These discussions and debates are further confused by the influence of Neo-Calvinism (not to be confused with New Calvinism) and Theonomy which build on Kuyper and in some cases apply his ideas (by means of holistic assumption and inference) to their monistic models. Under such thinking, Sola Scriptura is effectively redefined not only in terms of philosophy but with this recasting comes a notion we might call hyper-sufficiency.
Scripture is not just sufficient for the Church and thus individual Christians in order to know how to live in this world – a point functionally rejected by most Evangelicals.
Rather, the Scriptures become a kind of launch pad for all manner of philosophical inference and speculation. In this manner the Scriptures become (by means of deductive exercise) the basis for a universal or unified theory, a comprehensive basis for addressing every facet of life – the axiom for the reconstruction and redemption of the world. This is an abuse of the notion of sufficiency.
Under these assumptions, the Scriptures are effectively decovenantalized and universalized – applied to all times and places and thus the gospel message is radically altered into an imperative for the conquest of culture and the molding of civilisation by means of this so-called 'worldview'.
On the one hand the covenant aspect is de facto removed as the revelation of the Holy Kingdom is applied to the world – the work of the Spirit being replaced by culture, polity, and legislation. And yet in another sense we could speak of hyper-covenantalism as the advocates of this way of thinking see everything in covenantal terms – the world is holy, and the world is the Kingdom. Under this framework of thought, national charters and constitutions are covenantalised, civil law is sanctified and so forth. The covenantal categories of Scripture are blended ad hoc to the systems and institutions of man.
The end result is the concepts of covenant and Kingdom are rendered meaningless as they are re-cast and lose their very identity. The goal is to sacralise the culture but the end result is the secularisation of the Church, making it indistinguishable from culture and the world. Once again this is an oft repeated if tragic tale known to us from history. The contemporary collapse of this false paradigm continues to generate what can only be described as misguided lamentation. We ought to rejoice and I would argue there is Scriptural warrant for doing so.
And though the more extreme views espoused by the Neo-Calvinists and Theonomic Postmillennialism are not in keeping with Kuyper's views – and in fact in many ways eliminate their basis, nevertheless Kuyper is still infected with the same sacral poison. The form is different but the substance is the same. Kuyper is still driven by what are the same assumptions. Was he inconsistent? Some think so. It could be that he had not really worked out the implications of what he was saying. And likewise it should be noted that in addition to his theological errors, his assessments of history are also lacking and at times confused. His 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary demonstrate this as he misreads and romantically reinterprets the American Revolution and its ideological roots – as if the liberalism of the Founders was somehow commensurate with the sacralism of the confessional tradition. Needless to say Article xxxvi is antithetical to the assumptions found in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They are diametrically opposed in their understanding of epistemology, duty, and what constitutes moral government.
The fact that all the documents in question are wrong and laden with error is an option few seem willing to entertain.
To continue with Kuyper, many will understand Common Grace as delayed judgment, the tool of Providence to preserve a minimal or necessary degree of restraint and order in the world – a curtailing of post-lapsarian chaos that allows the Church to function and pursue its mission and testimony in the world. This undeserved and universal benevolence (a kind of non-redemptive grace) will in the end result in further judgment as those that rejected Christ took these blessings in life but were not thankful or repentant and are thus condemned.
Those who share in this understanding would not see Common Grace as a means to explain this age or harness its realities – thus redeeming the fallen world and its culture and bringing them into the service of the Church and the Kingdom.
And yet this is how Kuyper understood it. Common Grace was a critical or essential means by which the Kingdom is to be built. In the context of pluralism, the unbeliever (due to Common Grace) makes 'advances' in knowledge and (though lost) these unbelievers effectively contribute to the growth of the Kingdom – which Kuyper defines in sacralist categories of culture and civilisation. The New Testament definitions are effectively jettisoned. The end result is the very pluralism Kuyper advocates for is dissolved (an illusion) as these diverse elements are (unknowingly) participants in and contributors to the construction of Holy Zion. It's almost as if they are unwitting resident aliens in the Kingdom. It's the same old sacralism fitted with new garments, the same substance with a modified form. Sacralism survives in the post-Revolutionary period by sleight-of-hand. Kuyper just moves the goalposts and you can still have a 'Christian' culture.
