Much of Kuyper’s theology stemmed from his ecclesiology, from “thinking through his church ideal and his striving to realize it.” This dictum of Dutch scholarship contradicts the charge that “Kuyperian” theology tends to draw elsewhere: that it sells the institutional church short for the sake of Christian engagement in culture. That is just the first paradox. As we have seen, Kuyper’s enduring suspicion of the externalities of the church proceeded from the very same passion that motivated contemporaneous high-church parties’ devotion to liturgy, sacraments, and the apostolic succession of bishops. Again, for all his devotion to fixed principles and consistent thinking, “the church” to Kuyper was not a fixed quantity but evolved over the course of history. It evolved in his mind as well. At the same time, virtually all of his key ideas on church and culture were in evidence by the time he moved to Amsterdam in 1870.
We can find a way through this by understanding Kuyper’s work as a theologian under the rubric of three C’s: it began with the church and ended with culture, and the two were connected by Calvinism. Our path, further, divides into three segments. In his first phase, from graduate school through his Amsterdam pastorate, Kuyper worked out a theory of the church proper, moving from an ideal of inner spirituality to an assertion of “Calvinistic fixed forms.” In his middle phase, from 1875 through the Doleantie, he used “Calvinist” much less than “Reformed,” emphasized soteriology over ecclesiology, and concentrated on church law instead of ecclesiology proper. In the third phase, from the late 1880s through the late 1890s, “Calvinism” returned in force, and church gave way to culture as the center of his attention.
It is worth pausing to consider how Kuyper’s ecclesiological thought stood in the context of the rest of his theology. With all Calvinists he espoused a robust Trinitarianism, a radical theocentricity, and an overriding concern with the redemptive work of Christ. The themes of cosmic renewal and personal salvation that he propounded in The Work of the Holy Spirit (chapter five) along with the emphasis on the kingship of Christ that we will see him elaborating late in life (chapter sixteen) can be seen in one regard as the larger purposes which his doctrine of the church served. Then too, arguments over the church served his larger campaign against theological liberalism. Yet ecclesiology had central importance for Kuyper in its own right. It marked the crossroads where his twin passions of divine sovereignty and social formation intersected. Here especially, eternity worked in time, the holy encountered the other, and the mutual renewal of soul and society could go forward under the providence of God.
The Incarnation and the Church Visible
Kuyper’s early sermons on the church at Beesd set the baseline for his future development. The church, he said, was (1) a free community of the faithful (2) voluntarily gathered out of loyalty to Christ. (3) Animated by the work of the Spirit in the heart, (4) it performed works of righteousness in the world, (5) thereby sowing the seeds of the kingdom of God, (6) which constituted the essential and distinctive teaching of Jesus. Accordingly, the interior life of the Spirit was the believer’s only source of strength, and the deeds springing from it were the real measure of faith. External forms, whether of doctrine, governance, or liturgy, figured at best secondarily in this scheme, at worst as obstacles to spiritual integrity. This sort of sentiment was common on the Dutch religious landscape at the time, from Modernists who anticipated the church withering away in the course of cultural progress, to ultra-Calvinists who had separated themselves from the national church in contempt of its empty show, to the mediating center of Ethical pastors who focused upon the spirit instead of institutional busywork. It comported with the à Lasco enthusiasm with which Kuyper began at Beesd and stretched back across his education to his undergraduate thesis.
Another German he had read in school loomed large behind it all — the Reformed Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who worked to rehabilitate Christian witness from the ruins of the Enlightenment and the invading armies of the French Revolution. From Schleiermacher Kuyper absorbed the ideal of the church as a free and voluntary community that made à Lasco so attractive. For all of Kuyper’s later Calvinist enthusiasms, and for all of Schleiermacher’s subsequent usefulness to liberal theologians, the German’s presence at the heart of Kuyper’s ecclesiology never disappeared. His project going forward was to make Schleiermacher safe for Calvin under the rubric of Reformed orthodoxy.
The first hint of a shift appeared midway through his Beesd pastorate, coincident with his turn to Calvin and perhaps with his worship experiences in London while doing à Lasco research there. His inaugural sermon at Utrecht in November 1867 showed him to have skipped forward from that beginning very rapidly indeed. His text was John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and his theme, as we have seen, was the key concept of high-church theologians everywhere, the incarnation. “The Church,” proclaimed the new Kuyper, “is thus not just a gathering of Jesus’ followers; no, it has become in the full sense of the term the body of Christ, the rich organism wherein not just his spirit but Christ himself lives on.” Only when Christ appeared in human form could people apprehend God correctly; only thus could the human race be redeemed; only in Christ’s continuing presence as the head of a new humanity could this redemption go forward; and only in the outward, visible church did that continuing presence take hold. A visible church necessarily must cast a clear shape, must have the “fixed forms” of doctrine, liturgy, and polity that marked its bounds and mission — and that would mark Kuyper’s initiatives on the Utrecht church council. Theologically, to maintain the integrity of the continually incarnated Christ, and pragmatically, so that the church’s life might become vibrant and strong, a radical pruning of the body had emerged as the demand of the hour, Kuyper’s inaugural concluded: “all that passes itself off as Christian but does not bear its stamp does not belong to its [the church’s] essence, is a foreign element . . . [that] must be cut off, the sooner, the better.”
