Justified True Belief

(●) The Dutch Calvinist pastor who built a newspaper, a party, a university and a denomination on the conviction that Christ claims every part of life. + A phrase of his travels further than he does. "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’" turns up on conference banners, in the opening pages of books about business and art and politics, and on the walls of Christian schools whose founders could not have named the man who said it. He said it in Amsterdam in October 1880, at the opening of a university he had talked into existence, and he spent the rest of his life trying to make it true of a small country on the North Sea. What makes him matter to Christian apologetics is one claim in particular. He argued, as forcefully as anyone in his century, that nobody studies the world from nowhere. What a scholar believes about God, about whether the world is broken and whether a broken thing can be mended, reaches into the work itself, so that believer and unbeliever are not two people doing one science but two people doing two. That claim runs straight into the twentieth century: into Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics, which argues with an unbeliever about his starting point rather than about the evidence in front of him, into Alvin Plantinga’s case that belief in God can be entirely reasonable without being propped up by argument, and into every conversation since about whether a Christian university is a contradiction in terms. He was also, at one stretch of his life, editing a daily newspaper and a weekly, teaching theology, leading a political party, sitting in parliament and running a church, all at once. His seventieth birthday, 29 October 1907, was kept as a national occasion, and the committee behind it printed a commemorative volume gathering the speeches and the newspaper notices from home and abroad. One tribute has come down from that week and has been repeated ever since, though nobody has managed to pin it to a document: that the history of the Netherlands over the previous forty years could not be written, in church or state or society, in the press or the schools or the sciences, without his name turning up on nearly every page. It was flattery. It was also close to the truth.

(●) 1837 AD: Born in a minister’s house at Maassluis, and educated out of his father’s faith at Leiden. + Abraham Kuyper was born on 29 October 1837 in Maassluis, a fishing town at the mouth of the waterway that carries shipping up to Rotterdam. His father, Jan Frederik Kuyper, was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, a man of mild and unquarrelsome orthodoxy who had learned his English from foreign sailors and been put through his training by the people who noticed the gift. The family moved as ministers’ families do, to Middelburg and then to Leiden, and the boy grew up in a house where books were normal and money was short. He entered Leiden University in 1855 and did very well there. He passed his examinations in literature and philosophy in 1857, and in classical letters in 1858, each of them summa cum laude, with highest praise, and only after all that did he turn to theology. Leiden in those years was the center of the new theology in the Netherlands, and its leading light, J. H. Scholten, taught a Christianity in which the miraculous had been quietly retired. Kuyper admired him. Looking back, he described his student years as a detour away from the simple and pious faith he had held as a child, a faith that had been left too long without growing up and then simply collapsed. The academic triumph of those years was a competition. In 1859 his professor of Dutch literature, Matthias de Vries, pointed him at a prize essay set by the theology faculty at Groningen: compare John Calvin and John a Lasco, the Polish reformer who had led refugee congregations in London, on what the church actually is. The sources were nearly impossible to find until de Vries sent him to his own father in Haarlem, who turned out to own a remarkable collection of them. Kuyper worked at it for months, obsessively, won the gold medal in 1860, and was so spent afterwards that head pains kept him from studying for the better part of a year. On 20 September 1862 he defended the essay, reworked, as his doctoral dissertation.

(●) 1863 AD: A borrowed novel and a village woman who would not receive him remade his faith. + The first of the two things happened before he had a parish. His fiancée, Johanna Hendrika Schaay, gave him an English novel, Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe, and he read it and recognized himself in the wrong character. Philip in the story is clever, correct, ambitious and quietly proud, and he is destroyed by it; Guy is the weaker man who trusts God and comes through. Kuyper, who had lately been describing himself in letters as self-satisfied, hard-hearted and hungry for glory, took Philip’s defeat as a verdict on his own. He called what followed a conversion, and said afterwards that Guy had taught him how a grown man could still have a childlike faith. The second thing happened in the parish. In 1863 he married Johanna and went to Beesd, a village in the Betuwe lying between two branches of the Rhine, and found in his congregation a group of mostly unlettered farmers whom the neighbors called the malcontents. They held to the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, which is to say the old question-and-answer summary of the faith that Reformed churches taught their children and the rulings on election and grace that the Synod of Dort handed down in 1619, and they knew their Bibles better than he did. In their rough country Dutch the young doctor of theology kept hearing the voice of Calvin, whom he had spent three years reading in Latin. One of them was a woman named Pietje Baltus, seven years older than her new minister, who had stopped coming to church and was at first unwilling to let him in her house. When he asked why she stayed away, she told him plainly: he was not preaching the pure word of God. Then she showed him what he had missed. Kuyper went back, and back again. Years later, in an open letter called Confidentie, he wrote of that group that "their obduracy became a blessing for my heart and the rising of the morning star for my life" (the translation is R. D. Henderson’s), and that he had grasped the word of reconciliation without yet having found it. He spent his four years at Beesd reading Calvin and the other reformers again, and unlearning Leiden.