This worked out very well in the places where his influence has been the greatest – the decadent and worldly Netherlands, and twentieth century South Africa and its attempt at creating a sanctified and insulated culture for its Dutch Reformed majority – a political theory we know as Apartheid.
But again this Common Grace-Culture thinking can only function if New Testament teachings are ignored. The Kingdom is the work and realm of the Holy Spirit and the unbeliever has no part in His ministry of righteousness, peace, and joy. With Kuyper, the providential creational reign of Christ is confused and conflated with the Holy Realm. Worse, there is another critical doctrinal layer that is omitted – the post-lapsarian reality that this present age is described as evil and Satan is the god of this world.
We agree that 'every square inch' belongs to Christ but that is not manifest in this age, but in the age to come after the final judgment and after this world and all its works (including the culture so cherished by Kuyper) are burned up. The Kingdom is spiritual, heavenly, and eschatological. To bring it into the now is to redefine its nature, the ideals that undergird it, as well as its ethics. Sadly, Kuyper gave his life, theology, and his name to this misguided, erroneous, and (functionally) egregious project – one I frequently describe as a Tower of Babel topped by a cross.
Because the Dominionist spectrum of thinking (which includes Kuyperianism) cannot (due to its commitments) logically embrace the eschatological dynamic of the New Testament and the fact that Christ is both reigning King even while Satan is the god of this world and prince of this present evil age, the end result is that these truths and this dynamic are downplayed or ignored. As such, Kuyper's thought falls into the same syncretist patterns of over-realized eschatology, confusing the cursed bestial realm of the world with the holy eschatological realm of Zion. The Kingdom is redefined and the very understanding of the term Christian (to be in Christ) is redefined and not just expanded – it's exploded into another realm wherein institutions, states, and empires are essentially 'baptised' into Christ – somehow in union and communion with Him, sharing in His death and resurrection and (presumably) recipients of the Spirit as well. How this can be is a point that is never raised and (obviously) cannot be explained or justified.
One is hard pressed to imagine a more destructive heresy, and one that ranges well beyond Paul's anathemas directed at the Galatians. The Early Church long wrestled with questions of Christ and the Trinity and the challenge of heresy was arrested – at least on those points.
But when it comes to the great Kingdom Heresies that emerged post-Constantine, these won the day, which is why they're not spoken of as heresies. The Church embraced power and a set of new values and ethics regarding not just politics, but mammon, violence, and the core Christian calling to take up the cross and live as pilgrims and strangers on the Earth. It was almost as if a new religion was born. The Bride quickly turned Whore and found itself very much at home on the back of the Roman Beast – and many of its offspring in the centuries to come.
And the Magisterial Reformation (of which the Belgic Confession is a critical part) did nothing to correct this heresy but perpetuated it, and figures like Kuyper helped to recast it for modernity – making it compatible in the context of Liberalism and industrial society. This is his true legacy.
As stated, his plurality is an illusion, his notion of antithesis rendered functionally moot. It's the same old error simply re-cast for a different context and willing to incorporate a great deal of Enlightenment thought and assumption along the way.
His paradigm is in some respects better than the kind of crude sacralism of earlier eras but in another way it's actually much worse. It allowed the Church to function more potently in the post-nineteenth century context and grants theological justification for co-belligerence, not just with Rome but with other political forces. Some will understand that Kuyper is the (perhaps unwitting) architect of a socio-theological paradigm that is still with us – and one that continues to generate a great deal of compromise.
When these Kingdom and Common Grace notions are inevitably combined with Classical Liberalism, it leads (and continues to lead) to real confusion in the realm of Christian ethics, as the Church comes to fully embrace a host of Enlightenment assumptions and imperatives about 'rights', resistance, ethics, economics, and much else.
The great irony here is that under the older more absolute system, there could be a greater sense of antithesis when contrasted with post-revolutionary modernity. The line of demarcation was pretty clear but this quickly became confused as some justified the American Revolution – even while condemning the French.
