1. PSYCHOANALYZING ABRAHAM KUYPER

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Kuyper, Dr. James D. Bratt of the Calvin College History Department, (author of the book, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America) devotes two special articles in the October and November, 1987 Reformed Journals to a treatment of his life, the first to his public career, and the second to his private life. Both indicate a great deal of historical research and a close acquaintance with the subject, but it is the evaluation and interpretation given to the mass of detail that invites our attention.

Kuyper, the thinker and scholar, some of whose ideas still get attention among us, was constantly compelled to devote much of his time and effort to dealing with the practical problems of an enormously diverse career of leading a movement. “Put simply, Kuyper’s ideas emerged in the process of identifying, organizing and pushing a grassroots constituency to action.” The survey of his career becomes a comparison of his role in his own time and circumstances with those of Jerry Falwell and Martin Luther King—colorful preachers getting into politics and leading minority movements. Then the article becomes a briefer comparison with the ephemeral role of Jimmy Carter, and the longer and more extensive one of Grover Cleveland. Thus Kuyper’s career is sketched, “indelibly a 19th century man who came to office as the Netherlands’ first 20th century premier.”

The second article deals with Kuyper’s private life, focussing attention on his nervous breakdowns. “Why did this man who spoke, like the Master he served with authority, who was sure he knew the will of God and was quick to declare it on every issue under the sun–why did he collapse so utterly that people worried about his future -and not once but three times?” His first collapse occurred at 21 years after 8 months of strenuous and successful effort in a nation-wide essay contest. His second occurred after years of increasingly strenuous struggle in a movement for church reform which pitted him against the more compromising policies of his pastor-father, for “a Calvinistic system built from unshakable principles by hard logic into a complete edifice.” “One need not be a sworn psychohistorian . . . to recognize that Kuyper’s church battles involved, among other things, the redemption of a tarnished Mother (here evidently ‘Motherchurch’) and the exorcism of his father . . . .” Kuyper found a substitute father in G. Groen van Prinsterer, head of the confessionally Reformed. Thus he became involved in a campaign that led him as Amsterdam preacher, newspaper editor and member of parliament to his second breakdown in 1784 at age 37. His further career was full of struggle, and overwork which brought another breakdown. The writer sketches the way “the personal mirrored a cultural problem.” In the undermining of all kinds of traditional authorities across Europe many were obsessed with maintaining order. “The duty fell to . . . thinkers and movers who could construct the one big system that would put things back in place,” making those who tried “prone to messianism and mortification, to extreme but finally unavailing labor and subsequent collapse.”

The author compares the breakdowns of Kuyper with those of Max Weber and William James, observing that they all shared the common trait that “behind their fathers stood stout Calvinistic grandfathers and a tradition the grandsons knew well.” A concluding paragraph observes that “Kuyper’s career surely highlights once more the paradoxes of Calvinism-a system that begins with the inscrutable sovereignty of God and ends in the enforceable clarity of law; that starts out denying and ends up magnifying human agency; that warns of human depravity, yet can feed all ambition. These tensions must end in (self) destruction or in a self-deprecating humor that echoes the laughter from heaven. As ‘the tribune of his people,’ Kuyper did not allow that much in public. But in retirement he could do better. When asked how he knew he had done God’s work, Kuyper replied, ‘When you’ve done it as long as I have, you can’t be sure anymore.’”

How shall we appraise this anniversary portrayal of Abraham Kuyper? Does it show familiarity with Kuyper’s career and shed light on some unfamiliar aspects of his life? Indeed it does. Is it a fair evaluation of Kuyper? It exemplifies the efforts of many later historians to interpret history in the light of abnormal psychology. Stated more bluntly, to the eyes of our secular age, anybody who will work or fight for anything as stupid as religion has to be some kind of nut! Although this is contemporary, it is, of course, not new. Governor Festus said to the Apostle Paul, “You are out of your mind! Great learning is driving you mad” (Acts 26:24). To that Paul had to reply that even King Agrippa knew better. Understandable as that kind of evaluation is in an ancient or contemporary pagan, could we not expect better from a Calvin historian?

