Pro Rege
Volume XXXVII, Number 3
March 2009
Features
Is Neo-Calvinism Calvinist?
A Neo-Calvinist Engagement of Calvin’s “Two Kingdoms” Doctrine
Jason Lief
The Two-Kingdom Doctrine:
A Comparative Study of Martin Luther and Abraham Kuyper
Timothy P. Palmer
Our Academic Tasks and the Cosmic Gospel Economy:
What difference does being a Christian make in the study of the
Krebs cycle?
Tim Morris
Reverence, Mystery, and Christian Education
James C. Schaap
Book Reviews
Stanley Hauerwas:
The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God
Reviewed by Jason Lief
Marilynne Robinson:
Home
Reviewed by David Schelhaas
Stephen Gaukroger:
The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity
Reviewed by Keith C. Sewell
A quarterly faculty publication of
Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa
Pro Rege
Pro Rege is a quarterly publication of the faculty of Dordt College. As its name
indicates (a Latin phrase meaning “for the King”), the purpose of this journal is to
proclaim Christ’s kingship over the sphere of education and scholarship. By exploring
topics relevant to Reformed Christian education, it seeks to inform the Christian
community regarding Dordt’s continuing response to its educational task.
Editorial Board
Mary Dengler, Editor
Sherri B. Lantinga, Review Editor
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ISSN 0276-4830
Copyright, March 2009
Pro Rege, Dordt College
Is Neo-Calvinism Calvinist?
A Neo-Calvinist Engagement of
Calvin’s “Two Kingdoms” Doctrine1
by Jason Lief
I
n his article “The Two Kingdoms: A
Reassessment of the Transformationist Calvin,”
David VanDrunen challenges the neo-Calvinist
interpretation of Calvin’s eschatology, specifically
regarding the “two kingdoms” doctrine.2 The
neo-Calvinist expression of this doctrine in the
terms of “antithesis” provides the eschatological
framework for the engagement of culture in the
context of the struggle between the kingdom
of God and the kingdom of the devil.3 In this
context Christ’s death and resurrection represent
Jason Lief is Instructor of Theology and Youth Ministry
at Dordt College.
the climactic victory of God, which inaugurates
the redemption and restoration of creation.
The problem, according to VanDrunen, is that
this perspective misinterprets and badly distorts
Calvin’s position. He argues that Calvin believed
that the two kingdoms, the spiritual and temporal,
are distinctly separate from each other, with
different functions and government. The spiritual
kingdom—as the realm of the gospel, redemption,
and eternal life—is governed by Christ through
the Church and is concerned with the future,
heavenly life to come. Corporeal, or creational, life
is relegated to the temporal or civil kingdom. In
this sphere, God directs and rules through natural
law, reason, and civil government. According to
VanDrunen, the spiritual kingdom of Christ has
nothing to do with this realm. He writes, “Calvin
makes a categorical distinction between the church
and the rest of life, and identifies the kingdom of
Christ and the promise of redemption only with
the former.”4
A primary focus of VanDrunen’s argument
is Calvin’s insistence that the two realms remain
separate. He writes, “Against the attempt to apply
redemptive categories in approaching cultural
issues, Calvin disallows the gospel, in which the
message of redemption lies, from being applied
to the civil kingdom.”5 The underlying theological
basis for this separation is the protestant
understanding of justification. Salvation “by
grace through faith” means that the saving work
of the gospel can only be properly assigned to the
spiritual realm. Our work in the temporal realm is
Pro Rege—March 2009
1
not redemptive or restorative; it is a response of
gratitude to God as we live holy lives of obedience.
VanDrunen believes that the neo-Calvinist
position disregards this separation, encroaching
upon a form of “works righteousness” by calling
for the transformation of creational structures
and cultural life in the name of Jesus Christ.
VanDrunen demonstrates how Calvin insisted
upon maintaining the distinctions between the two
realms. He points out Calvin’s dualistic language,
not only with regard to the two kingdoms but
also in reference to the human person, reminding
us that Calvin describes this earthly, temporal
life in harsh, negative terms, in contrast to the
future, eschatological hope of the life to come.6
So is VanDrunen correct? Have neo-Calvinists
misrepresented Calvin’s eschatology, specifically
his “two kingdoms” motif, in calling for the
transformation of creational life in the context of
Christ’s redemptive work?
The purpose of this essay is to address the
relationship between Calvin’s two-kingdoms
perspective and the neo-Calvinist7 understanding
of eschatology. Beginning with a discussion of
Calvin’s “two kingdoms” motif, set in the context
of Calvin’s theology, this paper will demonstrate
that the neo-Calvinist perspective does reflect
the eschatological thought of John Calvin’s “two
kingdoms” doctrine.
What does Calvin mean by “two kingdoms”?
The two-kingdoms doctrine of both Luther and
Calvin is a modification of Augustine’s two-cities
perspective, which emphasizes the confrontation
between the city of God and city of man (or
of the devil). In his book The Political thought of
Martin Luther, W.D.J. Cargill Thompson explains
Luther’s two kingdoms perspective, differentiating
between his use of the term “kingdom” and
“regiment.”8 While the term “kingdom” focuses
on the apocalyptic struggle between the kingdom
of God and the kingdom of the devil, there are
two regiments—the spiritual and the temporal9—
within each kingdom. Each regiment is governed
differently and corresponds to different aspects
of human life. The spiritual regiment governs
the life of faith, grace, and salvation through the
church, while the temporal regiment regulates
2
Pro Rege—March 2009
corporeal life through reason, natural law, and
civil authority. Differentiating between these
two regiments demonstrates that the spiritual
and temporal regiments are not in opposition to
each other. While the distinction between them
must be maintained, both are used by God in the
struggle against the kingdom of the devil.10
While the focus of Thompson’s work is
Luther’s perspective, Calvin also differentiates
between “kingdom” and “regiment.”11 He
maintains the struggle between the kingdom of
God and the kingdom of the devil, emphasizing
the victory of God in the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ.12 Less apocalyptic than Luther’s
perspective, Calvin is more concerned with the
means by which we participate in the benefits of
Christ’s atoning work.13 In this context, Calvin
focuses more on the role of the two regiments
within the kingdom of God as the means for
bringing restoration and order in preparation for
the future eschatological blessing.14
This role leads to a few important questions:
How does Calvin understand the relationship
between the two regiments? More specifically,
how do both regiments relate to the biblical
proclamation of Christ’s lordship, not just over
the church but over all creation? If Calvin’s twokingdoms doctrine is examined within the context
of his theological understanding of anthropology
and Christology, we gain important insight
regarding the answers to these questions.
Calvin’s Anthropology
Calvin speaks of the human person using
body/ soul categories, even going so far as to refer
to the soul as the higher, or nobler, part.15 While
this view suggests the influence of neo-Platonic
thought, we must be careful not to over-estimate
the influence of Plato on Calvin with regard to
this issue.16 Given his historical and theological
context, Calvin inherits a manner of speaking
about the human person that undoubtedly
reflects the influence of Greek philosophy.
These categories are also found in many of the
creedal and confessional statements affirmed by
the Reformed tradition, namely the Heidelberg
Catechism and the Belgic confession. However, in
Man: The Image of God, G.C Berkouwer emphasizes
that the use of such language does not necessarily
represent a dualistic understanding of the human
person. He writes,
The decisive question here is whether the confessions in their use of anthropological concepts intend and mean thereby to give positive statements
on the composition of man, or whether they make
use of these concepts (as does Scripture) in a very
free and imprecise manner, intending by means of
them to refer to the whole man. There is a great
difference between non-scientific references to a
dual aspect of human nature and a thesis that man
is composed of two substances, body and soul.17
While his writings may be a more “scientific”
treatment than the confessions regarding the nature
of humanity in relation to God, I believe that
Beginning with a discussion
of Calvin’s “two kingdoms”
motif, set in the context
of Calvin’s theology, this
paper will demonstrate
that the neo-Calvinist
perspective does reflect
the eschatological thought
of John Calvin’s “two
kingdoms” doctrine.
Berkouwer’s statement applies to Calvin’s thought
as well. Calvin’s use of body/soul categories does
reflect neo-Platonic influence; however, a closer
examination reveals a Biblical anthropology that
emphasizes the unity of the human person, which
can be seen in his understanding of the body/soul
relationship.18
Calvin’s description of the soul as the seat of
the image of God in humanity must be understood
in the context of his understanding of the soul’s
relationship with the body. He writes, “And though
the primary seat of the divine image was in the
mind and the heart, or in the soul and its powers,
there was no part even of the body in which some
rays of glory did not shine.”19 Taking this further,
Calvin believed that the soul, as the image of God
in humanity, gives the body life and direction.
Again, he writes, “Moreover, having already shown
from Scripture that the substance of the soul is
incorporeal, we must now add…[that] it however
occupies the body as a kind of habitation, not only
animating all of its parts, and rendering the organs
fit and useful for their actions, but also holding
the first place in regulating the conduct.”20 While
Calvin makes a clear distinction between body and
soul, refusing to identify the body with the image
of God, his understanding of the human person
is fundamentally an inter-related unity of body
and soul.
More problematic is Calvin’s reference to the
body as a “prison” and to this temporal life as a
“pilgrimage.”21 Such language seems to suggest a
negative, possibly Platonic, understanding of the
body and temporal life. In her essay “Theology,
Anthropology, and the Human Body,” Margaret
Miles examines this issue, focusing upon Calvin’s
negative use of the term “flesh”:
In the fallen condition of human being, the body
shares with the rest of creation in bearing “part
of the punishment’” by its participation in a world
in which the whole order of nature has been confused, but Calvin is careful to emphasize that “the
offense is not with the work itself but with the corruption of the work” (2.1.11). The body plays no
role, for Calvin, either in the corruption of the soul
or in its own corruption, but is the helpless victim,
along with the soul, of the destructive hegemony
of “flesh.”22
Miles argues that Calvin understood the problem
of “flesh,” not as bodily or cultural existence
but as life in the fallen condition.23 Thus, when
Calvin speaks of the body as a “prison,” or when
he refers to temporal life as a “pilgrimage,” he
is speaking to the fallen condition of humanity,
which he also describes as life lived “under the
cross.”24 Therefore, redemption in Christ does
not negate the temporal, cultural life; rather,
redemption in Christ addresses the curse of sin
Pro Rege—March 2009
3
and its effects on temporal life.
Calvin believes that the work of God in Jesus
Christ forms “us anew in the image of God” so that
humanity might receive the “quickening Spirit,”
which brings regeneration and “renovation.”25
This renovation occurs through unification with
Christ by faith, through which the image of God is
restored and renewed in humanity. However, this
renovation is not for the soul alone. Just as the
soul gives life to the body, so too the “quickening”
of the soul leads to the quickening of the body.26
Miles writes, “Because of the operation of the
Spirit of Christ within the human spirit and body,
not only is the human mind quickened, but the
body is also vivified. Becoming ‘one body with
him,’ the Christian, being made a partaker in
his substance, ‘feels the result of this fact in the
participation of all his blessings’—an embodied
experience.”27 Just as Calvin’s understanding of the
body/soul relationship is of a holistically created
human person, so too redemption in Jesus Christ
is not just the salvation of the soul but affects the
entire human person.
Christology
Interestingly, Calvin connects his understanding
of the human person with his Christology by
using the body/soul relationship as an analogy for
properly understanding the relationship between
the two natures of Christ. He writes,
For we maintain, that the divinity was so conjoined and united with the humanity, that the entire properties of each nature remain entire, and
yet the two natures constitute only one Christ. If,
in human affairs, anything analogous to this great
mystery can be found, the most apposite similitude seems to be that of man, who obviously consists of two substances, neither of which, however,
is to be intermingled with the other as that both
do not retain their own properties.28
Just as the human person consists of a unified
body and soul, Calvin believed that the person
of Jesus Christ consists of the unification of a
divine and human nature, with each maintaining
its distinct characteristics without confusion. In
the spirit of Chalcedon, Calvin is concerned that
the divine essence of Christ not be diminished,
4
Pro Rege—March 2009
while still maintaining the reality of his human
nature.29 Calvin’s Christological emphasis is
fundamentally concerned with soteriology, namely
the perfect atoning work of Christ. In the perfect
humanity of Jesus Christ, God accomplishes what
fallen humanity could not.30 Because of the fall,
humanity cannot be saved by our own works, done
in the corporeal, temporal realm. Only through
the perfect obedience of Christ is grace merited,
and only through unification by faith is grace
appropriated.31 Thus, for Calvin, justification
by faith means appropriating the grace made
possible only through the work of Christ. This
grace is available only in the “spiritual” realm,
through the preaching of the Word and the
sacraments, because it is solely the work of God.
