HARLEY ATKINSON

Abraham Kuyper: Theologian, Politician, and Christian Educator

 

Abraham Kuyper was not first and foremost a Christian educator or educational theorist, however his noteworthy offerings to the theory and practice of Christian education (and education in general) merit attention. He led an exceptional life of achievements and in succession or combination filled the roles of minister of the Dutch Reformed church, leader of a Christian political party, member of Parliament, prime minister of the Netherlands, professor of theology, newspaper publisher, editor of widely-read periodicals, prolific writer on a wide range of subjects, co-founder of a university, co-founder of a new denomination, and reformer of elementary education.

 

Historical Background

 

Kuyper was born on October 29, 1837 in the Netherland province of South Holland to Jan Frederik, a minister of a Dutch Reformed Church and Henriette Huber. He married Johanna Hendrika Schaay in 1863. They would have five sons and three daughters. When Kuyper was 12, his father took a church in Leiden and sent the young Kuyper to a prestigious school where he developed an affection for formal learning and determined to follow in the steps of his father as a minister. At age 18, Kuyper entered the University of Leiden’s liberal arts college (1855) where he studied philosophy, the classical languages, and literature. It was here that he was exposed to the teachings of modernist teachers who espoused German higher criticism, and quickly abandoned the orthodoxy of his younger years, and embraced, “what he later called a rationalist approach to religion and the Scriptures.”[1]

 

His spiritual journey back to a Reformed faith was precipitated by at least two significant events. The first of these events occurred shortly before he entered the ministry and after his university studies. Upon reading Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyff, he became, in the words of James Bratt, “a Christian with an engaged heart. He started going to church again and looked forward to taking the Lord’s Supper.”[2] Kuyper was able to identify with the arrogant main character who eventually kneeled in repentance and acknowledged a reliance upon the sovereign God. The second event took place somewhat later during his first ministerial assignment. One of his parishioners, Pietronella Baltus, refused to listen to his modernist teachings and insisted that she share with him the message of the true gospel. Kuyper took the time to inquire of her doctrinal beliefs, listened to here reasoning, took her words to heart, and subsequently experienced a true conversion whereby he, “surrendered completely, unequivocally, not to men or to a movement or to a tradition, but to the triune God.”[3] At this point he broke completely with Modernism and embraced the Reformed faith.

 

Following in the vocational footsteps of his father Kuyper entered the ministry. A gifted and able preacher of the Word of God, he was ordained to the ministry and installed as the pastor of a small church in the village of Beesd in 1863. He served there for four years before pastoring a church in Utrecht for less than three years (1867-1870). In 1870 he accepted a call to the Amsterdam State Church where he felt he would be in a strategic position to help purify and restore Holland’s State Church. At Amsterdam, writes Frank Vandenberg, “[Kuyper] attained magnificent height as a preacher of the Gospel. He always addressed great, solid, eager masses of listeners.”[4] During this time he had become active in Christian politics and in journalism, and also emerged as an outstanding critic and opponent of theological modernism. His term as pastor ended in 1874 when he was elected to the Second Chamber of Parliament. He never returned to the ministry, but he remained an active churchman, serving as elder in the Amsterdam church.

 

In 1879 he founded and became head of the Anti-revolutionary Party, for whom the issues of public education was important. While party leader, he founded the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880 based on his vision, “for an institution of higher learning in which young men within the reformed ranks could be equipped for national leadership and influence in every area of society.”[5]  His lectures in theology at this institution reflect his most profound theological thinking. No doubt his doctor of theology, earned on the basis of his theological dissertation identifying the differences in the conventions of the church between John Calvin and John Laski, contributed to his ability to serve both as a university founder and theological professor.

 

Kuyper’s political career continued and he completed several terms in Parliament. From 1901 to 1905 he served as prime minister of the Netherlands. The year 1905 marked the beginning of a gradual withdrawal from national politics, though he continued to lead the Anti-revolutionary party until his death in 1920.

