The young pastor who somewhat anxiously entered his first charge that summer of 1863 need not have feared for his future. Kuyper quickly established himself at Beesd as a dynamo of social and spiritual ministry. He completed the next part of his à Lasco project, then opened a new career path by publishing a pamphlet on a hot issue in church politics. That helped win him a call to the university city of Utrecht, where he got involved in civil politics as well. By 1870, just seven years after entering the pastorate, he had moved to Amsterdam where he soon became a nationally recognized leader in religion and politics alike: the editor of two newspapers, a scholar of international repute, an orator in high demand, a cultural commentator of some promise, and a partisan with as strong an aptitude for organization as for polemics. Behind these moves and energizing all his action was the final step in his religious odyssey: he turned to orthodox Calvinism as a firm rock in a stormy world.
These changes were as unexpected as they were dramatic. His sudden prominence was so opposite his nightmare of dying in a dusty parish, his political involvements so far from the quiet study he idealized, Calvinist dogma such a backwater compared to the fresh Modernist tide — one can see how Kuyper associated these years with the qualities of miracle. Just as remarkably, all the themes of his mature career crystallized quickly between his moves to Calvinism in 1865 and to Amsterdam in 1870. By the end of that process his conceptual kit was largely set. It would prove to be sturdy, as it needed to be: it would have to upgrade Calvinism from an old dogma to an active life, to put Modernist methods to orthodox ends, and to redefine the church to make it fit, and challenge, the contemporary world.
The Apprentice Pastor
Kuyper arrived at Beesd still buoyed by his Redclyffe conversion, and his inaugural sermon breathed its air of spiritual intimacy. Fellowship with God was “the highest aspiration of the human heart”; fellowship with each other — and with the pastor — came a close second. Hear my prayer, Kuyper asked his new parishioners, “that you will all be my friends, and that you will fill the empty place in my heart” vacated by his having just left the only home he had ever known. Their fellowship would go forward in a common search for truth at which Kuyper confessed himself to be only a little more advanced than they. The “struggle to comprehend the infinite in the finite” was especially taxing because all earthly “forms” were so inadequate to the task. Strife over theological formulas was particularly to be avoided, as it “lovelessly puts off the brother . . . and builds endless evil.” Kuyper rounded off the point with a sentiment that he would never retract: “Religion is always a matter of the heart, and in that heart God the Holy Spirit speaks according to his divine good pleasure.” But there followed another phrase, this one utterly contrary to his mature practice: “Thus, I carry no one’s banner and shall battle for no single slogan.” He concluded on a social-gospel note. The only favoritism he would show, he pledged, would be in passing by those who were rich by the standards of the world for the sake of the one “who has to struggle for his daily bread.” A telling political afterword followed. The tide of democracy stood at the church’s door, Kuyper declared to the trustees, sitting in the front row; “Shall this awaken you, too, to give an ear to the cry of the age?”
His social consciousness showed up immediately in Kuyper’s parish activities. He worked with the local chapter of the national Society for the General Welfare to open a bank for small savers. He galvanized the parish deacons to visit the poor more regularly and to modernize church accounts. But inevitably he came up against two powerful leaders in town. The local noble, O. W. A. Count van Bylandt, Lord of Mariënweerd, Enspijk, Ooy, and Persingen, was forty-year chair of the church trustees; his estate manager had been mayor for thirty-five. Kuyper had privately chafed at Van Bylandt’s power over his own appointment, and his resentment built up to an explosion in the summer of 1866, when a cholera epidemic swept through the village, followed shortly by a devastating outbreak of cow typhus. Kuyper proposed to hold special prayer services; the count replied that, as such were not covered in the church budget, the pastor would have to cover the additional expense himself. Kuyper’s retort challenged the count’s integrity; the deacons’ sloppy bookkeeping gave rise to rumors about financial malfeasance that some in the village laid at Kuyper’s door. The old money problem from Redclyffe and his father’s house was flaring up again.
Kuyper’s spiritual labors were just as intense. He prepared and delivered two sermons a week, on top of thirteen hours of catechism lessons for children and an evening book discussion with interested laymen. He led visitation teams in an annual sweep of all the homes in the parish. By contrast, during his four years at Beesd he attended only one of the annual meetings of classis, the church’s regional unit where denominational business was reviewed. Although he would always disdain ecclesiastical routine, this was a rare neglect of the centers of power.
His visitations with Jo were more consistent. Their first child, Herman Huber, named after Kuyper’s brother and mother, arrived in July 1864, one year after the wedding. Jan Hendrik Frederik, named for both their fathers, came nineteen months later, in February 1866. Thereafter, with only two breaks, Jo would be pregnant every two years through 1882. Citified the Kuypers might have been, but they had not made the bourgeois turn to limiting family size.
Amid all his duties Kuyper still had his eye on an academic post and pushed forward with his à Lasco project. He signed a contract to publish a complete edition of the reformer’s works, to which end he sent queries to libraries and book-dealer networks from Dublin to St. Petersburg to Rome. As copies of à Lasco’s publications and correspondence began to arrive at the parsonage, Kuyper kept his study lamp burning well past midnight. When necessary, he moved heaven and earth again. The Dutch minister of foreign affairs intervened for him at the Vatican library. In a three-year chase he had Professor De Vries write Europe’s foremost historian, Leopold von Ranke, who got Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck to pry a manuscript out of a private archive in Köningsberg. Between times he composed a 120-page introductory essay, and in late 1865 sent the manuscript to press. The next spring the work appeared in two volumes, to solid acclaim from church historians.