While justification can never be achieved through
works within the temporal realm, the effect of
grace, “sanctification,” does address the realm of
creational life through the transforming power of
the Spirit. 32
Within Calvin’s Christology we see the
outworking of his soteriology, specifically God’s
work on behalf of humanity (justification), and
humanity’s obedient response (sanctification).
While the distinction between justification and
sanctification is essential in Calvin’s understanding
of soteriology, he believed that they are two
inseparable parts of a unified whole. Calvin writes,
“The whole may be thus summed up: Christ given
to us by the kindness of God is apprehended and
possessed by faith, by means of which we obtain in
particular a twofold benefit: first, being reconciled by
the righteousness of Christ, God becomes, instead
of a judge, an indulgent Father; and, secondly,
being sanctified by his Spirit, we aspire to integrity
and purity of life.”33 For Calvin, the “spiritual”
benefit of Christ’s work restores our love for God,
which then manifests itself in temporal life as we
love our neighbor. He writes, “There cannot be
a surer rule, nor a stronger exhortation to the
observance of it, than when we are taught that
all the endowments which we possess are divine
deposits entrusted to us for the very purpose of
being distributed for the good of our neighbor.”34
Thus, the two spheres of human life—love of
God (spiritual) and love of neighbor (temporal)—
are inseparably bound together. Commenting
on Jesus’ summary of the law, he writes, “On the
other hand, the love of God cannot reign without
breeding a brotherly affection among men.”35
Rooted within this soteriological unity of
justification and sanctification we discover Calvin’s
basis for a Christian engagement of culture life.
Vocation specifically becomes the means by which
believers fully engage the cultural life, using their
gifts to “cultivate the particular department that
has been assigned to [them]” for the benefit of
their neighbor.36 In The Christian Social Organism and
Social Welfare: The Case of Vives, Calvin, and Loyola,
Abel Athouguia Alves writes, “Calvin argued that
honest and upright work in one’s station for the
common good of all is an individual’s offering
to God and a prerequisite for a Godly society.…
With concupiscence restrained by God’s grace,
the individual assumes a social role for others,
demonstrating faith through the fruit of good
works.”37 Thus, while justification involves the
restoration of the relationship between humanity
and God, this restoration leads to sanctification,
which manifests itself in the temporal realm as a
love for neighbor, which seeks to bring restorative
order to society.38
Two Kingdoms Revisited
Having established these connections among
Calvin’s understanding of the human person,
the person of Christ, and soteriology, we now
engage his perspective of the “two kingdoms.”
VanDrunen approaches this doctrine in the context
of wanting to preserve the distinctions between
justification and sanctification. In doing so, he
overemphasizes the distinctions between the two
regiments at the expense of their unity. Calvin, on
the other hand, begins his treatment of temporal
authority with unity, not with diversity. He writes,
“For although this subject seems from its nature to
be unconnected with the spiritual doctrine of faith,
which I have undertaken to treat, it will appear
as we proceed, that I have properly connected
them, nay that I am under the necessity of doing
so….”39 Once again, Calvin employs the body/
soul analogy to describe the proper relationship
between the “two regiments.” He writes, “But he
who knows to distinguish between the body and
soul, between the present fleeting life and that
which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty
in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of
Christ and civil government are things very widely
separated.”40 Just as he does with the person of
Christ, Calvin sought to maintain the distinction
between the two regiments, believing their natures
should never be confused. This distinction is
rooted firmly in his soteriology, as he maintains
that redemptive grace is found only in the “spiritual
regiment” (justification) and can never be achieved
in the “temporal realm” (sanctification). However,
as with the human person and the person of
While the distinction
between justification and
sanctification is essential in
Calvin’s understanding of
soteriology, he believed that
they are two inseparable
parts of a unified whole.
Christ, the two regiments cannot be separated.
While they must retain their proper boundaries,
never claiming authority over issues outside their
jurisdiction, this distinction does not support the
assertion that the kingdom of Christ is unrelated
to the temporal, or civil, regiment.41
Instead, the language Calvin uses with regard
to distinction differentiates the means and function
of power within the two realms. Sheldon Wolin
writes,
In Calvin’s case, however, the rediscovery of institutional life led to a rejection of the antithesis
between the two types of power and of the assumption which underlay it. Civil government and
ecclesiastical government did not symbolize distinctions of kind, but of objectives. Their natures,
therefore, were more analogous than antithetical.42
Here we come to see that the power exercised by
the two regiments is the power of God, in Jesus
Christ. This power brings justification within the
spiritual regiment through the preaching of the
Pro Rege—March 2009
5
Word and the administration of the sacraments,
as governed by the Church. But this same power
brings sanctification within the temporal realm
through reason, civil government, vocation, and
cultural life, in which faith is expressed by loving our neighbor through seeking peace, justice,
and civil order. What is the source of this power
and, therefore, the unifying principle of the two
regiments? Just as the body and soul holistically
constitute one person, the two regiments holistically constitute one kingdom, with one Lord, Jesus
Christ.43 The Lordship of Christ, not just over the
spiritual realm but over the entire cosmos—a significant theme throughout Calvin’s commentaries
—is this unifying principle.44
Karl Barth, in The Theology of John Calvin, provides
a wonderful metaphor for this relationship when
he describes the temporal kingdom as a parable, or
sign, of the kingdom of God, or what he refers to
as a “temporal image of the eternal righteousness
of God.”45 Jurgen Moltmann describes this
perspective as follows:
There is no exact similarity between the state and
the kingdom of God, but there is no exact dissimilarity. Their relationship is to be perceived as that
of parable, correspondence, and analogy; this approach understands the justice of the state from
the Christian view of the Kingdom of God, believed in and proclaimed by the church. Politics,
like culture, is thus capable of acting as a parable,
a picture of correspondence, for the kingdom of
God, and necessarily so. Because of this, Barth
calls the civil community the outer circle of the
Kingdom of Christ. Since the Christian community as inner circle and the civil community as
outer circle have their common center in Christ
the Lord and their common aim in the kingdom
of God, the Christian community, by means of
political decisions, will urge the civil community
to act as a parable by corresponding to God’s justice and not contradicting it. It wants the state to
point toward, and not away from, the kingdom of
God.46
Abraham Kuyper, in his essays on common
grace, reflects a similar perspective.
He
emphasizes the “number of combinations and
6
Pro Rege—March 2009
organic connections” that “unite human life into a
single whole, in keeping with the original creation
ordinance.”47 As he explains,
The Christian religion has seized upon this to
promote mutual growth into one entity as well
as to advance the glory of God in that connected
whole. The same is true of our life together in
the home, of our life together in society, of the
common world of thought, of customary practices
in business, art, and science, and many more. All
these are examples of life-connectedness in the
human race, connections which we have not made
but find.48
From this emphasis upon the organic unity
of cultural life, Kuyper discusses the relationship
of the church, defined as an organism, with the
broader temporal existence of humanity. He
writes,
We are thoroughly misguided, therefore, if in
speaking of the church of Christ . . . we have our
eyes fixed almost exclusively on elect persons . . .
Christianity is more than anything social in nature. Paul has pointed graphically and repeatedly
to these three: body, members, and connective
tissue. The church as organism has its center in
Christ; it is extended in his mystical body; it individualizes itself in the members. But it no less
finds its unity in those original “joints,” those organic connections, which unite us human beings
into one single human race, and it is on those joints
that the spirit of Christ puts it stamp.49
Here we find in both Barth and Kuyper the
outworking of Calvin’s thought regarding the
relation between the “spiritual” and “temporal”
regiments. In both cases, the kingdom of God
has Christ and his church at the center (the
spiritual regiment), with an outward movement
that embraces all of creation, including political,
economic, and cultural life (the temporal
regiment). At the same time, both of these
perspectives are undergirded by the Christian hope
of consummation, which informs and directs the
Christian engagement and participation in the
temporal realm.50 They clearly reflect the “now”
and “not yet” eschatological understanding of the
kingdom, which, VanDrunen implies, is foreign
to Calvin’s thought. Yet a reading of Calvin’s
commentaries demonstrates his belief that the
kingdom of God has been inaugurated in Christ’s
death and resurrection, not just for the church, not
just for the “spiritual regiment,” but for the world.
For example, in his commentary on John 12:31,
he writes,
Now we know, that out of Christ there is nothing
but confusion in the world; and though Christ had
already begun to erect the kingdom of God, yet
his death was the commencement of a well regulated
condition, and the full restoration of the world. Yet it
must also be observed, that this proper arrangement cannot be established in the world, until the
kingdom of Satan be first destroyed, until flesh,
and everything opposed to the righteousness of
God, be reduced to nothing.”51
While Calvin emphasized
the future hope of
consummation, he also
believed that the kingdom of
God is a present reality and
that the restoration of “all
things” is “in the course,”
which is the basis for the
neo-Calvinist emphasis
upon transformation.53
And commenting on Acts 3:21, Calvin writes,
As touching the force and cause, Christ hath already restored all things by his death; but the effect
doth not yet fully appear; because that restoring is yet
in the course, and so, consequently, our redemption,
forasmuch as we do yet groan under the burden
of servitude. For as the kingdom of Christ is only
begun, and the perfection thereof is deferred until the last day, so those things which are annexed
thereunto do now appear only in part.52
While Calvin emphasized the future hope of
consummation, he also believed that the kingdom
of God is a present reality and that the restoration
of “all things” is “in the course,” which is the
basis for the neo-Calvinist emphasis upon
transformation.53
Conclusion: Is neo-Calvinism Calvinist?
The implication of VanDrunen’s argument
is that the neo-Calvinist “transformative”
eschatological perspective, which emphasizes the
Christian engagement of the temporal realm as
part of the kingdom of God, does not correlate
with Calvin’s two kingdoms doctrine. He argues
that for Calvin, the temporal realm has nothing
to do with the kingdom of Christ, and that for
the church to apply the redemptive grace of the
gospel to culture is to confuse justification with
sanctification. I offer the following response
based upon the above discussion of Calvin’s two
kingdoms perspective.
The use of the word “transformative” may be
problematic and imply certain connotations that
are misleading. The term implies social progress,
the idea that somehow Christians can manipulate
or “build” the kingdom through social and political
action, which leads to an overemphasis upon
human agency. Nicholas Wolterstorff, responding
to this criticism of the neo-Calvinist position,
writes,
Seldom will Christian social endeavor, no matter
how insightful and devoted, result in what one
could describe as “transformation.” Usually it results in no more than small incremental changes
—if that. An important element of Christian social action is learning how to act faithfully in the
face of what Elul calls “inutility,” without giving
up hope.54
With his emphasis upon faithful living, I believe
that Wolterstorff reflects Calvin’s beliefs that
justification leads to faithful living in the world
under the lordship of Jesus Christ, using our gifts
and vocation for the benefit of our neighbor. In
this context the good that is accomplished, the
“parables of the kingdom” that are evident, are
not the product of human effort but the power
of Christ’s redeeming Spirit manifesting itself in
Pro Rege—March 2009
7
his people and in the world. While most neoCalvinists who use the term “transformative”
undoubtedly have this understanding in mind,
finding a different expression might be beneficial.
VanDrunen also raises a valid point in arguing
that the neo-Calvinist position has the tendency
to over emphasize the present redemption and
restoration of creation at the expense of the
future hope of consummation. Wolterstorff
acknowledges this objection and summarizes it
this way:
Jesus is understood by neo-Calvinists as “the fixer,” an unfortunate but necessary remedy, rather
than the pinnacle and destiny of creation. This
role for Jesus . . . is understood and circumscribed
within the frameworks of creation . . . making
Christ’s incarnation necessary to the extent that
he “fixes” or puts right the original purposes of
creation.55
This critique is both important and legitimate.
Neo-Calvinism risks overemphasizing the “now”
aspect of the kingdom by focusing on the
restoration of creational structures and losing sight
of the eschatological hope that has characterized
Christian worship for centuries. However, the
potential neo-Calvinist distortion does not negate
the biblical and theological truth concerning the
presence of the kingdom of God—the “now”
aspect of redemption—which I maintain is an
important part of Calvin’s eschatological thought.
The solution is not rejecting one side for the other;
the focus must be maintaining a proper tension
between the “now,” the presence of the kingdom
at work transforming the world, and the “not yet,”
the hope of consummation.
The potential neo-Calvinist distortion is no
worse than the one it confronts—to be so focused
upon the “life to come” that one ignores the
significance of Christ’s lordship over this life and
the grace and redemption made present through
his death and resurrection. Again, the proper
perspective is in the middle, holding the two in
proper tension. Richard Mouw describes this
tension the following way:
The transformationist camp is correct, as I view
things, in expecting the transformation of culture
. . . Human culture will someday be transformed.
