Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures

by Abraham Kuyper

He so loves His world that He has given Himself to it, in the person of His Son, and thus He has again brought our race, and through our race, His whole Cosmos, into a renewed contact with eternal life.

To be sure, many branches and leaves fell off the tree of the human race, yet the tree itself shall be saved; on its new root in Christ, ...

The battle was waged, not against sacerdotium, but against sacerdotalism, and Calvin alone fought this battle through to the end, with thorough consistency. Lutherans and Episcopalians rebuilt a kind of altar, on earth; Calvinism alone dared to put it away, entirely.

The Westminster Confession beautifully sets forth this heavenly all-embracing nature of the Church, when it says: “The Catholic or Universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect that have been, are or shall be, gathered into one, under Christ the Head, thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”

not the building; not the institution; not a spiritual order. For Calvin, the Church is found in the confessing individuals themselves—not in each individual separately, but in all of them taken together, and united, not as they themselves see fit, but according to the ordinances of Christ.

there can be no distinctions of rank among believers; there are only ministers, who serve, lead and regulate; a thoroughly Presbyterian form of government; the Church power descending directly from Christ Himself, into the congregation, concentrated from the congregation in the ministers,

This is the all-important Calvinistic dogma of the Covenant; a prominent article of our confession, showing that the waters of the Church do not flow outside the natural stream of human life, but cause the life of the church to proceed hand in hand with the natural organic reproduction of mankind in its succeeding generations.

Nay, upon earth also, the Church exists merely for the sake of God.

Thus the purpose of the Church does not lie in us, but in God, and in the glory of His name.

Finally we have the service of Church philanthropy, in the Diaconate which Calvin alone understood, and restored to its primordial honor. Neither Rome nor the Greek Church, neither the Lutheran nor the Episcopal Church, caught the real meaning of the Diaconate.

The Deacons are not our servants, but servants of Christ.

It simply asks: What rival moral fruits have other religions to oppose if we point to the high moral earnestness of the Puritans?

He only is the real Calvinist, and may raise the Calvinistic banner, who in his own soul, personally, has been struck by the Majesty of the Almighty, and yielding to the overpowering might of his eternal Love, has dared to proclaim this majestic love, over against Satan, and the world, and the worldliness of his own heart, in the personal conviction of being chosen by God Himself, and therefore of having to thank Him and Him alone, for every grace everlasting. Such an one could not but tremble before the might and the majesty of God, as a matter of course accepting His Word as the ruling principle of His conduct in life—a

But it remained the special trait of Calvinism that it placed the believer before the face of God (coram Deo), not only in His church, but also in his personal, family, social, and political life. The majesty of God, and the authority of God press upon the Calvinist in the whole of his human existence. He is a pilgrim, not in the sense that he is marching through a world with which he has no concern, but in the sense that at every step of the long way he must remember his responsibility to that God so full of majesty, Who awaits him at his journey’s end.

What now does the Calvinist mean by his faith in the ordinances of God? Nothing less than the firmly rooted conviction that all life has first been in the thoughts of God, before it came to be realized in Creation. Hence all created life necessarily bears in itself a law for its existence, instituted by God Himself.

When our respiration is disturbed, we try irresistibly and immediately to remove the disturbance, and to make it normal again, i.e., to restore it, by bringing it again into accordance with the ordinances which God has given for man’s respiration. To succeed in this gives us a feeling of unspeakable relief. Just so, in every disturbance of the moral life the believer has to strive as speedily as possible to restore his spiritual respiration, according to the moral commands of his God, because only after this restoration can the inward life again thrive freely in his soul, and renewed energetic action become possible.

Can we imagine that at one time God willed to rule things in a certain moral order, but that now, in Christ, He wills to rule it otherwise? As though He were not the Eternal, the Unchangeable, Who, from the very hour of creation even unto all eternity had willed, wills, and shall will and maintain one and the same firm moral world-order!

It lays full claim, not only to the believer (as though less were required from the unbeliever), but to every human being and to all human relationships.

Hence Calvinism does not lead us to philosophize on a so-called moral life, as though we had to create, to discover, or to regulate this life. Calvinism simply places us under the impress of the majesty of God, and subjects us to His eternal ordinances and unchangeable commandments.

The Calvinist is led to submit himself to the conscience, not as to an individual lawgiver, which every person carries about in himself, but as to a direct sensus divinitatis, through which God Himself stirs up the inner man, and subjects him to His judgment.

A redeemed man who in all things and in all the choices of life is controlled solely by the most searching, and heart-stirring reverence for a God Who is ever present to his consciousness, and Who ever holds him in His eye; thus does the Calvinistic type present itself in history. Always and in all things the deepest, the most sacred reverence for the ever-present God as the rule of life,—this is the only true picture of the original Puritan.

To fear God, and to bid for the favors of Fortune, seemed to him as irreconcilable as fire and water.

Statesmen and Jurists are openly proclaiming the right of the strongest; the ownership of property is called stealing; free love has been advocated; and honesty is ridiculed.

to combat the unhistorical suggestion, that Calvinism represents an exclusively ecclesiastical and dogmatic movement.

And Groen van Prinsterer has thus expressed it: “In Calvinism lies the origin and guarantee of our constitutional liberties.”

