PROTESTANT

...For the next fifty years, American evangelicals kept away from politics, concentrating almost exclusively on preparing individual souls for Heaven...

...But the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was, as the historian George Marsden puts it, something like an immigrant experience for American evangelicals— except that their migration from a familiar homeland to a strange new country was spiritual rather than geographical...

...Over the last twenty years, the intellectual and cultural life of America seems to have grown increasingly divided between two camps: those willing to sacrifice the last vestiges of traditional morality, and those open to bringing back God...

...In recent years, —Editor's Note— Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish writers alike have been casting back through their traditions, seeking thinkers who examined the role of religion in democracy...

...Kuyper could be eloquent in his insistence on an intimate link between God's sovereignty and democratic ideals...

...Needless to say, this evangelical mood of isolation changed dramatically when the evangelicals who had spent a half-century thinking of themselves as a marginalized minority—with an apolitical or even anti-political world-view that denied the necessity to participate in American public life—sudden-ly roared into politics as the "moral majority" in the 1980s...

...What contemporary Catholic thinkers in America are looking for in natural law is exactly what evangelicals are looking for in Kuyper's common grace: a way to combat the relativism— even nihilism—in our culture while simultaneously preserving the democratic institutions of our politics...

...Support for this kind of political arrangement does not come easily for those who nurture deep convictions about what is right or wrong...

...If God alone is absolute, then no human government has the right to claim absolute authority over its citizens...

...By attempting to dethrone God in order to elevate autonomous Reason, that revolution paved the way not for democracy but for totalitarianism...

...For a while, old-fashioned Protestants adopted a militant strategy, attacking their secularizing foes both inside and outside the Christian fold...

...Even Kuyper's vision of the diverse spheres of human life fits, in a rough way, with our contemporary mood: His analysis of social multiplicity is not unrelated to postmodernists' talk of "multiple narratives" and "irreducible discourses...

...And so they launched their protest-driven programs—but without having decided exactly how to think theologically about pluralism, democracy, and the role of religion in the public square...

...Kuyper knew that he could not make claims for the contemporary relevance of his religious tradition without dealing with the tradition's past patterns of intolerance...

...For a halfcentury, he was a prominent figure in Dutch life...

...The practical issues Kuyper faced in nineteenth-century Holland were never far from his mind...

...Families, schools, and businesses do not exist by the permission of governments or churchly authorities...

...American evangelicals have few such resources...

...In such a setting, Kuyper's writings deserve sustained attention...

...Kuyper's God has a distinct bias in favor of diversity in the creation, but He also has a profound interest in making sure that we respect the differences among the diverse spheres of interaction...

...Kuyper's rejection of "neutral" rationality, however, did not lead him to reject universal reason...

...The idea of "sphere sovereignty" generated, for Kuyper, a complex framework for discerning boundary lines and making distinctions...

...But Kuyper gives a much more systematic treatment to the notion that there is a kind of grace which, while it does not bring about the salvation of the reprobates, does generate common blessings for all of humankind...

...We live in a time when righteousness and unrighteousness exist side by side, and believers must live with this fact in mind...

...The doctrine bears some strong resemblance to recent views about the way "mediating struc-tures"—neighborhoods, service organizations, leagues, religious bodies— function as safeguards against both individualism and statism...

...The proper role of the state is to show impartiality toward a variety of religious and moral perspectives: pluralism, not secularism...

...Among the latter, a major effort is underway to articulate a public theology—capable of reassuring believers that political life doesn't require them to abandon their religious principles, and capable of reassuring everyone else that those believers don't want to establish a theocracy...

...His doctrine of "sphere sovereignty" was set forth at length in his 1880 address at the founding ceremony for the Free University...

...Calvinists at the time of the Reformation, he observed, "yielded their victims, by tens of thousands, to the scaffold and the stake," a pattern he deplores "unconditionally...

...Even in the nineteenth century, theologically conservative Protestants felt some dislocation from modern America...

...Kuyper saw human beings as driven by trust...

...He relinquished his clerical credentials when he entered political life, but he continued throughout his career to write theological tracts...