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Pro Rege—March 2009
Does this mean, then, that we must begin that
process of transformation here and now? Are we
as Christians called to transform culture in the
present age? Not, I think, in any grandiose or
triumphalistic manner. We are called to await the
coming transformation. But we should wait actively, not passively. We must seek the City which
is to come.56
What does this “seeking” look like? He continues,
“Many activities are proper to this ‘seeking’ life.
We can call human institutions to obedience to the
Creator . . . And in a very special and profound
way, we prepare for life in the City when we work
actively to bring about healing and obedience
within the community of the people of God.”57
The purpose of this essay has been to
demonstrate the continuity of neo-Calvinist
eschatological thought with the theology of John
Calvin. In examining Calvin’s understanding of
anthropology, Christology, and soteriology in
the context of his “two kingdoms (regiments)”
perspective, I believe it is clear that Calvin
emphasizes the unity and inter-relatedness of the
two realms as components of the kingdom of God.
While Calvin’s writing reflects the language and
ideas of his time, we must be careful not to apply
labels, such as “dualist,” to his thought. Obviously,
he inherited categories and theological arguments
from his predecessors and contemporaries,
willingly engaging and often embracing much of
sixteenth-century thought. Yet the message of his
writing emphasizes unity—the unity of body and
soul in the human person, the unity of the two
natures in the person of Christ, and the unity of
the two regiments within the kingdom of God.
Calvin refuses to reduce reality to one or the
other—to the spiritual or material. He insists, as
is seen in his arguments for the resurrection of the
body, that reality is a complex unity, and that the
work of Christ addresses the totality of creation.
Here we find the roots of the neo-Calvinist
movement in the thought of Calvin: The refusal to
reduce creational life to one of its parts. Creation
is an inter-related unity of diversity, and the
redemptive work of God through the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ addresses every part
of creation. For Abraham Kuyper and those who
followed, the intention was to “to bring Calvinism
into line with the kind of human consciousness
that has developed at the end of the nineteenth
century,” to which I would add the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries as well.58 As we continue this
endeavor, we must work to maintain the proper
eschatological tension between the present reality
of the kingdom manifested in the world and the
hope of future consummation and the complete
restoration of creation in Jesus Christ.
Endnotes
1. Thanks to Daniel Den Boer for his assistance in
researching this essay.
2. David VanDrunen, “The Two Kingdoms: A
Reassessment of the Transformationist Calvin,” Calvin
Theological Journal 40 (2005): 248-266.
3. See Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theolog y: A
New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Mi.:
William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 65-66.
4. Ibid., 252.
5. Ibid., 259.
6. Ibid., 252. He writes, “To summarize initially, Calvin’s
two kingdoms doctrine may be characterized as a dualist
approach somewhat akin to certain forms of dualism
attacked by contemporary transformationists.” Also,
“[Calvin] frequently uses the image of Christians as
‘pilgrims’ to describe their status in the present world,
and he portrays their earthly lot as one of suffering and
hardship…”( 257).
7. Following VanDrunen’s lead, I too will use the neoCalvinist label broadly, as to include under its umbrella
the different manifestations of neo-Calvinism. See
VanDrunen, “The Two Kingdoms” (249-250, footnote
5).
8. W.D.J Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin
Luther (Brighton, Sussex: The Harverster Press Ltd,
1984), 36-61. Thompson differentiates between the
terms “reiche” and “regimente,”which I refer to as
“kingdom” and “regiment.”
9. Ibid., 37-38.
10. Ibid., 54. Thompson writes, “They [the two regiments]
are bulwarks which God has enacted against the
kingdom of Satan or weapons which he employs to
combat the Devil.”
11. John Calvin, Institutes, 3.19.15. Also see Sheldon Wolin,
“Calvin and the Reformation: The Political Education
of Protestantism,” The American Political Science Review
51. 2 (June, 1957), 428-453. He writes, “In a highly
revealing passage in the Institutes Calvin remarked
that ‘it was usual’ to distinguish the two orders by the
worlds ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’; and, while this was
proper enough, he preferred to call ‘l’une Royasume
spiritual, et l’autre Civil ou politique’ (regnum spiritual,
alternum regnum politicim)” ( 433).
12. John Frederick Jansen, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Work of
Christ (London: James Clarke & CO., LTD., 1956), 8890. Jansen argues that Calvin’s view of the atonement
must not be interpreted in just sacrificial or penal
categories, but must also include an overarching
“Christ as victor” motif, in which Christ’s death and
resurrection is understood as a “royal victory” over
Satan. For evidence of this perspective in Calvin’s
writings, see Comm. Matt. Xii. 29, and Comm. John
vi. 15.
13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans.
Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1989 One vol. edition). Specifically
from book II chapter XV into book III Calvin speaks
of the work of Christ in regard to the three offices of
prophet, priest, and king, and how Christ has merited
grace for the believer.
14. Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.2. Calvin writes, “But as we lately
taught that that kind of government is distinct from the
spiritual and internal kingdom of Christ, so we ought
to know that they are not adverse to each other[;]…
the latter is assigned, so long as we live among men,
to foster and maintain the external worship of God,
to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the
Church, to adapt our conduct to human society, to
form our manners to civil justice[,and] . . . to cherish
common peace and tranquility . . . But if it is the
will of God that while we aspire to true piety we are
pilgrims upon the earth, and if such pilgrimage stands
in need of such aids, those who take them away from
man rob hum of his humanity.” Also see Sheldon
Wolin’s discussion in “Calvin and the Reformation:
The Political Education of Protestantism,” concerning
Calvin’s thoughts on power and the appropriation of
power through the two regiments.
15. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.2. Also see Paul Helm, John
Calvin’s Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), chapter 5, “The Soul.”
16. For a discussion on the influence of Plato on Calvin’s
thought, see Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical
Philosophy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977), chapter 8, “Calvin
on Plato and the Stoics.” See also Helm, John Calvin’s
Ideas, p. 31.
17. G.C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God, Studies in
Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans,
Pro Rege—March 2009
9
1962), 213-214. Berkouwer goes on to say, “The
criticism of Dooyeweerd by other proponents…is not
directed against various confessional formulations as
such” ( 214).
18. Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy, p. 65. Partee
writes, “The lens of Calvin’s spectacles were certainly
tainted by Platonism here, but the source of Calvin’s
view of body and soul is the scripture.” Calvin,
Institutes, 3.25.6-8. Calvin deals with what he perceives
to be two errors with regard to the doctrine of the
resurrection of the body: the first, an overemphasis
upon the body which diminishes the immortality of
the soul, and second, a de-emphasis of the body which
denies the bodily resurrection of those united to
Christ. Thus Calvin argues for the unity of body and
soul in the human person.
19. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.3
20. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.6
21. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.2, 3.9.1-4.
22. Margaret R. Miles, “Theology, Anthropology, and the
Human Body in Calvin’s ‘Institutes of the Christian
Religion,’” The Harvard Theological Review 74. 3 (July
1981), 314. See also Gordon Spykman, Reformational
Theolog y: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics, p. 329.
23. For a discussion of Paul’s view of the body, see J.A.T.
Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theolog y (S.C.M.
Press 1952).
says that God did not raise up his Son from death to
give an isolated specimen of his mighty power, but that
the Spirit exerts the same efficacy in regard to them
that believe; and accordingly he says, that the Spirit
when he dwells in us is life, because the end for which
he was given is to quicken our mortal body.” See also
4.17.8.
27. Miles 316. Also see Charles Partee, “Calvin’s Central
Dogma Again,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 18. 2 (Summer,
1987): 198. He writes, “Further, ‘[w]e should note that
the spiritual union which we have with Christ is not a
matter of the soul alone, but of the body also, so that
we are flesh of his flesh, etc.”
28. Calvin, Institutes, 2.15.1. Also see Helm, John Calvin’s
Ideas, 83-88.
29. For significant treatments of Calvin’s Christology
see Francois Wendal, Calvin: Origins and Development
of His Religious Thought, Trans. Philip Mairet (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books, 1997), 215-232. Paul Helm,
John Calvin’s ideas, Chapter 3 “The Extra.” Helm
deals specifically with the issue regarding the “extra
Calvinisticum” in the context of the union of the two
natures, as well as the “communicato idiomatum.” Also see
Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christolog y and
Predestination in Reformed Theolog y from Calvin to Perkins,
Studies in Historical Theology 2 (Durham, NC: The
Labyrinth Press, 1986), Chapter II, “Predestination
and Christology in the Thought of Calvin.”
24. Miles, “Theology, Anthropology, and the Human
Body,” p. 311. Also see David E. Holwerda,
“Eschatology and History: A Look at Calvin’s
Eschatological Vision,” Calvin and Calvinism
9:
Calvin’s Theolog y, Theolog y Proper, Eschatolog y, Richard
C. Gamble, Ed. (New York: Garland Publishing,
Inc, 1992), 133-141, specifically p. 138, and Richard
A. Muller, “Christ in the Eschaton: Calvin and
Moltmann on the Duration of the Munus Regium,”
The Harvard Theological Review 74. 1 (January, 1981), 3159. Muller writes, “Calvin does indeed contrast the
‘spiritual body’ of the resurrection with the ‘natural
body’ of this life; but the contrast appears more as
deliverance from ‘hard and wretched’ conditions of
our earthly, crucified existence and as the result of
divine blessing than as a dissolution of body. Calvin
states the contrast in terms of Pauline vocabulary of
corruption and incorruption. Rather than passing
from corporeality to spirituality, the body passes from
corruptible corporeality to incorruptible corporeality,
the former being understood as the enlivenment of the
body by anima and the latter as enlivenment by Spiritus”
(36).
30. Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree, 27-29. Francois
Wendal, Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious
Thought, 230 – 232. John Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.3.
25. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.4.
34. John Calvin, Institutes, 3.7.5. Luther also insisted that we
loved God by loving our neighbor. See Paul Althaus,
The Theolog y of Martin Luther, Trans. Robert C. Shultz
26. Calvin, Institutes, 3.25.3. He writes, “For he elsewhere
10
Pro Rege—March 2009
31. John Calvin, Institutes, 2.17.2-3. Calvin emphasizes
that the obedience of Christ merited for us salvation:
“salvation was obtained for us by is righteousness;
which is just equivalent to meriting…so by the
obedience of Christ we are restored to his favor as if
we were righteous.” In book 3.2.24, Calvin connects
this justification with union with Christ: “Christ
is not external to us, but dwells in us….” Also see
Charles Partee, “Calvin’s Central Dogma Again,”
Sixteenth Century Journal 18. 2 (Summer, 1987):191-200.
Partee argues that the central organizing principle
of the Institutes is “union with Christ.” He writes,
“Nevertheless, the exposition of his theology finds the
presence of the union with Christ in so many places
and in such a significant way that ‘union with Christ’
may be usefully taken as the central affirmation”
(194).
32. John Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.16-23.
33. Ibid., 3.11.1 (emphasis mine).
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), Chapter 11, “God’s
will for men.” He writes, “The commandment to love
our neighbor stands beside the commandment to love
God. Basically these are not two commandments but
one and the same . . . He wants nothing from us for
himself, only that we believe in him. He does not need
our work for himself. He does need it, however, for
our neighbor. Loving the neighbor becomes the way
in which we love God; and in serving the neighbor
we serve God himself.” He quotes Luther, “You will
find Christ in every street and just outside your door.
Do not stand around starting at heaven and say, ‘Oh,
if I could just once see our Lord God, how I would
do everything possible for him’” ( 133). Cf D. Martin
Luther’s Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar,
1883), 20, 514.
35. John Calvin, Commentary on Matthew 22:39. See also
Calvin’s discussion of the relationship between the
“two tables of the law”( Institutes, 2.8.11).
36. John Calvin, Corinthians Commentary Vol. 1 Trans. Rev.
John Pringle (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1948),
398. Paul Althaus describes Luther’s perspective of
vocation by saying, “God does not need earthly agents.
It is by his own free decision that he calls and uses
them to work together with him. He commands us to
perform our tasks with zeal and to fulfill the demands
which our vocation and position in life make on us . . .
The success and result are and remain God’s doing.”
He goes on to quote Luther: “What else is all our
work to God—whether in the fields, in the garden, in
the city, in the house, in way, or in government—but
such a child’s performance, by which He wants to give
his gifts in the fields, at home, and everywhere else?
There are the masks of God, behind which He wants
to remain concealed and do all things.” Paul Althaus,
The Theolog y of Martin Luther, 108. Cf. WA 31, 436.
Calvin echoes Luther’s “mask” language with regard
to political rulers, referring to them as “vice regents”
through whom God is at work (Institutes 4.20.6).
37. Abel Athouguia Alves, “The Christian Social Organism
and Social Welfare: The Case of Vives, Calvin, and
Loyola,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20. 1 (Spring, 1989):
10.
