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January 16 - February 4, 2018
sphere sovereignty rendered as divinely ordained a theory of organic social development resembling that of the German historical school,
and become entwined with various currents of Romantic social philosophy across the Continent.
To prevent anomic individualism, the franchise should be extended to all heads of households, not to all adult persons.
He refused to join contemporary opinion in seeing the state as the unitary expression of the will of “the people,” the modern instrument of providence into which the church itself should be absorbed, or the power that would hold together all other domains in unity and order.
Kuyper’s core principle: the essence of the church was present fully and sufficiently in the local congregation, bound by the Word of God. Any broader bands of affiliation that the congregation wished to make were of a voluntary, federative nature.
They dispensed on principle with the pew-rental system that the Christian Reformed, like the national church, used to cover costs.
The heroic template was meant for day-to-day spirituality too. Ordinary Christians pray first for themselves, then for their neighbor, and finally for the adoration of God, he observed; the order should be just the reverse. Evangelicals and Ethicals were merely Christocentric; real Calvinists were Trinitarian, with a special relish for God’s secret counsel.
The connectedness wrought by the covenant — to past, to future, to fellows, to task — mandated by contrast a church, a body that risked impurity for the sake of God’s grander purposes.
The covenanted church, instead, holds up the task for which God elected people in the first place: not the salvation of their souls out of the world but a part in carrying on God’s majestic, mysterious purpose of redeeming that world.
Schelling the instrument by which he could finally reconcile Schleiermacher and Calvin.
All the institutional apparatus, however, exists to serve the work and well-being of the organism and poses a danger (by the power and money it accumulates) to subvert that mission and become an end in itself.
The pietist free style fostered a cult of inwardness that made it difficult to connect liturgy to life, that mistook spontaneity for authenticity, and that finally eroded any corporate religious authority.
the preacher on Kuyper’s model was to regard the assembly as a redeemed people of God and not as sinners in need of salvation.
Four to six celebrations a year should suffice, he thought, lest the observance lose its “exceptionally holy character.”
He followed Calvin over Zwingli in forthrightly affirming the real presence of Christ in the ceremony and “oppos[ing] any notion that the Lord’s Supper is only symbolic.”
an odd ecumenical streak in confiding his personal preference for taking the sacrament amid strangers, where he and they would not be distracted by knowledge of each other’s sins and questions of adequate repentance.
the Seceders and Kuyperians posed two consistent but incompatible systems, the first rooted in time and persons, the second in eternity and decrees.
his two key theological innovations: the doctrine of common grace and the epistemology of worldview.
Now he faced not the cultured despisers of religion but pious skeptics of culture: third-generation heirs of the Réveil, with its focus on evangelism and serial charities; Christian Reformed allies, tenacious for the purity of their church;
Faith-based politics requires some common ground with people of fundamentally different convictions — at least to establish mutual intelligibility and respect for the rules of the game, and at most to build coalitions on issues of common interest.
The twofold covenant laid out after the flood (Genesis 9) amounted to a serious upgrade of common grace. It instituted regularity in nature, as signified by the rainbow, and order in society by the power of the sword.
Without ever explaining the anomaly of his allegiance to the African Augustine over the pale Brit Pelagius, in Common Grace Kuyper bluntly set the white race over the yellow and yellow over black, with red doomed to extinction in the wilds of North America.
the image of God, though surely borne by individuals, comes to fullest manifestation in the human race as a whole.
Common grace he associated with structures and collectivities — with the formal institutions of government and culture, for instance, rather than with statesmen or artists themselves.
Not that believers were more gifted than unbelievers at science, art, technical skill, or political acumen; the opposite was the rule. Rather, those endowed with the insights of the gospel knew the ultimate purposes and norms for these gifts.
Where the process had worked longest — i.e., in Europe — the effects were most profound. It was the intensifying effect of particular grace in the workings of common grace, Kuyper claimed, that accounted in no small part for the West’s achievement of global supremacy.
Orr’s key text, The Christian View of God and the World, came out in 1893, as did the first volume of Kuyper’s Encyclopedia, two years before Mach published his Popular Scientific Lectures, and just as Wilhelm Dilthey began the treatises that would culminate with his full typology of worldviews, the apex of the method.
It is “[n]ot as if the knowledge of others rests on intellectual certainty and ours only on faith,” Kuyper declared in opening the Free University. “For all knowledge proceeds from faith of whatever kind. You lean on God, you proceed from your own ego, or you hold fast to your ideal. The person who does not believe does not exist.”
philosophy restricted its domain to elite competency, while worldviews aimed to perform philosophy’s functions — to provide answers to life’s fundamental questions — for a wide range of people.
the whole creation was — and remains — the expression of God’s thinking: a logos, an organic whole, a fabric of laws. This divine “archetype” was then matched by the “ectype” of the human mind. Reality and observer, object and subject, were tailor-made for each other.
the unity of the human race, broken by sin, was broken again by redemption, whereby God implants a new people upon the earth.
Kuyper’s contrast with William James
He took part as well in the campaign led by Dilthey and Weber to establish a method particular to the “human sciences” over against the materialist reductionism of the natural sciences.
If Calvinism had not produced much art itself, it had created the freedom for others to do so. In diminishing “the sensory” in worship so as to make it properly “spiritual” again, it liberated artists from ecclesiastical control.
Kuyper was hopelessly logo-centric.
Usually treated as an avatar of Modernism or postmodernism, Nietzsche struck Kuyper instead as a conclusion, the flaming out of a meteor that had appeared on the European sky a hundred years before:
To “man,” as Victorian language aptly put it, had fallen the task of making and managing the re-creation of the world.
testify to a work ethic gone gargantuan out of conviction that, though the world theoretically belonged to God, the project of proving the
Development taken biologically spells organicism. Victorian leaders loved the concept for proving their system to be inevitable, yet capable of improvement.
Kuyper’s sociology, ontology, and epistemology were as anti-atomistic as it is possible to be.
The philosophical approach that best fit this scheme was Idealism, particularly in the teleological structures that it predicated of reality.
Kuyper wanted to liberate his followers not to demolish the Victorian structure but to preserve it and show how much they deserved to preside there.
The great artist that Calvinism needed in the struggles of the age turned out to be Kuyper himself, the master of the political imagination, and “Calvinism” turned out to be his greatest work.
His mainline audience mostly dismissed his critique, while certain parts of his Dutch-American audience applauded his principles only to turn them against his assimilationist advice.
the CRC was gravitating toward Kuyper’s Dutch example, while the RCA embodied his American dream.
America demonstrated what a free people could do if allowed to pursue a free life, Kuyper asserted.
Its skilled workers were confident and self-reliant, its upper class was modest and generous, and the distance between the two was noticeably smaller than in Europe.
a democratic Calvinist in the Netherlands could not vote Democratic in the United States because that party traced its origins to Thomas Jefferson, who in turn had endorsed the principles of the French Revolution.
Kuyper’s Democratic-like commitment to local control as opposed to the Republicans’ preference for stronger, more centralized government.
Democrats enlisted Roman Catholics and (usually) Missouri Synod Lutherans, who operated the largest Christian school systems in the country, to the grief — and sometimes active hostility — of Republicans, who were committed to a single, nationwide system of public schools.
