Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism / Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Anderson, Clifford B

Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism

By Peter S. Heslam

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1998. 300 pp. $28.00.

Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader

Edited by James D. Bratt

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1998. 498 pp. $29.00.

Abraham Kuyper, Dutch theologian and statesman, delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898. In 1998, Princeton

Seminary commemorated the centenary of those lectures-since published as the Lectures on Calvinism-by cosponsoring an international conference with Calvin College, The Center for Public Justice, and the Free University of Amsterdam on Abraham Kuyper and his legacy. The conference also furnished the occasion for Eerdmans to release these two important new books on Kuyper. Both works lay the foundation for a balanced assessment of Kuyper's contributions to Reformed theology and political thought by cementing our knowledge of the historical person and his times.

Who was Abraham Kuyper? While most Christians who move about in Dutch Calvinist circles are familiar with Kuyper, many outside those circles are less well acquainted with him. Among the reasons for this disparity is that much of Kuyper's theology is deeply tied up with the history of the Netherlands. Not only was Kuyper a great Dutch patriot who frequently illustrated his theology by reference to Dutch history, but he also articulated many of his ideas in response to religious, political, and social struggles that raged in the Netherlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another reason is that many of Kuyper's important works have not been readily available in English translation. The arrival of these two new works should go a long way toward making Kuyper's theology more accessible to Christians who are not more directly acquainted with his Dutch cultural heritage.

Both authors provide excellent overviews of Kuyper's life and career. At first attracted to theological modernism, Kuyper underwent a change of heart during his first pastorate and later emerged on the national scene as an ardent proponent of Calvinist orthodoxy. He held that the doctrine of God's sovereignty constituted the genius of Calvinism and opposed that doctrine to any pietistic claim that Christianity was just about the salvation of individual souls. This conviction led him to formulate a theology that recognized God as sovereign over every sphere of life. What made Kuyper particularly significant was that he gave institutional form to his theological convictions. He advanced the interests of his co-religionists by starting a newspaper, organizing the Netherlands' first modern political party, founding the Free University of Amsterdam, and serving in the national government as, among other things, Prime Minister from 1901-1905.

Readers looking for an introduction to Kuyper's thought are advised to start with his Lectures on Calvinism, which remain the most accessible and systematic introduction to his thought. In those lectures, Kuyper held Calvinism to be a worldview that propounded the sovereignty of God over the sphere of the church, the state, the sciences and the arts. Peter Heslam's Creating a Christian Worldview is an indispensable guide to the Lectures on Calvinism. Heslam, a curate in the Church of England, examines carefully both the historical background to and the theological content of Kuyper's lectures. His exposition follows the order of Kuyper's lectures closely, highlighting significant themes in each lecture and relating them to their historical context. Readers will appreciate Heslam's expert guidance when it comes to Kuyper's attitude towards such disparate topics as apologetics, the French Revolution, and social Darwinism. Paradoxically, Heslam often enhances the reader's understanding of Kuyper by pointing to the ironies and discontinuities in his thought. For example, Heslam notes that Kuyper's characterization of Calvinism as a consistent worldview opposed to secular, modern worldviews borrowed its form largely from those opposing worldviews themselves. He also calls attention to the tension between what he terms the "universalistic" and the "particularistic" aspects of Kuyper's thought. In some lectures, such as "Calvinism and Science," Kuyper stressed the antithesis between Calvinism and modernity. In others, such as "Calvinism and Art," he stressed the commonalities between Christ and culture by way of his doctrine of common grace. In general, Heslam writes with an historian's restraint. He does not seek to resolve the tensions in Kuyper's thought but he brings them clearly to the surface and marks them off as topics for future inquiry.

"In his Princeton lectures Kuyper played the role of the statesmanlike scholar. This anthology aims to recover the rest of him." So writes James Bratt in the introduction to Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader. Bratt, a professor of history at Calvin College, has judiciously selected sixteen from the hundreds of items that Kuyper published during his multifaceted career. The volume is organized in four sections: Beginnings, Church and Theology, Politics and Society, and Culture and Education. The selections include Kuyper's narration of his "conversion," reflections on cultural trends, statements on the social and political controversies of his era, as well as addresses on such heartfelt topics as common grace, evolution, and sphere sovereignty. Bratt's anthology brings together not only documents written on various subjects but also documents composed for various venues. He presents us with Kuyper the pastor, the party rhetorician, the politician, the journalist, and the composer of devotional tracts. Kuyper emerges from these pages as a complex figure, at once devoted to Calvinist orthodoxy and deeply engaged with trends in nineteenth century European culture, at once promoter of strict confessionalism in the church and champion of Christian engagement in the public square. Bratt's succinct introductions and footnotes put the selections in context and fill in relevant historical details. The anthology's photographs, political cartoons and excerpts from more occasional writings also provide insight into the world in which Kuyper lived.