Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures

by Abraham Kuyper

And as regards blasphemy, the right of the magistrate to restrain it rests in the God-consciousness innate in every man; and the duty to exercise this right flows from the fact that God is the Supreme and Sovereign Ruler over every State and over every Nation.

The sphere of the State is not profane. But both Church and State must, each in their own sphere, obey God and serve His honor.

The first thing of course is, and remains, that all nations shall be governed in a Christian way; that is to say, in accordance with the principle which, for all statecraft, flow from the Christ.

The government bears the sword which wounds; not the sword of the Spirit, which decides in spiritual questions.

Church of Christ in the individual sphere of these churches. That churches flourish most richly, when the government allows them to live from their own strength on the voluntary principle. And that therefore neither the Cœsaropapy of the Czar of Russia; nor the subjection of the State to the Church, taught by Rome; nor the “Cuius regio eius religio” of the Lutheran jurists; nor the irreligious neutral standpoint of the French revolution; but that only the system of a free Church, in a free State, may be honored from a Calvinistic standpoint.

The sovereignty of the State and the sovereignty of the Church exist side by side, and they mutually limit each other.

(“In some respect every man is a sovereign, for everybody must have and has, a sphere of life of his own, in which he has no one above him, but God alone.”)

And the deeply rooted repugnance against the Inquisition, which for three long centuries would not be assuaged, grew up from the conviction that its practices violated and assaulted human life in man.

This imposes on the government a twofold obligation. In the first place, it must cause this liberty of conscience to be respected by the Church; and in the second place, it must give way itself to the sovereign conscience.

Meantime what the government in this respect demands of the churches, it must practice itself, by allowing to each and every citizen liberty of conscience, as the primordial and inalienable right of all men.

But for this very reason every son of the Reformation tramples upon the honor of the fathers, who does not assiduously and without retrenching, defend this palladium of our liberties. In order that it may be able to rule men, the government must respect this deepest ethical power of our human existence.

And even if I am forced to admit that our fathers, in theory, had not the courage of the conclusions which follow from this liberty of conscience for the liberty of speech, and the liberty of worship; even if I am well aware that they made a desperate effort to hinder the spread of literature which they disliked, by censure and refusal of publication;—all this does not set aside the fact that the free expression of thought, by the spoken and printed word, has first achieved its victory in the Calvinistic Netherlands.

Whosoever was elsewhere straightened, could first enjoy the liberty of ideas and the liberty of the press, on Calvinistic ground.

liberty in Calvinism and liberty in the French Revolution are two quite different things.

thoughtful consideration; first, that Calvinism fostered and could not but foster love for science;

secondly, that it restored to science its domain;

thirdly, that it delivered science from u...

and fourthly in what manner it sought and found a solution for the unavoidab...

The Spaniard offered peace and pardon to the dying people; but Leyden, remembering the bad faith of the enemy in the treatment of Narden and Harlem, answered boldly and with pride: “If it is necessary, we are ready to consume our left arms, and to defend with our right arms our wives, our liberty and our religion against thee, o tyrant.” Thus they persevered.

The population, all but starved to death, could scarcely drag themselves along, yet all to a man, limped as well as they could to the house of prayer. There all fell on their knees and gave thanks to God. But when they tried to utter their gratitude in psalms of praise, they were almost voiceless, for there was no strength left in them, and the tones of their song died away in grateful sobbing and weeping.

I speak of human science as a whole, not of what is called among you “sciences,” or as the French express it “sciences exactes.” Especially do I deny, that mere empiricism in itself ever is perfect science. Even the minutest microscopic, the farthest reaching telescopic investigation is nothing but perception with strengthened eyes.

And that Agnosticism, drawing a curtain across the background and over the abysses of life, is satisfied with a study of the phenomena of the several sciences; but some time ago, the human mind began to take its revenge on this spiritual vandalism.

How, now, can we prove that love for science in that higher sense, which aims at unity in our cognizance of the entire cosmos, is effectually secured by means of our Calvinistic belief in God’s foreordination? If you want to understand this you have to go back from predestination to God’s decree in general. This is not a matter of choice; on the contrary, it must be done.

Belief in predestination is nothing but the penetration of God’s decree into your own personal life; or, if you prefer it, the personal heroism to apply the sovereignty of God’s decreeing will to your own existence. It means that we are not satisfied with a mere profession of words, but that we are willing to stand by our confession, in regard both to this life and the life to come. It is a proof of honesty, unmovable firmness and solidity in our expressions concerning the unity of God’s will, and the certainty of His operations.

Calvinism has gone through many fierce struggles on account of its clinging to the counsel of God’s decree.

