Richard Mouw, soon to retire as president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is familiar to many readers of these pages. But, for those who might not know him, Mouw has had a successful career in writing books that—while aware of first-order scholarship—are accessible to what Mary Tyler Moore once called “ordinary people.” In this lovely book of 136 pages, Mouw has done it again.
His subject is Abraham Kuyper, a person known to some in the Presbyterian and Reformed community, but perhaps not so much elsewhere. In brief, Kuyper had several careers in an action-packed life (1837-1920): pastor, journalist, author, and politician (in the last he was prime minister of the Netherlands for a while).[1] While Mouw draws on Kuyper’s various writings, the one work that makes Kuyper so compelling is Lectures on Calvinism (hereinafter Lectures), which he gave as the Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898. The main subject of Lectures can be called Kuyper’s theology of culture. As Mouw charmingly says, “this was the Kuyper who lured me in.” What Mouw discovered in that classic work “was a vision of active involvement in public life that would allow me to steer my way between a privatized evangelicalism on the one hand and the liberal Protestant or Catholic approaches to public discipleship on the other hand.”
Since Rich Mouw calls his approach “a personal introduction,” I will get personal for a few lines as well. I first read Lectures early in the 1960s as an undergraduate student in a reading group at the Park Street Church on the Boston Common. The then-minister to students, Harold O. J. Brown, later to have a distinguished career at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, gave me the book and guided my thinking. I was excited by the book for the same reasons as Rich, and at about the same time. When I joined the Calvin faculty in 1969 as an avowed Kuyperian (though, importantly at that time, not a Dooyeweerdian), I was greeted as a comrade by Rich Mouw and George Marsden, who had been there for a couple of years. Even though they were only a few years older than me, George and Rich acted like the senior colleagues I needed. They helped guide me to a writing career beyond only teaching that I never imagined I’d have; like writing History Through the Eyes of Faith, and being an editor of Fides et Historia and the Reformed Journal. If I have done any good, Rich and George—under the shadow of Kuyper—deserve thanks.
The genius of Mouw’s take on Kuyper is the way he also “lures in” a Christian reader to a vision so compelling that, once a person sees it, she can’t un-see it, and life changes. Kuyper’s vision presents a robust proclamation of the lordship of Christ in all areas of life. This is summed up in a much-quoted sentence from Kuyper: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry ‘Mine.’ ” This is what Mouw means by a theology of culture, comprehending all the things that humans do and make. Those things are meant, in the intentions of God’s creation, to be related to each other in a coherent pattern that reveals the glory of God.
Of course, Kuyper and Mouw are aware that sin comes into the world and that Jesus has to come to redeem everything, but that’s the point; he came not just to save souls (although that) but to redeem the whole cosmos in all its differentiated complexity of ideas and institutions. Christ restores the created kingdom, allowing the full human flourishing that God meant from the beginning.
The idea of “sphere sovereignty” in Kuyper has caused some people to stumble, but Mouw does a fine job of easing the perhaps reluctant reader into it. Kuyper insists that each of the various patterns of culture—family, business, education, art, church, state—is meant to be sovereign within its own sphere because each is to do what none other does. This is an essential point for Kuyper and for Mouw, who quotes a recent scholar: “Each sphere has its own identity, its unique task, and its God-given prerogative.” But they are all meant to be coherently advancing God’s purposes in their own ways: for example, science is meant to advance knowledge; economic activity to advance stewardship; political activity to advance justice.
With government being only one sphere among many, we can see why Kuyper appeals to some modern-day conservatives who want to limit the role of government. Mouw seems to find in Kuyper more of a role for government than for the institutions in other spheres. First, government is called on to intercede when the activities of one sphere intrude unduly on those of another, what Mouw calls “patrolling the boundaries” between the spheres. Second, government must also act to protect the weak and the vulnerable against the powerful in any sphere of activity, most notably in the workplace. Third, there is a special role for government in matters that transcend the vocations of the various spheres, like the keeping up of roads and bridges that both business people and church people use. So while government is just one sphere, it seems almost to be a super-sphere, because it can and must do what other spheres cannot and must not do. While Kuyper is hard to classify in the left-versus-right politics of our time, he does not give much comfort to those who want to “get government out of the way.” Rather, he seems to see a rather active role for government in trying to make the creation norms work in the coherent way God intended them.
