More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 16 - February 4, 2018
the way he proposed for religious believers to bring the full weight of their convictions into public life while fully respecting the rights of others in a pluralistic society under a constitutional government.
Human society in his view was comprised of autonomous “spheres,” and a society’s health could be measured by the relative independence with which those spheres operated according to their God-given principle of development.
The modern distinctive in such situations was to prevent any one of these “world and life views” from gaining official preference or privilege. This lack of preference was a good thing, Kuyper said; in fact, it was the authentic Calvinist thing.
Kuyper thought, the two types of pluralism were made for each other: a society of vigorous autonomous development would thrive best in a polity of maximal religious assertion under rules of mutual regard.
He believed that a — the — real world did exist, created and upheld by God’s providence; but he also held that people’s cognitive grids (owing in part to their relative social power) so sorted and shaped their perceptions that human beings are, in a real and proper sense, framers of their own worlds.
in contrast to other contemporary Protestants of orthodox hue, Kuyper would combine Reformed Christian and German Idealist sources.
the leading question in the speech is unmistakably the epistemological question of “appearance” vs. “reality.”
They were Realists in their confidence that nature was meaningful and that imagination marked the high road into rather than away from things “as they actually are.”
But their program left them with exactly the problem that Kuyper explored in “Modernism”: how to determine where subjectivity ended and reality began; more broadly, how to harness vaulting spiritual yearnings to concrete earthly forms, how to reconcile the demand for personal autonomy with the goal of universal harmony.
In making his change Kuyper struck a chord that he would repeat for the rest of his life: the mandate to make a “definite choice” between stark opposites rooted logically in differing first principles.
Kuyper’s passion for the democratic option led him to a step that would change his career as sharply as the recent crisis had his convictions.
The decision about polity entailed support for either “the modern or the anti-modern life-conception,” he said — either “the Judeo-Christian, divine-human, ethical world- and life-view” or one that was at bottom “heathen, humanistic, [and] aesthetic.”
The shoe began to pinch at the third step: a fully faithful and effective church had to be arrayed in and keep a close watch over its visible, institutional forms.
The compliments Kuyper could accord Modernism he never lent to the Dutch Reformed hierarchy or the time-servers in the pulpit that he saw abetting its negligence.
His liturgical reform was not the multi-sensory ceremony beloved of Anglo-Catholics but literal adherence to prescribed formularies, especially at baptism — this both to create a common, familiar order and to enforce Trinitarian language against Modernist deviation.
Church and school alike, he insisted, needed to be freed from the dead hand of establishment, be it synod or state.
conservatism was wrong theologically, precisely by virtue of the reality of sin, for the heritage of the past bore the fruits of depravity as well as the wisdom of the ages.
Evangelical
too fixed on individual conversion.
Though not uniformly free-thinkers, Liberals in Kuyper’s era promoted secularization: socially, because the church was the ultimate in privileged corporations; intellectually, because the rationality behind economics should also erase the superstition and obscurantism endemic to religion.
Kuyper’s project was to organize just such a movement on the basis of religion instead of class and to make it the chief rival to Liberalism in Dutch politics.
1848 Constitution.
had kept the standing provision that public schools train youth in all the “Christian and social virtues” but added that this be done without offense to the conscience of any pupil or parent.
Calvinism was not an erstwhile establishment, but a philosophy of diversity.
Kuyper replied, in what would become a lasting slogan, that the supposedly “neutral” school was in fact a “sect school of Modernism,” with a Christian veneer as dishonorable as it was thin.
justice to every life-expression.”
Kuyper started from, rather than coming to, a pluralist posture.
The seventeenth-century English Puritan rising was not thus limited. It drew Kuyper’s unmitigated praise, even though it involved violent insurrection, regicide, destruction of church properties, terror in the (Irish) countryside, instability eventuating in military dictatorship, and any number of other features resembling the French Revolution.
