its own resources for devotional piety. Far from it! But some have sadly departed from the riches of our Calvinist heritage. I was fascinated to discover that Kuyper was deeply affected by his reading of a novel <span style="font-style: italic;">The Heir of Redclyffe</span>, and in particular its description of how worship relates to the life journey of a person. He writes: "When I thumbed through this delightful book again, mindful of the care of the Church; when I realized how Guy had been touched by what we seem to have lost, by the lofty significance of the Sacrament, by the prescribed forms of private and public worship, by the impressive liturgy and the blessed prayerbook, which he bequeathed to Phillip just before his death --at that moment the predilection for prescribed ritual, the high estimation of the Sacrament, the appreciation for Liturgy became rooted in me for all time. From then on I have longed with all my soul for a sanctified Church wherein my soul and those of my loved ones can enjoy the quiet refreshment of peace, far from all confusion, under its firm, lasting and authoritative guidance ."<br /><br />Public theology will bring us continually to Gethsemane and Golgotha. None of us are adequate to the task without being rooted and deeply nurtured in Christ. We must therefore as a matter of urgency attend to the development and practice of a cruciform spirituality.<br /><br />CONCLUSION<br /><br />The task of thinking and embodying, however imperfectly, the Reign of Christ is exhilarating, but not easy. Disciples of Jesus should embody a difficult hope and be ready to give an account for it, as the apostle Peter says, because in our postmodern world it will stick out like a sore thumb. To you students in particular I want to say that there is work to be done, and much to pray about, and then we need to work steadily for a renewal of this tradition. May we rise to the challenge!<br /><br />The test of our discipleship will always be how well we represent Christ. Wouldn't it be great if it could be said of us neocals what Kierkegaard said of Chrysostom: "He gesticulated with his whole existence"? Such is the holistic nature of Christ's redemption that this is the only way to gesticulate, as neocalvinism recognizes. Witness can never only be in word but must be in word and deed, in all areas of life.Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-1101084730876909982004-08-21T19:44:00.000-04:002005-02-06T14:22:56.130-05:00Introduction To Kuyper's Thought<span style="font-style:italic;">David Naugle, February 2001</span>
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<br />Described by his enemies as “an opponent of ten heads and a hundred hands,” and by his friends as “a gift of God to our age,”1 Abraham Kuyper (1837- 1920) was truly a homo universale, a veritable genius in both intellectual and practical affairs. A noted journalist, politician, educator, and theologian with mosaic vigor, he is especially remembered as the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, and as the Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901-1905.
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<br />The source of this man’s remarkable contributions is found in a powerful spiritual vision derived from the theology of the protestant reformers (primarily Calvin) which centered upon the sovereignty of the biblical God over all aspects of reality, life, thought, and culture. Indeed, as he thundered in the climax to his inaugural address at the dedication of the Free University, “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”2 On the basis of this theological axiom, Kuyper drew inspiration for the all-consuming goal of his life, namely the renewal of the Dutch church and nation, expressed in these often quoted words.
<br />One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. And sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that this is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which the Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.3
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<br />Indeed, this is the hallmark characteristic of the “Kuyperian” tradition as it has come to be known, and the concept of ‘worldview’ became a tool in his hands by which he expressed this comprehensive vision of the faith. Over the course of time, Kuyper realized that both obedience and disobedience to God were closely bound up if not identified with a particular persuasion or pattern of life, that is, a worldview.
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<br />If non-Christian worldviews characterized by idolatry and religious insubordination are worked out across the whole spectrum of life (which they are), then likewise Christianity must also be articulated in terms of a comprehensive vision of reality engendering the worship of God and submission to his will in all things.4 Indeed, when Kuyper was at the height of his powers, he had just this opportunity—to demonstrate that his beloved Calvinism was more than a just church polity or doctrinaire religion but an all encompassing Weltanschauung—when he was invited to deliver the prestigious Stone Lectures at Princeton University in 1898. These addresses and the book that resulted from them, Lectures on Calvinism, became a second influential source for conceiving of Christianity as a worldview among evangelical protestants.5
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<br />The consensus in recent Kuyperian scholarship is that though the Dutch polymath was quite cognizant of the notion of ‘worldview’ early on in his career and even used the word occasionally, nevertheless he did not define it carefully or work it out Calvinistically until the invitation came to give the esteemed lectures at Princeton. If Peter Heslam’s proposal is correct, Kuyper’s reading of James Orr’s recently published book The Christian View of God and the World might have been the turning point, underscoring the value of Weltanschauung in his eyes, and prompting him to cast his entire lectures on Calvinism as a complete belief system.6 Indeed, the similarities between the two thinkers on worldview are remarkable, and it appears that Kuyper drew considerably from Orr’s thought on the topic.7
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<br />The following survey of Kuyper’s first Stone lecture on “Calvinism a Life-System” will outline his basic thinking on the topic, marking the point from which the concept of Weltanschauung became a permanent fixture in his thought and writings.8
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<br />Kuyper begins by highlighting the common cultural and religious heritage that Europe and America share. Yet as he points out, “the storm of Modernism has arisen with violent intensity” against their revered Christian tradition on both continents, especially in the form of the malevolent influences of the French revolution, Darwinian evolution, and German pantheism. Like Orr before him, Kuyper sees the present cultural moment defined in both Europe and America by a life and death struggle between two antithetical worldviews, or as he calls them, “life-systems.”
