Calvinism for a Secular Age

A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper's Stone Lectures

Jessica R. Joustra, Robert J. Joustra, Jessica R. Joustra, Robert J. Joustra

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514001462
• eBook ISBN: 9781514001479
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian, pastor, and politician, was well-known for having declared that there is "not a square inch" of human existence over which Jesus Christ is not its sovereign Lord.

This principle is perhaps best reflected in Kuyper's writings on Calvinism originally delivered as the Stone Lectures in 1898 at Princeton Theological Seminary. These lectures reflecting on the role of the Christian faith in a variety of social spheres—including religion, politics, science, and art—have become a touchstone for contemporary Reformed theology.

How might the lectures continue to inform the church's calling in a secular age? In this volume, Jessica Joustra and Robert Joustra bring together theologians, historians, scientists, and others to revisit Kuyper's original lectures and to critically consider both his ongoing importance and his complex legacy for today.

1

KUYPER AND LIFE-SYSTEMS

RICHARD J. MOUW

WHAT DID KUYPER SAY?

One of my students once thanked me for assigning Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism in the course he had taken from me. Reading these lectures, he said, was a great experience for him. But then he added a mild complaint about the first of Kuyper’s lectures. “I think there should be a ‘warning label’ right there at the beginning. There is a bit of an arrogant spirit in the way he makes Calvinism look good and the other perspectives—including the Christian ones—look bad. And then he makes you wade through a lot of technical stuff as he is making his points. I was glad to get on to the next chapters, which I really liked!”

I was not surprised by his complaint about getting started in reading the Stone Lectures. I have gone through them many times over the years, and even though I understand the points that Kuyper is making, I don’t find it easy reading. And like the student, I find some of Kuyper’s references to other Christian traditions to be a bit too polemical in tone. Kuyper gets more interesting for me when he turns to specific areas of cultural engagement in the subsequent chapters, showing how Calvinism can help us understand why God cares about religious beliefs and practices, politics, science, and the arts.

Still, important topics are covered in these early pages, and it is good to get a sense of why Kuyper finds it necessary to contrast Calvinism with these other perspectives before he moves on to more specific areas. And it also helps to know why his tone is a bit strident as he sets up his overall framework.

Kuyper was well aware that the Presbyterian folks who attended these lectures at Princeton—mainly pastors and professors—were feeling beleaguered by attacks on the traditional Calvinism that had long characterized the theology at Princeton Seminary. And Kuyper himself had recently gone through some theological struggles back home in the Netherlands, resulting in a serious division in the ranks of the Dutch Reformed there. So, he wanted to offer words of encouragement to his hearers. He wanted to assure them that the defense of Calvinism is no lost cause—indeed, Calvinism provides a very exciting overall perspective on how we are to live our lives as people who want to serve the Lord in all things.

To make his case, Kuyper explained to his audience that he was going to explore some new dimensions in Calvinism, ones that often were not given adequate attention by those who, over the past centuries, professed loyalty to the theology of John Calvin. Kuyper made it clear that his intention in discussing Calvinism in these lectures was “not to restore its worn-out form”; rather, he was going to show how Calvinism, as a system of thought that flows from a deep “life principle,” fulfills in an exciting way “the requirements of our own century.”1

It may not have been the wisest thing for Kuyper to talk about not wanting to rehabilitate Calvinism in “its worn-out form.” He certainly wasn’t meaning to reject the Calvinism of the past, and it probably would have been better to assure his audience about that. Kuyper clearly endorsed the basics of the Calvinist portrayal of how an individual can get right with God. We were created to live in an obedient fellowship with God, but in rebelling against our Creator we have become deeply stuck in our own sinfulness. If we are to be rescued from our depravity, it has to happen from God’s direction. And God did move toward us by sending Jesus into the world to take our sin on himself. So we are saved by grace alone.

Kuyper firmly believed in all of that, including all of the traditional Calvinist formulations about election and predestination and the “eternal security” of the believer. His intention in these lectures was to show how Calvinism offers us all of that—but also a lot more. Yes, God saves us from our helpless sinful condition. But what does he save us for? And here is where the bigger Calvinist picture begins to unfold. We are saved—as members of a community of believers—to show forth the lordship of Christ over all things.