 

What Kuyper had to say on educational theory was only a part of his total life’s work, but it was an important part. Although the Anti-revolutionary Party, of which he was a principal leader, was not a one-issue party, much of its attention was devoted to education. The same cause made demands on Kuyper’s energy as a Member of Parliament and prime minister. Likewise, in his role as a journalist he wrote thousands of pages in defense and propagation of this cause. Furthermore, the accomplishment dearest to his heart was the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam, which was intended to be the very embodiment of his educational philosophy and principles.

 

For the most part, Kuyper did not devise the educational ideas he advanced. In working out his primary school program, for example, he built on foundations set forth by G. Groen Van Prinsterer and shared honors with A. F. de Savornin Lohman and other contemporaries.[6] Nonetheless he wrote extensively in expanding the theological background and support of these notions, and toiled more effectively than any other individual to put them into practice.[7]

 

Theological Foundations

 

Bratt proposes that we can understand Kuyper’s theology by understanding his work under the rubric of three C’s: church, Calvinism, and culture. In his first phase, from his graduate studies to the church in Amsterdam, he worked out a theology of the church. In the second phase from 1875 to the establishment of Doleantie (grieving ones), which was a secession from the state church (1886), he focused primarily on Calvinistic or Reformed theology and in particular, issues of soteriology. In the third phase Kuyper’s attention turned to developing a theology of culture.[8]

 

The Church

Some two decades before the establishment of Doleantie, the break-off denomination co-founded by Kuyper, his ecclesiological foundations were in process. Kuyper’s early sermons at Breesd established his foundational notions of the church, which served as the baseline for future developments. In his mind, the church was

(1) A free community of the faithful, (2) voluntarily gathered out of loyalty to Christ, (3) animated by the work of the Spirit in the heart, (4) it performed works of righteousness in the world, (5) thereby sowing the seeds of the kingdom of God, (6) which constituted the essential and distinctive teaching of Jesus.[9]

 

Thus, Bratt summarizes the relationship between the institutionalized church and the inner life of the believer according to Kuyper as follows: “the interior life of the Spirit was the believer’s only measure of faith. External forms, whether of doctrine, governance, or liturgy, figured at best secondarily in this scheme, at worst as obstacles to spiritual integrity.”[10] As Naylor observes, “Kuyper called upon his Utrecht congregation to let go of old institutional forms which, though comfortable and proven for one generation, had gradually become instruments of the undermining of Christianity in Dutch society.”[11]

 

When Kuyper arrived at Utrecht in 1867 he felt that it was time for reform within the State Church. “Whether we must undertake church restoration or the founding of a new church, we are in any case called to build, be it according to the ancient pattern or be it according to the purer style and the loftier architectural design which the Spirit of God reveal to us.”[12] Among other things, Kuyper spoke out against the authoritarian and intrusive policies of the national church synod, calling for the “liberation of the Church from both the State and the hierarchical organization capped by the Synod.”[13] Furthermore, he encouraged local congregations to select only truly reformed officers, and he advised churches to free themselves from financial dependence upon the state.

 

Calvinism

Early in his ministerial career Kuyper had become an ardent devotee of Calvinism and considered it to be the source and guarantee of the constitutional freedoms of the Netherlands. According to Kuyper, Calvinism has the deepest grasp of God’s unity with his creatures. "It [Calvinism] does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing high in majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature as God the Holy Spirit."[14]

Another significant motif for Kuyper is Christ’s general claim on all of life. John Kromminga summarizes this theme as follows: "The life principle instilled by Christ proceeds from the heart of the believer to every sphere: to the inner chamber, the church, life in society, the school, politics, statesmanship, the university, science, and finally to those deep principles of life which are the foundation al all national existence. It is the peculiar genius of Calvinism to recognize this sovereignty of God over all of life. If God has become man in Christ, there must always be a place for Christ in this world."[15]

In Kuyper’s theology this notion of Christ’s universal claim on every aspect of life was worked out in two interconnected themes: special or particular grace and its antithesis common grace.[16]  These two themes “can be understood only in dialectical relation to each other.”[17] While God confers his particular grace solely on those whom He has called to eternal life, He bequeaths his common grace on all individuals.[18] The Church is the territory of special grace, just as the world outside the Church is the recipient of common grace, though the two domains are not unrelated: “To be sure, there is a concentration of religious light and life in the Church, but then in the walls of this church there are wide-open windows, and through these spacious windows the light of the Eternal has to radiate over the whole world.”[19] The two varieties of grace work together, explains Naylor, “so that God’s historical and eternal purposes unfolded exactly as he ordained.”[20]