Kuyper immediately proceeded to phase two, a biography of à Lasco himself. He intended to spend his summer vacation in 1866 on a research sortie to Frankfurt, only to be thwarted by the outbreak of Prussia’s war with Austria. The next summer he was in London, working in the stuffy archives of the Dutch exile churches. But there he also decided to accept the call he had received from the church at Utrecht, in part because of the grumblings he had heard about his research trips. Yet when he left Beesd Kuyper also left off the à Lasco book, as well as the history of the exile churches that was to follow it. As one biographer has put it, Kuyper decided not to write church history but to shape it. Eventually he would use the model of à Lasco’s churches in exile to lead a church exodus himself.
Conversion to Calvinism
Behind this turn lay a decisive religious shift. Kuyper did not label it a conversion and talked about it only some time after the fact, and then in different ways to different audiences. On the one solid trail left from the time, however — his sermons — a new theological tone and urgency can be detected around late 1865, the same moment when he sent off his book. Up to that point his preaching tended to alternate between the plaintive, the inspirational, and the reassuring. His morning messages focused on the figure of Jesus; his (afternoon) catechism sermons used Christian doctrine as tropes for the stages of life; the two came together in ethical mandates. The “knowledge of God is, on the Christian terrain, a moral question,” Kuyper put it. To move his parishioners to answer that challenge aright, he tried to melt their hearts with pictures of Jesus’ sacrifice, pointed to the moral world order affixed within the Father’s creation, and called them to ever-higher reaches of self-sacrificing love, all of which operations were mediated by the Holy Spirit. Kuyper thus fit the pattern of the emerging Ethical school in Dutch Reformed theology, which tried to pose a moderate alternative between Scholten’s Modernist reductions and strict Confessionalism of the Seceders’ sort. The “Ethical” label reflected their centering of the Christian message in the existential decisions of the believer’s conscience and the leavening effect that was to radiate out from there into culture and society. Without surrendering to Modernist “neology,” the Ethicals gave Christian experience priority over Christian doctrine, put less stock in institutions than in individuals, and vested their hopes for church and nation in the free play of the gospel from person to person. Theirs was in a significant sense an extension of the “medical” side of the fading Réveil in the spirit of Isaac da Costa.
Kuyper remembered reading Ethical theology at Beesd to good effect; it provided “substance for my soul and pulled it out of its cocoon.” Yet, “inspiring, fascinating, captivating” as it was, it seemed “too relative, too uncertain of definition.” Likewise the Ethicals’ international kin, the doyens of the Mediating theology in Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. What he longed for instead was a “shelter in the rocks which, being founded on the rock and being hewn from the rock of thought, laughs at every storm.” That turned up in an old place. “It was Calvin himself . . . who first disclosed to me those solid, unwavering lines that only need to be traced to inspire full confidence.” In Calvin’s system were laid “the foundations which, banning all doubt, permitted the edifice of faith to be constructed in a completely logical style — and with the surprising result that the most consistent ethic ruled in its inner chambers.” Kuyper’s old psychology was coming back as his Redclyffe experience wore off. The old demanding “why” of the “logical, consistent thinker” was on the hunt and could come to rest only in “the power of the absolute.”
Kuyper never said what prompted him to re-connect to Calvin just now, but his new sense of urgency followed closely upon two signal events. In 1864 his old mentor J. H. Scholten published a study of the Gospel of John in which he reversed the judgment he had made just a few years earlier about the text’s authorship; where once he had held to the traditional view, now he repudiated it. Such variability in the master was unsettling in itself. The challenge to the warrant of a text that stood central in Kuyper’s preaching was even worse. Then in 1865 Allard Pierson, scion of an illustrious Réveil family and one of the Dutch Reformed Church’s leading lights, became the second prominent disciple of Scholten to quit the ministry in fidelity to Modernist principles. If Christianity was to be superseded by Culture and had been all along simply the expression of human moral evolution (and an erratic one at that), Pierson asked, then why not devote oneself straight out to science and education? Pierson’s defection stalled the confident march of Modernism; some of Scholten’s students started to leave to the Right as well.
Kuyper announced his move in a series of three sermons delivered in November and December 1865. Pierson’s logic was correct, he began; the church confronted a definite choice between “Humanism and Christianity.” The options allowed of no compromise or middle ground and involved the highest stakes. Not only was the church as a body at issue, but the very existence of the soul itself, or of any reality beyond the material realm. The specter of blank materialism would represent, from now on, the deepest horror of Kuyper’s imagination, the ultimate in a remorseless, meaningless world.
For the moment he responded with extreme measures. He chose Reformation Sunday 1865 to voice approval of the spirit of the Syllabus of Errors that the papacy had issued the year before. Though the Vatican went too far in its prohibitions, Kuyper said to a congregation not used to hearing anything positive about Catholicism from the pulpit, it recognized the theological and ethical issues at stake and had taken its stand with the true Christian tradition. Kuyper also gave a lecture that season to the town’s self-styled progressives’ club in which he appealed to Mesmerism and other psychic phenomena to prove the reality of the spiritual plane.
