Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader

by Abraham Kuyper and James D. Kuyper, Abraham ; Bratt

Book Overview

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) is one of the most remarkable men in the history of Reformed Christianity. He was eminent in Dutch public life for half a century and left a deep imprint on Dutch immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, and South Africa. A theologian, politician, journalist, university founder, and seminal thinker in the history of modern Calvinism, Kuyper offered an engaging critique of the nineteenth century that still has...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802843212
• ISBN13: 9780802843210
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Christ's complete sovereignty and total dominion

1. Abraham Kuyper: His World and Work Kuyper's work can be characterized by an "insistence on a consistent logic rooted in first principles and carried out until it comprehended every domain in life" (p. 4). Calvinism was Kuyper's "soul and his system, the purest form of Christianity, the treasure of the past, the hope of the future" (p. 1). He was deeply suspicious of modernity and sought to elaborate a worldview that would imbue all of the areas of life with the Christian perspective. 2. Common Grace (1902-4) Common grace is the hinge of Kuyper's constructive theology. His work on the Reform doctrine of common grace was far reaching, but his opponents "complained that this was more `invention' than elaboration" (p. 165). The distinction between saving grace and common grace is "evident from the undeniable fact that, without common grace, the elect would not have been born, would not have seen the light of day" (p. 169). Not all common grace impacts all aspects of human life in the same way; one common grace "aims at the interior, another at the exterior part of our existence. The former is operative wherever civic virtue, a sense of domesticity, natural love, the practice of human virtue, the improvement of the public conscience, integrity, mutual loyalty among people, and a feeling for piety leaven life. The latter is in evidence when human power over nature increases, when invention upon invention enriches life, when international communiation is improve, the arts flourish, the sciences increase our understanding ..." (p. 181). Contrasting his view to the dialectic distinction between the church as institution and the church as organism, Kuyper proposes that the church is both. The church as institution is comprised of its baptized, believing members. It is like a circle whose circumference increases as its membership grows. Yet there is another circle whose circumference is determined "by the length of the ray that shines out from the church institute over the life of people and nation. Since this second circle ... is not circumscribed by a certain number of people listed in church directories, and does not have its own office bearers but is interwoven with the very fabric of national life, this extra-institutional influence at work in society points to the church as organism" (p. 195). 3. Maranatha (1891) This was the keynote address at the Antirevolutionary Party convention where "Kuyper's rhetorical prowess swept the 700-plus delegates" (p 206). The speech "Maranatha," which means "Our Lord, come!" or "Our Lord has come" in Aramaic, united the Antirevolutionary Party as Kuyper recited lines from Da Costa's "Forward in the name of the Lord" (p. 227). Kuyper calls for "universal proportional suffrage but on the basis of the family, for a restoration of the old guilds in a new form, for Chambers of Labor and Agriculture," and for a "spirit of the Compassionate One [to] be poured out over our whole government administration" (p. 225). 4

Wonderful book

What a great Book! Gets at the heart of the dutch calvinist revival.Very good