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<br />Two life systems are wrestling with one another, in mortal combat. Modernism is bound to build a world of its own from the data of the natural man, and to construct man himself from the data of nature; while, on the other hand, all those who reverently bend the knee to Christ and worship Him as the Son of the living God, and God Himself, are bent upon saving the “Christian Heritage.” This is the struggle in Europe, this is the struggle in America . . . .9
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<br />Kuyper takes a dim view of the role of traditional apologetics in this single most important battle for the soul of the Western world. He notes that such an approach to defending the faith does not advance the Christian cause “one single step,” and later in his volume he refers to it as “useless,” likening it to the activity of a man trying to adjust a crooked window frame when the entire building is tottering on its foundations.10 Apologists, in other words, must occupy themselves with more fundamental and extensive matters and this is precisely what Kuyper intends to do.
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<br />Hence, as Orr proposed in his own lectures, Kuyper argues that a piecemeal apologetic approach must be replaced with a strategy that countered an allencompassing modernism with a comprehensive Christian Weltanschauung. If the battle is to be fought with honor and with hope of victory, then principle must be arrayed against principle: then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all embracing life-system assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power. And this powerful life-system is not to be invented nor formulated by ourselves, but is to be taken and applied as it presents itself in history.11
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<br />In his concluding lecture on “Calvinism and the Future,” Kuyper reiterates this point with even greater clarity and power:
<br />As truly as every plant has a root, so truly does a principle hide under every manifestation of life. These principles are interconnected, and have their common root in a fundamental principle; and from the latter is developed logically and systematically the whole complex of ruling ideas and conceptions that go to make up our life and world-view. With such a coherent world and life-view, firmly resting on its principle and self-consistent in its splendid structure, Modernism now confronts Christianity; and against this deadly danger, ye, Christians, cannot successfully defend your sanctuary, but by placing in opposition to all this, a life-and world-view of your own, founded as firmly on the base of your own principle, wrought out with the same clearness and glittering in an equally logical consistency.12
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<br />For Kuyper, of course, the only expression of Christianity adequate to enter into warfare against the powers of modernity was not to be found in vague versions of Protestantism. Rather, “this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism” which, according to him, had developed the theology of the Reformation more consistently and fruitfully than any other tradition.13 Consequently, there was no doubt in Kuyper’s mind that the subject he would develop and present before his American audience in his Stone Lectures would be Calvinism.
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<br />He was quick to clarify, however, that he was addressing it not in a sectarian, confessional, or denominational sense, but rather as a scientific name, developing its connotations not only for the church but across the whole spectrum of thought and life. Thus he presents Calvinism as a total life-system (lecture one), draws out its implications in the areas of religion, politics, science, and art (lectures two through five), and suggests the kind of role it ought to play in the future of the world (lecture six). So conceived and articulated, Calvinist Christianity could take its place along side the other great systems of human thought including paganism, Islamism, Romanism, and modernism, and be effective in the spiritual and intellectual warfare being waged for cultural dominance.14
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<br />Of course, Kuyper was anxious to justify his claim that Calvinism was far more than just a church view or religious tradition but an entire worldview. In order to do this, he offers some theoretical reflections on the nature of worldviews. He demonstrates that just like other credible systems of belief, Calvinism is capable of meeting the conditions every Weltanschauung must meet by providing insights into the three primary relationships that make up human existence: to God, man, and the world. Kuyper elaborates upon the Calvinist view of each of these areas, contrasts its position with those of its philosophic and religious competitors, and articulates his conclusions in this succinct summary:
<br />For our relation to God: an immediate fellowship of man with the Eternal, independently of priest or church. For the relation of man to man: the recognition in each person of human worth, which is his by virtue of his creation after the Divine likeness, and therefore of the equality of all men before God and his magistrate. And for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life.15
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<br />Since worldviews must articulate cogent positions on each of these relationships, so must Calvinism. Since it does, and does so successfully, Kuyper is convinced that it can stand on its own among alternative perspectives. Thus Kuyper affirmed, as Orr also did, that Christianity was capable of “claiming for itself the glory of possessing a well-defined principle and an all-embracing life-system.”16 The contest between the life-systems of modernity and Christianity comes to expression in all the social and cultural domains that Kuyper addresses in his lectures.