(●) 1872 AD: He founded a newspaper, gave up the pulpit for a seat in parliament, and then built a party of his own. + A pamphlet moved him. In 1867 he published thirty-four pages on a dull-sounding question, whether a congregation should call its own minister or leave it to the church council, and the answer he gave about where authority comes from and where it stops struck a nerve in people who had no idea they were a constituency. It also got him noticed by congregations looking for a minister, so that he was called away from Beesd to Utrecht that same year, and on from Utrecht to Amsterdam in 1870. From there he built a machine. He took over the weekly De Heraut in 1871 and founded the daily De Standaard in 1872, writing its lead article himself, and he kept doing it for close to fifty years. In 1874 the district of Gouda sent him to parliament and he gave up his pastorate. In 1879 he founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party, the first modern national party the Netherlands had, with a book called Ons Program for its platform; "anti-revolutionary" meant against the principle of the French Revolution, the idea that authority rises up out of the will of the people and answers to nothing above them. His constituency were the people he called the kleine luyden, the little people: shopkeepers, farmers, tradesmen, the sort he had met at Beesd, orthodox Protestants who had been outside respectable Dutch public life for generations. He organized them, and they carried him. The pace cost him. Early in 1876 he collapsed from nervous exhaustion, handed the paper to others, and spent the months that followed recovering in Switzerland and the south of France. He came home in May 1877, gave up his seat in parliament, and started again at the desk.

(●) 1880 AD: He opened a university answerable to neither church nor state, and told its first audience that Christ claims every square inch. + On 20 October 1880 the Free University of Amsterdam opened, and the word in the name was the whole point: free of state funding and state control, and free of control by the church as well, answerable only to the principle written into its charter. It was a small thing on the day. The opening was held in the Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam with all the ceremony a new university could muster, and the teaching then happened in rented rooms above a small mission church on the Amstel. There were five professors, Kuyper among them, and a first class of students counted at five in some accounts and eight in others. A village school would have been larger. Kuyper took a chair in theology and gave the inaugural address, Souvereiniteit in eigen kring, sovereignty in its own sphere. In it he answered the objection everybody was making, that theology might be a Christian subject but law and medicine and literature surely were not, and he answered it with the sentence about the square inch (T1). The university was the argument put into brick: if Christ’s claim covers everything, then there is such a thing as studying law before the face of God, and somebody had better build the place where it can be done. It survived, which was not obvious at the time. The Free University grew into a full university with thousands of students, and for close to seventy years it took no government money at all, living on small gifts collected congregation by congregation from people who had never been to a university and never would. State support began to arrive only after 1948, and the university was not funded on the same footing as the public ones until 1970.

