A Lost Family Treasure Rediscovered

A Book  Study by J. L. van Popta

Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism

Peter S. HeslamEerdmans:

Grand Rapids, 1998

300 pages

As the new millennium approaches a dramatic change in the generally accepted worldview is becoming more and more apparent. The modernist worldview is collapsing under the burdens it sought to carry. The answers modernism sought to bring forward to the questions of God, the world and man's purpose are being rejected. We are now entering into a new era. Some call it "post-modernism." Post-modernists rejects ultimate answers, yet still ask the questions concerning meaning, purpose and identity.

The Stone Lectures

One hundred years ago, Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian, statesman, writer, presented six lectures at Princeton University. He was invited to deliver the annual lecture series sponsored by the Stone Foundation. In his six lectures, published as Lectures on Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper laid out a ground work for a comprehensive Reformed worldview while at the same time giving a critique of, the then new, modernism.

In his book Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism Dr. Peter Heslam does the Reformed world a great service. Dr. Heslam points out in the preface that post-modern thinkers agree broadly with Abraham Kuyper's critique of modernism. Dr. Heslam's book gives access to Kuyper's lectures to a new generation of readers but also holds up Kuyper's thinking to examination and seeks to find where Kuyper himself was influenced by his own cultural and historical context and by modernist thought.

Correcting a Great Loss

For the Canadian Reformed community (and the other daughter churches of the 1944 Liberation) this book is especially valuable. For many years all things Kuyperian have been considered suspect. Yet, when all Kuyperian thought is rejected, a Reformed community suffers great loss. Dr. Heslam demonstrates that Kuyper attempted to sketch out a comprehensive worldview within a Calvinist theological structure. Kuyper was a giant on the world stage of his day. Though we today may dispute and disagree with some of his theological structures concerning covenant, regeneration and ecclesiology, Dr. Heslam's book demonstrates that Abraham Kuyper still has much valuable to say to society 100 years after he presented his lectures to the world. Few men have had such a broad and comprehensive view of the world; fewer have been able to present that view with clarity, insight and vision for the future. Abraham Kuyper, Dr. Heslam shows, was one of these few men.

This book contains 10 chapters. The first is an introduction and lays out the thesis of the book. The next two chapters outline the historical context of the 1898 Stone Lectures. This historical part first gives a thumbnail sketch of Kuyper's life followed by the circumstances surrounding his invitation and journey to the United States. Six chapters follow, each analyzing the content of one of the six lectures delivered at Princeton University. Chapter 10 summarizes and draws the threads of the previous nine together and makes some useful conclusions and suggests further avenues in Kuyper studies.

The First Lecture: Calvinism a Life System

One of the controlling themes of Abraham Kuyper's work in sketching a Reformed Calvinist worldview was his anti-revolutionary thrust. He believed that the French Revolution embodied and articulated the fundamental ideas of modernism. Modernism was built on the revolutionary principles of France. On the other hand, Kuyper believed that the USA, though also the child of revolution, was built on God's sovereignty (80). Kuyper's Lectures were part of his attempt to inspire confidence among American Calvinists that the principles they held had provided the foundations of their country. This perspective on America—that it was essentially a Christian nation—was a view point held by many Europeans at the close of the last century. Contemporary historical analysis shows that this likely was not as true as Kuyper would have liked to believe. Dr. Heslam argues that Abraham Kuyper was a child of his own age. This is true also in the structure of his thought. Dr. Heslam writes at the conclusion of his analysis of the First Lecture: Calvinism a Life System:

Although [the contents of his Christian worldview based on Christian principles] would be antithetical to all other modern secular worldviews, its form would bear a strong resemblance: it was to be derived from a single unifying principle (the sovereignty of God); it was to provide answers to the same fundamental questions of human existence; and it was to be comprehensive and internally consistent. The meeting of these requirements was the means by which Kuyper hoped the Calvinist worldview would be brought up to date, fit to engage with contemporary issues of society, politics and culture. To him, Calvinist thought, developed in accordance with the demands of the late nineteenth century, could offer a comprehensive, logically cohesive alternative to modernistic thought and provide the basis for Christian cultural renewal.

In fact, however, this program borrowed liberally from the systems it purported to oppose — from pantheism the idea of coherence and unity; from evolutionism the idea of human and religious progress. Despite his emphasis on the antithesis between Calvinism and modernism, Kuyper's ideas are a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of nineteenth-century modernism, of which he himself was all too keenly aware. His aim of using the modernist worldview as a model for his own in order to bring Calvinism up-to-date appears to have included some pitfalls he proved unable to avoid (111-112).

Dr. Heslam's analysis of this point should cause us all to sit up and take notice. If a man with as keen a mind and with as comprehensive a view of the world as Abraham Kuyper was unable to completely avoid integrating modern secular (even revolutionary) structures into his thought, we must be careful today in assuming that our worldview is free of modernist or post-modernist thought. These observations must be read as a warning to us today. We too might be so much children of our own culture that we cannot easily analyze or judge its structures nor develop or maintain a fully Reformed and Calvinist worldview.