 

Culture

Kuyper is most notably known in English-speaking circles for his theological notions on culture.[21] His theology of culture cannot be divorced from his Calvinistic views and both inevitably steered his ideas for primary and university education. A theological motif that was critical to Kuyper’s view of culture was sphere sovereignty. Kuyper argued that each of the spheres of society including the state, religion, family, business, science, and art is sovereign in its own domain. Each sphere has its own place in society and owes its existence to God, rather than the state. 

 

Christian culture can be seen in narrower and broader focus. There is no essential difference between them but the culture is better reflected in the narrower group, the confessing church. Election and special grace do not separate men from society, and common grace comes to completion only under the influence of special grace.

 

Christian is taken in two senses: that which is opposed to godlessness, and the like; and that which is opposed to liberal, neutral, unbelieving. General Christian culture fits the former; concentrated Christian culture, the latter. In the former sense once can call all education in Europe and America Christian; in the latter sense there is a dire need for more Christian education. This distinction was clear and important for Kuyper.

 

The motif of common grace doctrine lies not in cultural appreciation but in cultural activity. It gives the regenerated believer the possibility of existence, material to work with, and meaningful activity. In fact, Bratt insists, “Kuyper grounded Christian cultural activism in the most venerable of Calvinist precepts.”[22] It was this sharpness of vision that caused Kuyper to be engaged in educational and political reform highlighted by the founding of the Free University and Anti-revolutionary Party.

 

Kuyper sometimes expressed himself in such a way that his common grace doctrine appeared to tend toward synthesis, but in fact it did not; the antithesis remained throughout. This antithesis occurs between everything that proceeds from the life-principle instilled by Christ and everything that does not. This antithesis is all pervasive, but apart from the church it is focused most sharply in the university. For example, all science is based upon faith. Every person proceeds on his basic assumptions, which are either theocentric or homocentric. The national welfare is at stake here as elsewhere, for if science is cultivated on a rationalistic (homocentric) basis rather than a Christian (theocentric) basis, the nation will inevitably be de-Christianized.

 

Common grace presupposes a certain amount of cooperation in education, but the antithesis also operates here. The Christian school is far more than a means of evangelism and it differs from a “neutral” school, "In the spirit which controls all of the education and in the influence and application which is brought to bear upon the child in every respect. . . . Christian education . . . transmits Christian insights from generation to generation not only in respect to confession, but also in respect to everything that concerns the formation and upbringing of the child."[23]This applies not only to propositions, but to sympathies, habits, viewpoints and ideals.

 

If this is true of primary education, it is even truer at the university level. The neutral approach is invalid. Science is not neutral; an element of the spiritual is present in it, not only in the person making the inquiry but also in the subject, which he is exploring. Kuyper sought to restore the subjective element of scientific inquiry to its rightful place. The distinction between regenerate and unregenerate men applies to all knowledge, not merely to spiritual sciences. Only he who is renewed by the Spirit is in a position to view all things in harmony with their essential nature.

 

Contributions to Public and Christian Education

 

It should be evident from above that while Kuyper’s ideas were profoundly theological, they had a direct bearing on educational theory and practice. He sought to lay foundations for the position that all education ought to be Christian. However, to a great extent Kuyper, the man of broad vision, left to others the task of working out his ideas in practice. When all of his words had been spoken, the task of determining just how a school is fully Christian and how a subject is to be taught Christianly remained to be solved. With respect to establishing the legal right of existence for Christian schools of all descriptions, however, Kuyper was preeminent in his zeal, ability, and accomplishments.

 

It must not be assumed that Kuyper accomplished these things without a great deal of opposition. Long before he entered the political arena, he had become a controversial figure because of the nature of his position and his ardent espousal of them. He was vigorously opposed in the political sphere and bitterly lampooned in the public press. Some of his legislative efforts were failures, and in the end he had to settle for something less than he desired. Nevertheless the education law that he sponsored and the university that he founded were major achievements.