...Kuyper's way of putting this together is increasingly recognized by evangelical scholars as an important model for American religious thought...

...Mediating structures are not merely to be valued for their functions of shaping character and curbing the powers of the state...

...The line between good and evil cannot be easily drawn between groups of people, Kuyper argued...

...Protestant Catholic Jew Theology and Politics at the End of the Century It was at the end of the nineteenth century that Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the "flatheads" who imagined they could preserve morality without God...

...it provides a unique and comprehensive "world and life view"—a perspective that Kuyper spelled out in detail by giving separate lectures on the implications of Calvinism for religion, politics, science, and art...

...As a fledgling pastor called to a rural Dutch Reformed congregation, Kuyper was a theological liberal with little use for traditional orthodoxy...

...Bottum Protestant by Richard J. Mouw The Protestant Theology of Abraham Kuyper With all the publicity given in the last few years to the rise of the Religious Right, it's hard to remember that there was a time, as recently as twenty-five years ago, when evangelical Christians were regularly criticized for their lack of participation in American politics...

...Kuyper proposed a third way, refusing both a state church and merely private religion...

...The doctrine of original sin also functioned, in Kuyper's scheme, as a basis for Christian self-critique...

...One standard theme he drew upon was the classic Calvinist emphasis on divine providence...

...These notions, in Kuyper's scheme, had a direct link to pluralism...

...The notion that God works mysteriously in the hearts of the unre-generate, restraining their sinful tendencies and using their actions—even when they are motivated by wicked desires—to accomplish His purposes in the world, can be found in Calvin...

...Life in the modern, post-Enlightenment democracies is a relatively new thing in the history of Christianity...

...For the next several decades, he led the Anti-Revolutionary party (which he helped to found), and he served from 1901 to 1905 as prime minister...

...The essays in the collection, skillfully edited and introduced by James Bratt, display the range of Kuyper's intellectual contributions...

...Judgment Day is coming, but it has not yet arrived...

...The doctrine of common grace is closely related to such theological themes as natural law and general revelation in Roman Catholi-cism—and it is interesting that these themes seem to be cropping up more frequently among Catholics (and Protestants, as well) than in the recent past...

...He sought instead a rationality harnessed to worshipful obedience to the Creator...

...And they were left, in the end, with a deep pessimism about America, social reform, and participation in political affairs...

...He was a lover A false choice is often posed to Christians: Either withdraw from the public arena or take it over...

...The tiny handful of reactionary Protestants who believe in theocratic domination of the state by the church have it easy—as do the liberal Protestants who have divided their religious belief from their public lives and entirely given up any pretense of a theologically informed participation in politics...

...Thus the need both to respect government's proper "ordering" role and to be clear about its limitations...

...And there is some justice—mixed in with a far greater injustice—to the commonly heard leftist criticisms of this new evangelical politics...

...For Kuyper, a recognition of this pervasive tendency toward idolatry should make us especially wary of philosophical reductionism...

...For serious American evangelicals, however, things are more difficult, for they must affirm both the superiority of democracy and the possibility of making religiously informed moral judgments that have real effect in the public square...

...This changed quickly, however, when—largely through the influence of some uneducated but deeply spiritual parishioners—he experienced a profound evangelical conversion...

...God built these patterns of associational diversity into the very fabric of creation...

...As a successful politician, Abraham Kuyper may provide a model of Christian statesmanship...

...But Roman Catholics—and those Protestants, like Lutherans and Anglicans, with experience of belonging to a state church—at least have some tradition of theological reflection on how believers ought to participate in public life...

...The antithesis between righteousness and unrighteousness doesn't just divide righteous people from the unrighteous...

...But he could quickly turn Anglophobe (and racist) in defending the Boers of South Africa...

...But perhaps the most-telling criticism of evangelical politics is one it never occurs to secular critics to offer: Even while making much of the need for sound theology, American evangelicals did not explain how their political resurgence derived from any sound theological foundation...

...After ten years in parish ministry, Kuyper was elected to the Dutch parliament...

