The Kuyper Center Review, volume 4: Calvinism and Democracy

By John Bowlin

Explores the influence of Calvinism on democratic theory and practice

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) -- pastor, theologian, journalist, and politician -- is highly regarded as exemplifying how a Christian worldview can be confidently expressed in both theory and practice. Honoring the spirit of Kuyper's legacy, The Kuyper Center Review annually publishes substantial essays that relate the tradition of Reformed theology to issues of public life.

Kuyper was a principal force, both political and intellectual, behind the democratization of politics and public life that occurred in the Netherlands at the close of the nineteenth century. This volume reflects on that legacy, not only examining its theological roots and historical context but also assessing democracy's prospects in our own day and considering the ways in which Reformed theology might provide resources for democratic criticism and renewal.

Contributors:
Clifford B. Anderson
Michael Brautigam
Clay Cooke
Michael DeMoor
James Eglinton
George Harinck
Brant Himes
David Little
Jeffrey Stout
Harry Van Dyke

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781467440332

Book preview

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The Kuyper Center Review

New Essays in Reformed Theology and Public Life

The Kuyper Center Review publishes substantial essays of a historical or critical kind that relate the tradition of Reformed theology to issues of public life. Although it will take a special interest in the writings of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and in the neo-Calvinist style of thought that he initiated, the aim is also to provide a vehicle for the widest-ranging exploration of the history and contemporary relevance of Reformed theology to important topics in politics, economics, and culture. Contributions from a variety of disciplines—history, philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences, as well as theology—are warmly welcomed.

The Kuyper Center Review

volume 4 Calvinism and Democracy

Edited by

John Bowlin

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2014 Princeton Theological Seminary

All rights reserved

Published 2014 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8028-7115-2

eISBN 978-1-4674-4033-2 (ePub)

eISBN 978-1-4674-3991-6 (Kindle)

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Cover

Editorial Introduction

Contributors

Neo-­Calvinism and Democracy: An Overview from the Mid-­Nineteenth Century till the Second World War

George Harinck

Calvinism, Constitutionalism,

and the Ingredients of Peace

David Little

Christianity and the Class Struggle

Jeffrey Stout

Liberalism versus Democracy? Abraham Kuyper and Carl Schmitt as Critics of Liberalism

Clifford B. Anderson

The Christian as homo politicus: Abraham Kuyper and Democratic Imbalance in Post-­Democratic Times

Michael Bräutigam

Distinctively Common: Advancing Herman Bavinck’s Theology to Pressure Liberal Democratic Ideals

Clay Cooke

Legitimacy, Public Justice, and Deliberative Democracy

Michael DeMoor

Democracy and Ecclesiology:

An Aristocratic Church for a Democratic Age?

James Eglinton

Distinct Discipleship: Abraham Kuyper,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Christian

Engagement in Public Life

Brant Himes

Abraham Kuyper between Parsonage and Parliament

Harry Van Dyke

Kuyper as Emancipator and Christian Democrat

Harry Van Dyke

Editorial Introduction

This volume is the fourth issue of the Kuyper Center Review, and it includes papers presented at a conference on Neo-­Calvinism and Democracy sponsored by the Abraham Kuyper Center for Public Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in April 2012.

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) — pastor, theologian, journalist, and politician — was a principal force, both practical and intellectual, behind the democratization of politics and public life that occurred in the Netherlands at the close of the nineteenth century. The purpose of the conference, and so too this volume, is to reflect on this legacy, to explore its theological roots and historical context, but also to assess democracy’s prospects in our own day and to consider the ways in which Reformed theology might provide resources for democratic criticism and renewal.

In his contribution to this volume, George Harinck considers Kuyper’s complicated response to democracy. On the one hand, Kuyper’s theological anthropology is democratic in both substance and consequence. Calvinism, Kuyper insists, places our entire human life immediately before God. It regards us as equals before God, and consequently equal as man to man.¹ It resists every claim of natural authority, every rule or lordship justified on appeal to the nature of things.