38. Ibid. Alves writes, “Like Vives, John Calvin saw the
death of Christ as an act of reconstitution for a human
self and society broken by the Fall of man. Christ died
to ingraft us to his body and transmit his benefits.
Faith alone, granted by God’s grace, reconstitutes
the fallen self. The regenerated man, the Christian,
dedicates both his body and soul to God as Christ did,
and self love is replaced by self denial…”(8).
39. John Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.1.
40. Ibid., See also 3.19.15.
41. Ibid., 4.20.2. Calvin writes, “But as we lately taught
that that kind of government is distinct from the
spiritual and internal kingdom of Christ, so we ought
to know that they are not adverse to each other.”
42. Sheldon S. Wolin, Calvin and the Reformation: The Political
Education of Protestantism( 432).
43. In “To the Christian Nobility”, Luther writes, “Christ
does not have two different bodies, one temporal, the
other spiritual. There is but one Head and one body.”
Martin Luther, Luther: Selected Political Writings, Ed. J.M.
Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 41.
44. For a treatment of Calvin’s emphasis upon the Lordship
of Christ in his commentaries see Timothy Palmer,
“Calvin the Transformationist and the Kingship of
Christ,” Pro Rege 35.3 (March 2007): 32-39. See also
Calvin’s commentary on John 5.27.
45. Karl Barth, The Theolog y of John Calvin, Trans. Geoffrey
W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
1995), 221. Also see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3
First Half (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961), 110 – 135.
Barth writes, “We must be prepared to hear, even in
secular occurrence, not as alien sounds but as segments
of that periphery concretely orientated from its centre
and towards its totality, as signs and attestations of
the lordship of the one prophecy of Jesus Christ, true
words which we must receive as such even though they
come from this source” ( 124).
46. Jurgen Moltmann, The Politics of Discipleship and
Discipleship in Politics: Jurgen Moltmann Lectures in Dialogue
with Mennonite Scholars. Ed. Willard M. Swartley (Eugene,
OR: Cascade Books, 2006), 27. In his Church Dogmatics,
Barth writes the following: “But this means that in the
world reconciled by God in Jesus Christ there is no
secular sphere abandoned by Him or withdrawn from
His control; even there from the human standpoint it
seems to approximate most dangerously to the pure
and absolute form of utter godlessness. If we say that
there is, we are not thinking and speaking in the light
of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” See Karl Barth,
Church Dogmatics IV/3 First Half (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1961), 119.
47. “Common Grace,” Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader,
James D. Bratt Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1998), 188.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 189.
50. VanDrunen’s contention that neo-Calvinists deemphasize the significance of Christ’s return by
leaving out “consummation” as a category is a
misrepresentation of the neo-Calvinist position.
Consummation is implied in “redemption.” In Creation
Regained, Wolters writes, “Both the ‘already’ and the
Pro Rege—March 2009
11
‘not yet’ aspects characterize the interlude between
Christ’s first and second coming. The first coming
establishes his foothold in creation, while the second
coming accomplishes the complete victory of his sovereignty.”
Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for
a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans, 2005), 76 ( Emphasis mine). Also
see Spykman’s treatment in part five of Reformational
Theolog y: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics titled “The
Consummation.”
Gamble, Richard C. Ed. Calvin’s Theolog y, Theolog y Proper,
Eschatolog y. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1992.
51. Jon Calvin, Commentary on John 12:31 .Vol. 2, Trans.
Rev. William Pringle (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1949), 36( Emphasis mine). Also see John
13:31.
Jansen, John Frederick. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Work of Christ.
London: James Clarke & Co., LTD., 1956.
52. John Calvin, Commentary on Acts Vol. 1, Trans. Henry
Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
1949), 153(Emphasis mine).
53. Ibid.
54. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “In Reply,” Perspectives: A Journal
of Reformed Thought (Feb. 2008): 18.
55. Ibid., 19.
56. Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah
and the New Jerusalem (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1983), 75.
57. Ibid.
58. Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopaedie, 2nd Ed, I, vi. See also
Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham
Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans, 1998), 17. For an excellent, accessible,
treatment of Herman Dooyweerd’s engagement of
Kantian thought, see Albert Wolters, “The Intellectual
Milieu of Herman Dooyweerd,” The Legacy of Herman
Dooyweerd (University Press of America, 1985), 1-19.
Heslam, Peter S. Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham
Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism. Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 1998.
Holwerda, David E. “Eschatology and History: A Look
at Calvin’s Eschatological Vision.” Calvin and Calvinism
Vol 9.
Kuyper, Abraham. Encyclopaedie. Second Ed. J. H. Kok,
1908.
Luther, Martin. Luther: Selected Political Writings. Ed. J. M.
Porter. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.
Miles, Margaret R. “Theology, Anthropology, and the
Human Body in Calvin’s ‘Institutes of the Christian
Religion.’” The Harvard Theolog y Review 74.3 (July 1981):
314.
Moltmann, Jurgen. The Politics ofDdiscipleship and Discipleship
in Politics: Jurgen Moltmann Lectures in Dialogue with
Mennonite Scholars. Ed. Willard M. Swartley. Eugene,
OR: Cascade Books, 2006.
Mouw, Richard. When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah
and the New Jerusalem. Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1983.
Muller, Richard. Christ and the Decree: Christolog y and
Predestination in Reformed Theolog y from Calvin to Perkins.
Studies in Historical Theology 2. Durham, NC: The
Labyrinth Press, 1986.
Partee, Charles. Calvin and Classical Philosophy. Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1977.
VanDrunen, David. “The Two Kingdoms: A Reassessment
of the Transformationist Calvin.” Calvin Theological
Journal 40 (2005): 248-266.
Bibliography
Altheus, Paul. The Theolog y of Martin Luther. Trans. Robert
C. Shultz. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966.
Alves, Abel Athouguia. “The Christian Social Organism
and Social Welfare: The Case of Vives, Calvin, and
Loyola.” Sixteenth Century Journal 20.1 (Spring, 1989):
10.
Barth, Karl. The Theolog y of John Calvin. Trans. Geoffrey W.
Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
1995.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry
Beveridge. One-Volume Ed. Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 1989.
12
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Wendal, Francois. Calvin: Origins and Development of His
Religion Thought. Trans. Philip Mairet. Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Books, 1997.
Wolin, Sheldon S. “Calvin and the Reformation: The
Political Education of Protestantism.“ American
Political Science Review 51 (1957) : 425-54
Wolters, Albert. Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a
Reformational Worldview. Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 2005.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “In Reply.” Perspectives: A Journal Of
Reformed Thought (Feb. 2008): 18.
The Two-Kingdom Doctrine:
A Comparative Study of Martin
Luther and Abraham Kuyper
by Timothy P. Palmer
T
here is confusion in the Reformed world
about the two-kingdom doctrine. A series of
articles by a Westminster Seminary professor is
arguing for a “Reformed two-kingdom doctrine”;
Dr. Timothy Palmer is Professor of Theology at the
Theological College of Northern Nigeria (TCNN),
in Bukuru, Nigeria, where he has taught for twentyfour years. Specializing in Reformation Theology and
African Christian Theology, Dr. Palmer has served as
Academic Dean, Deputy Provost, and Acting Provost.
He also wrote The Reformed and Presbyterian Faith: A
View From Nigeria. He currently edits the TCNN
Research Bulletin.
and the Calvin Theological Journal is printing his
articles without a Reformational response. In
a recent publication, this professor claims that
even Abraham Kuyper holds to the two-kingdom
doctrine.1
The two-kingdom doctrine is the belief that
the kingdom of God is coextensive with the
institutional church and that life outside of the
church does not really belong to God’s kingdom.
I have already argued in these pages that such a
designation is not the most appropriate term
for John Calvin’s theology;2 but to suggest that
Abraham Kuyper holds to the two-kingdom
doctrine borders on the absurd.
This essay will first consider the original
statement of the two-kingdom doctrine in Martin
Luther’s theology. We will then ask whether
Abraham Kuyper holds to this teaching. We will
argue that Kuyper’s doctrine of the kingship of
Christ excludes a two-kingdom teaching.
Luther’s Two-Kingdom Doctrine
The two-kingdom doctrine, which began with
Martin Luther, was developed because of confusion
in his day about the roles of church and state. Both
the Catholic church and the Anabaptist movement
were confusing this distinction of church and
state. In the Catholic church of Luther’s day, some
theologians were insisting that the Roman church
had temporal powers, while some political leaders
were assuming ecclesiastical responsibilities. The
separation between church and state was very
blurred. In particular, Duke George of Saxony
Pro Rege—March 2009
13
forbade the printing and reading of Luther’s
works in his territory of ducal Saxony, and a few
other German princes were taking the same line.3
This was a clear infringement on the rights of the
church and the Christian believer.
Meanwhile, some of the Anabaptists were
trying to set up a temporal kingdom on earth, while
others were completely rejecting the temporal
government, teaching that the only legitimate
government in the world was that of the church.4
It is in this context that Luther developed
the two-kingdom doctrine. Much ink has been
used to describe and comment on this teaching.5
Although there will be a continued debate about
the nuances of his teaching, the main ideas are
clear. By way of summary, we will focus especially
on two of Luther’s works.
This teaching is first set out in some detail in
1523, in Luther’s “Temporal Authority: To What
Extent It Should Be Obeyed.”6 The German title
is “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.” Luther’s starting
point is the recognition of two classes of people:
“we must divide the children of Adam and all
mankind into two classes, the first belonging to
the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom
of the world.”7 Corresponding to these two
kingdoms are two types of government: “For
this reason God has ordained two governments:
the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces
Christians and righteous people under Christ; and
the temporal, which restrains the un-Christian and
wicked so that . . . they are obliged to keep still and
to maintain an outward peace.”8
The kingdom of God is thus the church. Its
members are the true believers, and its king is
Jesus Christ. Jesus rules by his Word, not by the
sword. He rules by the Gospel, not by the law.
The Sermon on the Mount typifies the ethics of
this kingdom. Love and non-violence characterize
this kingdom. Luther writes, “Christ is King and
Lord in the kingdom of God.” And, “he is king
over Christians and rules by his Holy Spirit alone,
without law.”9
But the kingdom of the world, or the temporal
government, is different. Since unbelievers will
not listen to the Gospel or the Holy Spirit, God
ordained another government, the temporal
government: “All who are not Christians belong
14
Pro Rege—March 2009
to the kingdom of the world and are under the
law.”10 The Scriptural justification for the temporal
government is Romans 13 and related passages.
While the kingdom of God is ruled by the Word
of God, the kingdom of the world is ruled by the
sword. While the kingdom of God is ruled by
the Gospel, the kingdom of the world is ruled by
the law.
From the above, it is clear that the kingdom of
the world is not the same as the kingdom of Satan.
The kingdom of the world is a third kingdom
between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom
of Satan. It has an ambiguous status between
these two kingdoms. The kingdom of the world
consists of unbelievers, but its government is
ordained by God and comes from God.
So who is the king over this kingdom of the
world? For Luther, “Christ is King and Lord in
the kingdom of God”; but “Christ’s government
does not extend over all men.”11 As we shall see more
clearly later, in Luther’s theology Christ is not lord
over the temporal world: instead, it is the prince
or the emperor who is lord in this sphere.
Where does the Christian belong in this scheme?
Of course, the Christian is part of the kingdom of
God. The Christian person is ruled by the Gospel
and the Holy Spirit. And yet the Christian is also
part of this world. He or she is subject to the
temporal government. Luther writes, “at one and
the same time you satisfy God’s kingdom inwardly
and the kingdom of the world outwardly.”12
Here we have the beginnings of the doctrine of
the two persons within a Christian: the Christian
person is the one who inwardly is subject to Jesus
Christ; the secular or worldly person is the one
who externally functions in society and is subject
to the earthly king. Two persons exist within a
believer: the Christian person and the worldly or
secular person.
These thoughts from Luther’s 1523 document
are expanded upon nine years later. In 1532 the
mature Luther published his commentary on the
Sermon on the Mount.13 At issue is the question
as to how to apply Jesus’ teaching in this sermon.
For example, should a soldier or a policeman
turn the other cheek while on duty? Should the
government not resist an evil person, as Matthew
5:39 might suggest?
In response to these issues, Luther said that
it is essential to distinguish the “secular and the
divine realm.”14 So, when Jesus says that the poor
in spirit are blessed, this statement refers to the
spiritual realm, not the secular or worldly realm.
The spiritual realm relates to “how to live before
God, and above and beyond the external.” But,
“having money, property, honor, power, land and
servants belongs to the secular realm.”15
When one comes to
Abraham Kuyper, it is
astonishing to find that
David VanDrunen puts
Kuyper in the two-kingdom
camp. For Kuyper there is
no square inch of reality
that is not under the
lordship of Christ.