(●) 1886 AD: His own church deposed him, and he led a second secession out and rebuilt it. + The fight was about who is admitted to the Lord’s Table. The Dutch Reformed Church was governed from the top by a national synod, and the rule that came down from the top was that a congregation must receive members transferring in from modernist congregations elsewhere, whatever those members believed. In practice that meant handing the bread and the cup to people who did not hold the faith the Table confesses. Kuyper and the majority of the Amsterdam church council refused to do it, and on 4 January 1886 the classical board of Amsterdam, the regional authority sitting over the local councils, suspended eighty of them. Kuyper was among them, sitting on that council as an elder rather than a minister, because he had laid down the ministry in 1874 when he entered parliament. Five withdrew and the remaining seventy-five were deposed for good later that year. The quarrel reached the point of locks and doors. Two days after the suspensions Kuyper and two of his Free University colleagues forced the panelled door of the consistory room in the Nieuwe Kerk, where the congregation’s registers and silver were kept, an episode Dutch memory still calls the paneelzagerij, the panel sawing. Then the civil courts took the case, and they found against him all the way up: the buildings and the papers stayed with the church he was leaving. Those who went out called themselves the dolerenden, the grieving ones, and the movement took the name Doleantie. It was the second such exit in living memory; an earlier secession, the Afscheiding of 1834, had gone out over much the same complaint. By 1889 Kuyper’s churches numbered over two hundred congregations with something like a hundred and eighty thousand members, and in 1892 most of them joined with the heirs of 1834 to form the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. Not everyone came; a minority on each side stayed where they were, which is the usual arithmetic of these things. It is worth seeing what he had done by that point. He had given his people a newspaper to read, a party to vote for, a university to send their sons to, and now a church to belong to. Critics called it a state within a state, and later Dutch historians named the pattern verzuiling, pillarization: a society organized into vertical columns, each with its own schools, unions, papers and clubs, meeting only at the top. Kuyper did not invent the idea on his own, but he built the first pillar and everyone else copied it.

(●) 1898 AD: Princeton heard him explain Calvinism as a way of living, and three years later he was Prime Minister. + In October 1898 Kuyper crossed the Atlantic to deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary and to collect an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. He gave six: Calvinism as a life system, and then Calvinism and religion, politics, science, art, and the future. He delivered them in English, which he spoke with difficulty, to an audience that had thought of Calvinism as a set of opinions about predestination and heard it described instead as a whole way of taking the world. Published as Lectures on Calvinism, they are the only book of his that most English readers have ever opened. Three years later the political arithmetic came out his way. An alliance of his Anti-Revolutionaries with the Catholic party won the 1901 election, and on 1 August 1901 Kuyper became Minister of the Interior and chairman of the council of ministers, which is to say Prime Minister, at sixty-three. He had been writing the programme in his newspaper for close to thirty years and he came into office meaning to legislate: a full code of labor law, and standing under the law for degrees from the universities his own people had built. The labor code never came. The university law did, in 1905, after he had dissolved the upper house to get it through. Then, in April 1903, railway and dock workers struck, and the man who had told the first Christian Social Congress that Christ stands with the poor (T5) called the strike revolutionary and rammed through laws making it a crime for railwaymen and public servants to strike. Dutch labor called them the strangling laws, and the ban on strikes by public servants outlasted him by sixty years. He lost the election of 1905.

(●) 1920 AD: He died at eighty-three, out of favor at home and only beginning to be read abroad. + The last fifteen years were a long diminishing. In June 1909 a socialist paper printed the story that Rudolph Lehmann, an Amsterdam merchant he had recommended for a royal decoration in 1903, had put eleven thousand guilders into his party’s treasury the following year. Parliament declined to hold an inquiry; a council of honor of three elder statesmen took the case instead and reported in 1910 that Kuyper had been negligent but not corrupt. The odor stayed, and he never held office again. When the Great War came he backed Germany in a country that had chosen neutrality, and a good many of his own countrymen did not forgive him for it. He kept writing. Pro Rege, three volumes on the kingship of Christ, came out in 1911 and 1912; Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde, two volumes of political theory, in 1916 and 1917. He wrote devotional meditations for his paper until close to the end, the sort of thing collected as To Be Near Unto God, and they are gentler than anything else he published. He died at The Hague on 8 November 1920. Then the books started to travel. Dutch families emigrating to Michigan and Iowa and Ontario carried him with them and founded colleges; Herman Dooyeweerd turned his sphere sovereignty into a philosophical system; American evangelicals a century later discovered the square inch and put it on a banner. The country that had wearied of him kept the institutions he built. The Free University is still in Amsterdam.