For the longer run his preaching settled into a new pattern, featuring biblical episodes of stark conflict, counterpoising opposite persons or traits. He put more emphasis on the suffering and adversity that come before consolation and reward, on Jesus’ confrontation with death and evil, on the exclusive character of Christ. God became more active in direct relation to persons and less a sum of abstract qualities helpful to humanity in general. For Easter 1867 Kuyper emphasized Jesus’ resurrection as a literal event and not just a metaphor. It alone constituted the necessary “proof of the validity of a Christian world- and life-view” over against the fatal logic of materialism, as well as the only sufficient bridge over the hard passages of life.
In making his change Kuyper struck a chord that he would repeat for the rest of his life: the mandate to make a “definite choice” between stark opposites rooted logically in differing first principles. The method was clearly reminiscent of Scholten’s seminar. But the substance of his new faith was the opposite.
Both the embrace of his mentor’s approach and the rejection of his theology were on display in a remarkable speech on Modernism that Kuyper delivered at Amsterdam a few years later — an event that put him on the national map as a cultural commentator and that might have been the first occasion in any country on which “modernism” was used in what would become the common sense of the term. The subtitle of the speech was meant to impress his upscale audience: “Modernism,” Kuyper said, was a “Fata Morgana on the Christian Scene.” Kuyper drew the metaphor from Arthurian legend (Morgan le Fey) as refracted through Sicilian folklore about optical illusions at sea. Modernism was an enticing picture that arose on a barren scene “by a fixed law” of optics, refracting an actual — and beautiful — reality, but bound to disappear on the morning air. Translation: Modernist theology reflected real faith amid the pallid offerings of compromised Christianity, and did so all the more persuasively for promising to meet the scientific temper of the age; yet its proposals finally amounted to human self-projection within a naturalistic frame. It failed the tests of its truth-claims by calling real what its language treated as metaphor. Even more, it disappointed the yearnings of true piety. It was bound to evaporate in the mists of time, but not before damaging many of the faithful and feeding the company of scoffers.
Beneath the accumulating weight of his long critique, Kuyper’s listeners might forget the compliments with which the speech began, but compliments they were. Compared to the “theological dwarves” of the previous hundred years, whose attempts to accommodate faith to Enlightenment reason had produced “rootless little fungi,” Modernists thought rigorously and delved deeply. They were not the theological “dealers in varnish and plaster” of the sort Kuyper had learned to detect at university. Dialectically, by its “bold negations” Modernism called the forgotten convictions of genuine Christianity back “from their grave,” forced the church to find a real “connection with our age,” and brought to light “all the passages of the mind and . . . [the] countless bypaths and side roads” of the world “that the church had not yet imbued with its Christian spirit.” Notably, these three points — recovery, relevance, and comprehensive program — would constitute Kuyper’s long-term agenda.
So also his attitude. In a sense, “Modernism has saved orthodoxy in the church of Jesus Christ,” Kuyper argued, since without its challenges “we would still be groaning under the leaden weight of an all-killing Conservatism.” Nor were historical dialectics the end of the matter. In contrast to its closest analogue on the American Calvinist side, J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, written fifty years later, Kuyper’s speech did not argue by close textual analysis to show Modernism’s propositional divergence from Scripture. Nor on this occasion did he posit a philosophical-theological defense of the supernatural as such. Rather, his history lesson led on to a phenomenological critique of the movement’s claims and achievements. In short, Kuyper met Modernism on its own grounds of human religious experience.
It was appropriate, then, that Kuyper closed his speech with a summons to the gospel framed in personal memories. The firm footing of reality, he told his audience, lay in the incarnation of the Logos as stated in John 1: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This was the realization that had awakened him, too, who had “once dreamed the dream of Modernism . . . [until] a gentle breeze from higher realms caused the horizon of my life to quiver and the truth appeared to me in the glory of my Lord and King.” This sweet and gentle language, however, gave way in the next sentence to images of horror, tapping a different memory — and a continuing threat. There is “a poisonous snake which seeks to enter the hearts of us all,” Kuyper warned, where it “sucks the last drop of lifeblood from our veins.” Indeed, “that monster has wrapped itself around our age and crept into its breast.” This beast was not the Morgana of Modernism but “Addiction to Doubt,” not illusion but disillusion, and Kuyper shuddered at the toll it was taking: “I have seen its victims, have seen the enervated souls, the weak of heart who float along with the crowd, powerless to resist the tide, people who know only the momentary flush of excitement but are inwardly dying so that only a dissembling life can, for the moment, conceal their spiritual death.”
This insight would be repeated a thousand times, in every mode of dress, from every point of view — national, philosophical, literary, of high taste and low — in European and American writing over the next seventy years. Kuyper in 1871 was indeed a pioneer modernist critic, even if his antidote remained manly combat of a late Victorian type: “As soon as principles that are contrary to your deepest convictions gain ground, then resistance is your duty and acquiescence a sin.” But that tack did not always work. One historian attributes Kuyper’s phobia toward doubt not only to his own struggles but also to his brother Herman’s loss of faith in just these years. Try as he might, the older brother could not win back the younger by logical arguments. Masculine pose did not avail, either: Herman joined the real army — the Dutch military, soon to be at war in the East Indies.