In order that the influence of Calvinism on our political development may be felt, it must be shown, for what fundamental political conceptions Calvinism has opened the door, and how these political conceptions sprang from its root principle. This dominating principle was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but, in the widest sense cosmologically, the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. A primordial Sovereignty which eradiates in mankind in a threefold deduced supremacy, namely, (1) The Sovereignty in the State; (2) The Sovereignty in Society; and (3) The Sovereignty in the Church.

Man is created from man, and by virtue of his birth he is organically united with the whole race. Together we form one humanity, not only with those who are living now, but also with all the generations behind us and with all those who shall come after us—pulverized into millions though we may be.

Who binds up, where nothing is broken? Who uses crutches, where the limbs are sound?

Thus originated the battle of the ages between Authority and Liberty, and in this battle it was the very innate thirst for liberty, which proved itself the God-ordained means to bridle the authority, wheresoever it degenerated into despotism.

Calvinism has therefore, by its deep conception of sin, laid bare the true root of state-life, and has taught us two things: First—that we have gratefully to receive, from the hand of God, the institution of the State with its magistrates, as a means of preservation, now indeed indispensable; and on the other hand also that, by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger, which lurks, for our personal liberty, in the power of the State.

God, in His Majesty, must flame before the eyes of every nation, and that all nations together are to be reckoned before Him as a drop of a bucket and as the small dust of the balances. From the ends of the earth God cites all nations and peoples before His high judgment seat. For God created the nations. They exist for Him. They are His own. And therefore all these nations, and in them all humanity, must exist for His glory and consequently after his ordinances, in order that in their well-being, when they walk after His ordinances, His divine wisdom may shine forth.

I do not speak of the family, for here organic, natural ties rule; but in the sphere of the State I do not yield or bow down to anyone, who is man, as I am.

all authority of governments on earth, originates from the Sovereignty of God alone.

For, in like proportion as you degrade yourself, by bowing low to a child of man, whose breath is in his nostrils; so, on the other hand do you raise yourself, if you submit to the authority of the Lord of heaven and earth.

Where such a condition exists he thinks that the people should gratefully recognize therein a favor of God, precisely as it has been expressed in the preamble of more than one of your constitutions—“Grateful to almighty God that He gave us the power to choose our own magistrates.”

It may result from a hard-fought war, even as Pilate had power over Jesus, “given him from above.”

It is expressed, in so many words, in the “Declaration of Independence,” by John Hancock, that the Americans asserted themselves by virtue—“of the law of nature and of nature’s God;” that they acted—“as endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights;” that they appealed to—“the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intention;” and that they sent forth their “declaration of Independence” —“with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”

In the “Articles of Confederation” it is confessed in the preamble “that it hath pleased the great Governor of the world to incline the hearts of the legislators.”

It is also declared in the preamble of the Constitution of many of the States, “Grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberty, which He has so long permitted us to enjoy and...

God is there honored as “the Sovereign Ruler,” and the “Legislator of the Universe” and it is there specifically admitted, that from God alone the people received “the ...

Or as Hamilton himself expressed it, that he considered “the French Revolution to be no more akin to the American Revolution, than the faithless wife in a French novel is like the Puritan matron in New England.”

Now it was to be not the sovereignty of the people, but the Sovereignty of the State, a product of Germanic philosophical pantheism.

There is no other right, but the immanent right which is written down in the law. The law is right, not because its contents are in harmony with the eternal principles of right, but because it is law. If on the morrow it fixes the very opposite, this also must be right.

That which exists is good, because it exists; and it is no longer the will of God, of Him Who created us and knows us, but it becomes the ever-changing will of the State, which, having no one above itself, actually becomes God, and has to decide how our life and our existence shall be.

It lifts us from an obedience born of dread of the strong arm, into an obedience for conscience sake. It teaches us to look upward from the existing law to the source of the eternal Right in God, and it creates in us the indomitable courage incessantly to protest against the unrighteousness of the law in the name of this highest Right.

And, however, powerfully the State may assert itself and oppress the free individual development, above that powerful State there is always glittering, before our soul’s eye, as infinitely more powerful, the majesty of the King of kings; Whose righteous bar ever maintains the right of appeal for all the oppressed, and unto Whom the prayer of the people ever ascends, to bless our nation and, in that nation, us and our house!

In a Calvinistic sense we understand hereby, that the family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the State, and which do not derive the law of their life from the superiority of the state, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the State does.

Thus no States would have existed, but only one organic world-empire, with God as its King; exactly what is prophesied for the future which awaits us, when all sin shall have disappeared.

From this arises all friction and clashing. For the government is always inclined, with its mechanical authority, to invade social life, to subject it and mechanically to arrange it.

And it is evident that Calvin himself wrote down the premises of the correct conclusion, by his acknowledgment that against atheists even the Catholics are our allies; by his open recognition of the Lutheran Church; and still more emphatically by his pertinent declaration: “Scimus tres esse errorum gradus, et quibusdam fatemur dandam esse veniam, aliis modicam castigationem sufficere, ut tantum manifesta impietas capitali supplitio plectatur.” That is to say: “There exists a threefold departure from the Christian truth; a slight one, which had better be left alone; a moderate one, which must be restored by a moderate chastisement; and only manifest godlessness must be capitally punished.”