However, such a Throne and Altar or Paleo-Authoritarian system would likely have not survived the storms of the twentieth century. The anti-modern popes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to hold the line but failed. These failures as well as the world wars would ultimately lead to the compromises of Vatican II.
Today, most of the Western Church embraces the erroneous assumptions of Classical Liberalism without hesitation and this (already compromised) paradigm is being challenged by the likes of Theonomy and Catholic Integralism. Both must be represented as spectrums rather than specific and narrow schools of thought. And yet (ironically) both of these anti-liberal challengers are nevertheless affected by Liberalism and both struggle to escape its influence. Even among the most extreme Catholic Traditionalists there are very few advocating for a true return to the old Throne and Altar paradigm. Many are libertarian capitalists masquerading as Traditionalists.
As such, many of the debates are actually quite pointless and fail to address foundational issues. So it is with the debate between Belgic Confessional fidelity and the views of Abraham Kuyper. Both camps are in error. Both are born of the same polluted sacralist font – and both factions have also imbibed additional poisons such as Liberalism. And the absurd nature of the debate is further confused by outside factions (such as Evangelicals more fully embracing the assumptions of liberalism and thus drunk on the same poison) hurling their misguided criticisms into the debate.
In the end, the debate over confessional subscription and the portions of Article xxxvi that have been bracketed – are meaningless to me apart from historical curiosity. If anything, this episode only further demonstrates the problems with such subscription and the unacknowledged but implied idea of progressive theology arrested by the Reformation-era confessional tradition. It's a baseless narrative and in no way do documents like the Belgic or Westminster Confessions represent a repristination of New Testament Christianity or Sola Scriptura.
In the post-Revolutionary context, a kind of hard subscriptionist confessionalism became practically impossible to uphold. A subscriptionist would have to argue all Liberal governments such as the United States and eventually the UK and all of modern Europe are illegitimate. And what does that mean in terms of ethics? It implies either political quietism or revolutionary activism. Unscriptural thinking generates such false dilemmas and the end result is even more Scriptural imperatives are ignored – and even the pilgrim ethos of the New Testament is functionally rejected and abandoned. One cannot help but notice that the many related discussions in articles and in Christian media dance around the Scriptures. They are referenced but not seriously employed. The debates are all on a philosophical and systemic level or rest solely on debates over Historical Theology – another outcome of the confessional approach.
One wishes they would return to the New Testament for even a cursory read dashes their assumptions and renders many of these debates moot – exposing just how far afield these people have wandered in their thinking.
Hoedemaker was right about Kuyper but it doesn't matter – both men embraced wrong assumptions and the end result is in reality the same. Kuyper was a pragmatist as Hoedemaker charged – but to argue that Article xxxvi is the result of exegesis is simply laughable. Only by Judaized gymnastics wielding a Rationalist hammer could one chisel out something like the doctrine found in Belgic xxxvi.
Hoedemaker wishes to cast a shadow over Kuyper's legacy for his infidelity to the confessional tradition. In actuality, Kuyper's great theological crime is that he created a platform for the integration of the Magisterial Reformation's sacral tradition and that of Enlightenment and post-Revolutionary Liberalism. As such he is the intellectual grandfather of modern Evangelicalism and unwittingly one of its inspirations if not architects. From its cultural compromises to its Faustian bargains with political forces, it's as if the ghost of Abraham Kuyper is always hovering in the background. The once aimless movement which emerged in the late 1940's found its cohesion in the teachings of Kuyper as transmitted by his disciples – men such as Francis Schaeffer and Charles Colson. And so much more could be said about the theological influence of Kuyper in the acculturation of groups like Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and again, the pro-apartheid Reformed Church in South Africa. Kuyper's teachings and approach to culture have proven to be malleable and unstable – a clear testimony to their unbiblical nature.
This is his dark legacy and this man, considered a hero by so many must in actuality be reckoned as a destroyer of the New Testament faith, one of the great villains of the modern Church. We can only hope that someday this will be acknowledged and understood.