The Birth of Politics
If Calvin provided the foundations that “banned all doubt,” the new Kuyper insisted that the “edifice of faith” had to be remodeled in contemporary style. His reading to that end brought him in touch with a bracing new voice of Reformed orthodoxy, Herman Friedrich Kohlbrügge, pastor of an independent church across the German border. Kohlbrügge’s radical message of all-sufficient grace, drawn straight from Calvin’s pages and one day to be saluted by Karl Barth, cut through the cult of religious experience favored by Ethicals and conservative pietists alike. The correspondence the two began at this time makes Kohlbrügge’s influence on Kuyper’s development undeniable. Yet Kuyper talked little about that and much more about confrontations he had with certain parish “malcontents” who refused to attend his preaching, then turned his monitory visits into debating sessions. These were devotees of the later Reformation and its conventicle system, conversant with the “old writers” if with no one else and uncompromising in their predestinarian convictions. In one of his memoirs, Kuyper remembered becoming increasingly drawn to their model. Though uttered in the “coarse dialect [of] simple peasants,” he said, their theology was “the same thing that Calvin gave me to read in his precise Latin.” Even more, they evinced such “a well-ordered worldview, be it of the old Reformed type . . . [that] it seemed as if I were back in the classroom hearing my talented professor Scholten lecture about the ‘doctrine of the Reformed church,’ though with reversed sympathies.”
Much later, fifty years after the fact, Kuyper identified a young woman, Pietje Baltus, as having been the most relentless interlocuter of them all and the key to his final conversion. He did not record Pietje by name at the time, however, and his gesture of 1914 might be ascribed to Kuyper’s wish to curry favor with common folk at a stage in his political career when he was waxing especially anti-elitist. By the same token, however, the Kuyper of the 1860s had reason not to publicize the impact that an uneducated woman might have had on him as a newly minted doctor of divinity. He certainly knew the Baltus family at Beesd; Pietje’s brother Herman would be a supporter of his on the church council. Perhaps the church-political connection, like the civil-political situation half a century later, was the real point. It crystallized what proved to be Kuyper’s enduring dream. What if old-fashioned Calvinism, without being diluted in substance, were to “advance exegetically, psychologically, and historically” in form so as to become as current a program as the one offered by Modernism? And what might happen if the “simple peasants” loyal to the old faith won the right to vote?
The Dutch Reformed Church was poised at just that possibility in 1867, and Kuyper determined to make the most of it. The church reforms of 1842 had given twenty-five year notice that each local congregation was to decide for itself whether to assume more power in appointing elders and deacons (hence also pastors) or to leave that to the self-perpetuating councils that had long been in charge of parish affairs. If accepted, this augured a new autonomy for Protestants analogous to that attained by the Roman Catholics in 1853, and it galvanized some of the same controversy. Kuyper’s passion for the democratic option led him to a step that would change his career as sharply as the recent crisis had his convictions. He published his first pamphlet for a national audience: “What Must We Do?”
The brochure supported popular rule with several layers of argumentation. First, Kuyper cast the issue under his newfound contest of ultimate principles. The decision about polity entailed support for either “the modern or the anti-modern life-conception,” he said — either “the Judeo-Christian, divine-human, ethical world- and life-view” or one that was at bottom “heathen, humanistic, [and] aesthetic.” He added a practical calculus of voting patterns that bore out this seeming abstraction. Modernists, appealing to the prosperous and educated, needed the protections of elite rule; orthodoxy was much more popular; thus, the politics of the Left would give pulpits over to the theology of the Right. With greater difficulty Kuyper’s brochure had to make what would in fact be a startling change seem moderate and historically rooted. His church-historical skills helped some, but his conservative invocation of rights and precedents could not hide a stereotypically “revolutionary” appeal to abstract ideals. Since the priesthood of all believers was the starting point of the Reformed “church idea,” Kuyper argued, a “democratic church form flows forth from it . . . wholly logically and consistently” — even though such had never been practiced in the Netherlands.
In another foretaste of polemics to come, Kuyper poured out contempt upon the current system. It was an “arbitrary caesaropapism,” “oligarchical in marrow and bone,” governed by “nepotism, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and clerical pride.” Count van Bylandt responded in turn, trying to obstruct the election at Beesd. When the vote was finally held, the congregation chose for popular rule and put four of Kuyper’s strongest supporters onto the church council — including the “malcontent” Herman Baltus. Nationally, parishes started to freeze out Modernist ministers just as Kuyper had foreseen.
He did not tarry at Beesd to enjoy the fruits of victory, however. His brochure on top of his à Lasco book gained him favorable attention at Utrecht. He was installed there on November 10, 1867, at the venerable Domkerk, where the Netherlands’ leading bishop had reigned in the Middle Ages, where the future Pope Adrian VI had worshipped as a child, and where Reformed traditionalists had since fashioned their citadel.
He and his hosts soon had reason to rue their decision — his hosts most of all. They were a well-placed, well-educated circle used to running their own show; they wanted Kuyper for his energy, not his own initiatives. Their national agenda called for the maintenance of solid morals, proper tone, and a unitary culture under the custodianship of the Reformed church. The most eminent of them, Nicolaas Beets, had conveyed these values in the poetry that made him famous earlier in the century, and now preached them from the pulpit that he invited the new arrival to share. Theologically, the Utrecht powers were Calvinists of congenial temperament, tending toward either the Ethical wing of the church or an “apologetic” school that tried to defend the essentials of Christian conviction by rational argument with opposing parties. They did not know about Kuyper’s turn away from such approaches, nor fathom how ready he was to shake up their arrangements. He did not wait long to let them find out.
