A Response to: “The Kuyperian Vision for culture: what it is, and how is it doing? by J. Hommes

I heartily welcome your essay on Kuyperian thought and practice and have enjoyed the discussion it has already created on this important topic. Like you, I have embraced Kuyperian ideas in the past, and would in many ways still consider myself Kuyperian in many ways. I grew up on the mission field (in Japan) where other models of the relationship between Christianity and culture were offered that I found unsatisfactory. Thus, particularly at Calvin College, I found the Kuyperian vision challenging and refreshing. But, I share some of your concerns for the direction in which some of the self-professed heirs of Kuyper are going or have gone. Read more…

The Kuyperian vision for culture: what is it, and how is it doing? Part III

A Balanced View?

I have been fairly hard on the Kuyperian vision. I also am not advocating the fundamentalist/Puritan model. So what is the alternative? Here are several principles for a different way: Read more…

The Kuyperian vision for culture: what is it, and how is it doing? Part II

Having laid out the general tenets of the Kuyperian vision and its contrast to the Puritan vision, I now want to cast a critical eye on it. We have now had over 100 years of Kuyperian theory and practice. How is it doing? How has it worked out? I will break this into two parts, theory and practice. Read more…

The Kuyperian vision for culture: what is it, and how is it doing? Part I

Many evangelicals have never heard of Abraham Kuyper, but most have been influenced by him far more than they know.  Kuyper was a Dutch pastor and politician who lived in the last 1800’s up to the early 1900’s. He was initially an enthusiastic “modernist” and was trained in modernism at seminary. Modernism is the school of thought, sometimes also called classic liberalism, which says that science, reason and logic are the hope for the future of mankind, sufficient for solving all important problems, and the old notions of religion and traditional morality must be discarded as things of the past. Kuyper, as a modernist, encountered robust, living Christian orthodoxy in his first experience as a rural pastor in Holland, and was eventually converted.  He still loved science and the academic world (“science,” as he would have defined it, included not just the “hard sciences” but all the reasoned endeavors of the university). He eventually propounded a very definite vision for the interaction of the church and culture, which can be called the Kuyperian vision, though of course others contributed to this view before and after Kuyper.  Read more…