Hence Calvinism condemns not merely all open slavery and systems of caste, but also all covert slavery of woman and of the poor; it is opposed to all hierarchy among men; it tolerates no aristocracy save such as is able, either in person or in family, by the grace of God, to exhibit superiority of character or talent, and to show that it does not claim this superiority for self-­aggrandizement or ambitious pride, but for the sake of spending it in the service of God. So Calvinism was bound to find its utterance in the democratic interpretation of life.²

On the other hand — and for precisely these same reasons — Kuyper opposes the idea of popular sovereignty that emerged in the French Revolution. Authority to rule does not come from the people. Rather, all legitimate temporal authority, democratic or otherwise, begins in the recognition of God’s sovereignty and arrives by divine delegation.

Kuyper’s contribution to democratic theory emerges at precisely this point. In response to the leveling and unifying effects of popular sovereignty, he offers a social ontology of sovereign spheres. This social ontology offers two distinct benefits. It helps Kuyper account for the differentiation that distinguishes modern life, in which family, work, school, and religion have a relative autonomy of their own, and it enables him to mark the boundaries of legitimate authority and action. God delegates authority to certain roles and offices within each sphere, and this authority is ordered to the tasks and purposes of each. It extends no further.

In a democracy, then, the authority of a people to rule comes from God and is limited to the mechanical tasks of politics and restrained by the reality and sovereignty of the spheres that God has created. Accountability is thus both vertical and horizontal, and on the horizontal axis it not only abides among the citizens of a democratic community but also between that community and the other spheres. It’s these multiple orders of accountability and authority that distinguish Kuyper’s political vision and that determine the contours of a democratic politics that he can actually endorse.

As I write, the citizens of Istanbul, Cairo, and São Paulo have taken their discontent to the streets and public places, protesting rule that refuses to be held accountable, arbitrary hierarchies of rank and position, and the covert enslavement of women and the poor. The Kuyper Center was created, in part, to stimulate new work and interest in the traditional concerns of the Reformed tradition and the emerging discourses of public theology. Our hope is that these efforts will help sustain a new and lively conversation, not just about Kuyper and his intellectual progeny, but also about the most pressing issues of the day in theology and public life. Such is our hope for this volume.

John R. Bowlin

1. Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism: Six Stone Lectures (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899), pp. 26-27.

2. Kuyper, Calvinism, p. 27.

Contributors

George Harinck is professor of the history of neo-­Calvinism and director of the Historical Documentation Center at the Free University Amsterdam, and special professor of history at the Theological University Kampen. He has published widely on the history of Dutch Protestantism in its international context.

David Little is a fellow of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and International Affairs, Georgetown University. He has taught at the University of Virginia and at Yale and Harvard Divinity Schools, among other places, and was a distinguished fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. His major publications include titles in the history of Calvinism, comparative ethics, and religion and human rights, nationalism, and peace.

Jeffrey Stout is a professor of religion at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1975. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the author of Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, 2010).

Clifford B. Anderson is the Director for Scholarly Communications at Vanderbilt University. He was formerly the Curator for Special Collections at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Michael Bräutigam is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the Christology of Adolf Schlatter. He holds degrees in psychology (University of Trier) and theology (University of Glasgow) and he was the 2012 visiting Puchinger Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Clay Cooke is a Ph.D. candidate at the Free University Amsterdam in theology and a Ph.D. candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary in Christian ethics. He has written numerous articles for Capital Commentary and Comment Magazine on the topics of political theology and Christianity and culture.

Michael DeMoor is an assistant professor of social philosophy in politics, history, and economics at The King’s University College, Edmonton, Alberta.

James Eglinton is research fellow in systematic and historical theology at the Theologische Universiteit Kampen. He holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the University of Edinburgh and is the author of Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (T&T Clark, 2012).

Brant Himes holds a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary and is a Ph.D. in Theology candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary. His published work on theology and discipleship includes Discipleship as Theological Praxis: Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Resource for Educational Ministry in Christian Education Journal.

Harry Van Dyke attended Calvin College, where he was involved in the Groen van Prinsterer Society, and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He is a professor emeritus of history at Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.

Neo-­Calvinism and Democracy: An Overview from the Mid-­Nineteenth Century till the Second World War

George Harinck

The notion of democracy has accompanied neo-­Calvinism from its early start. Insiders and outsiders labeled the neo-­Calvinist movement as democratic. But the relationship between the two is more complex than it may seem at first sight. In order to shed some light on this relationship, I distinguish between three levels of discourse on democracy. The first is the meta-­level, the level of worldviews. The second is the meso-­level, the level I roughly define as that of political theory. And then there is a third level, the micro-­level of politics, canvassing, elections, and coalitions. It is not always easy to distinguish which argument belongs to what level, but in general I hope these distinctions will be helpful in clarifying some of the complexities in the relationship between neo-­Calvinism and democracy.

I

I don’t think we have to pay a lot of attention to the notion that the neo-­Calvinist worldview is democratic. Neo-­Calvinists themselves have not been very hesitant on this issue. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) put it famously in the first of his Stone lectures that he delivered in 1898 in Miller Chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary:

Calvinism has derived from its fundamental relation to God a peculiar interpretation of man’s relation to man. . . . If Calvinism places our entire human life immediately before God, then it follows that all men or women, rich or poor, weak or strong, dull or talented, as creatures of God, and as lost sinners, have no claim whatsoever to lord over one another, and that we stand as equals before God, and consequently equal as man to man. . . . So Calvinism was bound to find its utterance in the democratic interpretation of life.¹

This qualification of the democratic nature of Calvinism was formulated in 1898, but it is already present in Kuyper’s early works. It has found its expression on the micro-­level of church organization and politics. This does not mean it has never been disputed, but supporters who disagreed on the democratic character of neo-­Calvinism (Ph. J. Hoedemaker) or in the implications of this character (A. F. De Savornin Lohman) sooner or later distanced themselves from this movement.

I won’t pay much attention to the micro-­level of the relationship between neo-­Calvinism and democracy, either. It is beyond doubt that the neo-­Calvinists were democratic in their policies. At about 1870 they presented themselves in Dutch politics with a demand for the same rights for all, thereby criticizing the underdeveloped democratic character of Dutch politics and the institutionalized dominance of the liberals. In 1871 Kuyper asked for political recognition of the different worldviews among the Dutch people and to make room not only for the liberal worldview, but for of all of them, In order to take away the root of bitterness, to clear the political atmosphere, and give to the Christian and to the catholic and to the liberal parts of the Dutch people the same domain and full freedom to develop. Then a battle of moral powers will take the place of factitious bickering that worries and harasses us without bringing the issue to a solution.² In 1872 Kuyper founded his political daily De Standaard, using it to inform people on political issues who did not yet have the right to vote. In 1879 the neo-­Calvinists founded the first political party in the Netherlands. By its practice of plurality and publicity the Antirevolutionary Party reached out to the people behind the voters and made a decisive step in developing Dutch democracy. This view is undisputed among historians.

But when we deal with democracy at the meso-­level and consider neo-­Calvinist political theory, then difficulties arise. When it comes to the use of the word democracy in this context, neo-­Calvinists have been hesitant. This needs a historical explanation.

II

France is the nation where the idea of democracy originated that dominated Dutch politics in the nineteenth century. Until the end of the eighteenth century authority in France was with the king, who had absolute power according to a droit divin. People suffered from this absolute power and felt restricted in their freedom. Philosophers reflected on the possibility of a different relationship of power and freedom in society, for example about the idea of a contract between individuals that would guarantee a certain degree of safety and freedom to each of them.

This was theory, but then in 1789 the French Revolution against the abuse of power occurred. A National Assembly took the lead. It implemented a constitution and the National Convention in 1792 put King Louis XVI (1754-1793) on trial for treason. He died on the guillotine, and an episode of the Terror followed. Abolishing absolute power is one thing; creating a new political system with checks on power is something else. In France the power shifted abruptly from the king to the people, which resulted in a time of chaos until one man, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), stood up and concluded that millions of citizens could not rule a country. Therefore he grabbed the executive power in the name of the people. In his function as French emperor he absorbed the sovereignty of the people. He was the nation, and as such he was godly, like God. From him came all authority, right, and justice, and whoever would offend him offended the nation. There was no freedom without Napoleon’s consent: no freedom of print and no freedom of association, whether in commerce, literature, or religion. In this way he restored order, unified the French nation, and ruled for some time most of Western Europe.

When in 1815 Europe defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, his political theory was not considered obsolete; on the contrary, it was copied, for example in the Netherlands. The Kingdom of the Netherlands had been created in 1813 after decades of French occupation, and the first Dutch king, William the First of Orange-­Nassau (1772-1843), intended to unify the nation and ruled in a Napoleonic way. This unification was a very welcome goal for many, because one of the main reasons the Dutch Republic had collapsed at the end of the eighteenth century was the very fact that the Republic had been so divided that federal power had become impotent. The Dutch constitution delegated almost all authority to the king. There was no freedom of press and in general there was no freedom outside of William the First, who, like Napoleon, absorbed the sovereignty of the people. The Netherlands had been liberated from French rule, but it implemented Napoleonic ideas.

Still, this implementation was mitigated in some ways. The liberals would take the lead in developing the political structure of the Dutch nation. Now that the monarch was bound to a constitution, their real challenge was to design this new kind of state. They had learned from the French Revolution that theories of the state could have disastrous consequences, so they were historically oriented and practical. But the liberals stuck to the idea that the state was the expression of the will of the people, and they supported the expansion of the state. The authority of the state was rooted more firmly than any theory of the divine rights of kings could ever have been.³

There was not much room for citizen political involvement under the constitution of 1814. Members of Parliament were elected indirectly by a small electorate, and the king could act independently of Parliament. This changed with the liberal constitution of 1848; in this constitution, freedom of press and freedom of association were embedded, and Parliament got a stronger position over against the king. Still, this did not mean that full democracy had arrived. The liberals were quite reluctant to grant the people direct political influence. They relied on rationality and free debate, and they did not trust the ability of the average Dutch citizen to argue in a reasonable way. They were also averse to religious elements in political debate. They defined Parliament as the place where reasonable men would debate in a reasonable way and come to reasonable decisions in favor of the public good. This meant that liberalism mainly appealed to the educated. Still, even if nothing like full democracy arrived with the 1848 constitution, it established a framework for democracy to emerge in later years.

III

It is against this background that the neo-­Calvinists’ understanding of democracy developed. I point to two defining historical moments. First, in the Dutch state of Napoleonic design, no association was allowed without the consent of the king. William I granted freedom of religion to existing churches, but new denominations had to apply for recognition. And all churches had to accept a church order designed by the government. When a group of orthodox believers organized themselves outside of the Reformed Church in the so-­called Secession of 1834, they came into conflict with the government. They did not apply for recognition of their church from the king for an obvious reason: one of their complaints was that the church had accepted a church order from the government that violated the Reformed church order. They expressly wanted to be independent of the king’s will. The small Seceder church did not fit with the ideals of the unified nation-­state of William I. The Seceders were fined, put into prison, and had soldiers quartered in their houses, but they did not give in. This situation lasted until the early 1840s and was the last instance of religious persecution in Dutch history.

From a democratic point of view, the Secession was a first sign in the Netherlands that the French ideal of the sovereignty of the people imposed uniformity in the public domain that violated the freedom of the people. The Seceders stated that the source of their freedom was not grounded in the constitution, nor in the King as executer of the will of the people, but in the Calvinist religion of election by grace. The certainty of their total dependence on God made these Seceders independent of the state.⁴ This experience from the first half of the nineteenth century made the next generation of neo-­Calvinists suspicious of the modern state’s defense of the liberties of the people.