A High Churchman at Utrecht
Kuyper focused his inaugural sermon on the incarnation of Christ as “the life-principle of the church.” That in itself did nothing to trouble the crowd, for the Ethicals liked the theme too. His second point was common enough as well: the church as the body of Christ continued the incarnation to the present, representing a whole new life that one day, as the Kingdom of God, would become all in all. The shoe began to pinch at the third step: a fully faithful and effective church had to be arrayed in and keep a close watch over its visible, institutional forms. This was a revolution for Kuyper, long a critic of “forms” as such. The “malcontents” at Beesd, the Ethicals at Utrecht, and the Modern Idealists at Leiden could all agree that it was the “invisible church” (whether that be the truly elect, the best of the human spirit, or the sacrality of conscience) that counted, just as the institutional church could be discounted. Kuyper now put forward the opposite claim as a clarion call to a new work. “An external church as a continuation of Christ’s historical appearance has been absolutely needed for Christianity in every age.” It was needed again, here and now.
In turning back toward the importance of the visible church, or a “high-church” position, Kuyper was part of a much larger company in nineteenth-century Europe, from neo-confessionalists in German Lutheranism to Anglican Tractarians to Protestant converts to Rome, with variations on all these themes playing out in the United States. In some cases the high-church impulse proceeded from the dynamics of personal salvation, in others from disgust with state interference with the church. Sometimes, as in Kuyper’s case, the two went together. Whatever the source, the consequence was to elevate the rights and dignity of the church, its world-historical significance as the continuing body of Christ, and its authority over questions of truth and justice, as well as the need to purify its usages, fortify its leaders, and call its members to truer holiness. The ultimate statement of the case had appeared just as Kuyper made his turn to Calvin, in John Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). It was not Newman who sparked Kuyper’s fire, however, but Charlotte Yonge in The Heir of Redclyffe and her pastor John Keble, who took leadership in the Tractarian movement after Newman went over to Rome.
With Kuyper, the Tractarian arrow hit its mark. We last saw him in tears of repentance prompted by the death of the noble Guy. Describing the ensuing burial service, Yonge wrote: “The word of peace rustled over the graves with the melodious sounds of the English Liturgy as his remains were laid to rest below the foliage of a beautiful chestnut tree, rendered a home by those words of his Mother church — the mother who had guided each of his steps in his orphaned life.” The passage struck Kuyper to the core: “That was what I wanted. Such a church I never saw or knew. . . . That was my homesickness, the thirst of my whole being.” More specifically, “Guy had been touched by what we seem to have lost, by the lofty significance of the Sacrament, by the prescribed forms of private and public worship, by the impressive liturgy and the blessed ‘Prayer-book.’” Kuyper might have been reading too far backward in claiming that Redclyffe “rooted” his yearnings for churchly forms “for all time.” But he concluded this section of his memoir with a high-church declaration worthy of Newman himself: “From then on I have longed with all my soul for a sanctified Church wherein my soul and those of my loved ones can enjoy the quiet refreshment of peace, far from all confusion, under its firm, lasting, and authoritative guidance.”
Kuyper’s passion at this point was as acute as his anxiety over doubt, and it is worth exploring the connections between the two. Kuyper did not enjoy it when, apropos of his arguments with brother Herman over religion, their father observed that the older brother had always felt compelled to dominate his siblings. The alternative, to Kuyper’s mind, was his father’s typical waffling and the spiritual costs it had exacted from his sons. One of Bram’s letters to Jo after reading Redclyffe explicitly associated her “gift of Guy” with childlike faith, and his farewell sermon at Beesd confessed that at his arrival there he had not completely recovered the lost faith of “my childhood days.” His Redclyffe reflections attributed that loss to his lack of “such a church” as Guy’s — “the mother who had guided each of his steps in his orphaned life” but now also, after his latest conversion, the “mother” that Calvin “had so beautifully [described] in the fourth book of his Institutes.” That was the “church I never saw or knew,” Kuyper rued. What he remembered instead was “the deceit, the hypocrisy, the unspiritual routine” of the church at Leiden where his father presided for twenty years.
The compliments Kuyper could accord Modernism he never lent to the Dutch Reformed hierarchy or the time-servers in the pulpit that he saw abetting its negligence. It is worth wondering, then, whether the acid in Kuyper’s forthcoming critique of the Dutch Reformed Church was distilled from the passion to redeem that suborned “mother” from his father, who had slid into her arms for personal advantage. Such speculation can note that, over a lifetime of writing, Kuyper cited Shakespeare more often than any other author, and Hamlet first among his plays. The vacillating son’s “To be or not to be” Kuyper quoted in his conversion memoir; and exactly Hamlet’s plea for the ghost of his true father to speak, Kuyper used as the litmus test of reality in his speech on “Modernism.” Both sons indeed heard the ghost’s command; in Kuyper’s case it was the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Both took action, with explosive results.