Already here, some two decades before the Doleantie unfolded, its ecclesiological foundations were in evidence. Kuyper’s sermon promised that a move from a single “mottled” fellowship to two or more well-defined religious bodies — one of them the church of Christ, the others whatever they pleased — would be honest and fair to all concerned, setting up a “noble competition” between the spirit of the church and the spirit of the world that would tell which had the greater potential to glorify God and elevate the human race. The prospect assumed an explosive, dialectical notion of church history at odds with the conservative sensibilities in his audience and with the evolutionary models favored by the leading German schools of the day. Christ’s incarnation demonstrated that “the divine does not come forth from the human but continuously breaks in upon it,” so that the subsequent “course of development” of his body “is marked by severe shocks”:
On the one side the form of Jesus’ church must remain fixed, for only in what is steady and enduring is the eternal character of its godly life mirrored; but at the same time this fixed form must be smashed and broken by the movements of the spirit and agitations from without.
The accelerating logic of modern times was precisely one of those movements: “to the eternal shame of the church it must be confessed” that it is owing to external pressures “and not to the life-strength of the church that the leaven of the Pharisees is again being somewhat driven out and the sacred freedom of conscience is again on the way toward reclaiming her rights.” Thus does “the spirit of the age . . . serve the Kingdom of God to cleanse and purify the church.”
In Praise of the Institutional Church
Notably, Kuyper’s battles at Utrecht concerned baptism, the sacrament of membership, and not the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament of nurture. That made his next step, defined in his debut at Amsterdam, as remarkable as the Utrecht inaugural had been over his beginning at Beesd. At first glance in this sermon the incarnation seemed to give way to God’s “eternal election” as the “fundamental principle” of the church, a move from more generic high-church to specifically Reformed ecclesiology. But Kuyper did not highlight election in the text of this sermon as such, only in the preface to its published version — and that after he had developed the theme with his second sermon at Amsterdam, on “The Comfort of Eternal Election.” This signaled the tack his theology would take in the second phase of his ecclesiological development, ten years down the road. His Amsterdam inaugural itself was absorbed in introducing and elaborating his famous distinction between the church as “organism” and as “institute” — but the role and value of the two were quite different from the meaning he would give them still later, in his third phase. These twists and turns are linked up with a tension evident in Kuyper’s chosen title, “Rooted and Grounded,” from Ephesians 3:17. The first term connoted God’s work in redemption as supernatural and autonomous; the second valorized the institutional church as nowhere else in the rest of Kuyper’s work. On top of that, Kuyper the Protestant issued this praise simultaneously, that August of 1870, with the meetings of the First Vatican Council, which set forth the highest claims ever for institutional church authority.
“Rooted and Grounded” opens with Kuyper’s favorite organic vocabulary to describe the spontaneous order of creation. Had not sin intervened, creation would have been continuously “perfected” until it realized its ultimate “connection with heavenly life.” The radical disruption of sin required God to plant a new seed, to institute a new creation, and that seed first appeared by a radical act of grace “in Christ as a human life.” Here was the incarnation again, breaking into the fallen world-order. In consequence,
now a double stream runs through the kingdom of the spirits. A stream of the old life that, whatever waves it makes, will run out into the sands before it reaches the ocean. And then another stream, dropping down from God’s holy mountain, that never loses its course even though it seems to mix in with other waters.
Through many twists and turns, the stream of grace continuously “deepens its channel to the ocean.” That channel, Kuyper concludes, is the church — the visible church. The church’s root in the love of eternal election produces a whole new “organism,” which makes up the “heart” of the church. The later Kuyper would expatiate on this theme to no end. Here, after just a few lines more, he turns to six pages of marked praise for the church as “institute.”
In fact, “Rooted and Grounded” lauds the institutional fabric of earthly life per se by planting it back in creation itself. Even before the fall Eden was cultivated — it was a garden, not a wilderness. Likewise, all that is instinctive and natural in life is raised to a higher plane by human effort. Again, the church is not only rooted in divine election but “just as much grounded” on foundations that are the work of apostolic — that is, human — hands. Pentecost was a miraculous divine interjection into history, but since then the church has developed as a human community in which the Holy Spirit dwells. Thus, not only the organism but “the institute of the church exists as an establishment of God,” a “God-given means . . . to nourish and broaden the organism.” At this point Kuyper explicitly invoked Calvin’s image of God the Father ordaining the church as a mother to nurture the elect to faith and then to maturity in faith. This happens, Kuyper continued, through the altogether institutional means of Word and sacrament. From there the church builds community, blending together the spiritual streams that arise out of each believer’s heart into the mighty current “that alone makes progress in the Christian life conceivable.” It brings believers together over time, lifting the current generation onto “the shoulders of those who have gone before us” into the church of all ages.
