Abraham Kuyper

Lectures on the L.P. Stone Foundation, Princeton, New Jersey on October 10th, 11th, 19th, and 21st, 1898

Calvinism : The Stone Lectures

Sean Wilson

After suspecting that I'd become some kind of crypto-Kuyperian, I thought it was time I checked. These lectures were stimulating to read, and certainly put some fire in my belly to connect all of life to the rule of Christ, even if they left me with a few questions.
Given the hearsay I'd received about Kuyper, I was very pleased to see that he had a high view for the preaching of the gospel and the importance of the church. Given his emphasis on a consistent Calvinist "world- and life-view", I was encouraged to see him acknowledge the genuine light to be found in non-Christian thinkers like Aristotle.
I wasn't convinced by his claim that civil government is an institution that assumes the fall, as though unfallen Adam and his children would not have developed magistrates and kings as they developed. This does give his view of the state a somewhat negative shade, compared to his views of things like the arts and sciences.
His work on common grace is very good, and allows him to "totalise" total depravity, without casting all of the works of unbelieving men into the outer darkness. However, it wasn't clear to me why Kuyper thinks the unregenerate scientist is more frustrated in his efforts than, say, the unregenerate painter or unregenerate prince.
On the eve of a bloody and tragic century, Kuyper foretold the malaise that awaits the West if it persists in shrugging its shoulders at Christianity and gives itself further to the modernist worldview inaugurated at the French Revolution: dictators and survival-of-the-fittest foreign policy! He insightfully pointed out that the only societies that have enjoyed a "resurrection" after a cultural decline are those that have been ready to welcome the gospel. That was a word of encouragement for our own dark times.
This is a good place to get an introduction to Kuyper's thought, in his own words and in a condensed form. Well worth a read, and I'll almost certainly come back to visit a few more times in the future.

Calvinism : The Stone Lectures Lectures on the L.P. Stone Foundation, Princeton, New Jersey on October 10th, 11th, 19th, and 21st, 1898

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