The particular measures that Kuyper proposed locate him more precisely on the high-church spectrum of his time. His liturgical reform was not the multi-sensory ceremony beloved of Anglo-Catholics but literal adherence to prescribed formularies, especially at baptism — this both to create a common, familiar order and to enforce Trinitarian language against Modernist deviation. In polity he protested less against the state (the Tractarians’ foe) than against the church’s own “yoke of synodical hierarchy,” so his solution was to amplify the power of local congregations. At his initiative the Utrecht church council sent a petition up the denominational chain of command, urging strict enforcement of the baptismal formulary. They got back a compromise that Kuyper found typically empty: the Synod requested pastors to keep “arbitrary departures” to a minimum for the sake of conscience and good order.
His next move raised a “great commotion in the land.” When the Synod sent its annual questionnaire to the Utrecht consistory, Kuyper persuaded them not to answer on the grounds that “these questions are put by a Synod with whose current dignitaries the Council has no fellowship of belief or confession.” He followed up with two new pamphlets putting his case to a national audience. By not enforcing confessional discipline, he argued, the Synod had exposed itself as either incompetent or illegitimate — and the twists and turns by which that body tried to reply gave some warrant to the charge. It first temporized by deciding to put the question of orthodoxy to church councils only on the triennial visit made by its personal representatives; then, in successive years, it heard, rejected, heard again and accepted, only to subsequently reject again, then entertain again, motions to drop the question entirely.
Yet when Kuyper pushed for still further defiance, none of the other Utrecht clergy supported him. Part of their reason was that by this time Kuyper had also become involved in civil politics and in its most divisive question, public education. The details of that controversy must wait for the next chapter; for now it is enough to say that he espoused there the same voluntarist position as in his ecclesiastical policy. Church and school alike, he insisted, needed to be freed from the dead hand of establishment, be it synod or state. If rendered responsible to their local constituents, they would become more vibrant, honest, and effective, delivering at once the safety that conservatives wanted and the progress dear to liberals. The Utrecht powers recognized that voluntarism also spelled pluralism, however, and they were not ready to take that step. Some, Kuyper’s strongest foes, were opposed on principle. Their heart still lay with the ideal of a unitary culture upheld by a common church and school, and if the official Reformed character of the first and Christian character of the second had to be stretched to cover increasing diversity in society, that was an accommodation they were prepared to make. Kuyper was not; in fact, he called it a formula for atrophy. Thus, when he received a call to Amsterdam in 1870, both parties were glad that he accepted it.
Preparing for the Capital
He did not leave quietly. His farewell sermon at Utrecht, along with his first two he gave at Amsterdam, delivered Kuyper’s full and final answer to the “church question,” a bold portrait of a Reformed church that was to be at once progressive and orthodox, confessional and activist, democratic and disestablished. By the standards of the day — and of much subsequent history — the first two pairs were each contradictory, and the three together an unlikely mélange. It took all of Kuyper’s visionary capacity to make them cohere. Calvin would marry à Lasco.
Kuyper’s Utrecht farewell, delivered on July 31, made the case for progressive orthodoxy; more precisely, it disrupted the equation that his audience assumed between the two terms in his title, “Conservatism and Orthodoxy.” Christianity did have a preservative nature, Kuyper granted, and Dutch patriots were properly allergic to the destruction wreaked by “revolution.” Still, conservatism was wrong theologically, precisely by virtue of the reality of sin, for the heritage of the past bore the fruits of depravity as well as the wisdom of the ages. Moreover, conservatism bred bad strategy. Three errors were particularly rife at Utrecht, Kuyper observed. The ultra-Calvinists insisted on re-instituting literal formulas from the past, dooming themselves to irrelevance in the present. The heirs of the Réveil were content with souvenirs, invoking a religious spirit that made for a pious “circle of friends” but lacking the clear theological definition required to make a “church.” As for the Apologists, they were content with whatever their opponents left them. Having sacrificed the initiative to their hungry opponents, they necessarily sacrificed more and more of the heritage they meant to maintain.
Back of all these schools, and back of Kuyper’s counterproposal, lay the question of “spirit” and “form” that had preoccupied him since his university days. His answer sounded German in its ontology and its remarkable confidence in historical development. The “principle” at the “core” of a spirit naturally produces an appropriate form for its “expression in life,” he declared, but for a body to stay vital its forms had to evolve with the age. Neglecting forms, Ethicals and Apologists doomed themselves to impotence; neglecting development, the “repristinators” did the same. That the Reformed confessional heritage, firmly asserted, was the necessary form of a vibrant church, his own work among them had demonstrated, he ventured. That the confessional “principle” must be reborn in the “life-form” which history bequeathed to their own times was the meaning of the incarnational theme on which his Utrecht ministry had begun. That Christ’s incarnation had its fulfillment in his resurrection spelled out the dynamic promise, the lure of God’s future, toward which their own share in the energies of the age ought to be dedicated. “Christ posits an all-embracing and absolute principle [beginsel],” he punned; “from him a whole new life derives its beginning.” That “germ of life . . . can regenerate the world, and you are the ones called to bring that life to the world.”
Kuyper’s debut at Amsterdam the next Sunday advanced this analysis with a new metaphor: the church was a body both “rooted” as an organism and “grounded” as a human institution. It could engage the future safely under the doctrinal supervision of the church “institute,” where the weekly rounds of worship, instruction, and administrative routine were conducted. But all that was to serve the “church organic”—believers engaged in the work of the world, collectively witnessing to Christ on weekdays as well as Sundays.