Again, when Jesus says that the meek will inherit
the earth, he is not speaking about a governmental
officer, who “must be sharp and strict . . . and get
angry and punish”; rather, he is dealing with a
Christian in his private relations. Thus, “we have
two different persons in one man”—the Christian
person and the secular person.16
The command to remove an offending eye or
hand again applies to the spiritual realm, not the
secular one. Likewise, denying oneself and hating
one’s soul “have nothing to do with the secular
affairs or the imperial government.” Instead, all
this is said in relation to spiritual life and spiritual
affairs.”17
In the context of these last sayings, Luther
makes some incredible statements excluding Jesus
Christ from the secular realm. Luther says,
“Therefore we must not drag [Christ’s] words into
the law books or into the secular government...
With the secular area [Christ] has nothing to do.”18 On
the issue of oaths, Luther again says that “Christ
has no intention here of interfering with the
secular realm, nor of depriving the government
of anything. All he is preaching about is how
individual Christians should behave in their
everyday life.”19
In respect to Jesus’ instruction not to resist evil,
Luther says that “Christ is not tampering with the
responsibility and authority of the government,
but he is teaching his individual Christians how to
live personally, apart from their official position
and authority.”20 On the same passage, Luther
writes,
Do you want to know what your duty is as a prince
or a judge or a lord or a lady, with people under
you? You do not have to ask Christ about your
duty. Ask the imperial or the territorial law.21
Finally, on not laying up treasures on earth,
Luther says that “Christ is giving instructions to
the individual or the Christian man and that a sharp
distinction must be made between the Christian
and the man of the world, between a Christian
person and a secular person.” He continues, “Of
course, a prince can be a Christian, but he must not
rule as a Christian; and insofar as he does rule, his
name is not ‘Christian’ but ‘prince.’ The person is
indeed a Christian, but his office or his princedom does
not involve his Christianity.”22
In the same passage, Luther explains his
distinction between the Christian person and the
secular person. A Christian prince should say,
“My status as a Christian is something between
God and myself. . . . But above and beyond this I
have another status or office in the world: I am a
prince. The relation here is not one between God
and this person, but between me and my land and
people.”23
These fairly extensive quotations show the
distinctive aspects of Martin Luther’s two-kingdom
doctrine. In between the kingdom of God (the
church) and the kingdom of Satan exists a large
area of life that is not spiritual but is temporal or
“secular” (weltlich). Both areas belong to God, but
Jesus Christ is excluded from the “secular” realm.
The lordship of Jesus Christ does not extend
to this area of life. Instead, the secular realm is
governed by reason and natural law.
Coupled with this two-kingdom doctrine is
Pro Rege—March 2009
15
Luther’s view of the two modes of a Christian’s
existence. The personal, individual Christian is
under Christ; but the Christian in society is under
the emperor. Christ’s rule extends only to the
personal, individual life of a believer.
From this brief survey, the basic contours of
the two-kingdom doctrine are clear. God rules the
world through two kingdoms. The kingdom of
God is the church, where Jesus is king and where
Jesus reigns by his Word or the Gospel. There
the Sermon on the Mount or the rule of love is
normative. Outside of the church is the worldly
or secular kingdom. There the emperor—not
Jesus—rules. The emperor—or prince—rules
with justice and the sword. This is the domain of
the law, not of the Gospel.
However, this theory has obvious difficulties.
Is not Jesus Christ lord over the entire world, and
not just the church? If all of societal life outside
of the church is not under the lordship of Christ,
then who is king in this “secular” realm? Does
not the two-kingdom doctrine give considerable
autonomy to “secular” life, putting it outside of
the rule of Jesus?
This danger has been recognized by various
theologians. Helmut Thielicke said that the twokingdom doctrine of Luther “makes it dangerously
easy for the world to be dissociated from the
Gospel.”24 Jürgen Moltmann says that “the two
kingdoms doctrine gives no criteria for a specific
Christian ethics.”25 Moltmann prefers the idea of
the lordship of Jesus Christ over the two-kingdom
doctrine.
Karl Barth said that since the two-kingdom
doctrine excluded Jesus Christ from the realm
of the state, the German Lutherans were more
apt to support Hitler’s Nazi state.26 Whether this
theory is true or not, it is interesting to note that
the Resistance in Calvinist Holland was stronger
than in Lutheran Scandinavia. When the state is
removed from the lordship of Jesus Christ—as in
the two-kingdom doctrine—then the possibility
of a Christian approach to politics is reduced.
There is thus a broad consensus as to the
identity of Luther’s two-kingdom doctrine, a
consensus that stands in sharp contrast to the
Reformed view of the lordship of Jesus Christ
over all of life. The two-kingdom doctrine creates
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Pro Rege—March 2009
a huge, autonomous area of life that is not under
the lordship of Christ.
A Dualist View of Abraham Kuyper
When one comes to Abraham Kuyper, it is
astonishing to find that David VanDrunen puts
Kuyper in the two-kingdom camp. For Kuyper
there is no square inch of reality that is not under
the lordship of Christ. How in the world can
Kuyper then be in the two-kingdom camp?
VanDrunen attempts a definition of the
two-kingdom doctrine in his article on Kuyper,
“Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed Natural Law
and Two Kingdoms Tradition.” There he says that
the two kingdoms are the spiritual kingdom, which
finds “institutional expression in the present age
only in the church,” and the civil kingdom, which
encompasses “the various non-ecclesiastical
cultural endeavors, particularly the work of the
state.” VanDrunen explains that God rules the
spiritual kingdom through Christ the redeemer
and the civil kingdom through Christ its creator
and sustainer.27 This two-kingdom doctrine, to
which Kuyper allegedly holds, stands in contrast
to “neo-Calvinism or transformationism, in which
all spheres of life are seen as subject to redemption
and the claims of the redemptive kingdom of
Christ in the present age.”28 In the following
pages, we will show the absurdity of suggesting
that Kuyper holds to the two-kingdom doctrine.
Is not Abraham Kuyper himself the one who
taught us that all of life is subject to the kingship
of Jesus Christ?
David VanDrunen is a crusader of the naturegrace dualism. In Kuyper, he assumes that the civil
kingdom is grounded in Christ’s work as creator
and that the spiritual kingdom is rooted in Christ’s
work as redeemer. The former is the realm of
common grace and natural law; the latter, the
realm of special grace. VanDrunen assumes that
for Kuyper there is a “clear distinction between the
church and the rest of life, and, for both doctrines,
the chief distinction lies in that the former is the
place where salvation is ministered and the latter
a place where it is not.”29 The following pages
will demonstrate that Kuyper does not fit into this
nature-grace straightjacket.
It is curious that this crusader of the two-
kingdom doctrine when writing of Kuyper seldom
speaks of the kingdom of God and never speaks
of the kingship of Christ. It would seem that talk
of kingdoms would involve talk of Jesus Christ
the king, who dominates Kuyper’s thinking. So
what is the kingdom of God for Kuyper?
Kuyper Rejects the Two-Kingdom Doctrine
An essential source in respect to Kuyper’s view
of the kingdom of God is his magisterial Pro Rege,
which means “for the King.” It is noteworthy
that VanDrunen’s study of Kuyper’s view of the
kingdom of God omits this vital source. From
6 January 1907 to 8 January 1911, Kuyper wrote
a series of articles in De Heraut under the rubric
of “Pro Rege” (for the King).30 These were
published in 1911 and 1912 in the three-volume
Pro Rege.31 The basic structure of this work already
shows how foreign a two-kingdom doctrine is
to Abraham Kuyper. In broad strokes, Kuyper
develops the kingship of Christ over seven areas
of life: Christ’s subjects, the church, the family,
society, the state, science, and art. All of life falls
under the kingship of Christ. There is no neutral
ground for him.
In his introduction to the three-volume Pro
Rege, Kuyper combats the two-kingdom doctrine.
The very first sentence reads, “Pro Rege intends
to remove the division that exists in our minds
. . . between our church life and our life outside the
church.”32 Dualists focus primarily on the area of
the church, where Christ is seen as a Savior who
removes our sins. But Christ is more than this.
Christ is king over all of life. The realization of this
kingship has led to the formation of “our Christian
press, our Christian science, our Christian art, our
Christian literature, our Christian philanthropy, our
Christian politics, our Christian trade unions, and
the like.”33 The rest of this massive work develops
this basic principle.
In his big work on Common Grace, Kuyper
makes the same point. Some dualistic Christians
maintain that Christ is exclusively the Expiator
of sin. (This is the two-kingdom doctrine.) But
Kuyper forcefully rejects this view: “The idea that
Christ has no significance but as the Lamb of God
who died for our sin cannot be maintained by those
who read Scripture seriously.” We cannot hold that
Christ was given to us only for our justification
and sanctification; we should rather follow Paul,
who says that Christ is our “full redemption.”34 He
continues:
To put it in a nutshell, shall we imagine that all
we need is a Reconciler of our soul or continue
to confess that the Christ of God is the Savior of
both soul and body and is the Re-creator not only of
things in the invisible world but also of things that
are visible and before our eyes? Does Christ have
significance only for the spiritual realm or also for
the natural and visible domain?35
Kuyper warns against the
doctrine of two kingdoms
or “two distinct circles
of thought: in the very
circumscribed circle of your
soul’s salvation on the one
hand, and in the spacious,
life-encompassing sphere of
the world on the other”. . . 38
Kuyper calls it “one-sidedness” to “think
exclusively of the blood shed in the atonement
and refuse to take account of the significance of
Christ for the body, for the visible world, and for
the outcome of world history.” Such a posture
runs “the danger of isolating Christ for your
soul”36:
Then the word “Christian” seems appropriate to
you only when it concerns certain matters of faith
or things directly connected with the faith—your
church, your school, missions and the like—but
all the remaining spheres of life fall for you outside
the Christ.37
Kuyper warns against the doctrine of two
kingdoms or “two distinct circles of thought:
in the very circumscribed circle of your soul’s
Pro Rege—March 2009
17
salvation on the one hand, and in the spacious,
life-encompassing sphere of the world on the
other”: Such people claim that “Christ is at home
in the former but not in the latter.”38
For Kuyper, then, Christ is the redeemer of all
of life, contrary to the two-kingdom doctrine and
VanDrunen’s perception of this. Christ is our “full
redemption . . . the Savior of both soul and body.”39
One can hardly make the point more clearly. There
is no autonomous area of life.
There is no independent kingdom existing
between Christ’s kingdom and Satan’s kingdom.
Kuyper speaks of just two kingdoms: the kingdom
of Christ and the kingdom of Satan: “Just as God
rules over spirits and humans, over spirit and
matter, including all of creation, so also Satan
desires to establish his kingdom over against
God.”40 The two kingdoms are those of God and
Satan: “Kingdom against kingdom, prince against
prince, chief against chief, king against king!”41
There are only two kingdoms, Christ’s and Satan’s,
and both lay claim on all of life. There is no
intermediate kingdom.
Nature-Grace Dualism?
Since there is no two-kingdom doctrine in
Kuyper, one wonders whether Kuyper subscribes
to a nature-grace dualism. When VanDrunen
speaks of “a two kingdoms-like dualism” in
Kuyper, presumably he is referring to a naturegrace dualism.42 He adduces distinctions such as
Christ’s offices of creator and redeemer, and the
contrast between common grace and special grace,
to support his view. He thinks that the realm of
grace has redemptive significance while the realm
of nature does not.
Although Kuyper does at times use naturegrace terminology, it should be put on record that
he vigorously opposes such a dualistic scheme.
In his work on common grace, after rejecting the
two-kingdom doctrine, he then rejects the naturegrace dualism. He says,
For if grace exclusively concerned atonement for
sin and salvation of souls, one could view grace as
something located and operating outside of nature.
. . . But if it is true that Christ our Savior has to do
not only with our soul but also with our body . . .
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Pro Rege—March 2009
then of course everything is different. We see immediately that grace is inseparably connected with
nature, that grace and nature belong together.43
He continues:
For if we set nature and grace against each other
as two mutually exclusive concepts, we get the
impression that nature now persists apart from all
grace and that grace is and has been extended exclusively to God’s elect. This inference is absolutely
untenable.44
Kuyper rejects “the inaccurate antithesis
between nature and grace that has come down to
us from medieval theology” in favor of a more
“Reformed principle.”45In the same work, Kuyper
writes,
Therefore, common grace must have a formative impact on special grace and vice versa. All
separation of the two must be vigorously opposed.
