Abraham Kuyper and the Continuing Social Question
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Neo-Calvinism” Is an Expression Which Was First Used by Max Weber in His Contributions to the Sociology of Religion
Christian Social Thought in the Dutch Neo-Calvinist Tradition Bob Goudzwaard From: Walter Block and Irving Hexham (eds) Religion, Economics and Social Thought: Proceedings of an International Conference Vancouver, Fraser Institute 1986 pp. 251-279 (Chapter Seven). “Neo-Calvinism” is an expression which was first used by Max Weber in his contributions to the sociology of religion. He used it to describe the revival of the social and political teachings of John Calvin which took place, especially in the Netherlands, during the last part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The roots of that revival lie mainly in the so-called Réveil movement, which had its origin in the first half of the nineteenth century in Protestant - not only Calvinistic - circles in Switzerland. That movement stressed the significance of a living Christian faith: biblical studies, and prayer for the reformation of the Church and the renewal of society. The most important Dutch representative of that Réveil was Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801- 1876). Deeply influenced by German thinkers Von Haller and Julius Stahl, who were primarily within the Romantic tradition, Groen gradually developed his own approach to the social and political problems of his time, although he always remained a true “son of the Réveil!” His main published work was a major study of the spirit of the French Revolution, Unbelief and Revolution. He saw the Revolution and its ideals as the driving force behind the modern unbelief of his age. However, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) must be seen as the founding father of Dutch neo-Calvinism. -
Abraham Kuyper
abraham kuyper De Vrije Universiteit op weg naar de samenleving A. Kuyper (1837–1920) was van 1880 tot 1901 hoogleraar in de Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid en buitengewoon hoogleraar Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde in de Faculteit der Letteren. George Harinck Abraham Kuyper is zo’n twintig jaar actief geweest als hoogleraar van de Vrije Universiteit. In zijn geval kunnen we gerust zeggen: maar twintig jaar. Want als we deze periode vergelijken met de jaren dat hij mede leiding gaf aan de andere instituten waarvan hij als de voor- naamste architect kan worden aangemerkt, dan valt de korte duur van zijn universitaire betrekking op. De in 1892 gevormde Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland laat ik buiten beschouwing, ook al was hij een belangrijke vormgever van deze denominatie: formeel gaf hij er geen leiding aan. Maar zijn kerkelijk weekblad De Heraut redigeerde hij een halve eeuw, vanaf 1870 tot op zijn sterfbed in 1920. Van het antirevolu- tionaire dagblad De Standaard was hij bijna vijf decennia hoofdredac- teur, van 1872 tot 1919. Hij had, om het in zijn eigen woorden te zeggen, ‘een halve eeuw’ (vanaf 1869) leiding gegeven aan de antirevolutionai- re actie toen hij het voorzitterschap van de Antirevolutionaire Partij per 1 januari 1919 neerlegde. Kuypers kracht werd soms zijn zwakte: hij organiseerde, bond samen en dreef voort als geen ander en slaagde daarin beter dan wie ook, maar het leiderschap kreeg hem in de greep: hij kon de teugels niet of niet tijdig uit handen geven. En zelfs waar openlijk weerstand werd geboden tegen zijn leiding, zoals in de Antire- volutionaire Partij, bleef hij dwarsliggen en tegenspel bieden, zodat hij binnen zijn eigen partij eindigde als de opposant die hij aanvankelijk naar buiten toe was geweest — al ontbeerde hij inmiddels de kracht van de stormram die hij in zijn jonge jaren was. -
Kuyper and Apartheid: a Revisiting
Kuyper and Apartheid: A revisiting Patrick Baskwell (Brandon, Florida, USA)1 Research Associate: Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics University of Pretoria Abstract Was Abraham Kuyper, scholar, statesman, and university founder, the ideological father of Apartheid in South Africa? Many belief so. But, there are others, amongst them George Harinck of the Free University in Amsterdam, who don’t think so. The article argues that there is an element of truth in both opinions. Kuyper did exhibit the casual racism so characteristic of the Victorian era, with its emphasis on empire building and all that it entailed. Kuyper was also directly responsible, ideologically, for the social structure in the Netherlands known as “verzuiling” or “pillarization” in terms of which members of the Catholic, Protestant, or Socialist segments of society had their own social institutions. This pillarizing, or segmenting, of society was, however, always voluntary. This is not true of the pillarizing or segmenting of South African society known as Apartheid. While there are similarities between Apartheid and “verzuiling”, especially in their vertical partitioning of the individual’s entire life, the South African historical context, the mediation of Kuyper’s ideas through South African scholars, the total government involvement, and therefore, the involuntary nature of Apartheid, point to their inherent dissimilarity. Apartheid was simply not pure Kuyper. Hence, while the effects of Kuyper’s ideas are clearly discernable in Apartheid policy, the article aims at arguing that Kuyper cannot be considered the father of Apartheid in any direct way. 1. INTRODUCTION In a recent article, George Harinck, director of the Historisch Documentatiecentrum voor het Nederlands Protestantisme (1800-current) at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, describes the beginnings of his research for a book on Abraham Kuyper. -
