Followup on Kuyper: where the rubber meets the road for many of us

Since first writing my essay on Kuyperianism, I have gotten a lot of feedback from various people. One line of feedback has been that my characterizations of Kuperianism do not so much fit for Kuyper himself as for later people who called themselves Kuyperian. There is some truth in that, but I have also gone back and read a fair amount more of Kuyper, and I still stand by my main characterizations.

But in this essay I want to focus on the second main theme of the feedback I have gotten. This is that, regardless of whether Kuyper said it or not, or whether it influenced churches and movements in the past, we still have a rubber-meets-the-road issue before us. This is the question that every young, well-educated Christian must ask: is going into “ministry,” specifically church work such as preaching and evangelism, a higher calling than work in a “secular” field such as science, art, or humanities? Essentially, you can boil down the two schools of thought that I described as “fundamentalist” and “Kuyperian” by their answers to this question. The fundamentalist says “yes” and the Kuyperian says no. Read more…