On that basis, the faithful can dwell in a city whose atmosphere and language are those of the Holy Spirit and not of the world. It is the church as institute, Kuyper emphasized, that lures us on to “the higher ground of the new life as a fixed figure in reality,” not merely as a personal dream. At the same time it “sets itself between us and the world so as to protect the distinctiveness of our life with the power, unity, and order” that it alone can provide. And so having formed a “life-sphere,” the church “forms the person, shapes the home, and gives direction to society.” Furthermore, it is “called from the root of its own life to show forth its own science and art, to strive in its confession toward an ever more precise expression of eternal truth and toward a purer worship of the Holy One.” In other words, Kuyper’s whole future program of Christian cultural engagement lay here in symbiosis with the institutional church. God was still building the Kingdom that Jesus announced, but the church is the “scaffolding” of that construction — dispensable at the end but utterly necessary along the way.
Election and the Church Invisible
Kuyper concluded this first phase of theologizing with Confidentie (1873), which included his famous spiritual autobiography by way of expounding upon the marks of the church for which he would eventually campaign in the Doleantie. Entering Parliament soon after, Kuyper plateaued theologically until his return from recuperating in the Alps. The next phase of his thought started up soon thereafter. In spring 1879 he began a fourteen-month series in De Heraut defending the doctrine of particular grace against notions of universal salvation. He followed that up with a similar exploration of the doctrine of the covenants, then one on the “practical consequences” of these doctrines, before finishing with a nearly three-year series (September 1883 until July 1886) that became The Work of the Holy Spirit. Kuyper’s second phase, that is, turned to the order of salvation, inevitably personal salvation first of all. It also reverberated with themes from the work he was simultaneously publishing on law and politics. Particular Grace ran in De Heraut simultaneously with Ons Program in De Standaard; the series on the Holy Spirit began the month before the Tractate appeared and concluded close to the day that his deposition from the ministry was sealed. Both topics and circumstances, then, cast shadows on the institutional church.
Kuyper announced a threefold agenda for this second phase at the start of Particular Grace. He wanted to advance the health of the church, uphold the honor of God, and achieve intellectual consistency in Reformed theology as a system. He realized only the second of these goals fully, but then also unfailingly. Like The Work of the Holy Spirit, Particular Grace and The Covenants asserted and reasserted God’s power, majesty, righteousness, and justice, however much that offended the sensibilities of the age. In particular, he did not shy away from warranting the right of God’s “good pleasure” to choose some but not others for salvation. Kuyper meant in general to reprove the outsized self-confidence that had been building with the nineteenth century’s technological achievements, and in particular to rebuke the self-centeredness of much current Christian spirituality, whether Evangelical, Ethical, or Modernist. In the process he prefigured something of the “wholly other” concept of God promulgated by twentieth-century crisis theology in its equally severe rejection of human pretensions. The fixation upon divine authority also launched his religious thought from the same starting point as the civil politics he was elaborating in Ons Program.
Since divine sovereignty was the theological fundamental, Kuyper’s rhetoric expanded to thwart any compromise or denial of its truth. To espouse the notion of universal salvation in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, he declared, was not just to defy common sense but to posit human ability to cross divine intentions — in other words, to posit a power greater than God. “We very earnestly resist this notion and do so with all the strength that is in us. This idea infringes upon the Godhead of the Divine Being. It abolishes God’s essence in the Divine Being. This may not be tolerated. This doctrine must be opposed.” The whole cosmos as well as God’s being was at stake, for without “the rule that the Lord God sets as the line of action for all of creation . . . there is no providence” — indeed no world, “but only chaos.” If so for the natural, how much more for the moral order: “the higher moral earnestness that must inspire our society” depended inescapably on a twofold recognition of sin’s pervasive reality and God’s transcendent power. The believer’s proper response to that power was to bow before it but then also to rise with it to defend God’s glory every day. That in turn required a periodic ascent to the heights of heroic spirituality; Kuyper recurrently visited the “mountaintops” in these series, as he had just done in real life. The heroic template was meant for day-to-day spirituality too. Ordinary Christians pray first for themselves, then for their neighbor, and finally for the adoration of God, he observed; the order should be just the reverse. Evangelicals and Ethicals were merely Christocentric; real Calvinists were Trinitarian, with a special relish for God’s secret counsel.
This drew Kuyper directly into the ordo salutis, a subject we have already seen him elaborate in The Work of the Holy Spirit. For our present purposes it is notable that Particular Grace and The Covenants drew a new line parallel to his ecclesiology, complicating it and also perhaps blocking his announced goal of fostering the health of the church. For in these series the church hardly seems necessary to the process of salvation. God in electing some had planted them “in embryonic form” in Christ; the mystical union between the believer and Christ was unmediated by any institution or community. “Everyone has his own tie with which he is bound unto his Jesus,” Kuyper declared; no one gains anything from anyone else’s connection. The way election works out is equally individualistic: regeneration is the direct operation of the Holy Spirit in the heart, just as conversion is a person’s own work in owning her dawning awareness of salvation. The church enters the process by the preaching of the Word which is “ordinarily” the means by which God’s calling becomes effectual. But since that effect can take a long time to arrive, as Kuyper honestly acknowledged, many are left for a shorter or longer time to uncertainty — are left, so far as Particular Grace takes it, to the speculative abstractions of decretal theology rather than to biblical evidence or the instrumentalities of the church. No mother here, in short, only the classic conundrums of Calvinism.
The Bridge of the Covenant
Alluding to this problem from time to time in Particular Grace, Kuyper addressed it fully in his next series, on the covenants. In fact, he insisted that election and covenant were not separate topics at all, but two sides of the same work of God that always needed to be treated together: “The Covenant of Grace is the glorious channel through which the water of life flows to us from the depths of election.” What was “glorious” in the picture was not the pristine majesty of God but the persistence of divine love as it advanced its purposes through the murky imponderables of human life. From the peaks of divine sovereignty, everything looks clear and settled, Kuyper said, but from our earthly vantage point it is always mixed. Mountain-climbers as they might be, believers must remember that “we do not sit in God’s chair but crawl as lowly creatures at his footstool.” This was good news for Reformed people, he continued, for many conundrums in the age-old arguments over theology dissolved in the waters of the covenant. Against the most common complaint, the covenant demonstrates that God in election does not treat people like “sticks and blocks” but embeds grace in time so that, as a “brook,” it bears the pure waters of salvation down from the mountaintops “through all the bumps and twists of our earthly life.” The covenant treats people as we recognize them in ordinary life, enwrapped in “transitional, mixed, and unconscious circumstances,” yet all brought to their destined end in God’s good time.
Covenant theology could also redeem the Reformed from the charge of spiritual elitism, Kuyper argued. Divine election neither elevated believers above others nor removed them from human solidarity. It was typically those discounted by the world who were chosen by God, he repeated after Paul, and it was the very solidarity of sin and the democracy of redemption that Scripture was teaching in those passages favored by proponents of universal salvation. The “all” and “whomsoever” God would save meant not every person who had or would ever live. Rather, right athwart the rankings of birth, class, sex, and wealth treasured by the ancient world wherein Scripture was written (not to mention the modern world in which it was read), God chose whosoever would genuinely believe from across all stations in life to eternal glory. Recalling a prominent theme from “Rooted and Grounded,” Kuyper now made covenant the forge of a new community spanning space and time. It established a bond between one generation of believers and those who had come before them, preparing the way, and those who would come later as their spiritual progeny. Within any single generation, the covenant placed people who were already aware of their redemption as a saving witness amid “the broad circle of people who do not know it yet.”
But to benefit from covenant teaching, believers would have to take it seriously, and long stretches of Kuyper’s presentation betrayed his fear that they did not. When thinking about election, he scolded, Reformed people all too often obsessed about the state of their own souls, betraying the very self-centeredness they faulted in Arminians. Their relentless quest to sort out who was and who was not elect arrogated to themselves a judgment that belonged only to God. The consequences were a passivity that fulfilled critics’ prediction about the logic of predestination, an inwardness that contradicted the best lights of their tradition, and an inclination toward despair that constituted Calvinism’s unique contribution to the annals of human pride. Tellingly for our purposes here, Kuyper labeled this the “holy despair of the sect.” The connectedness wrought by the covenant — to past, to future, to fellows, to task — mandated by contrast a church, a body that risked impurity for the sake of God’s grander purposes.
The opposite of Kuyper’s preferred ecclesiology can therefore be seen in his memorable typology of pious sectarianism, especially as it spied some family resemblances across the Calvinist-Arminian divide. Both election-denying “methodists” and election-adamant “passivists” generate three types of spirituality, Kuyper said: one that is genuinely compassionate; a less likeable sort that registers, respectively, as “meddlesome” or “lackadaisical”; and the truly obnoxious variant — the “manufacturing methodism that produces converts” and the ultra-predestinarianism that virtually welcomes the damnation of the unconverted. The covenanted church, instead, holds up the task for which God elected people in the first place: not the salvation of their souls out of the world but a part in carrying on God’s majestic, mysterious purpose of redeeming that world. Geen verbond, geen verband, Kuyper intoned; no covenant, no connection of believers with life, or with each other.
Still, Kuyper acknowledged that the path of covenant theology encounters any number of intellectual difficulties. For one, he had now defined two channels of grace, the covenant as well as the church, and the relationship between them could be confusing. Further, covenantal doctrine might simply relocate allegations of God’s arbitrariness from heaven to earth. If, as Kuyper argued, “the normal means” of entry into the covenant was by family lineage, what chance did one have to be born again if one were not born right the first time? Then there was the perennial charge of intellectual inconsistency in the Reformed teaching both divine predestination and human responsibility. Kuyper brought out the usual answers. Viewed from “God’s side,” the contradiction is only “apparent”; viewed from “the human side,” the cosmos shows a coherence — also a moral coherence — that is a function of law, of “fixed ordinances” according to which things “must happen.” But these answers were open to the usual objections: that the first begged the question and that the second, by insisting that God could not break the laws he had made, subjected the sovereign to something stronger than himself, violating Kuyper’s first principle and arguably laying the groundwork for the very Arminianism and deism that the Reformed were determined to oppose.
Kuyper left the matter on a more humble twofold conclusion. The spiritual life he was outlining in these tracts was as complicated in everyday experience as the political life he was elaborating in Ons Program. When we take up election and reprobation from the human side, that is, from the “psychological, anthropological, and ethical viewpoints,” Kuyper said near the end of Particular Grace, “there is a contradiction” between God’s good will and human damnation. “[T]hat we must acknowledge. Not to do that is either not to know oneself or the power of one’s own reasoning” — and in either case does “an injustice to the sacred.” Yet, equally insoluble contradictions arise if we opt for free will and universal salvation. Such spiritual mysteries can finally be fathomed only as the sovereign Lord “raises us up to the mountains of his holiness” and impels us to humble submission to the due authority of Scripture. And what does Scripture teach? That grace is the free gift of God, and sin the full responsibility of man. Those genuinely troubled by the paradox and not simply raising objections out of pride would find their very burden to be the doorway to grace.
The Church Organic
Kuyper’s third theological phase came after the Doleantie and showed the full impact of his changing fortunes. If he had lost the battle with the institutional church, he could see rising prospects in his political party and the Free University — that is, on the two principal fronts of Christian cultural engagement. Complicating things conceptually, however, Kuyper included every manifestation of that engagement under the rubric of “the church” — the church “as organism” now strongly valorized over the church as “institute.” Yet those terms did not mean what they had in his first phase, nor did they stand alone as the only dialectical pair in his thinking. Idea/appearance, being/form, internal/external, spiritual/material, higher/lower, kernel/husk: these and more had marked Kuyper’s writing from the start. They now amassed alongside some older couplets dear to Reformed theology — true church and false, visible and invisible.
Sometimes Kuyper slid the two sets of concepts over each other; more often he interlaced them. The result was not just definitional complexity but a mixing of markedly different thought-worlds. The older set came from the tradition of Reformed scholasticism, while the others were the idiom of nineteenth-century organic thinking rooted in Idealist philosophy and Romantic poetics. This later idiom now became as pervasive in his ecclesiology as in his social thought. Romantic organicism could sustain his purpose of celebrating the disparate, the individual, and the free while simultaneously exalting unity and order because it postulated a fundamental harmony between these sets of values, both in nature and in society. More precisely, drawing off the nature-philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, it could link any number of diverse elements as the “expression” of an “organism” that “developed” from a single “root” by its internal “law” (or “principle”) toward its inherent end. The words in quotation marks appear endlessly in Kuyper’s work, including his ecclesiology, perhaps making Schelling the instrument by which he could finally reconcile Schleiermacher and Calvin. In any case, such routine shuttling from “essence” to “manifestation” and its marked elevation of the (free) organic over (artificial) mechanism Kuyper took as axiomatic — and as an agenda.
In this context Kuyper reworked his old concept of the church. The true church was still the mystical body of Christ, embracing all those elect by God from all eternity and implanted in Christ. Regenerated by the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit, they constituted the true and invisible church on earth. Then, over time and according to personal circumstances, they were brought to awareness of their regenerate status as God’s calling upon them became effectual in their conversion. This group was now the visible church on earth, the “seed” of the new humanity that God was raising up to populate and to help effect the redeemed creation that awaited the end of time. Like humanity as a whole, the church was an organism, manifesting over time the eternal principle of election as it was deployed through the channel of the covenant. From its debut at Pentecost, the true church was spreading around the world until it would one day fit into every niche of the human race — into every tribe and tongue and culture, as the Revelation of John put it — as God’s new humanity.
Notably, Kuyper could go on in this vein for a long time without mentioning any of the “manifestations” usually taken to be the church: buildings, clergy, worship services, or administrative offices. All these were functions of the “church institute,” which emerged later in the process. The church as organism could and did exist, not only in God’s eternal counsel but concretely on earth, without them. The church as conventionally understood, Kuyper explained, emerges when a local group of the regenerate gathers together to enrich their new life by means of fuller fellowship. Recalling his Tractate, this local body contains the full essence of the church even without the familiar churchly apparatus. Those appurtenances grow from the gathered cell as one (but only one) manifestation of the church’s being and work. The body elects a board of elders to govern it; the elders call a pastor to preach the word and administer the sacraments; deacons are installed to carry out works of mercy; delegates are sent to the broader assemblies of the sister churches with which the local body has decided to confederate; and budgets are approved to finance the lot. All the institutional apparatus, however, exists to serve the work and well-being of the organism and poses a danger (by the power and money it accumulates) to subvert that mission and become an end in itself. The institute in Kuyper’s ecclesiology thus mirrored the “state” in his political theory just as the church organism did “society,” with the same invidious valuations.
