“Evangelicals In The Public Square” – A Continuing Book Discussion – Part 4
As yesterday, I would like to look at some pertinent quotations from the subject book with regards one of the other thinkers discussed – Abraham Kuyper. However, before getting to Kuyper, A brief note about the two others mentioned in the book, Francis Schaeffer and John Howard Yoder. The discussion regarding these latter two will not be examined here. Schaeffer was quite influential on me personally in many areas and ways and while he strongly and actively allied himself with the Moral Majority movement of the 1980's, his work was almost entirely philosophical – on this Budziszewski and I agree heartily. Schaeffer understood so much, but he just did not DO politics well. He would make a fascinating discussion, but in terms of "boots on the ground" politics, it is best to leave him at the war college.
Yoder is not about how to do politics, but about how not to do them. His writings were about a Christian call for political disengagement, founded in his deep and abiding Mennonite pacificism. His thought is strong in many corners of Evangelicalism, but such people are not going to be dealing with the issues this blog considers. Now, on to Kuyper.
Budziszewski's introduction:
A Dutch theological liberal would seem unlikely to become a major influence on conservative American evangelicals of the following century, but Abraham Kuyper was an unlikley sort of person. It was a shocking encounter with biblical faith of one of his parishioners that led him to rethink his theology and become an evangelical Calvinist. In subsequent years, he founded or helped organize a christian political party, A Christian university and Christian school movement, several Christian newspapaers and labor unions, and a Catholic-Protestant coalition, at the head of which he served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.
Kuyper's political thought reached American evangelicals through Dutch immigrants as well as through talks he gave int he United States, especially the celebrated L.P. Stone Foundation Lectrues at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1880. What Kuyper proposed was a principled pluralism….
Kuyper is hard to encapsulate in something like a blog post. He was a deep thinker who presented ideas in balance, seemingly stating two extremes that somewhat cancelled each other to create a harmonius, balanced position. The quotes I present here barely scratch the surface and further reading is strongly recommended. Calvin himself used government to enforce religious adherence, but as a Calvinist Kuyper felt this was not harmonious with Calvinistic thinking because after all, Calvin himself fractured the Roman Catholic church and its governmental strangelhold in the Reformation. Summarizes Budziszewski
The government must not give different legal standing to different churches but must honor "the complex of Christian churches as the multiform manifestation of the Church of Christ on earth."
Someone might object that the multiplicity of churches is beside the point, because every church but Calvin's is in error. In this case Kuyper accepts the premise but not the conclusion. First, one must discriminate according to the gravity of the error; the deviations of other churches are nothing as compared with rampant atheism.
Kuyper worked in government to "reChristianize" the Netherlands. This is something that is quite unAmerican, and Budziszewski successfully demonstrates that Kuyper's thought, when thoroughly considered, lead to the American idea as not only the best one, but the most Christian one. Budziszewski summarizes two Kuyperian principles:
(1) No citizen may be compelled to remain in a church that he considers mistaken, and (2) the different churches must be granted equal legal standing.
Budziszewski then uses the principles to show the error of Kuyper's attempts at reChristianization:
Kuyper is not trying to say Calvinism and Judaism should have the same legal standing because both are religions, whether in a decalogical or any other sense. What he is trying to say is the Calvinsim and Catholicism should have the same legal standing because both are manifestations of the church of Christ on earth. The problem is that if principle 1 is grounded in the common grace of conscience, then it is hard to see why principle 2 should not be grounded in it too. After all, if the state fuses itself with a religion that is at odds with its own, then my conscience is defiled whether I am compelled to belong to it or not; either way I am compelled to belong to the state, and the two are one. By this reasoning, we should prohibit not merely state churches but also state religions. It would be just as wrong to make an official church our of generic Christianity as it would to make on our of Calvinism – and it would be wrong from a Christian point of view.
It should be obvious that a candidate like Romney would have difficulty in Kuyper's Netherlands until the debate about whether Mormons are Christians was settled. Something that is probably not going to happen in our lifetimes. But as Budziszewski points out, this is not Kuyper's Netherlands and his own principles seem to dictate that the American approach is more truly reflective of God's grace. It should be remembered that in Europe, the Catholic/Protestant divide is a wide one ideed, as wide perhaps as the creedal Christian/Mormon divide is here. Rooted not just in theology, but in political dispute. (I refer here to the many community battles that erupted in the early days of the Mormon church) Given such parallels, Budziszewski's closing remarks on Kuyper are quite interesting:
Evangelicals can broaden and deepend their understanding of the plural sturcture of society; indeed, they already have. However, insofar as further progress depends on a broadening and deepening of dialogue with Catholics who are engaged in parallel enterprise, the greatest obstacle to progress is sectarian prejudice. The fact that so few evangelicals learn about Catholic social thought by reading orhtodox Catholic thinkers is a weariness and vexation of spirit. Most learn about it only from one another, with an occasional glance in the direction of Cathloic dissidents. This is not the way to hold a conversation. Pray God we learn to hold it differently.
The response to Budziszewski's comment on Kuyper is given by John Bolt. Bolt is quite the Kuyper scholar and in his book on Kuyper, he looks at Kuyper's travels in America, and the influence he picked up by reading Alexis de Tocqueville and makes the following proposition:
The future success of an American evangelical political philosophy depends on whether it is willing to affirm the providentially blessed reality of the American experiment in ordered liberty while successfully navigating the treacherous land mines of civil religion.
Drawing on De Tocuevile, Bolt says:
Tocqueville's arguement in Democracy in America is that religious faith is essential for the self-governing moral disposoition and habits required by a democratic society. Furthermore, the health of religion in America depends on the vitality of its voluntary associational character; in Ernst Troeltsch's terms, the sort of religion that is needed to sustain democracy must be sectarian.
A bit further on Bolt says:
In keeping with his anti-theocractic, anti-state-church perspective, Kuyper pleaded for ecclesial communities characterized by what he called "a free multiformity." Church reform, he insisted, was not to be achieved by repristining a past ideal national church unity, an approach that was nothing more than an effort "to restore an eccesiastical form that hs already proven unfit. Any new church formation, no matter what, should first of all completely purge away the curse of uniformity, which is the mother of lies."
One is forced to wonder what Kuyper would have said an written in today's Europe. A Europe where the battle lines are not Catholic/Protestant, but Christian/Islam. It would seem from his writing that in the modern Europe, he would not have lobbied for Islamic exclusion, at least as regards reasonable and non-violent Muslims, but would instead have tried to find a way to capture the vigor accorded to a multi-religious society. Such lies at the heart of Kuyper's political efforts. When one considers the open question of whether Mormons are Christians (this blog's position on that question having previously been made quite clear), one is forced to conclude Kuyper would have found a place for Mormons in his government.
Technorati Tags: Abrham Kuyper, Netherlands, John Calvin, political philosophy, Evangelicals, Mormons
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