421 Richard J. Mouw Does Abraham Kuyper Need Introduction Any

book reviews 421 Richard J. Mouw The Challenges of Cultural Discipleship: Essays in the Line of Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 246 pp., us$20.00, isbn 9780802866981. Does Abraham Kuyper need introduction any longer? For years, anyone who wrote about him in the English-speaking world would preface that work with a line like ‘Abraham Kuyper was a Dutch pastor and public theologian who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.’ For roughly a century, Kuyper stood outside the mainstream of North American theology, little known apart from places like Grand Rapids and Sioux Center. If his theology has experienced a renaissance during the past two decades, this unlikely achievement owes a great deal to Richard Mouw. As President and Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Mouw has attempted for years to make Abraham Kuyper accessible to English-speaking Christians. Thus, if Kuyper has gone mainstream, Mouw deserves a great deal of the credit. Pitching Kuyper to twenty-first century theologians is no easy task. The act of interpretation requires an artful touch since the diversity of religious experience in contemporary North America challenges so many of the presuppo- sitions Kuyper made about his audience. As leader of a nondenominational, evangelical seminary, Mouw understands it is necessary to broaden Kuyper’s appeal by revising and sometimes correcting his underlying assumptions. The thirteen essays in this volume, published between 1989 and 2010, represent various attempts to articulate, defend, and update the Kuyperian project for theologians who do not share his Dutch inheritance. Mouw’s leadership of the flagship evangelical seminary in the United States has also made him acutely sensitive to the biblical grounding of Neo-Calvinism. The concept of sphere sovereignty is core to any form of Neo-Calvinism, but it also numbers among its most biblically challenged doctrines. Roughly speaking, Kuyper contended that existence is divided into “spheres”—such as the family, the church, and the state. These spheres are equally under the lordship of Christ and cannot be subsumed into one another without injury to their confession of that lordship. Kuyper’s claim that these spheres are sovereign had real world implications. Among other things, it informed his break with the state-supported Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) and his revision of Article 36 of the Belgic Confession. More than anything else, the concept of sphere sovereignty distinguishes Neo-Calvinism from classical Calvinism. But, as Mouw notes, for an idea of such magnitude, Kuyper failed to give sufficient justification or enumeration of the spheres. In a significant concession, Mouw writes, “we must explain as best we can why we are deeply © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15697312-00804009 422 book reviews convinced that all of this is, while surely a speculative exercise, the product of sanctified imaginations” (56). In other words, the spheres are not ‘built into’ the order of things. Rather than doubling down on a search for prototypical spheres in the Creation, Mouw sensibly suggests (using Herman Dooyeweerd’s terminology, if not necessarily his meaning) that we think of “modes” or “patterns” of differentiation. This move makes the concept of sphere sovereignty more flexible and adaptable to shifting cultural and historical circumstances—for instance, to a North America at once more diverse and more unitary than Kuyper’s Netherlands. Whereas Kuyper could reckon on the existence of societal “pillars” such as liberalism, socialism, Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, etc., no such pillars exist for us today. Instead, we live more fragmented, less cohesive existences. Kuyper regarded his task as liberating and bringing to political consciousness a “pillar” of orthodox Calvinists with a consistent worldview but without voice in the prevailing political system. By contrast, Kuyperians in North America face the challenge of fostering a consistent worldview among evangelicals with political voice but with lots of crisscrossing beliefs. Mouw advocates a strategy of “sphere repair and worldview nurturing” to counteract fragmentation and homogenization of the spheres. This strategy requires questioning a basic tenet of Kuyper’s theology. If the boundaries between the spheres of state, commerce, and the family have become porous, Kuyper’s advice would have been to reinforce them. Mouw, however, suggests another line of response. In the present context, for example, the Christian family is not so much troubled by state interference as confused about its own identity. In many cases, the spheres of commerce, entertainment, and the state (among others) have suffused the sphere of the family to the point that it has lost its self-understanding. The church becomes central to Mouw’s vision of Neo-Calvinism because it is the single institution capable of restoring collapsed spheres such as the family. After reading these essays, the question arises whether postmodernism is really a fallback of sorts to pre-modernism. In many ways, we are not suf- ficiently sophisticated to be Kuyperians. Undoubtedly, we’ve learned critical lessons about potential deformations of Neo-Calvinism—we are alive, for instance, to the threat of racial interpretations of sphere sovereignty as exempli- fied by Apartheid theology. But we lack the social infrastructure Kuyper pre- supposed. For Mouw, our task today is more fundamental than Kuyper’s: the church must foster the recrudescence of the spheres by holding forth the vision of a comprehensive Christian worldview in our fragmented world. Readers of Mouw’s popular works on Abraham Kuyper will experience a sense of deja-vu when reading several essays as he reuses anecdotes and exam- Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014) 409–437.

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