Temporal and eternal life, our life in the world
and our life in the church, religion and civil life,
church and state, and so much more must go hand
in hand. They may not be separated.46
In the following pages, we will see that Christ
the redeemer renews and redeems that which he
created. Christ’s redemption is not restricted to
the soul but includes the physical world. Nature
and grace are not two separate realms; rather,
Christ’s grace transforms the natural world. Of
course there is a distinction between the physical
and spiritual side of a person, but this is not a
“dualism,” as VanDrunen asserts, but rather a
“distinction,” as Kuyper calls it.47
Instead of a nature-grace dualism, I suggest
that a redemptive-historical scheme is more faithful
to Kuyper. The structure of Kuyper’s theology is
built around a creation-fall-redemption scheme. It
was the eternal Son of God who created the world
and mankind; it was the same Son who redeemed
his creation.
The Kingship of Christ over All of Life
For Kuyper the kingdom or kingship of Christ
is derived from the sovereignty of the Triune
God. The original power and sovereignty rest
in the Triune God.48 Kuyper emphasizes the fact
that the kingdom of God includes all of reality:
“This kingdom of God embraces all things, visible
and invisible.” This king—God—has power over
people, the land and nature: “In short, everything is
his. His kingdom is over everything . . . His kingdom
is a kingdom of all ages, of all spheres, of all
creatures.”49
For Kuyper there are three stages of the
kingdom of God: “The kingdom of heaven is
a tangible reality which was present on earth in
paradise, which was banished from this earth
through sin and the curse, and which, returning
with Christ from heaven and begun at his manger
and the cross, has actually come to power again
on earth.”50
In the period of the Old Testament, Jehovah
was reigning. But the Old Testament constantly
looked forward to the reign of the Messiah. The
kingdom of heaven, in a real sense, began with the
Jesus brought regeneration
to the soul and physical
healing to the body; he
impacted all dimensions
of society, including the
family, the workplace, the
government and the poor;
and he confronted the evil
spirits.54
first coming of Jesus. It was John the Baptist who
said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near”
(Matt. 3:2).51 The kingdom of Christ, according to
Kuyper, began with the first coming of Christ.
Kuyper says of this kingdom: “it can never
be said that this kingdom bears a purely spiritual
character.”52 This is evident from the three years of
Jesus’ ministry: “In the few years that the king of
the kingdom of God stayed on earth, he revealed
the majesty of this kingdom of his in every area of
human life.”53 Jesus brought regeneration to the
soul and physical healing to the body; he impacted
all dimensions of society, including the family, the
workplace, the government and the poor; and he
confronted the evil spirits.54 Kuyper states, “The
idea that the action of Jesus in his kingdom was
exclusively spiritual in nature seems . . . ever more
untenable.”55 There is no nature-grace dualism
here.
In his three-volume Pro Rege, Kuyper lists seven
representative areas of Christ’s kingly rule. The
first area is the lives of individual believers. The
heart of Christ’s kingdom is the true believers.
The believers are those who respond willingly to
the reign of Christ. Using language from earthly
kingdoms, Kuyper calls the believers Christ’s
“subjects.”56 He enumerates various duties of
these subjects: they are to confess their king, be
witnesses to their king, take up their cross, be
soldiers for their king, and deny themselves for
their king.57 It is Christ’s subjects who will serve
their king in the world.
These subjects form the mystical body of
Christ. There is a bond of love that binds Christ
to his subjects. Not only is there a master-servant
relationship, but there is also a relationship of
friendship. We are Christ’s friends.58
Kuyper says that Christians are not “new
people” who are newly created but rather people
from the created world who are “renewed.”
Christians are new people only in the sense that they
are renewed. That is the meaning of “rebirth.”59
For Kuyper there is continuity between creation
and redemption in the life of a believer.
The second area of Christ’s rule is the
church. Although the mystical body of Christ
is the invisible church, “Christ also desired and
established here on earth an external, visible,
perceptible manifestation of that body, and in this
manifestation the body of Christ entered into the
world as the church of Christ.”60 This is what is often
called the visible church.
This church was established by Christ when he
called the apostles and gave them the keys of the
kingdom. Christ established the structure of this
church by ordaining its sacraments, offices, and
discipline. The preaching of the Word is a central
Pro Rege—March 2009
19
part of this church.61
Although Jesus’ kingdom is found in all of
life, “the congregation (Gemeente) . . . forms the
living center of that kingdom, through which
Christ allows the power of the Spirit to go out
among the children of men in all the world and
in all of history. The congregation forms the
essential chief ingredient of his kingdom, and it is
only in the congregation that his royal honor and
majesty not only work but are also recognized and
honored.”62
The third area of Christ’s rule is the family. A
Christian family is one that is rooted in creation.
It conforms to the creational norms. But sin
interfered. Therefore, “Christ is redeemer also for
the family life.”63 A Christian family will “not lose
its original ordinances but rather will be brought
back to the purity of these original ordinances.”
This is “not the bringing in of something new but
the restoration of the old which was spoiled.”64
There is thus no nature-grace dualism here. Christ
is the creator and the redeemer of the family.
The Christian family is guided by creational
norms. But how do we know what these norms
are? Kuyper finds them in Scripture. The fifth
commandment of the Law of Moses tells children
how to behave. Paul expands upon this command
in Ephesians. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul explains
the creational hierarchy.65 Thus there is no conflict
between creational and scriptural norms. Both
govern the Christian family; both come from
Christ the creator and redeemer.
Finally, a Christian family will have a family
altar. Kuyper says that “a family is not Christian
only because a family altar is established, but a
Christian family is not conceivable where the
family altar is absent.”66
The fourth area of Christ’s rule is society.
Society is a separate sphere between the family and
the state. Kuyper begins this section by describing
the cosmic struggle between the spirit of Christ
and the spirit of the world. The “spirit of the
world restlessly renews its attack on the kingdom
of Christ,” and “this will persist until the spirit
of the world has exhausted its last strength.” In
the end, the power of Christ our king will defeat
the spirit of the world: “But if this is the nature
of Christ’s kingship, how is it possible for this
20
Pro Rege—March 2009
kingship to be restricted to his church, the family
and the state and not to society?” Kuyper reminds
the reader that the statements of Scripture about
Christ’s kingship are all-embracing: “To him is
given all power on earth and in heaven. All things
are subject to him. Nothing is excluded.” So how
can one neglect “this broad terrain of our social
life”?67
Many Christians feel the claim of Christ
over their personal lives but not “over the broad
terrain of life where the scepter of Jesus’ kingship
extends.” The result is “that the kingship of Christ
does not live for them.” For them Christ is there
exclusively for the salvation of their souls but not
for the life outside of the church.68
These pietistic Christians are like house
sparrows: “The big society with its richly developed
life does not exist for them. And even if they do
read a newspaper, they are only attracted to the
obituaries and the advertisements. The rest does
not interest them.” But, even house sparrows fly
around on occasion, while these people do not!69
Such provincial Christians are practical examples
of the two-kingdom doctrine.
Societal life is grounded in creation. In the
Garden of Eden, there was a social relation between
Adam and Eve. Sin distorted this relationship,
but Christ came to restore society and establish
a Christian society.70 “Christian” here “does not
mean a new discovery and a new creation but a
return to the original creation.” In the Christian
society, the original creational ordinances are
honored.71 Thus, “the royal rule of Christ over
societal life is bound to these ordinances.”72
In Kuyper there is no conflict between
creational ordinances and the Word of God. Both
express the will of God. Kuyper writes, “For on
almost every point in the social question, God’s
Word gives us the most positive direction.”73
Kuyper lists the family, marriage, colonialization,
work, and state intervention as areas that God’s
Word addresses.
So how does Christ rule in society? Kuyper
identifies at least four means of Christ’s rule:
the Christian church, the Christian school, the
Christian organization, and the Christian press
(public opinion).74 Again, Kuyper rejects the twokingdom doctrine: “The inaccurate and superficial
idea that Christ is only our savior and redeemer and
not also our king and judge is completely rejected
precisely through the Christian school.”75
The need for Christian organizations is partly
grounded in Paul’s complaint about Christians
taking brothers to court before unbelievers. But
the rationale is deeper. There is a danger when
Christians participate in a mixed organization.
For then, “unconsciously they will exchange the
principle of the Christian life for the impure
principle of the worldly society.”76 Therefore,
Kuyper
recommends
separate
Christian
organizations.
The fifth area of Christ’s kingship is the state
or the political arena. The state was not present
in creation; instead, the state is a product of God’s
common grace that was revealed in the history of
mankind, especially after the flood and the tower
of Babel. Here too the reign of Christ extends.
Kuyper identifies three main ways in which
Christ rules the state. First, Christ influences
and directs political leaders, both pagan and
Christian. Examples of the former are Joseph’s
Pharaoh, Cyrus, and Nebuchadnezzar. But Christ
also governs Christian rulers like Constantine,
Charlemagne, and the house of Orange. Some
of these rulers applied Christian principles in their
kingdoms.77
Christ also rules the state through the law.
Kuyper speaks of a “mystical law,” which is valid
for all peoples and all lands. This divine law can
be found both in our conscience and in Scripture.
There is no opposition between the two since both
came from Christ the creator and redeemer. There
is only one law of God. Of course, we cannot
apply the Mosaic law directly to our contemporary
life. But the Mosaic law, like the New Testament,
contains principles that are relevant for our
contemporary nations. A Christian government
should bring its laws into conformity with the
principles of Christ.78
Christ also rules the state through Christian
political parties. In the Europe of Kuyper’s day,
there were parties that were advocating antiChristian principles. The Christian forces must
fight against such principles. This is why Groen
van Prinsterer advocated “the party of the living
God” to combat such ideas. Christians who for
many years have honored Christ as the savior of
his church must now begin to honor Christ as the
king over the state.79
The sixth area of Christ’s reign is the realm of
science or scholarship (wetenschap). “Kingship is
power,” says Kuyper, opening this section. When
we talk of Jesus’ power, we are talking of Jesus as
king. Scripture has at least ten references to the
power of Christ over all things. But the church
of Christ has often put his kingship in the shadow,
despite the testimony of Scripture “that all things,
except God the Father, have been given to him
and placed under his feet. How then can science
. . . be removed from the power of Christ?”80
Science too must be brought under the lordship
of Christ.
Jesus Christ is the truth. Thus, “True science,
both of visible and invisible things, in the end boils
down to a science of Christ, because in him are
hidden all treasures of knowledge and wisdom.”81
Jesus Christ is the truth.
Thus, “True science, both of
visible and invisible things,
in the end boils down to a
science of Christ, because
in him are hidden all
treasures of knowledge and
wisdom.”81
Christ’s majesty requires one to research visible
things, to understand the science that is in Christ,
and “to bring the knowledge of the visible and
the invisible things together in the harmony of
one’s faith consciousness.” We cannot separate
the knowledge of the visible and invisible things.
Nature is the greatest theater of God’s glory.82
The final area of Christ’s kingship in this study
is the area of art. Art (kunst) is an ability (kunnen)
from God. It is a gift from God that can be used
properly or misused. Art is both an instrument
and an inspiration. As an instrument or means of
Pro Rege—March 2009
21
influence, art is completely neutral. But the spirit
of art determines whether the art is Christian or
not. If the spirit of the art is godly, then the art
will point us to God; but if the spirit of art is
demonic, then the art too will point us away from
God.83
Around 1910, Kuyper was negative towards
modern painting and music. He felt that there
was a real danger of idolatry. The artist and his
or her art were often idolized, and the art itself
easily became self-autonomous.84 Huge crowds
would go to the art galleries, and the artist would
be worshiped, but the art was bad. He writes, “If
it is more naked, it is better; if it is more filthy
and coarse, it is more expensive.” Modern music
was not much better. Kuyper feared that modern
art and music were becoming another Sodom and
Gomorrah.85
For Kuyper, a “special relation exists between
art and Christ.” This is easily missed by those twokingdom people, who see Christ only as the savior
of our souls. The question must be asked “whether
art itself as such lies within the government of
the king of God’s kingdom.”86 The answer is
positive since Christ’s creation also belongs to his
kingdom. There is continuity between his creation
and redemption. The new earth of Revelation 21
will not be a “newly created world, but a recreated
one; it will not be a different world, but the same
one.”87
Kuyper says, “Of course the Redeemer and
Savior has significance for the world of beauty
since sin and the curse brought disturbance,
desecration and corruption also in this world of
beauty.” Sin is “a deviation from the original state
of affairs,” and thus “the reconciliation (Verzoening)
brings about nothing else than purification in the
world of this distorted beauty.”88
Art belongs both to the world of creation and
redemption: “Not only Christian art, but art in
itself, no matter how misused and polluted, belongs
to Christ’s kingly territory . . . The only proper
appreciation of the world of beauty depends on a
confession of the divinity of Christ.”89
The kingship of Christ over all of life is
powerfully stated in Kuyper’s three-volume
Pro Rege. But Kuyper laments the fact that this
kingship of Christ is constantly rejected in his day.
