Kuyper was big on boring down to first principles—uncovering the unspoken assumptions we bring to our thinking and practice.
Abraham Kuyper called Christians to live out their core conviction as Reformed believers: that God is Lord of all things, and that we live unto God’s glory. Plus he showed them that, in the modern world, living by these convictions meant more than being faithful in the traditional areas of church, family, and personal life. It entailed politics and higher education.
It meant revisiting and holding yourself accountable to the core principle of loving your neighbor as yourself in a new world where you suddenly had a wider expanse of neighbors living in unprecedented conditions; applying it to labor conditions in factories, international trade, the claims of rival ideologies and visions for society.
His movement’s slogan was “being Christian in all areas of life."And it’s come down to us today as being “agents of renewal,” “seeking shalom,” and so forth. On top of that, Kuyper regularly repeated that, while the modern world had plenty of features to cause fear, it also offered plenty of opportunities for holistic Christian witness.
Kuyper was big on boring down to first principles—uncovering the unspoken assumptions we bring to our thinking and practice. He wanted Christians to become conscious of these and conform them more and more to biblical principles and the “ordinances” (laws) that he saw stemming out of God’s original creation of the world.
His was a principled pluralism; it’s not just that we can’t but we shouldn’t want to use the force of law to privilege our convictions. Rather, we try to persuade others that the fruit of Christian convictions will serve the common good that they and we share together. This is possible because of Kuyper’s famous and quite expansive concept of common grace.
By means of his other principle, which hasn’t been noticed as much. Kuyper was a strong communitarian. Each individual has rights and liberties, yes, but society (and churches) must not be regarded as a collection of individuals, he’d say. We find our meaning, our health, our safety, our opportunities as parts of living social bodies.
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