What He Taught

(T1) There is no part of human life that Christ does not claim as his own. + A woman leaves church on Sunday morning having sung about a God who made heaven and earth, and on Monday morning she is at a desk deciding what to pay a supplier. Between the two there is a door, and much of the time the faith is politely asked to wait on the other side of it. Sunday is religion; Monday is business, where other rules apply. Kuyper spent his life attacking that door. His word for what he was offering was a life system: not a list of doctrines to sign but a set of convictions about God, about other people and about the world, deep enough that everything else follows from them. Christianity, he thought, had let itself be shrunk into a compartment labeled religion, and had then complained that the other compartments were being run without it. The reason the compartments cannot hold is that the claim being made is not a claim about the inside of a church. It is a claim about ownership. The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24:1); all things were made through Christ and for him and hold together in him (Colossians 1:16, Colossians 1:17); the point of it all is that in everything he should be first (Colossians 1:18). If that is true of thrones and dominions, it is true of a shipping contract. What this does not mean, and Kuyper was careful about it, is that the church runs everything. He had watched medieval Christendom try that and thought the cure worse than the disease. The claim is Christ’s, not the clergy’s, and the way it works out in practice is the doctrine that gave his address its title (T2). Christians have argued ever since about how much of the world this entitles a Christian to expect, and the criticism that the vision runs to triumphalism, talking as though the ground were already taken and the victory already in hand, is a fair one and is at least as old as Kuyper’s own critics. He has two answers to it, and they pull in opposite directions on purpose. One is common grace (T3), the kindness God shows to everyone alike, which means a Christian keeps finding God at work well outside the church. The other is the antithesis (T4), the division between those God has made new and those he has not, which cuts deeper than most people are comfortable admitting.

(Q) "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’" + Source: Sphere Sovereignty, the inaugural address at the opening of the Free University of Amsterdam, 20 October 1880 (translated by George Kamps, in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, edited by James D. Bratt, Eerdmans, 1998, page 488). The sentence closes a passage on the unity of knowledge: no single piece of our mental world, he says just before it, is to be sealed off hermetically from the rest. His hearers will grant a Christian theology and refuse a Christian medicine or a Christian law or a Christian literature, and he is telling them they have drawn the line in a place where no line exists.

(T2) Each part of life holds its authority straight from God, so no one of them may swallow another. + A father tells his son to be home by ten. A head teacher decides what is taught in the third year. A conductor stops the orchestra and takes the passage again. A judge sentences a thief. Four people giving orders, and nobody thinks they are all doing the same job or that any of them is doing it on loan from the others. The conductor does not get her authority from the mayor, and the mayor cannot overrule her about the tempo. That ordinary observation is Kuyper’s doctrine of sphere sovereignty, souvereiniteit in eigen kring, sovereignty in its own circle. Family, school, business, art, science, church and state are each a sphere with its own kind of authority, and each receives that authority directly from God rather than by delegation from the state. The state is not the trunk with the others as branches. It is one sphere among several, with a job of its own: to keep the peace at the borders where spheres collide, to defend the weak inside a sphere against those who would crush them, and to raise what it needs to do those things. What it may not do is absorb the others. He meant it as a wall against two encroachments at once. Against the modern state, which in the century after the French Revolution kept discovering that education and welfare and family life were really its business; and against the church, which had spent long centuries making the same discovery about everything else. It is worth noticing how close this runs to a Catholic idea taking shape in the same years, subsidiarity, which holds that a matter should be handled by the smallest body competent to handle it. Leo XIII laid its groundwork in Rerum Novarum in 1891 without using the word, and Pius XI gave the principle its name and its formula forty years later. Two men who agreed on very little arrived at neighboring conclusions. The Dutch school struggle is where Kuyper’s version cashed out: after forty years of argument, the settlement of 1917 gave religious schools the same public funding as state schools, on the ground that a school is not the state’s creature and parents are not borrowing their children from the government.

(Q) "The family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the state, and which do not derive the law of their life from the superiority of the state, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the State does." + Source: Lectures on Calvinism, Lecture III, "Calvinism and Politics" (the Stone Lectures, Princeton, 1898). He has just finished with the sovereignty of the state and turns to what he calls sovereignty in the sphere of society. The phrase "by the grace of God" is doing real work: it is the formula European kings used of their own authority, and he is deliberately handing it to a family and a workshop.