...Nietzsche didn't think much of the Western ethical tradition, but he sensed that it needed the continuing presence of religion: The culture that loses God will eventually lose the concept of good and evil...

...Kuyper wanted each confessional group to take its portion of public space, but none of them to have an official advantage...

...But for Kuyper, the spheres of human interaction are ultimately linked by their mutual relation to the transcendent will of the Creator...

...Such figures as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson proved better at inspiring their own followers than at reassuring the larger public that they were capable of working in a democracy for the common good...

...But it is as a thinker that he offers what we need most: a way for theologically informed Christians to grasp both what they should seek, and what they should not seek, from politics in a democracy...

...The growth of interest in Kuyper since then is proof both of the increasing maturity of evangelical political life and of the wise refusal of at least some evangelicals to barter their theological principles for political influence...

...The American ship is sinking, Moody had proclaimed, and the only proper public task left for evangelicals is to urge others to join them in the lifeboats—the enclaves of "Bible-believing Christians"—to await the coming apocalypse...

...Even though their efforts remain largely invisible to both grass-roots activists and leftist critics, evangelical scholars have devoted considerable attention to public theology...

...Recognizing these difficulties, Kuyper paid considerable attention to the spiritual and theological underpinnings necessary for democratic life...

...But he also demanded that these challenges be addressed out of a systematic Christian perspective on public life...

...This is spelled out at length when Kuyper develops his idea of "common grace...

...But there is also much in his work that has a modern feel...

...The subjects of the following essays are the Dutch Calvinist statesman Abraham Kuyper, the Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray, and the Jewish activist theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel...

...Kuyper proposed a third way, in which he refused to allow either a state-established religion or a religion that was merely a "private" affair...

...Their political reawakening over the last fifteen or twenty years has not been much welcomed by those who had grown accustomed to taunting evangelicals for escapism and failure to engage American culture...

...God is ultimately in control of all that happens, and He is obviously willing to tolerate some bad human behavior for a time...

...In 1898, Kuyper visited the United States to receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary...

...Even on the most charitable reading, there isn't much doubt that our present times cannot be squared with the Bible...

...We are created to offer our fundamental allegiance to God, and when we turn away from God, we form other and idolatrous allegiances: We become, in John Calvin's striking image, perpetual idol-factories...

...The feature of Kuyper's thought that is of the most relevance, howev-er—the thing that has made this unlikely Dutch politician an increasingly significant figure in American intellectual life almost eighty years after his death—is his way of dealing with the diversity of belief and practice in contemporary culture...

...Kuyper did not treat this challenge lightly...

...But he wasn't content simply to repeat past formulations...

...The appearance of a new hefty volume, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, is consequently a major event...

...And even those who cannot endorse the particulars of his Calvinist convictions often point to his system as a benchmark for constructing evangelical models for religious participation in the public square...

...In contrast, Calvinism was capable of providing a firm basis for a democratic faith...

...For English readers, access to Kuyper on such topics has been limited mostly to these Stone Lectures...

...While selections of his writings on some traditional theological topics are included, well over half of the volume—several hundred pages—is devoted to his reflections on social, political, and cultural themes...

...The evangelicals sensed instinctively that something needed to be done about pornography, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, sex education, and the like...

...During these years, they typically charRichard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California...

...This should not be seen, however, as a unique practice instituted by the Calvinists, "but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, gray with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself...

...Calvinism's positive contribution to political thought, Kuyper argued, is in the form of principles that introduce a new way of viewing political life...

...While the Dutch Reformed community in the United States forms only a small segment of the evangelical movement, its scholars have had a significant intellectual impact on conservative Protestantism, particularly on social and political topics...

...Here at the end of the twentieth century, we can begin to see just how right Nietzsche was, at least on this one point...

...Kuyper was passionately evangelical in his insistence that the Bible provides a worldview in stark contrast with the secularists' depictions of human life...

...And, furthermore, God has very clear—and published—convic-tions about the basic norms we should follow as we go about the complex business of living...

