When Religion Met God: Kuyper’s Second Lecture
Joshua Kellard continues our series introducing Abraham Kuyper’s influential 1898 Stone Lectures on Calvinism. Abraham Kuyper, as we saw in the last post, had an expansive view of what Calvinism was meant to be. Far more than a set of beliefs about salvation, it was a total worldview of its own, standing tall and providing compelling answers to life’s deepest questions. At the centre was its ‘mother principle’: the sovereignty of God over all things. Working from this axiom, it addressed every area of life with a God-centred program for renewal. A skilled vision-caster, Kuyper would use the rest of his Stone lectures to demonstrate the real difference that Calvinism could make in each area of life, and he began, quite understandably, with religion. In his second lecture, Kuyper set out to answer three basic questions: - What difference does Calvinism make in the sphere of religion? - What sort of Church organisation is encouraged by applying Calvinism? - How does Calvinism transform morality? We will briefly summarise Kuyper’s answers to these questions, thinking as we go about their relevance to us today. Religion: Of God, by God and For God Is religion primarily for people or for God? When Kuyper posed this question, Karl Marx had recently...