(T3) God’s restraining kindness keeps a fallen world livable, and that is why a Christian can learn from anybody. + Kuyper liked a picture from the rivers he grew up beside. A ferry crosses on a chain: the current that would seize the boat and smash it downstream is the same current that, held by the chain, carries it safely to the far bank. He had a second picture as well, the taming of animals. A wild beast can be caged, or broken to the halter, or bred over generations into a dog asleep by the fire, and none of those three has changed what the animal is. That is his doctrine of common grace, gemeene gratie. Christians had long distinguished saving grace, the particular mercy by which God rescues a person, from the ordinary goodness God pours out on everyone. Kuyper took the second and made it a load-bearing wall. Sin left to itself, he argued, would have made human life impossible; God restrains it, and the restraint is a gift, not a reward. The sun rises on the evil and on the good and the rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45); God did not leave himself without witness among the nations, giving them rains and fruitful seasons and glad hearts (Acts 14:17). The mandate given at the beginning, to fill the earth and have dominion over it (Genesis 1:28), was not withdrawn at the fall. The practical payoff is large and it is why the Free University opened with law and letters beside theology rather than theology alone. If common grace is real, then an unbelieving surgeon’s skill is a gift of God, a pagan poet’s ear is a gift of God, and a Christian who refuses to learn from either is refusing what God is handing him. Kuyper puts it bluntly: a Calvinist seeking God does not confine himself to theology and leave the rest of the sciences to unbelievers as beneath him. He is also clear about what common grace is not. It does not save anyone, and the unregenerate heart, the heart God has not yet made new, needs rescuing exactly as badly with common grace as without it. What common grace does is buy the world time and keep it habitable.

(Q) "There is a particular grace which works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammelled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator." + Source: Lectures on Calvinism, Lecture I, "Calvinism as a Life System" (the Stone Lectures, Princeton, 1898). He is contrasting this with what he takes to be the monastic instinct, which treats the world as territory to be escaped rather than as a creation to be worked. The three volumes of De Gemeene Gratie, published between 1902 and 1904 out of newspaper articles written across the preceding years, are the long version.

(T4) Nobody studies the world from nowhere, so there are two sciences and not one. + Two surveyors are sent to map the same valley. They use the same instruments and both are honest, but one has taken his starting height from a marker at the river and the other from a marker on the ridge, and neither thinks to mention it. Every measurement afterwards is careful and every map comes out different, and no amount of rechecking the arithmetic will reconcile them, because the disagreement is not in the arithmetic. This is what Kuyper means by the antithesis: the line that runs through the human race between those who have been made new and those who have not, and his claim, which was the controversial part, that the line does not stop at the church door but runs through the study and the laboratory. His own labels for the two camps were Normalists and Abnormalists. A Normalist takes the world as it stands to be normal, developing on its own from within, needing no rescue from outside. An Abnormalist holds that something has gone badly wrong with it, that the wrongness is sin, and that nothing short of a miracle mends it: the miracle of Scripture, of new birth, of God himself coming into a human life. Start from either and you build a different account of everything. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God and is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14); unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Two things keep this from being the flat anti-intellectualism it is sometimes taken for. First, Kuyper was explicit that the difference does not show up in weighing and measuring. Both camps can count, and he expected them to; the divergence appears where a scholar has to say what the facts mean and what kind of world produced them. Second, common grace (T3) keeps the two from being strangers, which is why he could praise unbelieving scholarship with real warmth on a Tuesday and deny that it was neutral on a Wednesday. The honest objection is that the doctrine invites a ghetto, a Christian science talking only to itself. Kuyper’s answer was that neither side should be silenced, both should build freely and openly, and the results should be set side by side; that is what he thought the Free University was for.

(Q) "Not faith and science therefore, but two scientific systems or if you choose, two scientific elaborations, are opposed to each other, each having its own faith." + Source: Lectures on Calvinism, Lecture IV, "Calvinism and Science" (the Stone Lectures, Princeton, 1898). The sentence is aimed at the way the quarrel was usually framed in 1898 and still often is, as science on one side and faith on the other. Kuyper’s reply is that both parties have a faith and neither is exempt, and he goes on in the next lines to say that neither system will be content with half the ground, because each of them wants the whole account of the world to hang together.