 

The Christian School

Kuyper argued for the notion of “Free schools the norm; state schools a supplement.”[24] While that included free schools for everyone—Roman Catholics, Jews, Calvinists, and even atheists—he was primarily concerned with the Christian school. Kuyper argued that the Christian school is far more than a means of evangelism. Furthermore, it was not a school that simply added religion to its curriculum. Rather, insists Naylor, “he claimed that a Christian school was one that taught children the skills, knowledge and dispositions they needed within the context of an explicit Christian world view and in the spirit of Christian faith.”[25]

 

According to Kuyper, "Christian education must be distinguished from neutral education not only by a new element, that of religion, being added to the other subjects but also in the spirit that rules over all of the education…. In this way, men have gradually come to the clear insight that a school is only Christian if she aims to propagate the Christian tradition, the Christian life-view and the Christian life customs from generation to generation, not only concerning pieces of the catechism, but also concerning the entire formation and nurture of the child…. There are instincts, insights, goals, ideas, customs that diminish the Christian life; but there are also sympathies, convictions, customs, ways of seeing, ideals that feed and strengthen the Christian life in family, society and church. And what people expect from the Christian education is that it will serve the latter."[26]

 

The Public School

From his first entry into Parliament, Kuyper espoused the cause of schools. He maintained that schools should have their autonomous organization, with local, provincial, and national boards. The state is to legislate standards, certify teachers, control and inspect, and require attendance. The state also has the obligation to make it financially possible for parents to send their children to the school of their choice. The state must respect the parents’ freedom of conscience. It should reimburse non-state schools for the money they are saving the state. His elementary education bill of 1905 brought non-public schoolteachers into the pension system and gave them the same legal status as their colleagues in state schools.[27]

 

The Free University and Higher Education

Kuyper established the principle that free universities—free from the controls of both church and state—have full rights alongside state universities. His intention was, as verbalized by Richard Mouw, ". . . to oppose two very basic patterns of cultural hegemony: the kind of ecclesiasticism that typified, in his mind, much of medieval life, where the church went beyond its proper authority by imposing its influence on family life, art, business, and politics; and statism, which tried to invest political government with the right to direct all of cultural life to its own purposes."[28]

 

He fought for the legal validating of the degrees awarded by free universities. Although he visualized the formation of many such universities, the only one to emerge in the immediate was his own—and the Free University of Amsterdam may justly be called his own.[29] His vision and energy were the greatest single factors in its establishment and Vandenberg proposes that, “the plan to establish a Calvinistic university stands out prominently as the boldest, the most original, the most creative thought of his career.”[30]

 

The Free University of Amsterdam began in December of 1880 with five professors and five students, with Kuyper himself the chief ornament. Kuyper’s principal courses were Systematic Theology and Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, but he taught Hebrew and Homiletics as well. During the initial year, he also served as its first rector magnificus or administrative head. While the university began with a theological faculty, he desired a genuine and complete university not merely a divinity school, and from the very beginning he worked for the ultimate accomplishment of this ideal. Some supporters of the Free University began to hesitate when studies progressed beyond theology, law, and letters, to the natural sciences. But for Kuyper this was perfectly consistent, and he never wavered in his progress toward this goal, which has long since been achieved.

 

One of Kuyper’s most noteworthy legislative achievements was the Higher Education Law of 1905. First, this bill granted legal status or state certification of non-state universities and granted private universities the entitlement to award diplomas with the same legal statuses as state universities (cum effectu civili). This provision provided obvious benefits for the already-existing Free University, but in 1923 a Catholic university was opened. Second, the bill provided for improvements in Dutch technical and vocational education. It provided for night school for working adults and upgraded the Delft Polytechnic School to university status. It also led to the establishment of the Agricultural University at Wageningen and commercial universities at Rotterdam and Tilburg.[31] Clearly Kuyper’s reform went far beyond his personal passion for higher Christian education and his hard work as Prime Minister benefited all Dutch universities and technical schools.