Friday Evening Keynote Address Mark A
Friday Evening Keynote Address Mark A. Noll Journal of Markets & Morality Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring 2002), 137–156 Copyright © 2002 A Century of Christian Social Teaching: The Legacy of Leo XIII and Mark A. Noll Abraham Kuyper Wheaton College Looking back as we can now, at the end of the twentieth century, to the end of the nineteenth century, we are able to see much more clearly why the Christian social teachings of Abraham Kuyper and Leo XIII were themselves so insight- ful.1 It is not just that the pope’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 and the many other social encyclicals of his long and distinguished pontificate were words in sea- son from and for a Catholic Church wracked by more than thirty-five years of revolution, strife over dogma, Kulturkampf, and local Italian crises. Nor was it only that Abraham Kuyper’s great lecture in November 1891 on “The Social Problem and the Christian Religion” or his consideration of “Calvinism and Politics” in his 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton offered what was, for Protestants in the 1890s, that rarest combination of sensitivity to the dispos- sessed with fidelity to a confession. It was not only, to repeat, that these were timely interventions. They were also prescient pronouncements. Their address to current events contained foundational reasoning that has been profitably extrapolated during the century that followed and in conditions and circum- stances that no one in the 1890s could have foreseen. Of course, what Kuyper and the pope said was not flawless; each had his blindspots and his weak- nesses. -
Journal of Markets & Morality Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1998)– Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 2012)
Journal of Markets & Morality Vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1998)– index Vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2012) Journal of Markets & Morality Volume 15, Number 2 (Fall 2012): 571–572 Copyright © 2012 Comprehensive Contributors Index Contributors Index Journal of Markets and Morality Vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1998)– Introduction Vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2012) To commemorate the fifteenth year and thirtieth issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, the following index was conceived as a way to take a step back to survey what has been built upon a rather humble foundation. From its beginnings as a forum for scholarship and controversy on the morality of the marketplace, the Journal of Markets & Morality has grown to include symposiums on a variety of theological and social topics as well as translations of seminal works of early modern economics and law in our Scholia section and of important engagements between religion and society in the last two centuries in our Status Quaestionis section. We have had theme issues on a range of subjects from urban planning to economic personalism to modern Christian social thought. We entered the information age with online content and recently launched a new website with a searchable database of our archives, among other features. Taking back the scaf- folding of years of work and surveying the edifice hidden beneath has revealed an achievement that simultaneously humbles and evokes a sense of pride, but not a single wall of this building could have been built apart from the research, scholarship, and labor of our many contributors. This index, then, is especially a tribute to all those without whom the Journal of Markets & Morality could not be what it is today. -
Subsidiarily in Her/His Own Sphere. Women and Christian Politics1
< é Subsidiarily in her/his own sphere. Women and Christian politics1 Bruce C. Weame Honorary Research Associate in Sociology Monash University AUSTRALIA Email: [email protected]. edu.au Abstract Subsidiarity in her/his own sphere. Women and Christian politics This article is a discussion of the attitude of Christian social thought to women. In 1891 two influential Christian documents addressed this issue. Pope Leo XW's Rerum Novarum and Abraham Kuyper’s Het sociaale vraagstuk der Christelijke religie were responses to industrialization and subsequent Christian responses to feminism have had to face the legal, cultural and political aspects of the enhanced female participation in commerce which assumes equality for all consumers in the market-place. Catholic and Protestant political initiatives in Europe in the early 20th century, in line with these two approaches, assumed that the vocation