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Pro Rege—March 2009
In 1910 he put Islam at the top of the list. Islam
does not recognize the kingship of Christ. But
in “Christian” Europe there is also a “darkening”
of Christ’s kingship. Scientific and technological
developments reduce our dependence on God.
Modernism—as seen in the world cities, the
growth of capital, and modern art—glorifies man
instead of Christ.90But within the church there is
also an undermining of Christ’s kingship. When
Christ’s kingship is limited to the visible church—
in the two-kingdom dualistic fashion—then his
royal power is limited. Bad theology leads to
an undermining of Christ’s kingship. Kuyper
criticizes the “sentimental longing for heaven”
of the pietists and other dualists. When they
pray “Thy kingdom come,” they are only thinking
about escape from this world and a personal
flight of their souls to heaven: “In the realm of
sentimentality there is an enthusiasm for a sort of
spirit life, a desire to have it good for oneself and
to spend eternity with other passionate souls.”91
This theology is essentially selfish.
The Reformed longing for heaven is totally
different. It is focused on God’s glory and God’s
kingdom, and it has to do with all of life. Your
God is “not a holy, heavenly emergency help who
only exists to pour out his blessings on this earthly
kingdom, and then to disappear out of your
thoughts. Your God is in heaven as the one and
only center who draws everything to himself.”92
This pietistic dualism also exists within the
Reformed churches. However, in Islam, religion
relates “to every area of life.” Kuyper laments
“how seldom in Christendom the broad scope
of the kingship of Christ is felt.”93 Even our
Heidelberg Catechism is weak on this point. The
answer to question 31 about the kingship of Christ
speaks about personal salvation “but is silent about
the broader significance, and precisely this silence
has led to a one-sided view of the kingship over
the believers.”94
Conclusion
Since Abraham Kuyper has such a strong
belief in the kingship of Christ over all of life, it
is clear that it is inappropriate to speak of a twokingdom doctrine in Kuyper. The kingdom of
God in his theology is not only the institutional
church but is found in all of life. As he puts it,
“the Kingdom of God is not in the least limited to
the institutional church but rules our entire worldand-life view.”95
Since Kuyper does not hold to a two-kingdom
doctrine, we must call into question the persistent
and ill-advised use of “Reformed two-kingdom
doctrine” by VanDrunen. Our dualist delights
in pointing to an alleged two-kingdom doctrine
throughout the Reformed tradition. But if Kuyper
does not teach a two-kingdom doctrine, then it
is questionable to what extent other Reformed
theologians hold to this same teaching.
The theology of Kuyper in the tradition of
Calvin stresses the lordship of Christ over all of
life. This is a radical difference from Luther’s
two-kingdom doctrine. If indeed “there is not a
square inch in the whole domain of our human
existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over
all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”96 then Christ’s kingdom
is broader than the institutional church. His
kingdom impacts all of life.
8. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 91.
9. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 88, 93.
10. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 90.
11. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 88, 92; italics
added.
12. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 96.
13. Martin Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” trans. J.
Pelikan, in Luther’s Works 21 (St. Louis: Concordia,
1956): 1-294.
14. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 5.
15. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 12.
16. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 23.
17. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 90.
18. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 90; italics
added.
19. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 99.
20. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 106.
21. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 110.
22. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 170; italics
added.
23. Luther, “Sermon on the Mount,” LW 21: 170.
24. Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics, vol. 1, Foundations,
ed. Wm. Lazareth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 369.
Endnotes
1. Cf. David VanDrunen, “The Two Kingdoms: A
Reassessment of the Transformationist Calvin,” Calvin
Theological Journal 40 (Nov. 2005); David VanDrunen,
“Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed Natural Law and
Two Kingdoms Traditions,” Calvin Theological Journal 42
(Nov. 2007): 283-307.
2. Timothy Palmer, “Calvin the Transformationist and
the Kingship of Christ,” Pro Rege 35 (2007): 32-39.
3. Steven Ozment, Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution
(New York: Doubleday, 1991), 122-24.
4. Ibid., . 126-27.
5. For summaries and bibliographies, see: Paul Althaus, The
Ethics of Martin Luther, trans. R. Schultz (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1972); and Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s
Theolog y, trans. R. Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1999).
6. Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What
Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” trans. J. Schindel and
W. Brandt, in Luther’s Works (LW) 45 (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1962): 81-129.
7. Luther, “Temporal Authority,” LW 45: 88.
25. Jürgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theolog y
and Ethics, trans. M. D. Meeks (London: SCM Press,
1984), 76.
26. See Thielicke, pp. 368-69 and Moltmann, 61.
27. VanDrunen, “Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed
Natural Law and Two Kingdoms Tradition,” 283-84.
28. Ibid., 284.
29. Ibid., 300.
30. J.C. Rullmann, Kuyper-Bibliografie, vol. 3 (Kok: Kampen,
1940), 378.
31. Abraham Kuyper, Pro Rege of het Koningschap van Christus,
3 vols. (Kok: Kampen, 1911-1912). Quotations from
this work are my own translation.
32. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: v.
33. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: vi-vii.
34. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Abraham Kuyper: A
Centennial Reader, ed. James Bratt (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1998), 171.
35. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 171.
36. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 172.
37. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 172.
Pro Rege—March 2009
23
38. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 172.
39. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 171.
40. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 505.
73. Kuyper, Christianity and the Class Struggle, trans. D.
Jellema (Grand Rapids: Piet Hein, 1950), 55.
74. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 164-204.
41. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 508.
75. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 183.
42. VanDrunen, “Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed
Natural Law and Two Kingdoms Tradition,” p. 303.
77. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 272-82.
76. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 189.
43. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 173.
78. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 282-93.
44. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 173.
79. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 302, 304.
45. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 174.
80. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 354-55.
46. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 185-86.
81. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 464.
47. VanDrunen, “Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed
Natural Law and Two Kingdoms Tradition,” 303;
Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 186.
82. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 466-67.
48. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 307.
49. Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno.
Toelichting op den
Heidelbergschen Catechismus, (Kampen: Kok, [1895]),
4: 465-66. Quotations from this work are my own
translation.
50. Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno, IV: 470.
51. See Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 384-91, 405-408.
52. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 412.
53. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 471.
54. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 472-74.
55. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 475.
56. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 1.
57. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 22-74.
58. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 12-21.
59. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 126.
83. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 531-33.
84. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 526-29.
85. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 530.
86. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 534-35.
87. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 537.
88. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 544-45.
89. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 545.
90. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 1-112.
91. Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno, IV: 476.
92. Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno, IV: 477-78.
93. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 580.
94. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 583.
95. Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science,” in Abraham
Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 458.
96. Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper: A
Centennial Reader, 488.
60. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 131.
61. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 139-234.
62. Kuyper, Pro Rege, I: 340.
63. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 362; see also p. 369.
64. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 356.
65. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 379-85, 437-44.
66. Kuyper, Pro Rege, II: 465.
67. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 8-9.
68. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 10-11.
69. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 26.
70. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 15-23.
71. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 23.
72. Kuyper, Pro Rege, III: 22.
24
Pro Rege—March 2009
Bibliography
Althaus, Paul. The Ethics of Martin Luther. Translated by R.
Schultz. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972.
“Common Grace.” Translated by J. Vriend. In Abraham
Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, pp. 165-201. Edited by J.
Bratt. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
“Common Grace in Science.” Translated by H. van den
Hel and W. Bornholdt. In Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial
Reader, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998: 441-60.
E Voto Dordraceno: Toelichting op den Heidelbergschen Catechismus.
4 vols. Kok: Kampen, 1892-1895.
Kuyper, Abraham. Christianity and the Class Struggle. Translated
by D. Jellema. Grand Rapids: Piet Hein, 1950.
Pro Rege of het Koningschap van Christus. 3 vols. Kampen:
Kok, 1911-1912.
Palmer, Timothy. “Calvin the Transformationist and the
Kingship of Christ.” Pro Rege 35 (March 2007): 32-39.
“Sphere Sovereignty.” Translated by G. Kamp. In Abraham
Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1998: 461-90.
Rullmann, J.C. Kuyper-Bibliografie. Vol. 3, 1891-1932. Kok:
Kampen, 1940.
Lohse, Bernhard. Martin Luther’s Theolog y. Translated by R.
Harrisville. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999.
Luther, Martin. “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It
Should Be Obeyed.” Translated by J. Schindel and W.
Brandt. In Luther’s Works, vol. 45: 81-129. Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1962.
Moltmann, Jürgen. On Human Dignity: Political Theolog y and
Ethics. Translated by M. Meeks. London: SCM Press,
1984.
Ozment, Stephen. Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution. New
York: Doubleday, 1991.
“Sermon on the Mount.” Translated by J. Pelikan. In
Luther’s Works, vol. 22: 1-294. St. Louis: Concordia,
1956.
Thielicke, Helmut. Theological Ethics. Edited by Wm.
Lazareth. Vol. 1, Foundations. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1966.
VanDrunen, David. “Abraham Kuyper and the Reformed
Natural Law and Two Kingdoms Tradition.” Calvin
Theological Journal 42 (2007): 283-307.
“The Two Kingdoms: A Reassessment of the
Transformationist Calvin.” Calvin Theological Journal 40
(2005): 248-66.
Pro Rege—March 2009
25
Our Academic Tasks and
the Cosmic Gospel Economy:
What difference does being a Christian
make in the study of the Krebs cycle?
by Tim Morris
T
herefore, prepare your minds for action. Be self controlled: set your hope fully
on the grace to be given to you when Jesus
Christ is revealed” (I Peter 1.13).1
Those of us involved in Christian higher
education frequently ask ourselves, and are often
asked by others, some version of the following
question: “What difference does being a Christian
make in the study of X?” The question is asked
for different reasons: as a starting point for a
potentially interesting exploration, as part of a
Tim Morris is Professor of Biology at Covenant College,
Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
26
Pro Rege—March 2009
faculty member’s soul-searching struggle with the
ideas of his or her discipline, by a constituency
looking for the Christian payoff for resources
given to Christian education, or even in a cynically
rhetorical mode by those who are deeply skeptical
of the project of Christian education itself.
The answers to the question vary. Sometimes
the answer is easy, for example when the value of
human beings as image-bearers is directly in view,
or when a particularly obvious ethical question
is being considered for which biblical teaching
provides a straightforward answer. In the case of
biology, my own discipline, a Christian view of
living organisms would be the conviction that they
are created and purposely sustained by God rather
than merely the material products of impersonal
forces, time, and chance. Another set of valid
answers can be provided by explaining distinctive
Christian attitudes toward the process and objects
of study: that as God’s children studying His
works for His glory, we are in a frame of mind
that is different from that of those attempting
to study without acknowledging God’s presence.
However, when it comes to judgments made in
the disciplines or in the study of straight-forward
observational, technical facts of science, Christian
scholars become frustrated or even defensive with
the whole “difference” game.
Some strange ironies appear when we pursue
the difference game. On the one hand, we
sometimes covet difference to justify ourselves
as bone fide Christian scholars in our own minds
and in the minds of our Christian constituencies.
For example, in the sciences we might really like
a revelation of something like the Krebs cycle
in the Scriptures, or we might like a specifically
Christian insight that led all Christians to support
scientific-theory A, which turned out to be
correct, over against scientific-theory B, which was
Any human activity that
loses its rootedness in the
gospel, its sense of benefit
from the gospel, and even
its sense of participation in
the gospel will eventually
become a narrow, dry
excercise fraught with
idolatry.
supported by all non-Christians but which turned
out to be wrong. These, we think, would be real
differences.
On the other hand, we sometimes fear
“difference” because it might put us at odds with
our non-Christian colleagues in our academic
disciplines. We prefer a high-profile Christian
difference that passes muster in our disciplines.
Some of the attraction of the intelligent-design
theory in biology might come from its promise
in this capacity. But then some of us worry: If it
can pass muster in the discipline, maybe it doesn’t
qualify as a specifically Christian difference. And
if Christianity isn’t making a specific difference
in our work, we are right back where we started,
feeling guilty about what we do and trying to find
a difference to exploit.
I’d like to explore this difference question in
the context of the Krebs cycle and I Peter 1:13.
To do so, I’ll consider the series of biochemical
reactions known as the Krebs cycle—but any
straightforward “fact” or technical process that
is a part of any other academic discipline could
stand in for the Krebs cycle here.