This became so characteristic a Kuyperian theme that it is important to register its provenance. Kuyper had been playing with the idea already at Beesd, disturbed by Allard Pierson’s complaint that Christianity was irrelevant to modern life. He had sounded it more boldly in his Utrecht inaugural: “No area of life remains alien to the Christian!” It was full blown by the time of his departure: “Christ does not tolerate our living a double life: our lives must be one, controlled by one principle.” His Amsterdam inaugural outlined the ecclesiology to sustain this insight. It also added a fourth party to the conservative schools faulted on his Utrecht list. This was the capital’s Evangelical band, which had long been proselytizing Jews, sending missionaries abroad, and trying to evangelize the urban wilderness around them. Noble enterprises, Kuyper assured them, but too fixed on individual conversion. Vital as that was, the quality of the whole — of the church as a body, and of that body in the world — was the ultimate point.
That said, it is also true that Kuyper did not flesh out his theology of Christian action or his ecclesiology of “institute” and “organism” for another twenty-five years, in the 1890s. He was busy in the meantime with the practicalities of movement-building. The church organic turned out to need a greenhouse to grow in, and Kuyper devoted his next two decades to its construction and operation. Meanwhile, his Amsterdam inaugural sermon was so novel and complex as to leave his audience confused. He returned to familiar ground the next week by serving up his supporters a rousing sermon on divine election. Why had this doctrine, once deemed “the heart of the church,” fallen into such neglect? Because of its adherents as well as its foes, he answered. The latter caricatured the tenet as cruel; the former made it seem fatalistic. True orthodoxy needed instead to recall the teaching’s original purpose of providing comfort to the faithful, assuring them that their salvation lay not in their own fallible hands but in those of a gracious Sovereign. The tensions that necessarily marked the church — institute and organism, orthodox and activist, progressive and confessional — likewise could be harmonized so long as the common root of all these elements in divine election was remembered. Most of all, he concluded, the modern descendants of John Calvin would find at just this point the vital power needed to motivate their ceaseless service for the glory of God. Thirty years later the German sociologist Max Weber would make the same point to a larger world.
With these three sermons, Kuyper’s conceptual set was virtually complete. Principial analysis, principial antithesis, principle extrapolating into world- and life-view, the church growing out of the incarnation of Christ and, bearing its dual character of institute and organism, radiating into “every terrain of life” empowered by the mandate of election — the salient themes of Kuyper’s life work emerged in one creative outburst between 1865 and 1870. By any measure it was a remarkable achievement.
It also left him with a daunting personal agenda. Where should he begin? What should he not do? The questions were amplified by his relocation to Amsterdam, where the theological strains were greater than at Utrecht and the establishment well apprised of Kuyper’s means and ends. The leading pastor in town wrote him a letter of warning to that effect. A more sympathetic observer thought that the greater diversity, and the city’s greater need, afforded greater room to maneuver.
A Pastor in Politics
Certainly Amsterdam was religiously under-served. The Dutch Reformed Church there had ten buildings, twenty-eight clergy, a 140-member council, and virtually no parish work. Of its 130,000 nominal members, barely five percent attended weekly worship. Its finances were dropping even faster than attendance — down 50 percent just in the 1860s. The situation was likely to get worse: the city’s population was finally beginning to grow again, but no new church had been constructed for almost 150 years.
The ten ministers called to the city over the previous twenty years were all Modernists; Kuyper was the first ardent Calvinist in memory, and the first called under the new democratic system. He was assigned to a district west of the canal-ringed center of town, but as relatively few of his followers resided there, they traveled across the city to attend his services, sometimes packing a lunch in order to hear both of his sermons. They chose his slot in the rotation to present their children for baptism; he might administer the rite to seventy or eighty at a time. Besides his pulpit duties, Kuyper hosted the usual catechism sessions for children and began Bible studies for adult women.
He had to attend to the general population as well. His district put some 7,000 souls under his care, many unschooled in the rudiments of the faith, most absent from services, and too many suffering from the early stages of Dutch industrialization. With another young pastor Kuyper created a new system of lay parish-care teams to attend to these needs. Two years later, when he moved near the docks on the east side, he brought some of these assistants along and turned them into an efficient machine to relieve his busy schedule.
As everyone expected, Kuyper also turned his skills to mobilizing the confessional cause. He focused on the consistory’s lay elders, emphasizing their equality as officers with the clergy to whom they had typically deferred. He formed his sympathizers into a caucus to coordinate voices and votes ahead of time, much to the disgust of traditionalists.
In fact, these “moderates” — of orthodox hue but traditionalist disposition — proved to be his most consistent opposition, for on some issues Kuyper made common cause with the Modernists. Both he and they wanted to devolve more control over congregational activities to the parish level, away from the city-wide council and especially from the synodical boards. They sometimes maneuvered together on new pastoral appointments out of a common hostility to the powers in place. On liturgical reform Kuyper went forward on his own, pressing for baptismal uniformity (motion defeated) and for more solemn and frequent — even weekly — celebration of the Lord’s Supper (issue tabled). After the council had been fully democratized in 1871, Kuyper could organize a bare majority without Modernist support. He then set out against their preaching, as it “undermines the very foundation of the church.” After appealing in vain to the authorities to enforce confessional discipline, his caucus put forward a slate of seventeen elders who pledged henceforth to boycott any service at which a Modernist pastor participated.