Spirit over Form
Kuyper recognized some of the unhappy inferences that could be drawn from this model and sought to forestall them. Yes, the impulse that made regenerate individuals want to congregate in the first place had nothing to do with the order of redemption but ran “according to ordinances endowed in our human race in Creation. . . . [It is from] the organic character of the general human race that the organic character of the church arises.” If it was thus “not for a moment anything other than a human phenomenon,” still the church was under such an “influence of a higher power” that it must “be understood as nothing other than the product of the in-working of a higher grace.” Likewise, for all that Scripture tells us about salvation from “God’s point of view,” from the human point of view the operations of the church institute were essential to the process. It was the sacrament of baptism that “sealed” the child of believers in the covenant, and it was through the preaching of the word that God’s act of regeneration dawned upon the spiritual seeker — more precisely, was made and kept “central” in the believer’s “consciousness.” Thus while the “personal life of the faithful in its germ lies outside [the church’s] organization,” and while in “the coming to be of conversion the institutional church is only an instrumental aid,” still “the central action upon the consciousness always proceeds from the institutional church” in the act of preaching.
Moreover, since the covenant brought into the visible church some children who did not manifest faith as adults and others who professed faith but had not experienced genuine conversion (that is, since the visible church was still not the same as the true invisible church), the exercise of pastoral counsel and the elders’ discipline remained essential, institutional though they were. This conscious regulatory concession Kuyper supplemented with an unfortunate choice of example in illustrating his ideal of spontaneous church formation. The Dutch Reformed immigrants who had recently arrived in Colorado and New Mexico, he offered, were already a church even though they had not yet called officers. In reality, this enterprise, though proceeding under the auspices of a professor at Kampen Seminary and a Kuyper associate, amounted to one of the sorriest episodes in the annals of Dutch-American immigration. Utterly unsuited for their high-plains environment, deceived and under-supplied by their sponsors, the group barely survived the winter, and many came to ruin. It was pastors and government officials on the scene, “institutional” officers all, who came to their rescue.
Yet the momentum in Kuyper’s theory and current practice all pushed toward the “organic” side. Doubling down on his rhetoric, his theory moved from his earlier institute-organism distinction to an institute-organism “opposition.” Put “more precisely,” he stated, the single undivided “organism of the church” shows a “twofold manifestation: . . . the one organic, the other institutional.” That is, the church comprised an organic organism and an institutional organism. If this was no arbitrary or “accidental” distinction but a “principial and necessary” one, the domains assigned to either side bespoke his preferences. The “institutional departments” in the academic study of ecclesiology included polity, history, and statistics. The “organic departments” studied the threefold Christianization of “personal life” (Christian biography, piety, and “character”), of “organized life” (home, society, and state), and of “non-organized life” (letters, arts, and science). That is, the “organic organism” included everything the 1890s Kuyper was interested in — what later scholars have labeled Christian cultural engagement but what Kuyper himself called “the Christian metamorphosis of the common phenomena of general human life.” This indeed evoked the ultimate purpose of the church’s whole existence, the fashioning of a redeemed humanity in a redeemed creation. On that new earth, Kuyper repeated, the church as institute will “fall away and nothing but the [organic] organism will remain.” But already now, the energy at the cutting edges of modern life was deployed only “minimally through the sphere of the institutional church.” Even within the church, the institute tapped “so little spiritual depth that every service in her circle, every vocation to her office, every energy in the service of the Word and Sacrament, however phenomenally organized and activated, derives her essential power from something that falls outside her jurisdiction.” The church organic too was sovereign in its own sphere.
In a way, Kuyper’s ecclesiology had come full circle. He had entered the ministry devoted to à Lasco’s ideal of a church living out of its common inner spirit and not by Calvin’s outward forms. He shared the worry of the ultimate German mediating theologian Richard Rothe that the church was becoming more and more marginal to the main forces of modern life, a Sunday-morning fellowship of a pious circle restricted to “religious” matters. Rothe yearned instead for an “organic” church made up of the entire community, infusing all domains of human life with godly passion seven days a week, even as its institutional structure withered away. Fatefully, for Rothe only the State (in the Hegelian sense of the “whole moral community of a nation”) qualified for that august role, a conclusion that Kuyper early on came to view with horror. Yet Kuyper’s alternative constituted something of a Rothean State-within-the-state, a constantly connected body of believers active everywhere while hedged about by “Calvin’s solid church form” of confessional distinctiveness amid a pluralistic society.
The Church Liturgical
It was one thing to theorize about the church with other scholars, another to serve a congregation of ordinary people. Kuyper had left his Amsterdam pulpit in 1874, but he never forgot his campaign for liturgical reform there. Some twenty-five years later he took it up again in De Heraut. The series went on hiatus in 1901 when he took over the cabinet but resumed in 1910 and finally appeared in book form the next year as Our Worship.
The volume added still another layer to Kuyper’s ecclesiology, for worship was institutional church work par excellence, yet Kuyper treated it not begrudgingly but with loving esteem. Some old perennials came back to life. Our Worship reproved class distinctions in the church at every turn. It repeatedly cut through the crust of custom to recover traditional sources while updating them in a remarkably progressive spirit. Most interesting, in light of the Doleantie’s reputation for spawning a “preacher’s church,” Kuyper advocated reducing the clergy’s role both in the concept and the conduct of worship. Ministers should take the pulpit only for tasks requiring ordination, he said: the sermon, service of confession, sacraments, and congregational prayer. All the rest — hymns, Scripture readings, announcements — should be handled by the elders, not least because the preacher “will retain a more humble and brotherly spirit if he is not always the only axle around which everything turns.” On Sundays people ought to know that they were going to an eeredienst, not a preekdienst — to “worship,” not to “sermon.”