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<br />However, the rivalry is particularly poignant in science, that is, in theorizing in general, or what the Germans call Wissenschaft, especially in the debate regarding the origin of life. He makes the point that this aspect of the culture war is not between religion and science per se, but between two competing life-systems underlying the two distinctive approaches to scientific investigation. There is the worldview represented by the normalists who assert that the cosmos is in its customary state as its various potentials are actualized by the mechanism of evolution (naturalism). On the other hand, there is the worldview represented by the abnormalists who insist that the cosmos is in an aberrant state because a fundamental disturbance has taken place in the past which can only be remedied by a regenerating power that can restore it to its original goals (theism).
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<br />So the origins debate is technically not one of religion and science at all, but between two life-systems underlying the science practiced by the respective groups, each having its own unique set of motivations and assumptions.17 As Kuyper puts it, “. . . the difference between the science of the Normalists and Abnormalists is not founded upon any differing result of investigation, but upon the undeniable difference which distinguishes the self-consciousness of the one from that of the other.”18 In another place, Kuyper argues that because there are basically two kinds of people, there are two kinds of science. The difference between people is established upon their relation to palingenesis, that is, spiritual regeneration. Regenerate people with a Christian worldview produce a roughly theistic interpretation of science, and non-regenerate people with an non-Christian worldview produce an idolatrous science.
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<br />While Kuyper carefully nuances his position to avoid absurd conclusions, nonetheless he is clear that the experience of palingenesis, which radically alters the content of human consciousness and reshapes worldview, makes a decisive difference in the way the cosmos is interpreted and science is pursued. Kuyper summarizes his viewpoint, famously known as the “antithesis,” in these words:
<br />We speak none too emphatically, therefore, when we speak of two kinds of people. Both are human, but one is inwardly different from the other [because of palingenesis], and consequently feels a different content rising from his consciousness; thus they face the cosmos from different points of view, and are impelled by different impulses. And the fact that there are two kinds of people occasions of necessity the fact of two kinds of human life and consciousness of life, and of two kinds of science; for which reason the idea of the unity of science, taken in its absolute sense, implies the denial of the fact of palingenesis, and therefore from principle leads to the rejection of the Christian religion.19
<br />
<br />The seamless robe of science, according to Kuyper, is torn asunder by the experience of spiritual regeneration which makes a homogeneous approach to the enterprise impossible. Scientific reason is not the same for all people. It depends upon whether or not the scientist has or has not been religiously renewed. There is not a neutral, scientific rationality leading to certain objective and shared conclusions. Instead, scientific theories are a function of the religious backgrounds and philosophical orientations of the scientists or theorists.20
<br />
<br />In summary, Abraham Kuyper has bequeathed to the evangelical church the legacy of the Calvinist, Christian worldview. It is a rich description of the faith, zeroing in on the pillar points of creation, fall, and redemption, and characterized by several important themes.
<br />
<br />First is the idea that God’s redemptive “grace restores nature,” that is, the salvation achieved by Jesus Christ is cosmic in scope and entails the renewal of everything in creation to its original divine purpose.
<br />
<br />Second is the assertion that God is sovereign and that He has ordered the universe and all aspects of life within it by his law and word (“sphere sovereignties”) thereby giving each thing its particular identity, preserving the wondrous diversity of creation, and preventing the usurpation of one sphere of existence over another.
<br />
<br />Third is the wholehearted affirmation of the “cultural mandate” in the opening chapters of Genesis, demonstrating that God intends the progressive development of the creation in history as a fundamental human occupation to God’s glory and for the benefit of mankind.