To put it in simple terms, in these lectures Kuyper wants to portray Calvinism as a big-picture perspective on the Christian life. This is why he gives so much attention in this first lecture to the importance of seeing Calvinism as a “life-system.”2 If all we have is a theology about individual salvation, we can easily be taken in by the answers to the broader questions about human well-being generated by what he sees as the four other life-systems providing influential guidance for human living at that time: paganism, Islamism, Roman Catholicism, and modernism. To resist these competing influences, he argues, we must be clear about what Calvinism has to teach us about what he identifies as the “three fundamental relations of all human life”: how we human creatures relate to God, how we relate to our fellow humans, and how we relate to the larger world in which we find ourselves.3

Foundational to all of this for Kuyper is our understanding of who God is. The supreme authority of the God of the Bible is basic to Kuyper’s understanding of reality. As the Creator of all things, God is distinct from all he has called into being. God did not have to create a world in order to be fully God. That view stands in stark contrast to the pantheistic understanding, which equates the divine with the “all” of the universe. Kuyper was passionate about that classical conception of the Wholly Other-ness of God.

The denial of this vast “being” gap between the Creator and his creation is at the heart of human sinfulness. God alone is worthy of our ultimate trust, and when we put that trust in something less than God—something creaturely—we are engaged in idolatry, and this is the root of all sin. By turning our ultimate allegiance toward something within the creation, we mess up those “three fundamental relations of all human life.”4 By refusing to honor God’s authority, we cut ourselves off from the blessings of living in fellowship with our Creator, and this in turn disrupts our relations with our fellow humans as well as with our ways of relating to the nonhuman world.

What’s at stake in all of this for Kuyper is the insistence that Christian faith is more than a purely “personal” matter. It is not less than that, of course. We human beings got into the mess that we are in because our first parents made the very personal decision to trust the serpent’s promise that if they would disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, they themselves would “be like God” (Gen 3:5). But that personal act of rebellion has wide-reaching consequences for human life—which is why Kuyper goes on in these lectures to explain how restoring our personal relationship with God through Christ’s atoning work has profound implications for how we view church, politics, science, and artistic endeavors.

Before getting into the details of those specific areas of Christian service, though, Kuyper wants us to see how the life-system he sets forth differs from other major life-systems that are at work in the world. He is especially concerned about one of these in particular. In present life, he says, it is modernism and Christianity that “are wrestling with one another, in mortal combat.”5 He sees a close connection in this regard between the modernist life-system and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century.

Two decades earlier Kuyper had founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party, of which he had served as the party’s leader in the Dutch Parliament. In choosing “Anti-Revolutionary” for the name of his political party, he signaled his conviction that the ideology of the French Revolution was diametrically opposed to Christian life and thought. The revolutionaries in France were committed to abolishing everything associated with belief in God. Central to their thinking was the insistence on the radical supremacy of the independent human self. In that sense, the ideology of the French Revolution was the philosophical expression of the serpent’s promise that human beings can be their own gods, with human reason functioning as the ultimate source of meaning and value.

As Kuyper explains the modernist perspective in more detail in this first lecture, he introduces some complications. In addition to the French atheistic themes, he sees some “pantheist” German philosophical ideas at work in modernism, particularly the ways that the traditional Christian belief in divine providence had been incorporated into evolutionistic thought, with the conviction regarding the inevitably of human progress. For our purposes here, though, we do not need to follow the philosophical details of Kuyper’s exposition as long as we grasp his basic point, which is that modernism is a life-system that seeks to eliminate all the influences of Christian faith from human life and thought.

While that modernist project clearly remains a major challenge to the Christian faith in the twenty-first century, Kuyper’s other two non-Christian life-systems are still very much in the picture for our Western culture—more so than they were in Kuyper’s time. He was thinking globally, and for him, paganism and Islam were a major presence primarily in other parts of the world. As he put it, the pagan understanding of spiritual things could be seen in both “the lowest Animism” and “the highest Buddhism.” What every form of paganism has in common, he observes, is an understanding of the divine that “does not rise to the conception of the independent existence of a God beyond and above the creature.”6 In that sense, paganism is a presence in our current surroundings, not only in popular “New Age” thinking but also in the outlook expressed in the popular motto, “I’m not religious at all, but I do consider myself to be quite spiritual!”