Historian Bratt devotes more than a page to the multitude of parallels he discovers between the lives of Abraham Kuyper and Martin Luther King (much closer than between Kuyper’s and Falwell’s). In the November 1987 Banner of Truth Geoffrey Thomas reviews David Garrow’s 1986 800-page biography of Martin Luther King, Bearing the Cross. He observes that “The picture that emerges is not an attractive one and scarcely one of the life of a Christian minister.” “Martin Luther King’s double standards in sexual morality, and subsequent and related dark depressions that characterized the final years of his life are some of the revelations of this book. They have been the stuff of rumor for many years but Garrow has interviewed all those involved in the so-called Southern Christian Leadership Conference and built up this picture of a man who from student days was attracted to women. There were three particular relationships which were more than brief, one of these lasting for almost two years. Of that liaison Morrow writes: “‘That relationship, rather than his marriage increasingly became the center place of his life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings that were a commonplace.of King’s travels.’ King’s double-mindedness caused him to be guilt-ridden, depressed and obsessed with the spectre of his death. At one five-day retreat he told Joan Baez, after a couple of whiskies, that he was sick of everything and just wanted to be a preacher. But preach what? He said:

‘People expect me to have answers and I don’t have any answers. I don’t feel like speaking to people. I don’t have anything to tell them’ . . . . With his enormous potential to be a leader and preacher of Jesus Christ, King turned his back on all of that to guide his people into the wilderness of political action where he deserted them and where so many of them forlornly wander until today. We must be thankful that black American ministers are beginning to preach again the whole counsel of God unintimidated by the humanist pressures to preach another gospel. The betrayal of the black pulpit in America is King’s legacy.” Bratt, determined to see only psychological parallels, ignores all this, glossing over the difference between the two men with only the incidental remark that “Kuyper’s ego tended to abuse male rivals; King’s, female subordinates.” The enormous religious difference between the two, Bratt flatly denies: “Nor should aspersions about the Christianity of King‘s vision be quickly granted.” “. . . King’s was as fundamentally an interpretation of the gospel as was Kuyper’s.” Thus, to Calvin’s secular historian, the difference between believing and struggling for the Biblical gospel and rejecting it is of no consequence!

2. EVALUATING FRANCIS SCHAEFFER

Another Calvin College historian, Ronald A. Wells, contributes a 21page essay to the 1986 Zondervan book, Reflections on Francis Schaeffer, edited by Ronald W. Ruegsegger. Of interest here are not so much Wells’ analyses of the broad-stroke and often imprecise and not well-documented talks of Schaeffer, as his own views on the subject of Calvinism. He saw one of Schaeffer’s later books, A Christian Manifesto, as reflecting his acceptance of the notion of “the antithesis,” a necessary struggle between “those who ‘stand fast’ for the truth . . .  and those who accommodate to ‘the world.’” Although his call “for a return to Christian foundations” is “in a venerable tradition of Calvinist writing.” Wells regards his “antithesis” as false, because it does not reckon with the “pluralism” that has fro m the beginning characterized America. “No doubt Schaeffer is quite correct in suggesting that cultural pluralism has become the norm of American society . . . a society in which no norm of one religious or ethnic group may be imposed on another.” Schaeffer objects, “Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. . . . There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference.” “But, one asks, what is the alternative in a democratic society? Does Schaeffer mean that . . . Christians should enforce their views by ‘law’ if people will not accept Christian belief and behavior by choice?” “This tendency to promote one’s own view by ‘law’ has always been the dangerous part of Calvinism: one sees Calvinists in power as triumphal and dictatorial. Whether in Calvin’s Geneva, Knox’s Edinburgh, Cromwell’s London and Dublin, Winthrop’s Boston, or in our own time, Vorster’s Pretoria and Paisley’s Belfast, Calvinists in power have wielded that power oppressively. Without doubt the above-named Calvinists thought they were doing God’s service-restoring God’s law-when they did their (in my view) intolerable, even heinous acts of repression” (p.137).

Schaeffer felt that with the legalization of abortion in our society, secularization had gone so far that a Christian must oppose the whole movement. But Wells raised the question, “Can modernization be opposed or its processes stopped?” He is convinced that they cannot. Schaeffer was only “half-right” in seeing the change as one in the system of thinking; it was every bit as much the product of the change in society. “Evangelical Protestants, who typically have had a trivial view of evil, believe they have an answer. If they were to ‘preach the gospel,’ people would be ‘saved’ and, since evil resides essentially in the human heart not in social structures, social evils can be eradicated when people ‘turn to the Lord.’ More thoughtful evangelicals, like Francis Schaeffer . . . realize that the gospel needs to be articulated into the social order.”