<br />
<br />Finally there is the concept of the spiritual “antithesis,” namely that the human race is divided distinctly between believers who acknowledge the redemption and kingship of Jesus Christ and unbelievers who do not, with the concomitant implications of both life orientations across the whole spectrum of human existence. Thus, a spiritually sensitive and holistic interpretation of Christianity that includes the transformation and development of all aspects of human thought and culture is at the heart of the Kuyperian vision.21
<br />
<br />Two additional aspects of the preeminent Dutchman’s neo-Calvinistic worldview tradition touched on earlier need to be reinforced by way of summary.
<br />
<br />First, Kuyper’s approach to Christianity as a complete worldview provided him with an alternative to traditional apologetic strategies. As mentioned earlier, in his estimation, the rationalist and evidentialist approach to defending individual aspects of the faith based on the assumption of the mind’s ability to decide objectively regarding matters of truth was naive. It must be replaced by a method that recognizes the influence of underlying presuppositions on the mind’s perception of what constitutes reason and evidence in the first place. Apologetic warfare must be conducted at the more basic level of underlying worldviews.
<br />
<br />Consequently, Kuyper emphasized the importance of presenting the faith as an complete life-system or fundamental interpretative principle, for what was at stake first and foremost was the very conception and meaning of the universe. Kuyper’s denigration of old school apologetics and his advocacy of a worldview approach fueled the controversy that persists even today between evidentialists and presuppositionalists.22
<br />
<br />Second, to extend the previous contribution in another direction, the notion of ‘worldview’ provided Kuyper with a mechanism for critiquing the scientific and scholarly enterprise, broadly conceived. Kuyper showed that human reason is not neutral in its operation, but functions under the influence of a set of antecedent assumptions that condition all thinking and acting. This realization led to a powerful critique of the modern ideal of scientific neutrality and objectivity. Given the recognition that all theorizing arises out of a priori faith commitments, it also encouraged Christian thinkers to undertake their academic projects on the basis of theistic beliefs with confidence. It is hard to overstate the profound impact that this insight has had in engendering a renaissance in Christian scholarship across the disciplines in recent days. 23
<br />
<br />Accordingly, George Marsden can speak in cautious terms of “The triumph—or nearly so—of what may be loosely called Kuyperian presuppositionalism in the evangelical [academic] community.”24 Thus, a worldview apologetic and a presuppositional critique of theorizing constitute two additional aspects of Kuyper’s Weltanschauung legacy. This conception of Calvinistic Christianity subsumed under the rubric of worldview was appropriated by Kuyper’s followers—the Dutch neo-Calvinists or Kuyperians25—and passed down to subsequent generations.
<br />
<br />Eventually it migrated with them across the Atlantic, and became a significant theme among them as an immigrant community in North America. Both Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada— where Kuyperian ideals and worldview thinking have flourished—were birthed out of this tradition. From this community of faith, it spread into mainstream American evangelicalism where it has had a substantial impact.
<br />
<br />Its more immediate influence, however, was registered through the second generation of Kuyperians in both theology and in an amazingly fruitful way in the Christian philosophy inspired by this tradition.26 His contributions were matched by colleagues and by those following in his wake, especially theologian Herman Bavinck (1854-1921),27 and second generation Christian philosophers D. H. T. Vollenhoven (1892-1978),28 and most notably, Vollenhoven’s brother-in-law, Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). Among his American disciples, Cornelius Van Til has been an exponent of Kuyperian presuppositionalism par excellence.29
<br />
<br /> Among this company, I myself, have cast my lot. I would describe myself as a Kuyperian or neocalvinist to a large extent, though there would be some areas of disagreement. His focus on God’s kingship over the whole of life, and his notion of a life system consisting of the themes of creation, fall, and redemption seem to me to be preeminently biblical. It is an interpretation of biblical faith that has opened up a whole new perspective on the majesty of God, the goodness of creation and creaturely life, our humanly fulfilling cultural tasks, the disaster of sin, and the amazing grace of God expressed in Christ Jesus our Lord who has achieved a cosmic redemption. Through the ministry and power of the Holy Spirit, He is restoring genuine believers to their original purposes and the entire creation back to God for our blessing and His greater glory. This perpsective has radical daily implications across the whole spectrum of life, calling us to holiness in everything. This includes the enterprise of Christian higher education here at DBU and for the endeavors of scholarship, study, teaching, and learning for students and professors alike who take seriously the Lordship of Christ over their entire lives and all creation.
<br />
<br />-------------------------------
<br />ENDNOTES
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<br />1 John Hendrick de Vries, biographical note to Lectures on Calvinism, by Abraham Kuyper (1931; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), iii.
<br />
<br />2 Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
<br />
<br />3 Quoted in de Vries, “Biographical Note,” iii.