If sphere sovereignty is one Kuyperian principle that has given some non-Reformed readers problems, then “the antithesis” is another, though some evangelicals may know about it via Francis Schaeffer, who borrowed it from Kuyper and popularized it. Kuyper often said, and his zealous followers still quote this line: “the fact that there are two kinds of people [redeemed and unredeemed] occasions of necessity the fact of two kinds of human life and consciousness of life and two kinds of science [knowing].” One faction of those who follow Kuyper style themselves the “Reformational” party, and they take the notion of the antithesis to its logical conclusion, that is, that non-Christians are not able to know much of anything important. God is the author of truth; if people do not know God, they cannot know (what Francis Schaeffer used to call) true Truth. In fact, I once heard a “Reformational” lecturer remark that, while unbelievers could know their phone number and how to get home, they couldn’t know much of any importance beyond that.
Mouw helps us here in recalling that there is another side of Kuyper, one that valued “common grace,” which he held in paradoxical relation to “the antithesis.” He kept the two in creative tension by placing them in a larger theological context. Mouw again helps us with an accessible way to understand this: “When an obviously wicked person does some unexpectedly good thing, we Kuyperians can say ‘that’s common grace at work.’ When a sinner acts according to the total depravity script, or when we feel the continuing pull of sin in our own lives, we can take this as confirmation that the antithesis is real.”
The author does many other things in this splendid book, such as thinking through a Kuyperian lens about: enhancing the church’s role when institutions in other spheres aren’t working well; developing patience to wait on God’s time in the public world, when kingdom solutions aren’t so apparent; helping sometimes too-confident evangelicals to learn from the humble discipleship of the Anabaptists, especially the Mennonites; and learning to dialogue with Islam.
But Mouw’s last chapter, to use the cliché, is by itself worth the price of the book. The author is at both his Reformed and evangelical best in “A Kuyperianism under the Cross.” He follows the eminent historian Mark Noll, who published a lecture I was privileged to hear at Calvin some 16 years ago, “Adding Cross to Crown.” Noll was fully supportive of the whole Kuyperian vision of asserting Christ’s lordship in all areas of life. But sometimes that led to a triumphalism that did not reflect well on the Christ of the Cross. The Jesus who points us to all that territory to be claimed for him is a Savior whose “footprints are spattered blood, and the hand that points is marked with a wound.” To follow this Jesus, says Noll, is to remember “the road to Calvary that the Lord Jesus took to win his place of command.” Mouw then disarms us all by asking that the confident Kuyper [this is mine, says Jesus] meet the humble and self-effacing Mother Teresa, whose loving care for dying lepers in the streets of Calcutta gives a necessary corrective to the triumphalist, sometimes almost arrogant, spirit of the Reformed. Of course, Jesus will one day say “mine” to all creation, and a joyful day that will indeed be; but until then we are called to go out, as Mouw writes, to “those broken regions of creation where the homeless set up their crude sleeping shelters, where people grieve, and where the abused and abandoned cry out in despair. Jesus calls us to join him there, for those square inches—and those who inhabit them—belong to him too.”
If readers are not deeply moved by Mouw’s conclusion, I declare them here and now to be hard-hearted people! Kuyper rightly teaches us to develop a theology of culture. But, until the day the trumpet blows, that cultural awareness needs to be formed in the shadow of the Cross. We are much in Rich Mouw’s debt, again.
Ronald A. Wells is professor of history, emeritus, at Calvin College. He is now mostly retired in Tennessee, where he directs the Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His most recent book is an anthology, The Best of the “Reformed Journal,” co-edited with James Bratt (Eerdmans).
1. For another recent look at Kuyper in Books & Culture, see Makoto Fujimura, “Breathing Eden’s Air,” July/August 2012.
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