Liberal opinion across Europe worshipped the rational autonomous individual in politics as in philosophy, and Dutch Liberal voices like Robert Fruin, Kuyper’s old teacher at Leiden, thought political parties to be inherently wrong in a parliamentary system.
Thorbecke had instilled as secular an ambience in Parliament as possible, and all sides showed outright aversion to discussions of political theory. Thus Kuyper’s insistence on bringing every issue back to fundamental questions, along with his quotations from Scripture, provoked criticism.
Brighton thus aimed to teach a more flexible, personalized model of Protestant piety, frankly sacrificing the Alliance’s old socio-political concerns.
Kuyper’s Romanticism would thus remain Calvinistic: “And so I come again to the realization that God did not create the world in the first place so that we mortals should enjoy it but so that He should delight in the works of His hands.”
Unwittingly, Kuyper had replicated a list of complaints that American churchmen had compiled against evangelical revivalism a generation earlier.
“Pelagius always lurks in the shadows of this heresy,” he declared — not the Pelagius of arrogant rationalism but the one of “genuine desire for the holy.”
they number sins individually and try to erase them one by one, rather than plumbing the Sin that occupies the core of their whole person.
the Holiness voices at Brighton, on the teaching of Finney, Palmer, and Mahan, defined sinlessness as the perfect alignment of one’s conscious actions with the will of God; but this premise Kuyper deemed to be “precisely the shallow and utterly unholy view of Pelagius that you find in all his intellectual children. . . . Sin is not what you but what God sees and knows and detests as sin.”
To limit the Spirit’s work to the elect, as hyper-Calvinists did, or to matters of salvation, like evangelicals, was to suffer from “crude superficialities.” The Reformed genius was to “unite organically the natural and spiritual life . . . the realm of nature and that of grace.” Not the mere perfection of the person but of the cosmos was on order.
education as the party’s catalyst and heart. So it was in many countries at the time, for secular and religious parties alike: thus the recently fought kulturkampf in the German Empire on the right, the pending campaign for laïcité in the French Republic on the left, the perennial endeavor in the United States to establish a “Christianity above creeds” (i.e., a generic Unitarianism) in public schools against Roman Catholicism.
By turning the theology faculties at state universities into departments for the “neutral” or “scientific” study of religion as a human phenomenon, the Dutch government pioneered the discipline of religious studies around the world.
But why a whole university if theological education was the problem?
Kuyper’s initiatives built a thick sociology that — just as conservatives warned — replaced traditional local hierarchies with a national network as the locus of identity and social control.
while democracy might give “the people” some sense of power, it certainly afforded ambitious figures of the second rank a mechanism by which to move up.
Kuyper stopped attending church on a regular basis.
Christians, Kuyper said, constitute a world — because they operate by a worldview — of their own, and so need a place where the premises of that worldview can be fathomed and its consequences worked out in a thoroughgoing, consistent fashion.
Althusius’s definitive treatise of Calvinist, antiroyalist thought (Politica Methodice Digesta, 1603) set forth a consociational picture of politics intended to refute the French Catholic Jean Bodin’s theory of unitary sovereignty.
Kuyper’s social ontology: “Our human life . . . is so structured that the individual exists only in groups, and only in such groups can the whole become manifest.”
a fundamental tenet of republican political philosophy: that virtue is a bulwark of liberty. For Kuyper the antidote to unitary power was not just spheres orbiting in theoretical sovereignty, but a resolute citizenry whose moral strength animates the spheres with vitality enough to resist encroachment.
Kuyper’s Antirevolutionary label bespoke a consistent ideology partaking of the very abstraction that Burke had faulted in the Revolution itself.
“Church and state each have their own domain,” Kuyper declared, “and should come into mutually mediated conduct only through the persons who stand in relationship to both.”
even if sin precluded deriving sound political theory from any direct reading of “nature,” it would be folly for the Christian, especially the Christian statesman, not to harvest the best insights that can be gleaned from the rich and varied history of human political life.