<br />
<br />4 R. D. Henderson, “How Abraham Kuyper Became a Kuyperian,” Christian Scholars Review 22 (1992): 22, 34-35.
<br />
<br />5 Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1931; reprint Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994). For an excellent study of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures, see Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).
<br />
<br />6 Orr also delivered the Stone Lectures for the academic year 1903-04, an effort which resulted in the publication of God’s Image in Man, and Its Defacement, in the Light of Modern Denials (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905).
<br />
<br />7 Heslam shows that both Orr and Kuyper delivered their respective lectures, Kerr and Stone, in order to show that there is an explicit Christian Weltanschauung. He explains other parallels between Kuyper and Orr thusly: “Orr argued that Christianity had an independent, unified and coherent worldview derived from a central belief or principle, an argument which is virtually identical to that of Kuyper on behalf of Calvinism. Kuyper also resembles Orr in his argument that modern worldviews are expressed in a unified system of thought, that they are derived from a single principle and are embodied in certain forms of life and activity, and that they are antithetical to Christianity. Kuyper’s claim, likewise, that Calvinism’s only defense against modernism was in the development of an equally comprehensive worldview, in which principle would be arrayed against principle—is almost indistinguishable from Orr’s argument regarding Christianity.” See his Creating a Christian Worldview, 93-94.
<br />
<br />8 Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 96.
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<br />9 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 11. Kuyper takes advantage of this reference to “life system” to mention in a footnote on page 11 Orr’s “valuable lectures” contained in The Christian View, pointing out the difficulty of translating Weltanschauung into English. He notes that Orr employed the literal translation “view of the world,” even though he prefers the more explicit phrase “life and world view.” American colleagues convinced him, nonetheless, that the expression “life system” was as an appropriate synonym with wide currency in the United States. He chose this translation for the title of his first chapter (“Calvinism as a Life-System”), though he interchanges the two expressions later in his lectures, depending upon the context and the nuance of his argument.
<br />
<br />10 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 11, 135-136.
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<br />11 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 11-12.
<br />
<br />12 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 189-190 (emphasis his).
<br />
<br />13 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 12.
<br />
<br />14 Here is where I see Kuyper and Orr deviating in their respective purposes. On the one hand, Orr’s concern was to spell out the essence of the Christian worldview theologically, centering his presentation on the incarnation; Kuyper on the other hand was concerned to demonstrate the implications of the Calvinist worldview culturally, showing the relevance of reformed theology across the whole of life. For an expanded treatment on the cultural implications of Calvinist theology, including a discussion of Kuyper’s perspective, see Henry Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1959).
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<br />15 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 31.
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<br />16 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 32. Albert Wolters has pointed out that as a worldview, Calvinism is eminently comparable to Marxism in its comprehensiveness and direct applicability to the total range of cultural phenomena and intellectual concerns. See his, “Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Worldview, Philosophy and Rationality,” in Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition, Christian Studies Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 117.
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<br />17 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 130-136.
<br />
<br />18 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 138 (emphasis added).
<br />
<br />19 Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, intro. Benjamin B.
<br />Warfield, trans. J. Hendrik De Vries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980),
<br />154.
<br />
<br />20 While such an understanding of scientific theorizing is explicitly religious, Kuyper’s proposal anticipates aspects of Thomas Kuhn’s postmodern paradigm thesis by seven or eight decades. Nicholas Wolterstorff has offered some sharp criticisms of Kuyper’s concept of two people/two sciences, arguing against what he calls its “religious totalism” in his essay “On Christian Learning,” in Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, Christian Studies Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 56-80.
<br />
<br />21 Albert M. Wolters, “The Intellectual Milieu of Herman Dooyeweerd,” in The Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd: Reflections on Critical Philosophy in the Christian Tradition, ed. C. T. McIntire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 4-10.
<br />
<br />22 See the excellent discussion illuminating this issue by George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 122-52. Recent contributions to this debate on apologetics include R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, Zondervan, 1984); Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, eds., Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers Grove, IL:
<br />InterVarsity Press, 1995); Steven B. Cowan, ed. Five Views on Apologetics, Counterpoints Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000).
<br />
<br />23 Both Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff have extended this aspect of the Kuyperian tradition. In his famous address “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984), Plantinga has advised Christian academics (philosophers in particular) to take certain biblical doctrines as assumptions in their philosophic work. Similarly, Wolterstorff in his equally influential Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2d ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984) has argued that the religious commitments of the Christian scholar ought to function as “control beliefs” in the devising and weighing of theories. The success of the Kuyperian vision in academic life has been noted in the popular press. See Alan Wolfe, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” The Atlantic Monthly 286 (October 2000): 55-76.
<br />
<br />24 George Marsden, “The State of Evangelical Christian Scholarship,” The Reformed Journal 37 (1987): 14. See also Richard J. Mouw, “Dutch Calvinist Philosophical Influences in North America,” Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 93-120.
<br />
<br />25 The phrase “neo-Calvinism” was originally coined by Kuyper’s opponents, but was eventually accepted by him and his followers since it suggested that their views were not simply a restatement of the reformer’s original convictions, but were a positive and progressive development of them. In due course, the eponymous adjective “Kuyperian” was used synonymously with “neo-Calvinist” to designate this revival movement that stemmed from the prodigious thought and industrious activity of its founder.
<br />
<br />26 See Richard J. Mouw, “Dutch Calvinist Philosophical Influences in North America,” Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 93-120.
<br />
<br />27 In a booklet titled “Christian Worldview” (Christelijke Wereldbeschouwing) written in 1904, Bavinck presents a version of the Christian faith that stands in the neo-Platonist tradition of Augustine and Aquinas. A few years later in 1908 when his own opportunity to present the Stone Lectures at Princeton arose, Bavinck articulated a conception of ‘worldview’ similar to Kuyper’s, describing it as the pretheoretical substructure to all forms of theoretical thought. In these lectures he referred to Wilhelm Dilthey’s recent publications in which he described Weltanschauung as the subterranean well spring of the sciences. From Albert Wolters, “On the Idea of Worldview and Its Relation to Philosophy,” in Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, Christian Studies Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 21.
<br />
<br />28 D. H. T. Vollenhoven, who was professor of philosophy at the Free University from 1926-63, argued that Calvinistic philosophy was not the same as world and life view, but was “the latter’s scientific elaboration. ”See Wolters, “On the Idea of Worldview,” 22.
<br />
<br />29 As Van Til himself testifies, he always sought to work “in Kuyper’s line,” rejecting traditional apologetics and taking up his position in the Christian theistic system as the fundamental presupposition of his thought. As he puts it, “Calvin was right. We must not, like the Greeks and the scholastics after them, engage in vain speculations about the essence of God. We must not, like Descartes, start from man as a final point of reference in predication. We must listen to what God has told us about himself, and about ourselves, and our relation to him throught [sic] Christ in Scripture as our Creator-Redeemer.” Van Til’s comments are found in response to an article on his apologetics by Herman Dooyeweerd in E. R. Geehan, ed., Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 92.
<br />Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-24877534572837281362004-07-22T06:17:00.000-04:002007-07-06T06:53:29.053-04:00Book Store<br /><br /><iframe src="http://astore.amazon.com/thenextneoc-20" frameborder="0" height="3000" scrolling="no" width="84%"></iframe>Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8834113.post-78542321478058763212004-06-22T13:36:00.002-04:002008-09-22T07:45:00.576-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj_NuBvDAGuMwPYz8P3CbH9B6cv29XdwbeRSpbGk5sxfS7b3KTpD_MiUXxCf3vwbGwFUtPnnHyBeCHyw51DX4WvvJHAD7lEIGCLb16_GkYYm0yOU8bts2kir5hgJl3YtDZWlaMPQ/s1600-h/KuyperProfile2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj_NuBvDAGuMwPYz8P3CbH9B6cv29XdwbeRSpbGk5sxfS7b3KTpD_MiUXxCf3vwbGwFUtPnnHyBeCHyw51DX4WvvJHAD7lEIGCLb16_GkYYm0yOU8bts2kir5hgJl3YtDZWlaMPQ/s320/KuyperProfile2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248810319485875314" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHcIXBjXNkUL1hImmrSd22s_zVgW_rjr_Y5oSc9pKOjX1qXcVKpxrmU4hdzLjmdI1w2HcTZDLdAd-zRqFeXoQpWtMhe4PqVNMe6j6W8UVViLnSNffdNSzQjAlA5tG-mle0g7auw/s1600-h/KuyperCartoon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHcIXBjXNkUL1hImmrSd22s_zVgW_rjr_Y5oSc9pKOjX1qXcVKpxrmU4hdzLjmdI1w2HcTZDLdAd-zRqFeXoQpWtMhe4PqVNMe6j6W8UVViLnSNffdNSzQjAlA5tG-mle0g7auw/s320/KuyperCartoon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5193609351886804594" border="0" /></a>Baushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15081376115291852909noreply@blogger.com