The second historical moment was the implementation of the Constitution of 1848 in laws on primary education. At stake was the character of the public school. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) was the first political leader of the orthodox Christians in the Dutch parliament. He was the only significant opponent of the liberals. He claimed that the Netherlands was a Protestant nation and therefore its public institutions — for example, church and school — should be Protestant. Against him in Parliament was the liberal Jan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798-1872), the prime minister who had been the architect of the 1848 Constitution. Defending the separation of church and state, he favored a non-­religious public school. According to the constitution, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews were allowed to create their own free schools, but these schools would not be funded by public money. In short, Thorbecke defended the liberal character of the public domain, and Groen its Protestant character.⁵

Their conflict culminated in the parliamentary debates on a new law for primary education. In 1857 a law was adopted that excluded confessional religion from the public school. Parliament did this at a time when more than 95 percent of the population adhered to a confessional religion.⁶ Groen concluded that the liberties of the people could not be defended by parliamentary means and gave up his seat. At that time only 58 out of 3,422 primary schools were free Christian schools.⁷ What he did next was create and lead a free Christian school association (1860). Most Dutch citizens did not have the right to vote for Parliament at that time, but they did have the right to found free schools. If this Christian school movement would grow stronger, Groen reasoned, it might put pressure on Parliament to reconsider the law of 1857. In this way, a separate school system, financed with private money, developed alongside the public school system. This experience made the neo-­Calvinists suspicious of the uniform character of the public domain.

These were the two defining moments for the neo-­Calvinist idea of democracy: the defense of freedom of religion in a unified state, and the opposition to liberal hegemony in the public domain.

IV

It was clear that a non-­public alternative such as independent schools might avoid collisions with the liberal state, but would not end liberal hegemony. This is where Abraham Kuyper stepped in. In 1869 the Christian school association adopted his motion to call upon Christian parents to remove their children from the public school because of its anti-­Christian character. He had two reasons for this: he wanted to make the cause of Christian schools more urgent among parents, and he believed that Christians should not avoid but oppose the liberals.⁸

Kuyper’s intervention on behalf of the Christian schools led to a split in the association. Some members did not want to give up on the many Christians who sent their children to public schools, and they did not want the Dutch nation to be divided between Christians and non-­Christians. But Kuyper favored this divide, not just for tactical reasons, but because he believed that liberalism was in the end nothing but anti-­Christian. That is why he called himself antirevolutionary — in opposition, not just against this or that law, but against the French revolutionary spirit of the liberals that was embodied in the Dutch laws.

V

It was Kuyper, and before him Groen, who appealed to the parents and to the people behind the voters and made room for the democratic element in the neo-­Calvinist political movement. In the 1870s he organized public opinion, founded a political party, and presented a complete political alternative to liberal politics. But in all this, he hardly ever used the word democratic. A liberal commentator wrote about Groen that he belonged to those who were most averse toward democracy, but propagated it at the same time.⁹

Kuyper’s attitude toward the political concept of democracy was rather indifferent, as had been John Calvin’s.¹⁰ In 1874 he wrote, The issue is not whether the people rule or a king but whether both, when they rule, do so in recognition of Him. In the founding twenty-­one articles of the Antirevolutionary Party that he organized in 1879, Kuyper articulated no preference for any political system. In Article Six he accepted the present Dutch situation of the constitutional monarchy as fitting for the Netherlands.¹¹ But the word democracy is absent from these articles, and in his more than 1300 pages of commentary on them he hardly paid attention to the political concept of democracy.

To Kuyper the word democracy referred to authority, not to participation or representation. Who has the authority in a state to execute power, and what relationship obtains between institutions and citizens in regard to that authority? Neo-­Calvinism’s view of democracy was rooted in the notion of God’s sovereignty. Kuyper agreed that there was a contradiction in his argument that civic liberties were basically dependent on recognizing the absolute sovereignty of God.¹² But this contradiction was only apparent, or so he argued. Since God is the absolute sovereign, there is no natural sovereignty on earth: One creature cannot have authority over another unless God gives it.¹³ This goes for a family, as well as for a business or for a state. But this insight did not lead to a preference for a political democracy on principle. To God, Kuyper wrote, a democracy, as in America, is just as useful for his sovereign glory as is Russian absolutism.¹⁴

VI

Did Kuyper not speak out more