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

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Anderson, Clifford B

Abraham Kuyper remains a controversial figure in contemporary theological discussions, chiefly because he tangled up his theology with some of the untoward social and political ideas of his era. Heslam describes Kuyper's subscription to the "myth of 'heliotropic' development," which led him to conceive of civilization as arising in the Middle East and developing progressively westward towards its penultimate culmination in America. This myth prompted Kuyper both to praise the United States as the future bulwark of Calvinism and to speculate about an impending cataclysmic confrontation with the Buddhist East. "The South African Crisis," which Bratt includes in his anthology, demonstrates Kuyper's deep sympathy for the Boer cause against British Imperialism as well as his callous disregard for the conditions of black South Africans. The possible connections between Kuyper's theology and the development of apartheid in South Africa remains a subject of continuing controversy.

There is no doubt that Kuyper's theology cannot be reappropriated uncritically today. Kuyper himself would have objected to the contemporary repristination of his theology. As he stated in "Conservatism and Orthodoxy: False and True Preservation," which is reproduced in Bratt's anthology, "repristination is an undertaking that is self-condemned." True preservation follows a different method. "First seek to have for yourself the life your fathers had and then hold fast what you have. Then articulate that life in your own language as they did in theirs. Struggle as they did to pump that life into the arteries of the life of our church and society." Contemporary Christians have much to learn from a renewed acquaintance with this nineteenth-century Dutch theologian. These two books provide the necessary tools for the critical but joyful task of rediscovering the Calvinism that animated Kuyper's thought.

CLIFFORD B. ANDERSON

Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, NJ