of Christian women, inside and outside the domestic sphere, has to be that of a bulwark against materialism and liberalism. In line with this point o f view they helped to counter the domination of market-place values over all spheres of social life. These documents are also part o f latter-day efforts to reconsider women’s place. Female involvement in industry and public life around the world increases unabated as "affirmative action ” re-structures the public status of women. The ambiguous legacy of "economic rationalism " poses new threats since the burden of social welfare falls again onto the shoulders of overworked women. A sociological account which would be Christian must address historical, social and economic ambiguities. This article explores the issue, noting typical ways in which these two prominent Christian contributions will be interpreted. -
Herman Bavinck and Adolf Schlatter on The
Edinburgh Research Explorer Scientific Theology? Herman Bavinck and Adolf Schlatter on the Place of Theology in the University Citation for published version: Eglinton, J & Brautigam, M 2013, 'Scientific Theology? Herman Bavinck and Adolf Schlatter on the Place of Theology in the University', Journal of Reformed Theology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 27-50. https://doi.org/10.1163/15697312-12341275 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1163/15697312-12341275 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Journal of Reformed Theology Publisher Rights Statement: ©Eglinton, J., & Brautigam, M. (2013). Scientific Theology? Herman Bavinck and Adolf Schlatter on the Place of Theology in the University. Journal of Reformed Theology, 7(1), 27-50doi: 10.1163/15697312-12341275 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Journal -
Session I Abraham Kuyper and Reformed Social Teaching
Session I Abraham Kuyper and Reformed Peter S. Heslam James D. Bratt Social Teaching James C. Kennedy Journal of Markets & Morality Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring 2002), 11–33 Copyright © 2002 Prophet of a Third Way: The Shape of Kuyper’s Socio- Peter S. Heslam The London Institute for Political Vision Contemporary Christianity A century after Abraham Kuyper’s visit to the United States, the issue that dominated political discourse both in Northern Europe and in the United States was that of the so-called Third Way. This was reflected in a meeting that took place in Washington in the autumn of 1998 between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the serving governmental heads of the United Kingdom and the United States. It was a time of seemingly intractable crisis at the White House in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair, but the theme that pervaded the agenda of that meeting was that of a Third Way in politics, and it served to cement the Blair-Clinton relationship with bonds of solidarity. It even diverted the focus of media coverage of the United States president, which hitherto had been fixed on the unfolding scandal. Much debate ensured in the broadsheets as to what was meant by the term; was it a radical alternative to two opposing ideologies, one that bore no similarity to what it sought to replace? Or was it an amalgam of the best parts of each of them? Although Kuyper did not use the term, his sociopolitical vision was designed as a Third Way—an alterna- tive to the ideologies of individualism, on the one hand, and collectivism, on the other. -
Towards an Abrahamic Ecumenism? the Search for the Universality of the Divine Mystery
Van der Kooi Towards an Abrahamic Ecumenism? C. van der Kooi TOWARDS AN ABRAHAMIC ECUMENISM? THE SEARCH FOR THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE DIVINE MYSTERY ABSTRACT This contribution explores the notion of an Abrahamic ecumenism as proposed by Hans Küng and others in search for a way in which Islam, Judaism and Christianity can live peacefully together. It is argued, however, that to pursue a viable political pluralism, it is more promising for Christian theology to take into account the historical development of the image of God instead of an orientation on a common historical origin in Abraham. The elaboration of the universality of the divine mystery in history does not have to be won by going back to Abraham, but by going forward to Jesus Christ and by thinking of and living out of Him. 1. INTRODUCTION Before discussing the possibilities of an Abrahamic ecumenism, I wish to make a preliminary remark. This contribution is different from, for example, the book of Miroslav Volf, entitled Allah. Volf (2011:13) explicitly states that his book is an exercise in political theology and not in soteriology. His book is written in the shadow of 9/11 and the mutual fears and anxieties that this attack had elicited from different sides. Can Christians and Muslims live under one roof? Can Muslims support a theory of political pluralism and not merely a democracy? For this reason, Volf analyses God’s character according to what he calls normative Christian theology and according to normative Islam. He concludes that it should be possible to be a Prof. -