And, of course, Islam has become a highly visible presence in Western cultures. When I was growing up, what we knew about Muslims was mainly from what returning missionaries told us when they visited our congregations to report about their ministries in Arab countries. Now I see Muslims daily, in supermarkets and schoolyards.

Islam presents a unique religious phenomenon for Kuyper. Muslims certainly do not confuse the Creator with some aspect of his creation. The God to whom they pray is very much above and beyond the created order. Indeed, in Kuyper’s telling, the problem with Islam is that it creates too great a spiritual distance between Allah and the world. It makes God’s being so distinct from created reality, he says, that it “isolates God from the creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.”7 The result, as one Calvinist expert on Islam has put it more recently, is that

in Islam there is little room for a life of personal fellowship with God. Allah is so great and so exalted, and his will is so completely dominating, that very little is left on the human side. . . . Even the sense of personal responsibility toward him and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation, find no possibility of development.8

As opposed to these other life-systems, for Kuyper, Christianity gets it right in spelling out the big picture. The Bible tells us of a God who reigns over his creation, while also emphasizing the fact that God created human beings with the capacity to live in a vital fellowship with him. For Kuyper this requires that we see all aspects of our lives as taking place before the presence of God. Kuyper regularly uses a wonderful Latin phrase to capture this reality: coram Deo, which means “before the face of God.” He insists that the genius of Calvinism is that it sets forth a life-system that highlights the inescapable reality of our living every moment before the face of God.

The obvious Christian alternative to Calvinism for Kuyper is the Roman Catholic view, which he likes to label “Romanism.” The key defect in Catholicism for him is the way it relies on the church as mediating our relationship to God. For the Calvinist, Kuyper argues, divine grace comes to us directly from God, and nothing must stand in the way of “a direct and immediate communion with the Living God.”9 More broadly, Kuyper also objects to the way the Catholic Church had long seen itself as mediating the relationship between God and the other spheres. For Kuyper, the churchly realm is just one of the areas of collective life—alongside the state, the art guild, the university, and the area of economic activity—that stands directly under God’s sovereign rule.

Kuyper sees other Christian traditions—Baptists, Anglicans, Wesleyans, and Lutherans, for example—as lacking the full life-system character of Catholicism and Calvinism. The Anabaptists receive special criticism from him for what he sees as their refusal to engage the larger culture at all.

As my student made clear, the tone of Kuyper’s depiction of other Christian groups can strike us today as much too confrontational. Fortunately, we will find him acknowledging, as he moves to his conclusions in the final lecture, the positive lessons he has been learning from Catholics—and even from modernist Protestants.

What we cannot excuse in this opening lecture, however, are the remarks he makes about traditional African culture. Kuyper credits Asia for its cultural development while also criticizing Asians for failing to contribute their cultural riches to the larger world. But Africa, he suggests, simply has not had any significant cultural development to share with the rest of humanity. In offering this assessment, he even mentions Noah’s sons—alluding to the tradition which has taught that Ham, who was cursed by his father, was the one whose offspring populated the African continent. Such a sentiment, of course, reveals at the very least an unwillingness to expand one’s understanding of culture; at its worst, it reveals something much more sinister.

Kuyper’s perceptions of African culture were clearly shaped by the views of the Dutch who had settled in Southern Africa—he was closely in touch with them. Those folks would soon establish the racist apartheid structures, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface - James D. Bratt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - Robert J. Joustra
• 1 Kuyper and Life-Systems - Richard J. Mouw
• 2 Kuyper and Religion - James Eglinton
• 3 Kuyper and Politics - Jonathan Chaplin
• 4 Kuyper and Science - Deborah B. Haarsma
• 5 Kuyper and Art - Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
• 6 Kuyper and the Future - Bruce Ashford
• 7 Kuyper and Race - Vincent Bacote
• 8 Lost in Translation: The First Text of the Stone Lectures - George Harinck
• Conclusion - Jessica R. Joustra
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Notes
• Praise for Calvinism for a Secular Age
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright