Kuyper is best known in English-speaking circles for his theology of culture. Kuyper, more than most other conservative Protestants before or after him, laid great stress upon creation in its own right and as the starting point of theological reflection. He elevated the “cultural mandate” in Genesis (1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply . . .”) as an enduring command for humanity to develop the potential endowed in creation as service to God. He made cultural engagement a strategic priority for his followers in the context of their times. And he deployed that effort along the lines of his two key theological innovations: the doctrine of common grace and the epistemology of worldview.
This program as a whole and in each of its parts has spawned abundant commentary, positive and negative. The biographer’s role in adding to the mix is neither to elaborate nor to evaluate but to contextualize this dimension of Kuyper’s work amid his other initiatives and the dynamics of his day. That is, the when of this particular project has something to say about its what. The timing is clear enough. Although Kuyper sounded these themes from the very start of his career and reverted to them periodically, he brought them into sharp focus in the decade 1887-98 — the decade just after the Doleantie had gone awry and just when the road to the political promised land opened up. This was the decade of democratization, when the Dutch political system doubled and then re-doubled the size of the electorate. It was the decade when the nation rose from the economic depths to start making real progress on the domestic front. Not coincidentally, it saw Kuyper at his most progressive, certainly at his shortest patience with conservatives in church and state. On the global stage, the same decade saw an explosion of Western imperialism and the harbingers of a cultural revolution that would usher in a new form of Modernism. Common grace, worldview epistemology, and the call to Christian cultural engagement reflected each and every aspect of this scene.
Cultural Activism
Early in his career Kuyper had to assert a public role for Christianity against religious moderates and secular skeptics. His ongoing argument with the Ethical theologians chafed at their limiting faith to existential questions and traditional “spiritual” domains. His inaugural at Utrecht reminded the establishmentarians there that the Reformed tradition did not just warrant national-church prerogatives but made claims on “all fields of life,” “every domain.” His opening address at the Free University not only defended the sovereignty of various spheres but insisted upon an active Christian part in all of them. The most memorable words of that speech, perhaps of his entire career, were a challenge to the “thinking class” of the nation, which regarded the faith as either erroneous, private, or of narrowly moral relevance. On the contrary, he thundered: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” Kuyper thus grounded Christian cultural activism in the most venerable of Calvinist precepts.
Kuyper leaned heavily upon that fulcrum after the Doleantie. Now he faced not the cultured despisers of religion but pious skeptics of culture: third-generation heirs of the Réveil, with its focus on evangelism and serial charities; Christian Reformed allies, tenacious for the purity of their church; and his own ecclesiastical followers, embittered by the way the powers of church and state had thwarted ecclesiastical reform. To these and others like them Kuyper outlined a new strategy in the memorable address “A Twofold Fatherland,” delivered at the Free University convention in June 1887. With the wounds of the church struggle still raw, he admitted that it was tempting to give up on the nation, “our fatherland here below,” and he indulged his audience with the myth of a seventeenth-century golden age when pure Reformed religion “defined the direction of [our] public life.” Yet he reminded them that God remained the Sovereign Lord over all history, including the present place and time. If it was manifestly so that “secularization is the stamp” of the age, then the Lord must have also provided the means for believers to sound the claims of faith in that context.
To discern those means Kuyper directed his audience’s attention to the secularists’ road to power: their command of government, public opinion, the arts and science. The faithful were called to work in those same venues, Kuyper reasoned, even — no, especially — from their place on the margin. The temporizers they had just left behind in the national church were fated to remain priests endlessly trying to atone for the mix of purity and impurity with which their cult of unity diluted the gospel. The Calvinist remnant was called to be prophets instead, nurtured in their own networks but stepping forth boldly into public life to call “prince and people back to the Law and the Testimony.” This was Kuyper’s church-organic living as “a colony of the heavenly fatherland.” If that remained always the object of their highest allegiance, believers were still to plant here below deep roots for a long engagement in public life. They were to be patient with small beginnings, searching with the eye of hope for tokens of “a better dawn.” Kuyper did not have to add, that summer of 1887, that a bright dawn indeed was at hand for the Calvinist political cause in the expanded franchise currently being negotiated in the capital. Christian cultural engagement was a strategic offensive for a promising future.
Those prospects looked even brighter nine years later when Kuyper addressed the 1896 synod of the GKN at Middelburg, the city of his youth. True, that assembly would deal with formal protests against his teaching from the Christian Reformed side of the denomination, but in assigning him the keynote address the synod had forecast the outcome of the debate. Kuyper took full advantage. As we shall see in the next chapter, another expansion of the franchise was imminent in national politics, and Lohman’s Réveil conservatism had just been purged from the Antirevolutionary Party and the Free University. With his own health restored after those combats, Kuyper went after the conservatives in his new church with a bracing vision of the Calvinist future.
It was a weak faith, he began, a trimming of the sovereignty of God, that was at work in the sectarian mentality which accepted a “reduced lot,” wrote off the larger world, and hoped only to bequeath to the future safe “little churches” with their “spiritual prattlings” and balm for the soul. The brethren should recall, he noted, that piety and orthodoxy had never been stronger than in the age of the Reformation, when Calvinism had been full of verve and commanded respect. The good news for his followers, Kuyper then said in a startling reversal, was that the golden age had not been so golden. The devoutly Reformed had made up no larger a portion of the Dutch nation then than they did now; they had faced just as strong a foe, wrestled with conflicts and inadequacies as in the present. But the fathers knew that “conflict quickens faith,” and that faith led them to accept the high calling to be “an instrument of the Lord in the struggle of the ages.” True heirs of their Calvinism, Kuyper concluded, would remember that God’s sovereignty extends over the whole world and not just the house of the pious; that Christ offers not only the breath of consolation but the Word of Wisdom structured by creation into all things; that personal salvation is less an end in itself than a means to God’s larger purpose of renewing the cosmos. “Brothers,” he concluded, “I believe in the future, I believe in it with all my heart. . . . As Reformed people we have not just in the Netherlands alone but on the great world scene still a future, still a calling, still a holy task entrusted to us.”
These two addresses, representing the start and the apex of Kuyper’s most confident decade, also unveiled his key ideas for carrying the new project forward. In his synodical address of 1896 he sketched the outline of worldview thinking by which Calvinism could become a player on the intellectual frontiers of the age. Protestantism as a whole had become a spent force in the Netherlands, he mourned, surrendering the cultural initiative to Catholicism on the one hand and pantheism on the other. Now Calvinism should enter the lists by articulating from its definite “standpoint” and ruling “principle” a consistent “Christian worldview in the tongue of our own time.” And if that encounter boded conflict, in “Twofold Fatherland” Kuyper pointed to a different frontier, the heavenly kingdom toward which the earthly pilgrimage walked under the canopy of common grace.
Common Grace
Kuyper’s work on common grace bore obvious connections with his rising political career. He unfolded the concept in his theology column in De Heraut over a six-year period — from September 1895, soon after he had reentered Parliament, until July 1901, when he was forming the cabinet. In fact, he foreshadowed the project already during his first term in Parliament, in 1874, when he dilated on “the natural knowledge of God” that was available to all human beings. The reason is plain enough. Faith-based politics requires some common ground with people of fundamentally different convictions — at least to establish mutual intelligibility and respect for the rules of the game, and at most to build coalitions on issues of common interest.
Still, common grace is first of all a theological concept that addresses a real problem in the Reformed tradition. Kuyper noted this at the very outset in invoking John Calvin’s treatment of the “virtue of the heathen” in his Institutes (II/3/3). Calvin wondered, as should we, said Kuyper, how it was that “the unbelievers who dwell in our midst often outdo many a child of Christ in their quiet, serious devotion to duty.” Historically, “Anabaptists” (more accurately, the pietists and conventiclers in his audience) resolved the conundrum by denying any real virtue outside the true church — a move, he observed, whose dishonesty did little credit to the ethics of those who made it. “Arminians,” on the other hand, trimmed the Reformed teaching of human depravity, divine sovereignty, or both. The doctrine of common grace thus salvaged Reformed orthodoxy by seeing the virtues of the unregenerate as fruits of the sovereign grace of God. This was not saving grace, Kuyper emphasized; that went only to the elect by the operations of “particular grace.” Yet it was real grace nonetheless, the unmerited favor of God, shed upon all people regardless of their spiritual destiny. Indeed, upon more than all people, for it extended through the whole cosmos, just like the reign of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. It touched the body as well as the soul, peoples as well as persons, things “secular” as well as “sacred.” In brief, common grace addressed an old problem in Reformed theology with a classic Reformed answer while warranting Kuyper’s new Calvinistic initiative.
Common grace had two goals, Kuyper said; better, it represented two temporal means of reaching the one perennial goal of magnifying the glory of God. First, God by means of common grace intervened immediately after the human fall into sin to delay the death that was the sure consequence of disobedience. Kuyper pointed this out already in Particular Grace, the favorite text of those who deny any other sort: “if no curtain of protection had been placed between God and the human race against [God’s] fiercely burning wrath, everyone would go alive, directly, and without a moment’s delay to hell.” At other places he opined that life on earth would have gone on but as a living hell, a chaos of such disorder, destruction, and distrust as to render impossible any productive economy, any formation of culture, any civil society. Common grace thus exercised a “bridling,” “tempering” effect that “restrained” or “blocked” the natural outworking of sin. Yet, as Kuyper read early Genesis, these operations were of diminishing effect until God intervened dramatically again in the days of Noah. The twofold covenant laid out after the flood (Genesis 9) amounted to a serious upgrade of common grace. It instituted regularity in nature, as signified by the rainbow, and order in society by the power of the sword. Not accidentally, Kuyper continued, Genesis next records the rapid emergence of culture — of agriculture, manufacturing, city life, music and the arts, and everything else that marks human flourishing. While much of this went awry under renewed human rebellion, he acknowledged, it still set the context in which an elect people could be called and gathered over time. Without common grace, particular grace would not have had a chance.