(T5) When rich and poor stand against each other, Christ stands with the poor. + In November 1891, the year Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, Kuyper opened the first Christian Social Congress in the Netherlands with an address on the social question. He was fifty-four, he had a newspaper and a party behind him, and he used the platform to tell his own people that they had been asleep. Charity, he said, was not the answer and never had been; a church that hands out bread while blessing the arrangements that made the bread necessary has not understood the prophets. The question was architecture, not almsgiving. The argument he built runs through the Old Testament law and out the other side. Israel’s law kept restoring people to their land and their freedom because property is held from God rather than owned outright; whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker (Proverbs 14:31); the command is to open your hand wide to your brother, to the needy and the poor in your land (Deuteronomy 15:11). Then he turns to Christ, born in a stable, without a place to lay his head, sending out apostles with no purse, announcing good news to the poor (Luke 4:18), and he draws his conclusion from where Jesus stood rather than only from what Jesus said. God, he said, has chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith (James 2:5). What he wanted was concrete: a living wage, a day of rest, limits on the labor of children, and a state willing to step in where one sphere is grinding another (T2). It made him, for a while, the most radical-sounding orthodox Christian in Dutch public life, and it helped keep working men inside his party at a time when the socialists were winning them everywhere else. Twelve years later he was Prime Minister and broke a strike, and his own ledger has to carry both.

(Q) "When rich and poor stand opposed to each other, He never takes His place with the wealthier, but always stands with the poorer." + Source: the opening address to the first Christian Social Congress, Amsterdam, November 1891, published in English as Christianity and the Class Struggle (translated by Dirk Jellema, Piet Hein Publishers, 1950), page 27, and later as The Problem of Poverty. The sentence comes at a turn in the argument. Kuyper has been describing how Jesus taught about money, and he stops to say that the teaching is not the half of it: Jesus preached by where he stood, and the stable, the borrowed tomb and the empty purse are the sermon.

(Q) "Now, let Calvinism be nothing but such an Aeolian Harp, absolutely powerless, as it is, without the quickening Spirit of God, still we feel it our God-given duty to keep our harp, its strings tuned aright, ready in the window of God’s Holy Zion, awaiting the breath of the Spirit." + Source: Lectures on Calvinism, Lecture VI, "Calvinism and the Future" (the Stone Lectures, Princeton, 1898), the closing lines. An Aeolian harp is a stringed box people used to set in an open window so that the wind would play it. Kuyper has just said that his own age is at a low ebb religiously and that nothing he has proposed will move an inch without God, and the last thing he does at Princeton is take the whole programme, the university and the party and the newspaper, and call it a tuned instrument waiting for a wind it cannot summon.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The Dutch church he rebuilt became a school of theologians, and his successors carried the ideas further than he took them. + The nearest of them was Herman Bavinck, who came to the Free University in 1902 and whose four-volume Reformed Dogmatics gave Kuyper’s instincts the one thing Kuyper himself never quite managed: dogmatic form, which is to say the whole of Christian teaching set out in order and at length, one doctrine leading into the next, carefully and patiently. The two were temperamentally opposite, the journalist and the scholar, and Bavinck is the one theologians reach for when they want Kuyper’s theology without Kuyper’s sharp edges. After them came the philosophers. Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven took sphere sovereignty (T2), which Kuyper had left as a social doctrine, and built it into a full philosophy of what they called modal aspects: the several irreducible ways a thing can be considered, numerical, spatial, biological, aesthetic, juridical, and so on, none of which can be collapsed into another. Whether that is what Kuyper meant is still argued. G. C. Berkouwer taught dogmatics at the same university for a generation and made a point of engaging theologians who disagreed with him, including Karl Barth, which was not the family habit. The institutions outlasted the arguments. The Reformed Churches in the Netherlands grew into a substantial denomination with a serious theological faculty; the Free University became a full university; and the pattern of building your own institutions rather than petitioning for a place in someone else’s was exported wherever Dutch Reformed families settled, which meant Michigan, Iowa, Ontario, Australia and South Africa.

