Calvinism and the Future: Revisiting Kuyper’s Vision for Today

Among the six lectures on Calvinism, it is the third lecture I am most familiar with. Here, Abraham Kuyper discussed the relationship between Calvinism and politics. When I used his material in my classes on church and society and studies on Calvinism, I gave it a new title in the form of a question:

How does Calvinism help protect liberty?

I think the title I gave is appropriate, for the author argues in his lecture that only in Calvinism can we find the theoretical basis to address the threats posed both by state tyranny and anarchism. And Calvinism accomplished this with its concept of the cosmological sovereignty of the Triune God, where all sovereignties are subsidiaries and obtained delegated power from on high.

In this article, I want to explore the sixth lecture where Kuyper expounded the connection between Calvinism and the future. Note that more than a century has already passed since Kuyper first delivered this lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898. Thirty-three years later, it was published as a book. Considering this context, much of what he discussed about the future then is already part of our present. And so instead of retaining the title of the sixth chapter, I want to revise it into:

Revisiting Calvinism to Meet the Challenges of Today

In this final lecture, Kuyper started with a grim picture of his day that he expected to deteriorate even deeper unless an antidote were to be discovered. But before he presented the dark image of his time, he reiterated that to confine Calvinism as exclusively an ecclesiastical movement and a doctrinal affirmation is a misrepresentation. He wants to dispel this notion so that people will see the far-reaching influence of Calvinism that helped advance human civilization. Here's how Kuyper describes such a widespread influence of Calvinism:

. . . it proved to be the guardian angel of science; it emancipated art; it propagated a political scheme, which gave birth to constitutional government, both in Europe and America; it fostered agriculture and industry, commerce and navigation; it put a thorough Christian stamp upon home-life and family-ties; it promoted through its high moral standard purity in our social circles . . . (Lectures on Calvinism, 1931, p. 171)

If the above description is accurate, I wonder now why Calvinism remains almost unheard of or, if heard, appears strange to the ears of many?

In introducing his topic, Kuyper saw consistent moral and social decline after the so-called success of the French Revolution in 1789. He describes this social bankruptcy as a universal phenomenon. Yes, he acknowledges the advancement in the external and tangible areas of life, such as in communication, lifespan, and surgical science. But when it comes to internal and something spiritual, a sign of decay is evident almost everywhere. He cited many witnesses to prove this analysis, names like Arthur Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a certain German author, and Lord Salisbury, and intellectual constructs like social democracy, anarchism, and nihilism. The unanimous social diagnosis is that the modern era is "rotten to the very core" (p. 173).

This article serves as an introduction. The lecture is 29 pages long. Even though I completed rereading it and took summary notes last night, it is not easy for me to capture everything in one sitting, so I decided to stop at this point and pick up this idea of social and moral deterioration later in my next article.

Grace and peace!

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