The Second Lecture: Calvinism and Religion

The analysis of the Second Lecture: Calvinism and Religion is of special interest to many readers of Clarion. In this lecture Kuyper discussed, among other things, his ecclesiology. Dr. Heslam's analysis is striking in that it comes not from the perspective of that other great Dutch theologian, Dr. Klaas Schilder. Some students of Dr. K. Schilder or those who profess to hold to his ecclesiology may have a tendency to create a caricature of Dr. A. Kuyper's ecclesiology. Reading Dr. Heslam's analysis sheds light on Kuyperian - Schilderian differences. Dr. Heslam, not dwelling on theoretical inaccuracies, investigates Kuyper's views on church within the late 19th century historical context. He wants to understand and explain the background against which Kuyper formulated his ecclesiology and what he hoped to achieve by expounding it in the Stone Lectures (133). Dr. Heslam points out that Kuyper's understanding of the church as organism was borrowed from German philosophy. A striking observation is made by Dr. Heslam when he comments on the democratic nature of the church. The church, writes Dr. Heslam, according to Kuyper, is "democratic to its bones and marrow" (135). The church is regulated according to a Presbyterian form of government. This preserves the monarchical reign of Christ with His authority invested in the congregation. "This applied not only within each local congregation but also between churches, such that no one church could have authority over another; churches could only be united by confederation, rather than by means of a hierarchical structure" (135). Dr. Heslam concludes then, that in Kuyper's scheme a church federation organized on these principals may never become synodical.

Kuyper also defended a pluriform idea of church. This arose out of his belief in the office of all believers and its democratic nature. And he used this view of church to defend and justify the Doleantie and the establishment of such churches outside of the synodical jurisdiction of the Hervormde Kerk. Dr. Heslam argues that much of Kuyper's theoretical thought was driven by practical circumstances.

The Rest of the Lectures

On the pages of this issue of Clarion you can find an analysis of The Third Lecture: Calvinism and Politics. Dr. Heslam's analysis is different from that of Mr. Kenneth J. Boessenkool and is worth reading but we will let Mr. Boessenkool's suffice. Dr. Heslam goes on to investigate, analyze, and set within their historical context, the other lectures: Calvinism and Science, Calvinism and Art, and Calvinism and the Future. In our day in which science plays such an important role, Dr. Heslam shows that Abraham Kuyper is still relevant. As for the chapter on Calvinism and Art, it should be required reading (along with Kuyper's original lecture) for anyone who wishes to speak to the issue of fine arts and music. The debate on Rock Music in Reformed Perspective some time ago would have benefited greatly if the contributors had read Dr. Kuyper's fifth lecture and Dr. Heslam's analysis of it. Though Kuyper did not articulate guidelines for the fine arts in his lecture he did, by his analysis of the arts, attempt to legitimize artistic endeavor in the Reformed community (262-63).

An Unresolved Tension

Dr. Heslam points out however, that it is in the lecture on the arts that the clearest indication of the tension within Kuyper's thought appears (262). Kuyper's thought on the arts is dominated by his doctrine of common grace, which is emphasized at the expense of his doctrine of the antithesis, which dominates his lecture on science. Dr. Heslam writes:

This discrepancy is one of the clearest indications of what is perhaps the central tension in Kuyper's thought between the antithesis and corresponding isolation on the one hand, and common grace and corresponding engagement and accommodation on the other. It was tension Kuyper never resolved, and a comparison of his Stone Lecture on art with that on science demonstrates how it led to flaws in the overall coherence of his thought (222).

In his last lecture Dr. Kuyper appealed for a future for effective Calvinistic activity. These lectures delivered at the end of the last century, along with the rest of Kuyper's work, have resonated down the decades. We now again stand at fin de siecle; even more so, we stand at the end of the millennium. There is a sense of fear, uncertainly and insecurity prevalent in our culture. Kuyper was trying to respond with a Biblical Calvinism to the rise of Nietzche's "cry of despair." Though he did not adopt the pessimism of Nietsche's nihilism and anarchism it seems, Dr. Heslam writes, that Abraham Kuyper was willing to recognize and work within their modernist framework (228).

Kuyper's Lectures were an attempt to answer one of Christianity's crucial questions: "What is the relationship between Christianity and culture?" Dr. Heslam writes in his conclusion that the solutions of Kuyper's contemporaries were either pietism or modernism. Dr. Abraham Kuyper strove to present an alternative. Pietism held that the institutions of culture, being part of the fallen world stood in opposition to Christ. Christian modernists sought to solve the problem of Christ and culture by insisting that Christ is the great hero of culture. Christian modernists, far from demanding a separation from culture, tended to identify Christianity with culture (267-268).

What has Christ to do with Culture?

Abraham Kuyper attempted in his lectures, to present a holistic coherent worldview in which this crucial question might be answered: "What relationship is there between Christ and culture?" Dr. Heslam concludes that Abraham Kuyper held to a radical distinction between God's work in Christ and the work of human beings in culture. He held, with the Pietists, to the doctrine of total depravity of man, but in contrast to them he opposed cultural withdrawal. He rejected the modernist view of Christ as the hero of culture and held to a radical antithesis. The modernist failure to recognize the falleness of creation was unacceptable to him. His alternative was a scheme in which creation, fall and redemption were each thought of in the broadest sense, encompassing the entire cosmos. He insisted that earthly life is in an abnormal state and that it requires Christ's work to restore it to wholeness .

Conclusion

Dr. Peter Heslam's historical analysis of Dr. Abraham Kuyper's lectures are must reading for anyone who is interested in developing a Reformed worldview for the 21st Century. Published with a twenty-four page bibliography of primary and secondary literature, this book can be used an access, guide and primer to the discussion concerning Reformed worldview. If Calvinists and Reformed Churches are to be able to present relevant answers to cultural questions of the new millennium Abraham Kuyper's lectures cannot be ignored. Dr. Heslam has demonstrated this clearly. His book is a great contribution to this discussion.

 

 

Highlights

page 1

When all Kuperian thought is rejected, a Reformed community suffers great loss.

Page 2

Kuyper taught that churches could only be united by confederation, rather than by means of a hierarchical structure.

page 3

What relationship is there between Christ and culture?