The maneuvering wore on everybody, especially the moderates who yearned for the peaceful, pre-democratic days before 1867. When they circulated a mass petition against the new order, Kuyper replied with brochures repeating his church-historical arguments for democratization and local control. He then added a 100-page book that joined that case to a narrative of his own conversion. It was entitled Confidentie (“Confidentially”) — and was published to a nationwide market. Finally, he produced a plan to end all the wrangling. It divided the city into five districts, assigning two to the orthodox, two to the Modernists, and one to the moderates. Each parish would be largely autonomous, responsible for its own religious, educational, and social services. Kuyper believed such a plan was the key to making them more vigorous and effective. Likewise, worship attendance would improve as laity developed stronger bonds with their local church. He defended the plan politically as an equitable division between different parties in the church, each of which had a right to exist but none of which could flourish if constrained by the others. Localist, pluralist, accountable, vital — Kuyper’s motion fit all his ideals. It was telling, then, that the council turned him down flat. They argued unity and tradition; they also meant to keep control of appointments and properties.
All the while Kuyper had to meet the expectations for national leadership that came with his call to the capital. Journalism seemed the best avenue, for the States General had just cancelled a per-copy tax on newspapers and magazines, making a mass-circulation press viable for the first time. In October 1870 he assumed editorship of De Heraut (“The Herald”), an old Réveil magazine for Jewish evangelism which he turned into an organ devoted to “a free church and a free school in a free Netherlands.” “Free school” meant speaking out on state as well as church affairs, and his taking on such subjects led to requests that he stand for Parliament. In May 1871, after much inner turmoil, Kuyper acceded. While he professed great relief when he lost, the experience made him wonder what might be done with effective organization. By April 1872 he had support in place for a separate daily newspaper to concentrate on politics. Its name, De Standaard, evoked the banner of the armies of the Lord, but Kuyper also meant it to define proper Reformed opinion nationwide. With De Heraut appearing as its Sunday supplement, Kuyper now had a public forum seven days a week. That did not keep him from publishing sermons, polemical brochures, and his first volume of Bible studies on the side.
It was no wonder, then, that illness became as common a feature as work at the Kuyper residence. The pattern began with their move to the city when Jo, seven months pregnant, was hospitalized for angina. She managed to give birth to Henriëtte Sophia Susanna, named after both their mothers, in October 1870, but was pregnant again in a year. She miscarried in January 1872, was soon pregnant again, and delivered Abraham Jr., their fourth child, that November. Kuyper himself seemed to get sick every winter and verged on collapse every time his work load was compounded by personal stress. He took the same cure as at university. In the wake of Jo’s miscarriage, he was off to London. When deciding whether to run for Parliament in 1871, he went to Switzerland for a month, visiting Kohlbrügge en route but also Allard Pierson, “Holland’s Hamlet,” with whom he discussed his “Modernism” address. In January 1873 he took a water cure for sore throat and rheumatism, but after baring his soul in Confidentie that summer, he needed two months of recuperation in the Alps. The stench of Amsterdam’s canals contributed to the problem (Jo fled for sea breezes in her latest pregnancy), but the housemaids back in Beesd already had voiced alarm at the long hours Kuyper kept. There he had been trying to finish à Lasco while searching the Reformed fathers for footing on polity, liturgy, and doctrine. Now he faced questions of career besides.
It boiled down to pulpit vs. politics. His parliamentary candidacy in 1871 came at the insistence of Groen van Prinsterer, who we will see had emerged by this time as something of a surrogate father to Kuyper. But Kuyper was again having doubts about his clerical calling, just like ten years before. His frustration with the Amsterdam church council made him wonder whether “holding true to principles will be possible” in the ecclesiastical strife to come. “Don’t forget,” he needlessly reminded Jo, “I’m prickly. . . . As the battle proceeds and people turn bitter against me . . . might I not become bitter and misanthropic myself?” An opposite assessment came from a pastor-colleague in the Amsterdam church, a Modernist who wanted him to stay. I have never seen the insincerity others have alleged in you, he wrote Kuyper, but I wonder “whether you are completely honest with yourself. . . . Your special pleading and dialectics sometimes give me the impression that you might not be serious enough” in self-assessment to see that “the devil of ambition is sometimes too strong for you and that your genuine holy enthusiasm . . . sometimes makes you one-sided.” Could you, then, really remain upright on “so slippery and dangerous a field as political life?”
While the voters mooted the question in 1871, it never went away. Kuyper gave himself a crash course in political theory and started tracking voting patterns in likely districts. Opportunity dawned again in December 1873 when, the day after submitting his plural-parish plan to the Amsterdam consistory, Kuyper agreed to run for an open seat in the lower house of the States General. He won — and promptly entered another crisis of conscience. Active clergy were prohibited from taking parliamentary posts, so accepting office as politician would entail emeritation as minister. Petitions from his parishioners asked him to stay. A letter from his closest friend at university, the liberal minister Isaac Hooykaas, told the truth: “In your whole ecclesiastical bearing and history lies much more the statesman than the churchman. . . . There would be something forced, against your nature, if you should decline.” On February 10, 1874, Kuyper officially accepted his seat. He preached his farewell at Amsterdam on the ides of March and was installed in Parliament on March 20. One month later his brother Herman died in combat in the East Indies, as far away from the faith as he was from home.