Government Schools Or Free Schools? Abraham Kuyper Addresses a Long-Standing Controversy in the Dutch Parliament
Government schools or Free schools? Abraham Kuyper addresses a long-standing controversy in the Dutch parliament Harry Van Dyke The Netherlands experienced a struggle for educational freedom between 1840 and 1920. Although this freedom was guaranteed in the Constitution of 1848, the ruling elite insisted for many decades that only public schools, which were operated by the government and consigned to religious neutrality, qualified for public funding. Private, religious schools were excluded. This meant that parents who used a private Christian school in fact paid double for the education of their children: first as taxpayers for the public school, and then for their own school. Christian parents in the lower classes thus faced a dilemma: either education for their children in the spirit of home and church, involving expensive tuition fees; or education in the religiously neutral public school, which was free of charge; or else no school attendance at all for their children (school attendance was not compulsory). A foremost champion of parity treatment of both types of schools was the journalist-theologian Dr. Abraham Kuyper. For many years he and his followers campaigned against the inequality, particularly since it jeopardized freedom of conscience. They challenged the claim that education could be religiously neutral. Kuyper spoke often about the issue, both as a member of parliament and from 1901 to 1905 as prime minister. He did that so eloquently that a selection of quotations from his parliamentary speeches is worth taking note of. The struggle was ultimately resolved when both public and private schools were accorded equal funding from the public treasury. -
Mackay Van Ophemert En Aanverwante Geslachten, 1370- 1968 (1994)
Nummer Toegang: 2.21.115 Inventaris van het archief van het geslacht Mackay van Ophemert en aanverwante geslachten, 1370- 1968 (1994) Versie: 15-08-2019 G.J.W. de Jongh Nationaal Archief, Den Haag 1967 This finding aid is written in Dutch. 2.21.115 Mackay van Ophemert 3 INHOUDSOPGAVE Beschrijving van het archief.....................................................................................13 Aanwijzingen voor de gebruiker...............................................................................................15 Openbaarheidsbeperkingen......................................................................................................15 Beperkingen aan het gebruik....................................................................................................15 Materiële beperkingen.............................................................................................................. 15 Aanvraaginstructie.....................................................................................................................15 Citeerinstructie.......................................................................................................................... 15 Archiefvorming.........................................................................................................................16 Geschiedenis van de archiefvormer..........................................................................................16 1. Het geslacht Mackay (van Ophemert)...............................................................................16 -
The Context of Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures
TBR 1 (2010): 4–24 The Context of Herman Bavinck’s Stone Lectures: Culture and Politics in 1908 James D. Bratt Dept. of History, Calvin College This essay explores the historical context in which Herman Bavinck delivered his Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1908.1 It takes off from a leading motif in the analysis that George Harinck made of Bavinck’s first trip to North America in 1892. That tour, Harinck found, was the start of Bavinck’s move “van buiten naar binnen,” from without to within,2 a move that would become increasingly characteristic of Bavinck’s approach to biblical hermeneutics, to theological reflection, and to the cultural commentary which he built out of both. The Philosophy of Revelation lectures, delivered on his second trip sixteen years later, registers the maturation of that approach and documents its time in that “from without to within” was the trademark of a revolution in elite culture that was underway across the North Atlantic world in the first decade of the twentieth century. This essay, therefore, aims to sound the reson- ances between that cultural movement and the Bavinck of the Stone Lectures—the resonances and the discord between the personal and the institutional, the parochial and the international. 1 Bavinck’s Stone Lectures were published simultaneously in Dutch, German, and English. For the English publication see Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation: The Stone Lectures for 1908–1909, Princeton Theological Seminary (New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longman, Greens, and Co., 1909). 2 Harinck lays out this analysis in his Introduction to a republication of Bavinck’s Mijne reis naar Amerika (Barneveld: De Vuurbaak, 1998).