But there was more. It would be the old pious smugness, Kuyper warned, to see the human race existing only to bring forth the elect. Thereupon he launched forth on the second leg of common grace and into his era’s confident interpretations of history. He began by returning to the cultural mandate. God endowed the human race with abilities on purpose, and common grace was the means by which that intention was not thwarted by the fall. All the powers latent in creation and human nature could and must still unfold, more slowly and erratically than they would have absent sin but no less progressively. This was an invitation to celebrate the century’s achievements in science and technology, and Kuyper did not pass it up. Nor did he demur at joining the chorus prophesying even greater glories to come in the twentieth century (bitterly ironic as those predictions seem today). The growing mastery of science over nature included such feats as his country’s recent conquest of time and space via the railroad and telegraph, and it promised further reductions in the high rates of child mortality that troubled his soul.
Kuyper saluted more than material gains, however. The “higher” levels of thinking, the “nobler” sentiments of family life, the civil tongue of bourgeois discourse, the salience of appeals to equity and justice, the rising prospects of international peace via treaties and arbitration — all these were undeniable improvements over the superstition that had benighted so much life in the past: the brutal tone of pre-modern family relations, the raw exploitation of early industrialism, the unapologetic hauteur of aristocratic regimes. While hypocrisy pervaded much of the contemporary scene, it was a salute that vice paid to real virtues; and while cruelty and injustice still marred any number of social relations, surely no one would wish to return to the harshness of an earlier day. That the official norms of the age afforded leverage for continued improvement was a blessing from the Lord that everyone, including the saints, should appreciate.
In this commentary Kuyper had his eye on “the West,” that is, the nations of central and western Europe along with the Anglo domains of North America, where industrial and bourgeois progress had made its greatest strides — and whence ventures of conquest were bringing the course of Western imperialism toward its apogee at just this moment. Kuyper mapped the course of common grace along the same track. Granting that every race and tribe had a culture, in many cases, as in the “backwaters” of Asia and Africa, these had turned in on themselves, becoming “isolated.” Only along one track — the grand arc that arose in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, ran across the Mediterranean to Greece and Rome, crossed the Alps into northwestern Europe, and now spanned the Atlantic to America — had human civilization made cumulative progress. Precisely here, in the terms of common grace, creational potential had been most realized to date, and here it would come to its climax. It was Western Europeans and their American cousins, Kuyper elaborated, who best nurtured the fruits of common grace, from technology to human tenderness. It was they who had subdued “lower” passions beneath “higher” ideals, and it was their destiny to have mastery over all the globe, as was now unfolding before his readers’ eyes.
This reading of history owed more to Hegel than to Scripture, and Kuyper did not hesitate to link it into the racial hierarchies of the day. Without ever explaining the anomaly of his allegiance to the African Augustine over the pale Brit Pelagius, in Common Grace Kuyper bluntly set the white race over the yellow and yellow over black, with red doomed to extinction in the wilds of North America. It was in his commentary on common grace and art that he deployed some of the most offensive rhetoric in his entire corpus.
Beauty does not enrich the entire earth. On the contrary, the beautiful, the common, and the hideous today exist next to each other. A lion is beautiful, a calf is common, a rat is hideous. . . . [T]he same is true of people. The Arab appeals to you by beauty of appearance, we Dutch look very common, and the Hottentot fills you with loathing.
At the same time, common grace theology itself, separated from this historical trope, could warrant as sweet a chorus of cultural diversity as postmoderns might wish to sing — or that Romantic social thinking in the line of Herder, Kuyper’s own trajectory, originally sounded. In a striking invocation of the social implications of the Trinity, and in another echo of his old critique of uniformity, Kuyper asserted that the image of God, though surely borne by individuals, comes to fullest manifestation in the human race as a whole. The implications were democratic. “If it has pleased God to mirror the richness of his image in the social multiplicity and fullness of our human race,” then in “the whole life of the world, the life of Kaffirs in Africa, of Mongols in China and Japan, and of the Indians south of the Himalayas,” as well as in the ancient cultures of “Egyptians and Greeks, in Babylon and Rome,” and so also in life “today among the peoples of whatever continent,” there was nothing “that was or is not necessary” to the fulfillment of the potential that God had endowed in creation to the ultimate display of the richness of his glory.
Common Grace and Particular Grace
This level of generality, however inspiring to Kuyper’s readers, glanced over some concrete questions. If they lowered their sights from civilizations to persons, could Calvinists see acts of real goodness in their non-Christian neighbors, read words of real truth in a pagan classic, appreciate real beauty in the work of, say, French Impressionists? Logically, Kuyper had to say yes. If cultural complexes are more, they are never less than the sum of their parts, and if the whole has genuine merit, so must some of the parts. Kuyper cited specific individuals as examples, typically at the level of genius. “The names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have constantly been honored by Christian thinkers,” while among the moderns it was an “undeniable fact that . . . Kant and Darwin shone [as] stars of the first magnitude, geniuses of the highest degree, who uttered the most profound thoughts even though they were not confessing Christians.” The same could apply to people without fame. The natural science of the day, although conducted “almost exclusively” by anonymous ranks “who are strangers to the fear of the Lord,” had “produced a treasure of knowledge that we as Christians admire and gratefully use.”
Typically, however, though nothing in his theory required it, Kuyper tended to deal with individual persons in the context of particular grace. Common grace he associated with structures and collectivities — with the formal institutions of government and culture, for instance, rather than with statesmen or artists themselves. He especially emphasized in this regard the potent if informal sinews of custom, habit, tradition, and public opinion. This reflected his Burkean past but also the communal emphases of his political and social theory, the elevation of the organic church in his ecclesiology, even his derogation of soul salvation to the level of means rather than end in his soteriology. In all his theorizing, that is, Kuyper tended to be more concerned with the connections between people, with “the life-relationships of the human race,” than with the persons themselves.
Of these relationships, that between common and particular grace became one of his more pressing questions. Unlike some of his acolytes, Kuyper always treated the two in combination, as two “distinguished but not divided” operations of the same God, aimed at the self-same goal of re-creating the whole world until it finally reflected the glory of the divine image. If the organism of the church, made up of those elected under particular grace, would one day fill that world as its new humanity, then common grace permitted the spoiled creation to stay in being while that development went forward. At the same time it produced significant achievements — whether at believers’ or unbelievers’ hands — that would all be assumed into the new order, purged and refined. Those achievements, in fact, would do much to lift the re-creation quite beyond the Edenic original.
To sort out the complications in the meantime, Kuyper devised a four-part typology that can be best visualized on a spectrum. At the two ends lay the two graces pure and simple. In lands not (yet) evangelized, common grace operated alone, with no small record of accomplishment but no hopeful goal in sight either. In the institutional church, purely reformed, particular grace operated safe from the corruptions of the world. In the two middle segments the two graces overlapped with complex results. Kuyper gave these segments most of his attention from here on out.
The middle domains registered the fact, in Kuyper’s opinion, that particular grace strengthened and best realized the possibilities of common grace. Not that believers were more gifted than unbelievers at science, art, technical skill, or political acumen; the opposite was the rule. Rather, those endowed with the insights of the gospel knew the ultimate purposes and norms for these gifts. At the same time their life together in families, churches, and voluntary associations manifested a winsome model, a noble spirit, that their neighbors wanted to enjoy. Thus Christianity, starting out everywhere as the conviction of a doughty minority, could not help but change society for the better as its witness drew more people into its ranks and so shed its influence into its local setting. Where the process had worked longest — i.e., in Europe — the effects were most profound. It was the intensifying effect of particular grace in the workings of common grace, Kuyper claimed, that accounted in no small part for the West’s achievement of global supremacy.
Furthermore, the fruits of secular progress could be claimed for Christianity even though many people in these leading nations, particularly in their leading sectors, were no longer believers; their accomplishments were the long-term residue of a once-dominant public faith. This was the first mixed category, then, “the life of non-confessors in a Christian country.” In this loose sense of the term, Kuyper said, “Christian” indicated “nothing about the spiritual state of the inhabitants of such a country but only [bore] witness to the fact that public opinion, the general mindset, the ruling ideas, the moral norms, the laws and customs there clearly betoken the influence of the Christian faith.” As fruits of that influence he listed the abolition of slavery, the elevation of women’s status, “the maintenance of public virtue, respect for the Sabbath, compassion for the poor, consistent regard for the ideal over the material, and — even in manners — the elevation of all that is human from its sunken state to a higher standpoint.”
The increasing level of generality on this list shows Kuyper approximating the notions of Christian kultur that the belligerent nations in World War I would put forth to legitimate their destruction of each other — and inevitably of the concept itself. Even without that destruction, Kuyper’s near equation of Christian and bourgeois in this context evinced little of the critical rigor he was simultaneously developing in his worldview epistemology. Perhaps he was trying one last time to recover the Netherlands as a “Christian nation,” now as a nation with a collective Christian memory to which an explicitly Christian political activism could appeal.
In any case, Christian action more tightly defined was the mark of the fourth segment on the spectrum, the second mixed category, “the life of Christ-confessors outside of the church institute.” Here was Kuyper’s cherished church-organic, the body of believers’ work and witness in everyday life, especially on the cutting edges of modern development. Strengthened as these endeavors were by particular grace, they could work in society only because of the points of contact established there by common grace.
In this domain Kuyper used “Christian” in a stricter sense. He borrowed three images from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) to refract its meanings. The briefest treatment went to the image of “salt of the earth,” by which believers’ engagement with the ambient culture worked only to preserve it. “The light of the world” he invoked more fulsomely:
Though the lamp of the Christian religion burns within the walls only of that institute [the church], its light shines out through its windows to areas far beyond, illumining all the sectors and associations that appear across the wide range of human life and activity: justice, law, the home and family, business, vocation, public opinion and literature, art and science, and so much more.
Yet light established only an “external contact.” Leaven, by contrast, wrought an “internal kinship,” and it was as “a leaven [that] has permeated the three measures of meal” that Kuyper wanted the people of particular grace to participate in the world preserved by common grace, effecting thereby the “Christian metamorphosis” that was at once the ultimate goal and the first fruits of God’s eternal design.
Worldview
The interface that common grace gave Christians with people of other convictions was evident not only in Kuyper the politician but in Kuyper the intellectual. He was remarkably attuned to the cultural currents of his time, and at no instance more than in elaborating his second theological innovation, the epistemology of worldview. “Worldview” as an understanding of collective consciousness had its roots in Immanuel Kant’s later work and had steadily grown with the German Romantic and Idealist movements stemming from it. By the 1890s, however, an acute sense of crisis in European high culture drove more thinkers than ever to entertain the concept as a solution to two components in that crisis: the question of cultural authority and the question of cultural coherence. As those issues were perpetually atop Kuyper’s intellectual agenda, “worldview” offered him a way to put Calvinism at the cutting edge of cultural discourse while simultaneously showing his followers that they had as legitimate a voice in that conversation as their self-proclaimed superiors.
The question of cultural authority arose from doubts about the hard-nosed scientific enterprise that had been staking the strongest recent claim to that authority. The ruthless nation-building and industrialization that marked politics and economy since the 1860s had as their academic partner a “positive” science that warranted the naturalism of its philosophical premises by the amplitude of its technological rewards. On this model, unbiased observers looked directly upon a nature devoid of non-material qualities to capture reality as it actually was. This capture came by discovering the laws that controlled phenomena in a given domain, explaining what had seemed mysterious, revealing order behind what had seemed chaos, and promising ever further grasp of nature’s ways. Grasp also meant control; “science” would harvest nature to yield greater bounty, health, and well-being for its human masters. If the process seemed to lack heart, as some critics contended, its enthusiasts pronounced it to be unstoppable, like the “progress” it yielded. The individual or nation that did not want to “get ahead” was foolish.
Yet by the end of the century the fools had become the wise, or at least had achieved critical mass. Some of positivism’s critics came from the outside, like philosophical Idealists and the religiously orthodox who argued that a world lacking in spiritual qualities necessarily lacked ethics and purpose. Young leaders in the emerging social sciences and humanities worried (some of them, like William James and Max Weber, nearly worried themselves to death) that a sheer naturalistic study of humanity would erode human dignity and freedom. On this view “progress” looked very much like a prison. The most telling criticism came from within the natural sciences themselves, and first from the “hardest” sciences of all, mathematics and physics. Upon observation it turned out that the behavior of gases had to be understood in terms of statistical probability, not as a definitive picture; and upon reflection it turned out that a mathematical point was a hypothetical and not a “real” entity. The preeminent physicist Ernst Mach complained that the emerging paradigm of atomic theory, which was about to revolutionize physics with (literally) earth-shaking consequences, was not science at all but philosophical speculation. Mach soon had to conclude, with fellow “critical positivists,” that science was a human improvisation which did not gaze upon the “real world” as conventionally understood and consequently did not yield true certainty. Ordinary science continued apace despite these questions, and ordinary people still looked to it as a font of plenty. But in philosophical circles and among public intellectuals, the door was now open to reassertions of the creative power of the human observer (the “subject”) after a half-century of subordination to the material observed (the “object”). The door was likewise open to reassertions of the spiritual over against the material, intuition over strict empiricism, the vital and dynamic over deadening controls.
In proposing his worldview construct Kuyper entered this traffic and pursued a longstanding dream. His turn to forthright Calvinism came in response to the specter of scientific naturalism that was then (in the mid-1860s) in the booster phase of its ascent. His first publication defended the democratization of the church as a means of defending Christian orthodoxy and invoked worldview tropes in the process. One’s position on the question at hand, Kuyper said in 1867, was not susceptible to objective settlement; it all depended on “which corner” one came from, “the Judeo-Christian, incarnational, ethical world- and life-view” or its “heathen, humanistic, aesthetic” opposite. More fulsomely, he inaugurated the Free University in 1880 with epistemological as well as historical and social-theoretical arguments. Recalling the century’s contests between empiricists and Idealists, monists and atomists, subjectivists and objectivists, Kuyper emphasized how much first principles directed research programs, how incommensurate were different sets of presuppositions, and how actively they played in all disciplines, not just in theology or philosophy. “What natural scientist operates without a hypothesis?” he asked fifteen years before Mach. “Does not everyone who practices science as a man and not as a measuring stick view things through a subjective lens and always fill in the unseen part of the circle according to subjective opinion?”
These earlier gestures Kuyper now built into a full system, weaving his epistemology through the massive scholarship of his three-volume Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (1893-94), distilling it in the Lectures on Calvinism that he delivered at Princeton in 1898, and purveying it in popular form to his Dutch readers in the final installments of his series on common grace at the turn of the century. Some Anglo-American writers, including Peter Heslam and David Naugle after him, ascribe considerable influence to Scots Presbyterian theologian James Orr in inspiring Kuyper’s move to worldview as an organizing motif, though the evidence points as much to a convergence between the two as to any causal relationship. Orr and Kuyper’s common steeping in nineteenth-century Germanic thinking is more to the point, as is the coincident appearance of their work with other monuments of the worldview approach. Orr’s key text, The Christian View of God and the World, came out in 1893, as did the first volume of Kuyper’s Encyclopedia, two years before Mach published his Popular Scientific Lectures, and just as Wilhelm Dilthey began the treatises that would culminate with his full typology of worldviews, the apex of the method.
Worldview epistemology fit any number of Kuyper’s desiderata. He welcomed its recognition that everyone, group or individual, operated out of a cognitive framework that was itself not established by reason or science. Contrary to decades of derision from the positivists, it gave people of faith just as good a warrant to stake their claims, and equal potential for realizing those claims, as anyone else. It is “[n]ot as if the knowledge of others rests on intellectual certainty and ours only on faith,” Kuyper declared in opening the Free University. “For all knowledge proceeds from faith of whatever kind. You lean on God, you proceed from your own ego, or you hold fast to your ideal. The person who does not believe does not exist.”
Worldview also promised coherence in a rapidly expanding universe of knowledge, rendering an ordered whole out of what otherwise would remain a jumble of data. Kuyper was particularly emphatic on this point. Unlike some practitioners of the method, he traced every worldview back to a single “fixed starting point,” a leading “principle,” by whose guidance the everyday world was explored, by whose logic a meaningful world was constructed.
Further, as the term implies, a worldview embraces the whole world, the same claim Kuyper was now making for Calvinism among his followers. Worldview thus established a mandate for critical Christian comprehensiveness. Believers had to extend the logic of their faith to sites they had heretofore ignored, had to test anew every theory and practice to see if it was of God, had to reconceptualize every place they had taken for granted or had visited on other terms. If common grace could baptize whole cultures as “Christian,” worldview analysis delved beneath the surface of every project to ferret out its animating faith.
Worldview was also inherently democratic: that is, it assumed a pluralistic situation, was designed for popular reception, and sought to inspire action. As to pluralism, it was to normalize perennial disagreements among schools that Dilthey entitled his definitive essay on the matter “Der Streit der Weltanschauungen,” the conflict of the worldviews. Some of Kuyper’s latter-day progeny have aptly noted that, whereas “philosophy” at the time made claims to universal truth, “worldview” connoted the particular vision of one group or another. Also, philosophy restricted its domain to elite competency, while worldviews aimed to perform philosophy’s functions — to provide answers to life’s fundamental questions — for a wide range of people. Finally, worldview sought to furnish a feedback loop between convictions and experience, each clarifying the other so as to propel action. We can add that “the wide range of people” in question were often newly literate and newly urban under conditions of industrialism, thus living amid an unfamiliar welter of opinion and circumstance. Worldview was first conceptualized this way by Friedrich Engels; it perfectly fit Kuyper’s project.
The Self, the Spiritual, and Science*
Still, worldview had some unsettling implications for Calvinists who, after all, were committed to the absolute truth of Scripture and the universal sovereignty of God. Were these claims now true just for Calvinists, and was it the Calvinists’ convictions that made them so? Kuyper built in counterweights at key points in his structure to block such implications. These become clear if we trace his theological recapitulation of human development. In the beginning God made everything fit and good. More precisely, Kuyper said, the whole creation was — and remains — the expression of God’s thinking: a logos, an organic whole, a fabric of laws. This divine “archetype” was then matched by the “ectype” of the human mind. Reality and observer, object and subject, were tailor-made for each other. Some critics within Kuyper’s tradition have noted the residue of scholastic elements in this model, but Kuyper’s Romanticism was also at work again. Ontologically, German nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie, which he much preferred to its materialist-mechanist rivals, regarded physical realities as the manifestation of inherent Ideas; Kuyper needed only to posit God as the Thinker of these Ideas. Epistemologically, he characterized knowledge in Eden as immediate intuition. Genesis 2:19-20 served as his paradigm: Adam spontaneously apprehended the “essence” of each animal, Kuyper claimed, and so named it perfectly. The same rapport marked Adam’s communion with God.
But we live after Eden, Kuyper went on, after the epistemological as well as ontological catastrophe spelled by the fall into sin. Where we once might have intuited truth quickly, we now stumble about through false starts and forgetfulness, by tedious observation and fatiguing effort, to fathom our world. “To Adam, science was an immediate possession; for us it is bread we can eat only in the sweat of our minds, after hard and strenuous labor.” As to fathoming God, Kuyper granted that Ludwig Feuerbach was half right; left to our own devices, we each do fashion God in our own image. Not for nothing had Calvin called the human mind an idol-factory. Yet, however broken, Kuyper repeated, God’s original order persists. These two competing lines built some potent tensions into Kuyper’s system.* There was from the start, Kuyper repeated, an organic unity in creation, an organic wholeness in the human mind, and an organic fit between the first and the second. These now lie in fragments, each and all. We are still called to think God’s thoughts after him, yet our operational system lacks capacity, runs erratically, and moves across a broken plane. Still, glimpses of the original harmony are more than evident in our fallen state, and the popularizers of science that his readers could hear trumpeting the triumphs of progress on every side as the nineteenth century neared its close Kuyper took to be heralding what God’s endowment had made possible.
To settle these ambiguities Kuyper focused in on the human mind, and joined the era’s “return to the subject” in the process. To begin with, he noted that some of the mind’s original integrity could still be seen in the enterprise of research and scholarship. Just as the image of God is best borne by the human race as a whole, so, Kuyper said, the “great temple” of knowledge had been raised stone by stone by a wide variety of people over the centuries. Each age and agent contributed a piece, even as later generations refashioned or relocated them by the lights of their time. Yet none of this labor followed “an elaborate blueprint” drawn up at the start by human hand: “The entire temple was built without human plan and without human agreement . . . [yet it emerged] with a definite form and style that lets you guess how the completed building will look.” This could only happen because the laborers were all responding to the plan and works of God. To this extent, in philosophical terms Kuyper was a Realist.
But the unity of the human race, broken by sin, was broken again by redemption, whereby God implants a new people upon the earth. This familiar trope Kuyper in the 1890s started calling palingenesis — a new beginning, a starting over — to remind pious readers that being “born again” entailed renewal for the whole creation and not just individuals. But if palingenesis creates a new people, it necessarily creates a new collective mind. And if there were two peoples in the world, two minds, concluded Kuyper in one of his most famous declarations, then there had to be two sciences — two integrated, reflective, tested, evolving bodies of knowledge. This comported well enough with the canons of worldview thinking. But whereas some of its practitioners hoped for eventual conciliation among the disparate visions thus wrought, hardliners like Friedrich Engels did not. He wanted not compromise but confrontation, clear bifurcations that prompted action. Kuyper was in this company. The thought-worlds built by Christians and by others were not complementary or on the road to consensus, he declared. Christians saw the world as fallen into sin and therefore as “abnormal” (i.e., being in contradiction to or off the mark set by its proper norms); others regarded the world as naturally evolved from its original state and thus as “normal” (in tune with or steaming under its own power toward what it should be). Neither side’s organizing axioms were provable by a commonly shared reason or set of data; both ran on faith, and athwart each other. The much-bruited war between science and religion was therefore perfectly misnamed, Kuyper declared. War there was, but it was war between two faith-based sciences.
The Holistic Character of Truth
It is important not to exaggerate the discord Kuyper saw here. First, as he was simultaneously writing in Common Grace, in the scholarly race believers were not necessarily brighter, harder-working, or more accomplished than others; more likely the opposite. Second, not all scholarly contests stemmed from differences in core convictions. Some manifested antagonistic mixtures of personal disposition, experience, and social location; others reflected the dialectic between rival schools inherent in collective reflection. Either way, “friction, fermentation, and conflict” were as much a part of scholarship as of life itself. Third, in their scholarly pursuits people of contrary orientations could hold much in common. Thus Kuyper allowed that palingenesis did not affect logic or raw observation, or the routine tasks of measurement and calculation that characterize the “lower” sciences. The “lower-higher” metaphor was just one way Kuyper mapped this landscape. Another was to picture knowledge as a tree from whose trunk grew diverging branches: the more they developed, the farther apart they spread. A third take recalled his image of the temple of knowledge. People of different interpretive frames could use — could even join in fashioning — some of the same stones or joists but would put them in different places and to different purposes in their finished structures, thus in a real sense altering the components themselves. In any case, Kuyper averred, while emphasizing differences “we are equally emphatic in our confession, which we do not make in spite of ourselves but with gladness, that in almost every department there is some task that is common to all.”
Yet to Kuyper these were secondary issues. The creation and collation of data, the sorting and interpreting of bits and pieces, this experiment and that paled in significance to the ultimate task of pulling everything together into a meaningful whole under a unified theory. This vision mirrored the pattern he followed in Common Grace: as structures figured there, so overall design did here. Gestalt loomed large; individual pieces or persons fell in the frame. Grand forces clashing on the battlefield of ideas were the stuff of his intellectual history — at the cost of the nuances important to any war on “uniformity.” Doubtless, Kuyper’s passion for order and control was at work again, but equally important was his original assumption about the nature of being and thinking. Kuyper’s model was radically relational; it was the connections between things, between people, between subject and object, and between all of these and God that were — literally — of the essence.
Furthermore (to invoke the electromagnetic theory of the day), pervading all creation, both in its original perfection and in its fallen state, was a divine teleological charge, the purpose planted in everything by God which gave the whole and every part its destiny and dignity. The question of coherence that haunted cultural analysts at the end of the nineteenth century was also a question of meaning, and Kuyper took it straight on. “Our mind constantly and inescapably asks these three great and mighty questions,” he repeated: “whence? how? whither?” Since on his understanding “how” meant “why,” his mantra can be translated as “whence, why, and whither,” and so places him in striking company. Virtually as Kuyper was penning these words, Paul Gauguin was finishing one of his epochal paintings, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1897). Twenty years later Henri Bergson, precursor of twentieth-century phenomenology, called philosophers back to the “questions of vital interest”: “Whence do we come? What are we doing here? Whither are we bound?”
If knowledge is a magnetic field organized by answers to such leading questions, then Kuyper’s conclusion was accurate enough: Christianity and the evolutionary pantheism that he took to be the main alternative on offer were not just incommensurate but positively hostile worldviews, and remain so a century later. But already in his age the question arose whether knowledge really was such a bloc, and what costs are entailed by regarding it as such. Here Kuyper’s contrast with William James is particularly revealing. Only four years younger than Kuyper, like him having Calvinist forebears and a vexed relationship with his father, James too passed through deep philosophical anxiety in his twenties before experiencing a virtual conversion. In his, James decided to assert free will as the first act of free will. He went on through a career in experimental psychology to become a pioneer of American pragmatic philosophy. Both men struggled long with the heritage of German Idealism (incidentally, taking respite from their labors at the same water-cures in Germany), and both reserved their greatest contempt for the deterministic monism of Herbert Spencer. Kuyper disliked it because it was a system without God; James, because it was a system. Kuyper craved certainty under a gracious Lord; James welcomed uncertainty so as to make room for human freedom. Kuyper recognized a plurality of worldviews; James, a pluralistic universe.
Blurred Boundaries
As James’s quarrel with Spencer attests, thinkers who started from secular premises could come to radically different conclusions. So could Christians. Kuyper himself traced distinct Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic lines of thought well beyond theology per se. Furthermore, in a silence that boded ill for the future, he did not discuss possible variations within the Calvinist camp. As an empirical statement, then, Kuyper’s insistence that the world of knowledge split into just two “sciences” was wrong. But as an assessment of prevailing currents it was plausible, and as a rallying cry to his followers it was compelling.
Yet his own momentum pushed against so neatly tied-down a system. It would not do for a critic of Spencerian monism to build what James called a “bloc universe” of his own. Kuyper shared much of James’s — and the era’s — yearning for energy, openness, and free exploration, as we will see. He took part as well in the campaign led by Dilthey and Weber to establish a method particular to the “human sciences” over against the materialist reductionism of the natural sciences. Riding the neo-Kantian wave in contemporary philosophy, this project, like Kuyper’s, looked for a middle ground between the extremes of Idealism and empiricism that had fought so inconclusively over the previous century. It gave a separate (too separate, Kuyper would complain) place to “values” vis à vis “facts,” and affirmed the power of the first both to bring forth and to shape one’s understanding of the second. Unlike Kuyper, Dilthey and Weber were reluctant to prescribe any single value-system as normative for all, resorting instead to description of the “ideal types” or “elective affinities” that might explain human behavior. In this sense Kuyper’s “normal-abnormal” antinomy belongs in the same gallery as the “once-born” and “twice-born” souls by which James sought to sort out The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Ferdinand Tönnies’s tracking of Western society from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft (1887); the triad of “naturalism,” “objective idealism,” and “the idealism of freedom” that composed Dilthey’s final typology of worldviews; and the spectrum of correlations between world-orientations and world religions that Weber began to explore in The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
As to his core question, Kuyper’s original horror at the implications of philosophical naturalism found him thirty years later, at the end of his epistemological analysis, squarely in the camp of the “subject.” To repeat his stunning one-sentence summary of the course of nineteenth-century thought: “Whoever neglects to maintain the autonomy of the spiritual over against the material in his point of departure will eventually come to the idolization of matter by way of the adoration of man.” For that reason, “we insist so urgently that the subjective point of departure again be honored” in culture and the academy. Whatever the original match between archetype and ectype, Kuyper concluded that the human mind’s operations show it to be “something entirely different from a mirror. . . . [T]he image cast on our consciousness is hardly the one thing” that makes up knowledge, for even without the fall into sin, the mind in exploring the cosmos from its far reaches to its minute particulars would function as a formative, constructing power. How much more so, under the infusions of grace, did the spirit within shape understanding of the world without. If Kuyper was a Realist, he was a most Critical Realist, like any number of eminent thinkers of his day from all different points of view.
*In all these discussions Kuyper used wetenschap (like the German wissenschaft) which translates literally as “science” but means in English “advanced study” or “higher learning,” including that of the humanities and social sciences. All references to “science” in this chapter carry this meaning unless otherwise indicated.
*A similar bi-valence characterized Kuyper’s model of the academic disciplines. He designed the Free University along a very traditional plan of the five faculties. Theology studied God, or transcendent spiritual reality; the natural sciences studied immanent, extra-human physical reality. The three other faculties took up the range of human life in between: Medicine for the body, Letters (philology/literature, history, and philosophy) for the soul, and Law for society. On the other hand his design for Theology per se was innovative, arranged not by the five traditional loci but by the four different sites where the supernatural had broken into human life: Scripture, ecclesiology, dogmatics, and church offices.