Calvinism has been reviled and slandered on account of it, and when it refused to exclude even our sinful actions from God’s plan, because without it the program of the order of the world would again be rent to pieces, our opponents did not shrink from accusing us of making God the author of sin. They knew not what they did. Through evil report and good report Calvinism has firmly maintained its confession.

namely, that Calvinism restored to science its domain. I mean to say that cosmical science originated in the Graeco-Roman world; that in the Middle Ages the cosmos vanished behind the horizon to draw the attention of all to the distant sights of future life, and that it was Calvinism which, without losing sight of the spiritual, led to a rehabilitation of the cosmic sciences.

then certainly every child of God on his death-bed would tender the palm to Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas rather than to Heraclitus and Aristotle.

Let it be quite understood therefore that I do not in any way over-rate the classical world, to the detraction of the heavenly lustre which sparkled through all the haze of the Middle Ages.

and that Calvinism alone, by means of its dominating principle, which constantly urges us to go back from the Cross to Creation, and no less by means of its doctrine of common grace, threw open again to science the vast field of the cosmos, now illumined by the Son of Righteousness, of Whom the Scriptures testify, that in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

All agree that the Christian religion is substantially soteriological. “What must I do to be saved?” remains throughout all the ages the question of the anxious inquirer, to which above all else an answer must be given.

And this one-sided, inharmonious conception in the course of time has led more than one sect to a mystic worshipping of Christ alone, to the exclusion of God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Christ was conceived exclusively as the Savior, and His cosmological significance was lost out of sight.

This dualism, however, is by no means countenanced by the Holy Scriptures. When John is describing the Savior, he first tells us that Christ is the “eternal Word, by Whom all things are made, and Who is the life of men.” Paul also testifies that all things were created by Christ and consist by Him; and further, that the object of the work of redemption is not limited to the salvation of individual sinners, but extends itself to the redemption of the world, and to the organic reunion of all things in heaven and on earth under Christ as their original head.

But God arrested sin in its course in order to prevent the complete annihilation of his divine handiwork, which naturally would have followed. He has interfered in the life of the individual, in the life of mankind as a whole, and in the life of nature itself by His common grace.

In this wise God restrains the evil; and it is He who brings forth good out of evil, and meanwhile we Calvinists, never remiss in accusing our sinful nature, yet praise and thank God for making it possible for men to dwell together in a well-ordered society, and for restraining us personally from horrible sins.

For then, in his judgment, not only the church, but also the world belongs to God and in both has to be investigated the masterpiece of the supreme Architect and Artificer.

A Calvinist who seeks God, does not for a moment think of limiting himself to theology and contemplation, leaving the other sciences, as of a lower character, in the hands of unbelievers; but on the contrary, looking upon it as his task, to know God in all his works, he is conscious of having been called to fathom with all the energy of his intellect, things terrestrial as well as things celestial; to open to view both the order of creation, and the “common grace” of the God he adores, in nature and its wondrous character, in the production of human industry, in the life of mankind, in sociology and in the history of the human race.

It was now clearly seen, that the history of mankind is not so much an aphoristic spectacle of cruel passions, as a coherent process with the Cross as its center; a process in which every nation has its special task, and the knowledge of which may be a fountain of blessing for every people.

Yea, it was intuitively conceived, that there was nothing either in the life of nature round about us, or in human life itself, which did not present itself as an object worthy of investigation, which might throw new light on the glories of the entire cosmos in its visible phenomena and its invisible operations.

On the contrary, a fish lying on dry land is perfectly free, namely, to die and to perish, while a fish, which really shall be free to live and to thrive must be entirely surrounded by water and guided by its fins.

Herein is found the fundamental evil. In this wise Science surrendered its independent character.

The cosmos, in all the wealth of the kingdom of nature, was spread out before, under, and above man. This entire limitless field had to be worked.

And so it came to pass that the people itself, who had until now refrained from encouraging science, by a new and sparkling energy, suddenly called it into action, spurring it on to a sense of liberty, hitherto entirely unknown.

And yet, although the energy of the difference of principle lies at the root of all these disputes, these subordinate conflicts are entirely put in the shade by the principal conflict, which in all countries perplexes the mind most vehemently, the powerful conflict between those who cling to the confession of the Triune God and His Word, and those who seek the solution of the world-problem in Deism, Pantheism and Naturalism.

Notice that I do not speak of a conflict between faith and science. Such a conflict does not exist. Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

On the other hand every kind of faith has in itself an impulse to speak out.

the miracle in the Christ, descending as God with his own life into ours; and thus, owing to this regeneration of the abnormal, they continue to find the ideal norm not in the natural but in the Triune God.

Within a quarter of a century the lifeview of the Normalists had conquered in a literal sense the world in its leading center. And only he, who adhered to the abnormalist view by virtue of his personal faith, refused to join in the chorus of those, who sang the praises of “modern thought,” and at the first brunt, felt inclined to anathematize all science, retiring to the tent of mysticism. It is true, for a short time theologians tried to defend their cause apologetically, but this defense might be compared to a man who tries to adjust a crooked window-frame, while he is unconscious of the fact that the building itself is tottering on its foundations.