The Century of Revolutions and Theological Responses

The long nineteenth century (1789-1917) was the century of revolutions. Across Europe, there were revolutions in agriculture, in industry, in ideas, and in many places in politics. In France, where the Catholic Church had enjoyed monopoly power under the monarchy, its privileges waned and waxed with every successive constitutional order. Across Europe, socialism, Marxism and communism were on the rise.

There were three established theological responses to industrialization, the Enlightenment, and political revolution.

Catholic Rejection of Modernity

The first was to reject these new phenomena and to insist that the role of secular governments was to enforce Church doctrine. This was the position of the Catholic Church, which did not begin to develop its Catholic Social Teaching until 1891 (when Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical, Rerum Novarum) and did not officially endorse freedom of religion until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Lutheran Endorsement of Nationalism and Change

The second response was to endorse the technological change, to embrace the developments in ideas, and to support nationalism as a political ideal. This was the approach of the Lutheran Church, especially in Germany.

Non-Conformist Advocacy for Freedom

The third response was to seek to argue for freedom of religion, for freedom of enterprise, and for democracy. This was the approach of the Non-Conformist Churches in England, whose theology was indebted to Calvinism and to Methodism. It was also dominant in the United States of America.

Abraham Kuyper’s Intellectual and Political Journey

Abraham Kuyper (1837 to 1920) was the son of a minister in the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church. Kuyper was just 11 when the Year of Revolutions (1848) swept across the continent of Europe. Though in all cases the new regimes did not last, they left a legacy of political instability.

In 1862, he completed a doctorate in theology and in 1863 he himself became a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. At this time, he was a modernist, with a stance similar to the second theological response described above. The example of a woman in his congregation, Pietje Balthus, and his correspondence with an MP, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer caused Kuyper to become more orthodox in his theological views.

By the early 1870s, Kuyper had moved to Amsterdam and founded his own newspaper. In 1879, he established a political party which he called the Anti-Revolutionary Party. The party’s name highlighted that Kuyper was opposed to revolutions but not to political and social change. In 1880, he founded a University. In 1886, Kuyper was suspended from the Dutch Reformed Church because he had insisted that its ministers and members adhere to the classic Reformation confessions. Within three years, he had been joined by more than 200 congregations and a new denomination was formed.

In 1898, he was invited to Princeton University in the USA where he gave six Stone Lectures on Calvinism. In 1901, he became Prime Minister of the Netherlands, a post he held for four years. As that brief biography shows, Kuyper was indefatigable.

Kuyper’s Three Core Claims

In his Stone Lectures, Kuyper set out his mature exposition of the political theology he had been developing in print since 1870. Kuyper had three big claims.

1. Calvinism as the Source of Modern Freedoms

The first was that Calvinism had been a key influence on the development of the modern freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.

2. Sphere Sovereignty: A Framework for Society

The second was that God’s will was that no one institution should dominate a society. Law and politics was one sphere of human activity, in which Government was the key institution. Faith was another sphere of human life, in which the churches were the primary institutions. But, claimed Kuyper, there were other spheres of human activity, such as education, business, and the arts, which need their own relative autonomy (which Kuyper somewhat misleadingly called “sphere sovereignty”) in order to pursue their individual goods.

“The sovereign authorities of the family, of the church, etc., are derived as directly from God as is the sovereign authority of the government.” (Anti-Revolutionnaire Staatkunde, vol. I, pp.265ff.)

Kuyper argued that God’s sovereignty was not replicated on earth in one single authority but was diffused between different spheres of human activity, each of which had its own sphere sovereignty. Families, church, schools and universities, hospitals, businesses, journalism, science, the arts etc. each of these had their own distinct goals to pursue. Organisations pursuing these goals had their own rights, and the role of the state was to facilitate and co-ordinate the exercise of those rights.

Though framed in reaction to the French Revolution, Kuyper’s ideas were an emphatic rejection, before the event, of the total control over society exercised by Fascism and Communism.

Kuyper’s understanding was that God “did not give all his power to one single institution but gave to every one of these institutions the power that coincided with its nature and calling.” (Ons Program, p.198). In other words, power is divided among social institutions, and given to different institutions because of their differing goals. The goal of parenting is the raising of children; the goal of schools and universities is the education of students; the goal of commerce is the provision of goods to supply human needs; the goal of science is discovery and the advance of knowledge; the goal of art is the production and appreciation of beauty; the goal of the State is the common good.

The role of government was not to dominate or to plan out the whole of society, as the communists and the socialists intended, but instead to do two things: to manage the boundary conflicts between the different spheres and to protect the weak if they were being treated unjustly by the authorities in a particular sphere (Lectures on Calvinism, 124-25).

3. Common Grace: God’s Work Beyond the Church

Kuyper’s third big idea was the idea of common grace. As we have seen in previous blogs in this series, Christian thinkers tended to think of God’s standards which all human beings were capable of understanding in terms of natural law. Kuyper instead emphasised common grace, that is the work of the Holy Spirit in revealing aspects of truth even to those who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.

Kuyper’s Legacy: Promise and Distortion

Kuyper’s legacy had its shadow side. In South Africa, his ideas were distorted to justify the policy of “separate development”, which underlaid apartheid. In the Netherlands and in Belgium, the implementation of sphere sovereignty led to pillarization, in which Catholics, Protestants, and secular people went to different schools, to different universities, then joined separate trade unions and separate social clubs.

Although Kuyper’s ideas allowed Christian ideas to benefit from government funding and to be implemented within their own communities, this was sometimes at the cost of Christians being “salt and light” to their neighbours. This was not Kuyper’s intention. Kuyper was trying to avoid the situation in which the terms of the engagement between Church and Government were set by the secularists. He was trying to prevent the Church being squeezed into an ever-decreasing circle of private life as the activities of the welfarist state expanded.

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For further information about Kuyper’s thought, see Craig G. Bartholomew, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition (2017). For a critique of Kuyperian thought and a defence of Two Kingdoms theology, see David van Drunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Crossway, 2010).