The foundations of his ecclesiology also served as the starting point in liturgy. The sovereign in worship was God as revealed in Scripture; the human center was “the assembly” of the local congregation; neither was to be displaced by officialdom in the form of “the preacher.” The purpose of worship was to enter into corporate communion with God, overcoming the separations wrought by sin. That required that the assembly be properly disposed to encounter the Holy in their inner spirit. All outward, material elements had to be subordinated to that end.
Yet across this familiar grain ran strong assertions of institutional forms. It was the elders, ordained officials, who assumed the pulpit when the preacher sat down. The service must open with the Votum, for only its invocation of “the Name of the Lord” transformed the gathered individuals into a corporate body of Christ and united them with the church of all ages. Kuyper liked a common lectionary for promoting ecumenical purposes; likewise the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, which lifted the local church beyond its parochial identity. He commended kneeling in prayer and lamented how that practice had been hindered by the introduction of fixed pews into Dutch churches at the behest of civic dignitaries who wanted, predictably, the best seats in the house. He urged the use of liturgical prayers and faulted the prevailing cult of spontaneous utterance as too likely to indulge the supplicant’s ego and to wander into a thicket of discordant, unedifying bypaths. In short, the Kuyper of Utrecht and Amsterdam made his return, lauding “fixed forms” not only in doctrine but once again in a modestly high-church liturgy.
His rationale for this choice was sometimes pragmatic. Spontaneous prayer made it difficult for the congregation to keep up with the speaker’s petitions and make them their own, while it also overtaxed the preacher who was nervous about his impending sermon. Kuyper also conducted some keen historical analysis. “Our churches,” he wrote to readers with Doleantie and Seceder roots, were beholden to habits established in eighteenth-century Dutch conventicles on the model of seventeenth-century British Puritans and Presbyterians, who were overreacting to sixteenth-century Anglican ritual. Too much of the liturgical landscape remained defined by oscillation between those two poles — and by their inadvertent mirror-imaging of each other. Thus, said Kuyper, naming names, a revivalist like Ira Sankey warbling biblical parables and a professional Anglican choir chanting Scripture both pushed worship toward a cult of performance that would inevitably end in mere market competition. His main objection was theological, however. The pietist free style fostered a cult of inwardness that made it difficult to connect liturgy to life, that mistook spontaneity for authenticity, and that finally eroded any corporate religious authority. This was the ultimate point. The conventicle, along with all the sectarianism issuing from its principles, did not qualify as a church, nor its gatherings as genuine Christian worship, nor its homilies as the real preaching of the Word.
The paramount exercises of the church institute — preaching and the sacraments — occupy one-third of Our Worship and illustrate how Kuyper’s formal ecclesiology filtered into regular practice. True to his doctrine of unmediated regeneration, the preacher on Kuyper’s model was to regard the assembly as a redeemed people of God and not as sinners in need of salvation. He might — in fact, periodically must — call the saints to the “mini-conversions” of repentance and amendment of life, but the definitive work of justification was not his to effect. The Lord’s Day was not the time for revivals, altar calls, or seeker services. The preacher’s purpose was to promote sanctification, to undertake the long-term pastoral labor that grew from a close understanding of his flock’s spiritual condition, refracting Scripture through the heart of his own reflection and experience onto their specific situation. In other words, although Kuyper for once did not use the term, good preaching was organic.
As to the sacraments, the Lord’s Supper had over the years received less of Kuyper’s attention than had baptism, and his Amsterdam proposals for weekly Communion did not survive the transit to this point. Four to six celebrations a year should suffice, he thought, lest the observance lose its “exceptionally holy character.” Yet Communion lacked for nothing in significance: “The worship service reaches its highest point in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.” In contrast to his understanding of baptism, where Kuyper waffled between realism and symbolism, the Lord’s Supper he cast in unambiguous terms. He followed Calvin over Zwingli in forthrightly affirming the real presence of Christ in the ceremony and “oppos[ing] any notion that the Lord’s Supper is only symbolic.” So devoted was Kuyper to the literal form of Jesus’ institution that he urged even large city congregations to make every effort to take the sacrament seated around tables in front of the church, logistical difficulties to the contrary notwithstanding. And he showed an odd ecumenical streak in confiding his personal preference for taking the sacrament amid strangers, where he and they would not be distracted by knowledge of each other’s sins and questions of adequate repentance.
The Problem of Baptism
Baptism was more complicated and, not accidentally, it developed into a full-scale controversy in Kuyper’s new church. As to its mode of administration he countenanced considerable latitude. The original model of immersion no longer applied, he argued, partly for reasons of climate (northern European rivers being less hospitable than Middle Eastern) but more because of theology. The adult converts of the earliest church needed to be demonstrably washed of their sins, whereas infants baptized under the covenant needed only a “sealing” of its promises in the “sign” of sprinkling on the forehead. Yet Kuyper preferred that the font instead of a mere bowl be kept before the congregation as a reminder of the original practice.
