Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), pastor, journalist, founder of the Free University of Amsterdam (1880) and of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, leader of the secession from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1886, and Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. The founder of Neo-Calvinism: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!” He edited the daily De Standaard and the weekly De Heraut, in which most of his devotional and theological books first appeared.
Works (13)
- Asleep in Jesus — Fifty-two meditations on the state of the believer who has died, each taken from a text of Scripture: the dead in Christ, their clothing, their service and rest before God, the judgment, and the resurrection. The foreword is dated The Hague, 29 October 1902. (54 notes)
- Calvinism, The Origin and Safeguard of Our Constitutional Liberties — The second of Kuyper’s articles on the Reformed roots of political liberty. It goes back from the Calvinistic troubles in England to the Huguenots of France, and compares Coligny’s plans and the Huguenot constitution with the Independents and, in outline, the American Constitution; it asks why the Calvinist principle of the separation of church and state was not carried through, and ends with Kuyper’s own programme for the Netherlands. (1 notes)
- Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology — The English version of the general part of Kuyper’s three-volume Encyclopaedie der Heilige Godgeleerdheid (1894). In three divisions Kuyper traces the name and idea of encyclopedia; sets out the organism of science, how sin has impaired it, and why regeneration produces two kinds of people and so two kinds of science; and then treats theology itself — its conception, its principium in the self-revelation of God and the Holy Scripture, its method, its organism and its history. (18 notes)
- His Decease at Jerusalem — Fifty meditations on the sufferings and death of Christ, from the decease He was to accomplish at Jerusalem, through Gethsemane, the trial, the cross and the burial, to the blood of Abel. The foreword is dated Amsterdam, November 1900. (52 notes)
- In the Shadow of Death — Forty-eight meditations, In de schaduwe des doods (1893), written for De Heraut first for others on whose way Kuyper saw that death had cast its shadow, and finished, as his preface says, after he had wept at the grave of a child of his own. They go from divine chastisement, the body and the physician, through the sick-bed, sleepless nights, the dying-bed and the last hour, to the widow, the grave, the seeing again of those who have died, and being “clothed upon”. Each meditation is headed by its text of Scripture. (50 notes)
- Keep Thy Solemn Feasts — Thirty-six meditations for the great days of the Christian year (Kuyper’s foreword is dated The Hague, 1 December 1903): nine for Christmas, nine for Easter, three for Ascension, six for Pentecost and nine for the Old and New Year. With a foreword by Kuyper and a translator’s preface on his life and work. (38 notes)
- Lectures on Calvinism — The L. P. Stone Lectures given at Princeton Theological Seminary in October 1898: Calvinism not as a church’s confession but as a life-system, and its bearing on religion, politics, science and art, and on the future. Kuyper’s account of sphere sovereignty is in the third lecture, and his doctrine of common grace in the fourth. (6 notes)
- The Antithesis between Symbolism and Revelation — A lecture Kuyper gave to the Historical Presbyterian Society in Philadelphia, on the Stone Lectures trip of 1898: the ritualism that was drawing the children of English non-conformists back to the episcopalian services and now threatened Calvinist church life. Symbolism, he argues, replaces revelation and falls back from conscious to unconscious religion, while Calvinism puts the Word first and allows only such forms of worship as echo it; he closes with a test for telling the harmful influence of the symbolical from a right love of liturgical reform. The Dutch version appeared in De Heraut in December 1898. (1 notes)
- The Biblical Criticism of the Present Day — Kuyper’s rectorial address at the Free University of Amsterdam. He argues that the biblical criticism of his day, as it is practised at almost every Protestant university on the continent, is destructive of the best interests of the church: it tears the parts of theology out of their relation, robs the church of the Holy Scriptures, and destroys her liberty in Christ. The second part (Article IV) answers the question whether there is no good at all in the critics’ labour, and closes with an appeal to the younger theologians. (2 notes)
- The South-African Crisis — Kuyper’s essay on the origins of the Boer War, first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1900 and dated Amsterdam, 15 January 1900. Writing as a Dutch statesman and Calvinist who had long admired Britain, he argues from the history of the Cape and the Transvaal that the British Government was wrong to settle its quarrel with the South African republics by force rather than by arbitration. (2 notes)
- The Work of the Holy Spirit — Het Werk van den Heiligen Geest (1888): the work of the Spirit in creation and re-creation, in Scripture, the incarnation and the Church, and then in the individual — regeneration, calling, justification, faith, sanctification, love and prayer. (126 notes)
- To Be Near Unto God — Nabij God te zijn: one hundred and ten meditations, written week by week for De Heraut, on Psalm 73:28 — “It is good for me to draw near to God.” (110 notes)
- When Thou Sittest in Thine House — Fifty-eight meditations on the Christian household: the family’s place in God’s creation, husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the home’s work, money and trouble, sickness and old age, the family’s dead, and the generations. The foreword is dated Amsterdam, 1 July 1899. (60 notes)