(†) America took up his square inch, and his antithesis turned into a theory of knowledge. + The first American to take him seriously also disagreed with him. B. B. Warfield of Princeton, who wrote the introductory note to the English edition of Kuyper’s Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology in 1898, thought the antithesis (T4) had been pressed too far. If the regenerate and the unregenerate really cannot reason together, Warfield asked, what becomes of apologetics, the work of showing an unbeliever that Christianity is true? Kuyper thought that work of strictly limited use, since a man’s starting point is not something an argument reaches. Warfield thought Christianity must be shown to be true to right reason, and that God gave the reason. The disagreement is still live, and most of what has been written since about whether apologetics can work is a footnote to it. Cornelius Van Til, a Dutchman raised in Indiana and teaching at Westminster in Philadelphia, took Kuyper’s side and built presuppositional apologetics on it: the argument that the Christian and the unbeliever differ not over evidence but over what makes evidence evidence, so the case must be made at that level. Half a century later Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff developed what became known as Reformed epistemology, the case that belief in God can be entirely rational without resting on arguments, the way belief in other minds or in the reality of the past is rational without resting on arguments. Plantinga names Kuyper as a source. Francis Schaeffer, Charles Colson and Richard Mouw carried the broader vision to a wider evangelical public, and "every square inch" became a slogan among Christians who would not have called themselves Calvinists at all.

(†) Where his own record fails him: the strike he broke, the honor he recommended, the peoples he ranked, and a doctrine he pressed past the text. + Kuyper is an unusually well-documented man, and the documentation includes the parts he would not have chosen. Four entries belong in the ledger, and they are his own. - The strike. In April 1903 railway and dock workers struck, and the Prime Minister who had told the Christian Social Congress that Christ stands with the poor (T5) called the strike revolutionary and carried laws making it a criminal offence for railwaymen and public servants to strike. He passed real labor protections in the same years, and he plainly believed that a government which lets its railways be stopped has surrendered the peace it exists to keep. The ledger of 1903 still does not balance, and his own working-class supporters were the ones it fell on. - The decoration. In 1903 he recommended an Amsterdam merchant, Rudolph Lehmann, for a royal honor, and the following year the same man gave eleven thousand guilders to the treasury of Kuyper’s party. When the story broke in 1909 parliament declined to hold an inquiry, and a council of honor of three elder statesmen reported in 1910 that he had been negligent but not corrupt. Negligent is not nothing. He had stood exactly where the question could be asked of him, and a man who had spent thirty years telling the Netherlands that public life is lived before the face of God had no cover for that. - The ranking of peoples. In the first of the Princeton lectures, arguing that Calvinism had carried human development forward, he described China and India and the Mexico and Peru of Montezuma and the Incas as isolated lakes and the peoples of Africa as "a far lower form of existence, reminding us not even of a lake but rather of pools and marshes," with the one living stream of history running from Babylon and Egypt to Greece and Rome and on to the Calvinist nations of Western Europe. The sentiment was ordinary in Europe in 1898 and that is not a defense. It sits inside the doctrine of common grace (T3), which ought to have taught him the opposite: if God has not left himself without witness among any people (Acts 14:17), and if every nation is made from one man (Acts 17:26), then there are no marsh peoples. He had the resources to see it and did not. - Presumed regeneration. He taught that the baptized children of believers should be presumed regenerate until they show otherwise, and his own brethren contested it from the start, on the ground that it reads into the covenant promises a certainty the texts do not give. When the Synod of Utrecht settled the quarrel in 1905 it split the difference: the children of the covenant are to be held regenerate and sanctified in Christ until their walk or their doctrine shows otherwise, but it is less correct to say that they are baptized on the ground of a presumed regeneration, since the ground of baptism is God’s command and promise. Reformed Christians still divide over it. It is a family argument rather than a boundary of the faith, but it is a place where careful readers of the same Bible judged that he had gone past what is written. None of this makes the work worthless, and Kuyper would have been the first to say that a man is not his own vindication. He wrote a great deal about total depravity, the doctrine that sin reaches into every part of a person and leaves no corner of him untouched, and he evidently meant it.