“Christians really have only two options: to work within (modernity) . . . and . . . effect some accommodations to it, or to oppose it on every level.” Wells sees “liberal (mainline) Protestantism” as generally choosing the first of these, that of accommodation, while “Fundamentalists . . . final the modern world view unacceptable as much in socio-political as in religio-moral terms.” He sees evangelicals since 1945 wavering between Fundamentalist militancy and semblances of modernist accommodation. They are compelled to adjust themselves to the situation “in order to make their message comprehensible to modern people,” thereby losing the energy to sustain their movement over time. “On the other hand . . . they will be unable to keep their movement pure enough to survive if they choose the route of resistance,” since he cannot see how they can stand against “modernity’s most powerful agents: universities, the professions, upper social classes, and urban lifestyle.”

TODAY’S CHRISTIAN COURSE

Although we may notice some difference in temper between these two essays, what is unmistakable in both of them is their capitulation to modern society and their rejection of Calvinism as hopelessly out of date. Both, despite their wide acquaintance with the history, seem oblivious to what necessarily distinguished Christians, not only leaders like Paul, Calvin and Kuyper, but their hosts of followers as well, from the non-Christian world, and inspired, drove and sustained them in the Christian testimony that “turned the (pagan) world upside down” (Acts 17:6). As I observed in a November Outlook article (“How to Lose the Gospel.”), God after the Fall introduced “the antithesis” of a continuing conflict between Himself and the devil (Gen. 3:15). Although U.S. colonial beginnings were not as uniformly Christian as some like to think, to reject the Biblical antithesis because it is contrary to current U.S. “pluralistic” political theory, puts us on the side of the anti-christian secularists who try to outlaw all recognition of God and His laws from public life. Today’s sophisticated academic advice to “accommodate” a world that more and more explicitly rejects every semblance of Christian faith or morals is the exact opposite of the Biblical injunction, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2). This secularist advice ignores the gospel‘s call to all Christians to “contend for the faith” in this world and its assurance that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us” (Rom. 8:37).

The book of Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, has shaken our academic world by showing how current educational policy has been destroying our ability to think coherently. Near the end of his book (p. 374) Bloom observes that “One can most clearly see (the current lack of interest in truth) in the case of the Bible.” “It is subjected to modern ‘scientific’ analysis, called Higher Criticism, where it is dismantled to show how ‘sacred’ books are put together, and that they are not what they claim to be.” Or it is used “as one expression of the need for the ‘sacred’ and as a contribution to the very modern, very scientific study of the structure of’myths.” Thus he sees the prejudiced refusal to even consider its claim as Revelation. Bloom is not a Christian and his proposed correction (a broader, less ideologically stunted, classical education) is inadequate, but he has seen more clearly than some Christians do how misguided and destructive the current academic course is.

Our college was established and still appeals for support to equip young people for Christian service in the world. What kind of preparation and encouragement are they receiving for such careers by having all who have lived and still live such committed lives as Calvin, Kuyper and Schaeffer caricatured as misguided fanatics?

Many years ago a first-year Calvin student asked my opinion of the comments of a history professor, that the Council of Nicea, under the authority of a still half–pagan emperor and dominated by men more politicians than Christian theologians, was far less significant than we bad been taught to believe. I had to concede the validity of some of the critical remarks. But had the professor also shown how out of this political mess bad emerged Athanasius? That remarkable man was for 46 years a bishop, 5 times exiled and a fugitive for a total of 20 years. In spite of all the political and religious authorities who (accommodating to changing times) surrendered to the denial of the deity of Christ and who threatened his life innumerable times, he so adamantly refused to compromise this truth that the saying, “Athanasius against the world” became proverbial. Even the skeptic, Gibbon, in his many-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was moved to write some of his most extravagant prose in admiration of that church father. And, despite all of the political chicancery, Atbanasius’ confession of Christ’s diety, so long maintained against apparently hopeless odds, was vindicated as the orthodox teaching of the church. This story the student had not heard!

Gibbon saw the thrilling story (as some Christian historian apparently didn‘t), but Gibbon still misinterpreted it, attributing it to the extraordinary character of Athanasius. Athanasius knew better. It was not the genius of Athanasius that produced the doctrine, but the Word and Spirit of God that called and sustained Athanasius in his lonely, but finally triumphant confession to God’s truth. The same observation applies to Paul, Calvin, Kuyper and hosts of others. If and as long as we let the secularist unbelieving modern mind control everything we study and say, we will always misread our history, betray our faith and sabotage our cause.

We must open our Bibles and learn again that every Christian is called to the most difficult, but also the most wonderful and most rewarding enterprise in the world, full of promise for “the life that now is and that which is to come.” That is what, page after page, fills Paul’s Christian testimony, and will be endlessly repeated in the life of every believer who shares in the same taxing but triumphant business. We must prayerfully get on with it and not let “modern secular scientific” historians (to use the phrase of a state university professor) keep us from even discovering it.