 

Conclusion

 

Although Kuyper’s activities were carried on in many fields, there was a massive unity in his efforts, and although his work as educational theorist was not his chief professional role, very much of his activity was directly related to Christian education. The Christian education that Kuyper advocated was in no way intended to isolate the Christian community from the nation or from the world of learning. It involved separate Christian organizations, to be sure, but such organizations are deeply immersed in national life. Because of his principles Kuyper could never rest satisfied with an ivory-tower existence. Christ has absolute claims on all of life, and His claims many not be ignored. Separate organizations exist not to isolate these claims, but to make them effective in society. Thoroughly consistent with this was Kuyper’s insistence that Christian education involves all of learning. A mere school with the Bible was far from his intention. His educational philosophy carried the inescapable implication that no subject could be understood apart from Christian insight. Common grace, likewise, requires that these insights be applied to every activity.

 

 

Endnotes

 

[1] Wendy Fish Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper and the Emergence of Neo-calvinist Pluralism in the Dutch School Struggle” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2006), 13.

[2] James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 39.

[3] Ibid., 38.

[4] Frank Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1960), 57.

[5] Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper,” 27.

[6] H. Colijn, Levensbericht van Dr. A. Kuyper (Kampen: Kok, 1923), 15.

[7] John H. Kromminga, “Abraham Kuyper,” in A History of Religious Educators, ed. Elmer L. Towns (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975), 289.

[8] Bratt, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 172.

[9] Ibid.,173.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper,” 23.

[12] Quoted by Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper, 47.

[13] Ibid., 51.

[14] Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures (n.p. 1898 reprint), 16.

[15] Kromminga, “Abraham Kuyper,” 291. Kromminga in turn cites W. J. Aalders, “Dr. Kuyper,” Onze Eeuw 4 (1921): 18.

[16] The concept of antithesis was significant to Kuyper. Naylor describes it as uniquely religious in nature, “There existed an absolute division between life and death, between which there was no possibility of synthesis, and which resulted in a principled struggle for the religious root of culture. . . . all people and all societies were faced with an absolute either/or. Either God was sovereign or he was not” (p. 107).

[17] Kromminga, “Abraham Kuyper,” 291.

[18] Kuyper, Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures, 23.

[19] Ibid., 42.

[20] Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper,” 64.

[21] Bratt, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 172.

[22] Ibid., 195.

[23] Abraham Kuyper, De Gemeene Gratie vol. 2., 273.

[24] Abraham Kuyper, "Ons Program"  (Amsterdam: J.H. Kruyt, 1879), 487-8; Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper,” 143-4; Wendy Naylor, “School Choice and Religious Liberty in the Netherlands: Reconsidering the Dutch School Struggle and the Influence of Abraham Kuyper in its Resolution,” in International Handbook of Protestant Education, eds, William Jeynes and David W. Robinson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 263.

[25] Naylor, “Abraham Kuyper,” 143-4.

[26] Kuyper, De Gemeene Gratie, vol. 3. pp. 391-392

[27] For additional comments on public education reform see Bratt, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 312 and Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper, 243.

[28] Richard J. Mouw, The Challenges of Cultural Discipleship: Essays in the Line of Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 193

[29] As noted below, Kuyper was not only the visionary for a free university, he was the founder, professor, and first administrator of the Free University of Amsterdam.

[30] Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper, 114.

[31] Bratt, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 312-3 and Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper, 231-42.

 

Bibliography

 

Aalders, W. J. “Dr. Kuyper,” Onze Eeuw 4 (1921): 18.

Bratt, James D. Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013.

Colijn, H.  Levensbericht van Dr. A. Kuyper. Kampen: Kok, 1923.

Kuyper, Abraham. Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures. n.p.: 1898 reprint.

________. De Gemeene Gratie 3 vols. Leiden: Donner, 1907.

________. Principles of Sacred Theology. Trans. By J. H. De Vries. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960.

Mouw, Richard J. The Challenges of Cultural Discipleship: Essays in the Line of Abraham Kuyper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

Naylor, Wendy F. “Abraham Kuyper and the Emergence of Neo-calvinist Pluralism in the Dutch School Struggle.” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2006.

Naylor, Wendy F. “School Choice and Religious Liberty in the Netherlands: Reconsidering the Dutch School Struggle and the Influence of Abraham Kuyper in its Resolution,” in International Handbook of Protestant Education, eds, William Jeynes and David W. Robinson. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012.

Vandenberg, Frank. Abraham Kuyper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960.