One aspect of the sacrament remained absolute, however, and that was the verbal formulary instituted by the church and bearing real supernatural power. Here too the old Kuyper was the new, having held to the same line without deviation for forty years. His original protest at Utrecht involved this issue, and his second-phase book on The Covenants had concluded with a linguistic tour de force on the question of whether a child was properly baptized “in” or “to” the Triune Name. The former was the due Augustinian language of the appointed form, Kuyper demonstrated, while the latter indicated a Pelagian error that naturally made it attractive to Modernists but that also deprived the ceremony of any sacramental power. Now, in late career, Kuyper kept the same insistence. The prescribed form must be followed to the letter to effect its purpose for both parties, the church and the child.
That said, the Kuyper who consulted God’s point of view had to wrestle with the very necessity of the ceremony. As we have seen, he urged it be conducted as soon as possible, even if the mother was not sufficiently recovered from childbirth to attend. The father was the covenant representative of the family, the congregation the body to which the child was being added, and the prevalence of infant mortality reason enough for urgency in the matter. Yet he opposed the practice of “emergency baptism” by pious laity, since God did not need a few water drops to indicate a dying child’s spiritual status. (If born to at least one believing parent, the infant was presumed to be elect.) “If baptism neither adds to nor subtracts from the salvation of the child, why then should one rush or attach such great value to baptism?” Kuyper frankly asked. “There is no escaping this dilemma. That is why . . . [it] is all the more urgent” to observe the sacrament for the sake of its other audience: “to always enliven the remembrance of baptism among the baptized, to remind them of the comfort they possess in the seal of the covenant, and to direct them continually to the obligation of the new obedience that issues directly from baptism.”
By the time he published these words, Kuyper had fought and lost a battle in the GKN over the theological construct behind the dilemma. In the first years after the Union of 1892, Kuyper’s followers held the initiative in the new denomination while the Christian Reformed party lost ground. The most obvious issue involved competing claims between Kampen Seminary and the Free University over theological education; next came Kuyper’s agenda of cultural engagement vis à vis the old Seceder focus on spiritual nurture and boundary-maintenance. Indeed, on this front an old Christian Reformed lion launched an arrow at the heart of Kuyper’s ecclesiology:
To conceive of the visible or local church, in contrast to the church as organism, as only an institute for the service of the Word, only of practical value, a phenomenon of only passing significance, is to damage its character, lower its destiny, and attack its essence. It becomes just one manifestation of the real church set next to and on one line with other manifestations, for instance in the social or scholarly domain, by which either scholarship is deified or the church is made worldly.
In 1896, the date of this grievance, the Kuyperian star was so ascendant in the Reformed sky that the protest did not prevail. His very successes, however, increasingly drew Kuyper out of ecclesiastical affairs, ultimately to the head of national politics, and left an opening for the Christian Reformed party to strike back. Feelings grew so bad that at the Synod of 1902 the denomination seemed ready to break apart. It managed to avoid that by letting both Kampen and the Free University carry on pastoral training and by implicitly endorsing Kuyperian cultural activism while explicitly downgrading the ecclesiology behind it.
The GKN Synod of 1905 had to finally settle the fight by ruling on Kuyper’s understanding of election and its theological consequences. First, did God choose the elect before humanity’s fall into sin (supra-lapse) — indeed, before creation — or afterward, as Seceder infralapsarianism held? Second, were the righteous thus understood to be justified from all eternity? Third, were covenant children baptized on the presumption that they were regenerate? Finally, was regeneration accomplished unmediated by any instrument, including the church?
The Synod held with the infralapsarians down the line. More precisely, it declared “infra” to be the preferred, and “supra” a lesser though legitimate, track in the Reformed tradition. As to the timing of election it decreed that teaching and preaching should “adhere as closely as possible” to the language of the confessions, which clearly had an infra understanding. The timing of regeneration was established clearly in neither Scripture nor confession, so that the question of whether “God fulfills his promise either before, in, or after baptism must be addressed with great circumspection.” Such language was a study in circumspection itself. As one scholar has concluded, the Seceders and Kuyperians posed two consistent but incompatible systems, the first rooted in time and persons, the second in eternity and decrees. The Synod found for the implications of the former without boring down to the foundations of either, in particular bypassing the “Archimedean point of the Kuyperian system,” the teaching of unmediated regeneration. By a most un-Kuyperian inconsistency, the church held together.
Kuyper took the setback without public protest because in 1905 he was battling to survive as prime minister. More generally, he had long since embarked on other initiatives. During the late 1890s, when he was recovering what he deemed to be proper Reformed liturgy, he was laying out on the facing pages of De Heraut a dramatic new line in Reformed theology. This was the doctrine of common grace, the “seed” of which he located in some words of Calvin but whose “manifestation” he elaborated much further than any predecessor had ever tried. It was the linchpin to his theology of culture, and the subject to which he turned his attention after long struggles over the church.