...And his conviction that Calvinism is the highest expression of the religious spirit gives his writings a decidedly unecumenical tone: His references to Roman Catholicism and Methodism are seldom friendly...

...of many things British and American, especially whatever he identified— sometimes in a confused manner, as editor Bratt shows in this new vol-ume—with Puritanism...

...And given the human propensity toward sinfulness, governments are both necessary shields against sin and themselves affected by our common depravity...

...The American evangelicals who rushed into politics in the 1980s have discovered that effective Christian activism requires clear thinking about the proper contours of the public square...

...Kuyper insisted, however, that these safeguards require a theological underpinning...

...For Kuyper, associational diversity isn't an accidental feature of contemporary life...

...Such rediscovered figures were often liberals in their own day, because they set themselves the task of explaining to their brethren why the health of religion in the modern world depends on accepting the principles of democracy...

...But they appear profoundly conservative today, because they managed to explain along the way why the health of democracy depends on religion...

...The same God who wanted families to be a part of creation also made room for schools, corporations, teams, and legislatures...

...He was, after all, a Calvinist who believed in what he regularly referred to as the "antithesis" between belief and unbelief: People of faith have a radically different way of viewing life than that of nonbelievers...

...God has ordained their existence, and no human power has the right to inhibit their proper functioning...

...He saw the increasing fragmentation of our modern experience of reality, religious diversity, and democratic pluralism...

...acterized the general culture with the kind of apocalyptic imagery first made popular by such nineteenth-century evangelists as Dwight L. Moody...

...How in a democracy do we make our peace—or our war—with this kind of thing...

...When Kuyper studied theology at the University of Leiden, where he earned a doctorate in 1863, the school was a hotbed of revisionist theology...

...The retrieval of theological perspectives from the past has been high on the agenda in these discussions, as Christian theologians, philosophers, and historians have explored a variety of Protestant tradi-tions—Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Wesleyan—for ways to ground social activism in careful theological reflection...

...In these lectures, he argued that Calvinism is more than a narrow set of doctrines...

...the collected newspaper cartoon caricatures of Kuyper would fill a good-sized volume...

...We encounter these days some deep and seemingly ineradicable evil in American society...

...It is this that distinguishes Kuyper from the evangelical activists who burst into American political life in the 1980s, for systematic theological justification for their activism is exactly what they lacked...

...The struggle against sin is also waged within the soul of each individual...

...The theological task, however, has not been completely neglected...

...There was no doubt in his mind that the public square is one of the strategic places for waging the ongoing battle between righteousness and unrighteousness...

...But they were publicly humiliated at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and they suffered significant casualties from the intra-Protestant controversies that raged in the 1930s between the fundamentalists and the modernists...

...Kuyper was aware of the false choice often posed to Christians: Either we must withdraw from the public arena or we must take it over...

...His opposition to the French Revolution puts him in the company of those thinkers of our time, like Alastair MacIntyre, who scorn "the Enlightenment project...

...And the brand of Calvinism associated with Calvin College in Michigan and Dordt College in Iowa has drawn much of its inspiration from the example of the nineteenth-century Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), a Calvinist who exhibited an unusual blend of public activism, theological depth, and personal piety...

...Two lengthy selections from Kuyper on common grace appear for the first time in English translation in Bratt's new Kuyper reader, and they constitute an important contribution to evangelical discussion...

...Kuyper named his party "Anti-Revolutionary" because of his deep opposition to the thought associated with the French Revolution...

...These three figures from the last hundred years have achieved new prominence thanks to our pressing need to find a public theology fit for liberal democracy—and a liberal democracy fit for public theology...

...One of his essays bears as its title a favorite Kuyperian phrase: "The Blurring of the Boundaries...

...In addition to his political and theological efforts, he founded the Free University of Amsterdam, edited a newspaper, wrote popular religious devotional material, and led a breakaway group of churches that became the second largest Reformed denomination in the Netherlands...

...And unbelievers often perform better than might be expected from the perverse principles they sometimes serve...

...Believers may have the right principles, but they continue to be plagued by their innate sinfulness...