I’ll begin with a little background in the
Krebs cycle. In 1937, a German biochemist
named Hans Krebs proposed a novel solution
to puzzling experimental data that had built up
over several decades as biochemists explored the
cellular reactions of energy metabolism. Before
Krebs’ proposal, most of those working on the
problem were stuck in a linear frame of mind,
instinctively picturing metabolism as a series of
reactions operating one after another in a straightline fashion. Krebs’ insight was to realize that this
particular series of reactions was operating in a
cyclical rather than a linear fashion, and for this
insight he won a Nobel Prize in 1953. There are
eight major reactions in the cycle. In each round
of the cycle, two carbon atoms’ worth of food
molecules are processed, and some of the food’s
energy is captured for the cell’s use—energy
which ultimately allows you to maintain an orderly
configuration of molecules in your body. These
reactions take place in sub-cellar organelles known
as mitochondria, of which there are 50 or so in
almost every one of the roughly 50 trillion cells
that make up your body. In fact, right now (unless
you are crash dieting), complex, highly ordered,
carbon-containing molecules from a recent meal
are being broken down via the Krebs cycle to
simpler, less-ordered molecules of carbon dioxide,
which you are exhaling by the millions in each
breath.
Now, what difference might being a Christian
make in the study of these reactions? The
difference is not very obvious, given the common
way of thinking about features of biology—simply
as facts to be memorized or techniques to be
mastered. The same set of reactions is accepted as
a “fact of nature” by Christian and non-Christian
alike. Christian students in my classes learn the
same details as students in similar classes taught
by professors who don’t claim to be Christians.
How should I respond to this apparent
lack of difference? Should I conclude that my
Christianity doesn’t make any difference because
there are no obvious ethical issues to discuss
and the background beliefs are too much in the
background to make any real difference? Should I
simply tell my students that they should have better
attitudes about studying the reactions because they
Pro Rege—March 2009
27
are Christian and leave it at that? (Anyone that has
actually taught the Krebs Cycle in introductory
biology knows that attitudes toward the study are
a struggle for Christian and non-Christian students
alike.) Should I feel defensive that the words and
figures I use in the lectures are commonly used
by Christians and non-Christians alike? Should
I admit that there is no real difference here and
focus more on topics where difference may be
more obvious so that I can justify the course as
being taught Christianly?
Big Gospel
I certainly don’t pretend to have all the
answers to these challenges, but in my struggle
with these issues in the sciences, I have found
myself slapping my forehead and exclaiming, “It’s
the gospel, stupid.” I want to discuss several of
my ideas from these head-slapping sessions and
explain how they relate to difference and to “setting
our hope fully on the grace to be given … when
Jesus Christ is revealed” (1Peter 1.13).
Any human activity that loses its rootedness in
the gospel, its sense of benefit from the gospel,
and even its sense of participation in the gospel
will eventually become a narrow, dry exercise
fraught with idolatry. What I have in mind when I
say gospel here is what we could call Big Gospel, the
expansive vision of the gospel expressed in the
Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation belief.
Big Gospel is the good news that God in Christ
creates, sustains, rules, judges, reconciles, and
completes “all things” in the created realm. This is
the gospel expressed in that familiar passage from
Colossians:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn
over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or
authorities; all things were created by him and for
him. He is before all things, and in him all things
hold together. And he is the head of the body, the
church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from
among the dead, so that in everything he might
have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have
all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to
reconcile to himself all things, whether things
on earth or things in heaven, by making peace
28
Pro Rege—March 2009
through his blood, shed on the cross. (1.15-20)
I will draw out several points concerning Big
Gospel and relate them to the Krebs-cycledifference question.
Big Gospel is radically Christocentric.
God’s work in his created realm is
Christocentric from beginning to end. It is the
pre-eminence of God in Christ that is literally
“fleshed” out in “all things: Christ is the “Alpha
and the Omega,” the Creator and Finisher of all
that is, the focal point of all aspects of creation
and of every moment of its history. He is the only
“mediator” of creation, of redemption and of
consummation. There is nothing good in created
reality that is good on its own; all that is good is
good only “in Christ” (Genesis 1.31a, John 1.13, Eph 2.10). Nothing that is ruined by sin will
be redeemed except “in Christ” (Ephesians 1.10,
1Cor 1.30, Romans 8.19-23). And nothing known
by humans will be known except it be known in
Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2.3).
Big Gospel tells a comprehensive story that involves literally all things.
Even though human redemption and
completion in Christ is center stage, God’s gospel
purposes go far beyond. John Calvin frequently
likened all creation to a theater that displays God’s
glory”;2 the idea here is not that creation is a
theater but that creation is theater. Created reality
is not simply the stage or an incredibly complex
prop for a story that God is telling; rather, created
reality is the gospel story he is telling in time and
space. All of creation and its history are integral to
this cosmic gospel economy. Furthermore, God’s
gospel promise is not just to repair the sin and
evil problem in creation, to move things back to
time zero. Instead, his promise is that through
judgment and grace he will remake all creation, to
bring into being a new heavens and a new earth,
populated by humans who are themselves new
creations in Christ. He is recreating a total reality
that supersedes the present reality in all respects
yet is relationally connected to the present reality
as its completion and perfection. 3
Big Gospel asks us to be triumphant without
being triumphalist.
The gospel story of Christ’s redemptive rule
unfolds and develops over created time in such a
way that history is neither just a time delay until
King Jesus swoops in on the clouds of heaven,
nor simply a matter of an obvious and telegraphed kingdom crescendo leading into consummation. There are demonstrations of the coming
kingdom in history, but there are also what we
could call gestational elements. Gestation in biology commonly refers to the period of time a
developing organism is carried inside its mother
before its birth. The extensive development taking place doesn’t become obvious to outside observers until birth, when suddenly the months of
behind-the-scenes activity becomes evident to all.
Likewise, in Christ’s rule, in addition to kingdom
demonstration there is also kingdom gestation, a
quiet, more hidden, yet nonetheless real unfolding
of Christ’s pre-eminence, in preparation for the
day it will burst forth in all its fullness.
Not only are we looking toward the triumph of
the kingdom, but all creation with us is longing for it.
That familiar passage from Romans 8 explains this
gestation aspect:
The creation waits in eager expectation for the
sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was
subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but
by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope
that the creation itself will be liberated from its
bondage to decay and brought into the glorious
freedom of the children of God. We know that the
whole creation has been groaning as in the pains
of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only
so, but we ourselves, who have the first- fruits of
the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for
our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8.19-24)
While redeemed image bearers “have the firstfruits” of Christ’s redemptive work from among
the created things, there is also the sense that
we (humans) are a demonstration to the rest of
creation as to what God will ultimately do for it.
The rest of creation is waiting for us to be revealed
fully as recreated children, and even now we are
demonstrating to the rest of creation what it is
like to be “in Christ.” In fact, it seems that human
regeneration is linked in some sense to creational
regeneration and that we should be motivated in
part by both a sense of solidarity with creation and a
sense of special responsibility among the creatures
to lead the way, to demonstrate how redemption
looks, acts, and thinks. The way we treat the rest
of creation matters in both the gestation and
demonstration of the coming kingdom. How
exactly is a “demonstration” received by nonpersonal creatures and inanimate things? I haven’t
a clue, but there it is in Romans 8.
The way we treat the
rest of creation matters
in both the gestation and
demonstration of the
coming kingdom.
Big Gospel gives us the “Weight of Glory.”
Finally, it is only in light of Big Gospel that
humans can feel the full measure of humility that
comes from absolute dependence on God and yet
experience the full weight of glory in the gospel
vision of human empowerment. We are absolutely
dependent on regeneration for newness of life. Yet
this regeneration gives humans a new nature that
is fully empowered to respond to God as true sons
and daughters. Regeneration does more than reset
the clock, giving us a fresh start. The perishable
and corruptible mode of being is replaced with a
new mode that is incorruptible and imperishable.
As new creations, redeemed humans are not only
established as new persons but also called to work
at “being” new persons. We are to “put on the new
self, which is being renewed in the image of its
Creator” (Col. 3.10).
This new self is not to be just a beautiful,
isolated, put-on-the-heavenly-shelf museum piece.
Our reconciliation to God creates an entirely new
and comprehensive web of relationships, with
Pro Rege—March 2009
29
new connections to self, to others, and to the
rest of creation. These new relationships center
around a “new” aspect of image bearing, that
of restoration, redemption, and bearing witness
to the present and coming transformation of
all things in Christ. The regeneration of human
beings in Christ sets in motion a transformation
wave, a ripple effect of our transformation that
emanates from us and that, by the Spirit, we assist
in propagating. We regenerated humans become
centers of redemptive activity, not in the sense
of generating redemption under our own power
but in the sense of resonating the redemption we
have received through our restored relationship
to God. We are to resonate our redemption
in all our relationships within creation until the
reverberations of his transforming power bring
down the curtain on the present age.
Seen in that light, human recreation involves
more than simply restoring image-bearing. It
expands and transforms image-bearing and imagebearing tasks in a variety of ways. As New Creatures
in Christ, we reflect deity in new and better ways
than before the Fall. The task of ruling and caring
for creation, given before the Fall, is given a new
and better form, based on human reconstitution in
Christ. Thus, our creational “unfolding” task now
should not only explore and develop the potentials
of creation but (in and through doing so) bear
witness to God’s redeeming work in the “now,” as
well as pointing to and gestationally building up to
the “not yet” of consummation.
Now We Return to Krebs.
Having briefly sketched some of the features
of Big Gospel, I return to the Krebs cycle and the
difference a Christian perspective makes in our
studies of Krebs-cycle types of things. The fact is
that when new creatures in Christ hold things like
the Krebs cycle in their hands and minds, those
things do become different, and that difference
is not dependant on our intelligence and our
cleverness. That difference is dependent on Christ
and is rooted in who he is, what he has done, and
what he is doing and will do in us and in all of
creation. Because we are in Christ, every feature
of creation that we grasp and puzzle over, every
process that we learn and apply, is transformed,
30
Pro Rege—March 2009
is made different by the Spirit through our work
with it. By God’s grace, faithful work by true
sons and daughters always moves His kingdom
forward. The Krebs cycle, in a highly personal way,
is transformed when you and I as a unique sons or
daughters of the King establish a relationship with
it through our study. In fact, the natural sciences as
a whole offer a wide variety of means to establish
this specialized kind of relationship to the natural
world around us. The question, then, is not
whether our being in Christ makes a difference in
a particular area of our studies per se; it is more a
question of the kind of difference it makes.
Let me bring back the gestation and
demonstration terminology mentioned earlier.
Part of working faithfully is to consider whether
the difference that God makes in his world in and
through us is more gestational of the kingdom—
more part of the quiet building of the kingdom
behind the scenes—or whether faithfulness in a
particular case demands that the difference be
a more explicit, more public, and more directly
demonstrative of the coming kingdom.
As we establish and nurture the specialized
relationships with creation that our studies enable,
some differences should and will be obvious to
all, and we dare not minimize or apologize for
those differences so that we can better fit into our
disciplinary guilds. We should always keep pressing
to understand the difference our redemption
makes and should always be asking whether there
are explicit differences to be owned and pointed
to before our Lord and before a watching world.
At the same time, we should be wary of
equating explicit difference with difference per se,
especially such that we only pay attention to and
put a premium on elements of our work that bring
out explicit differences. To do this would seem
to dispute with God concerning the gestational
aspects of his prosecution of history according
to his purposes and plans. The temptation to
overvalue or manufacture explicit difference is akin
to the temptation toward legalism in our approach
to specifying Christian righteousness. In legalism,
we are not satisfied with Christ’s righteousness, so
we seek to manufacture a righteousness of our
own, using human-generated rules. In our Krebscycle-like cases, we are tempted to be dissatisfied
with the kind of difference we find in Christ and
to construct difference that is “in us” rather than
“in Christ.”
Let us neither underestimate nor overestimate
the impact of our work before God as individuals
and a community involved in the project of
Christian education in our own small corners of
the Kingdom. God is bringing out his purposes
in Christ in and through created things, even in
things like the Krebs cycle and our interactions
with it. The wonder is that in Christ, our work in
our disciplines and our work together in Christian
higher education are somehow integral, not just
incidental, to the gestation and demonstration of
Christ’s kingdom. As we renew our work together,
let us prepare our minds for action and be selfcontrolled in setting our hopes for our work fully
on the grace to be given us when Jesus Christ is
revealed.
Endnotes
1. All scripture references are taken from the New
International Version of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 1978).
2. Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and
the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1991).
3. See the longer discussion of this issue in Tim Morris
and Don Petcher, Science and Grace: God’s Reign in the
Natural Sciences (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006),
193-202. The talk on science and grace, given in 2004
(this paper) informed, in a variety of ways, the material
that ended up later in chapter 7 (159-206) of Science and
Grace, titled “New Creatures at Work in the King’s
Realm.”
Bibliography
Holy Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 1978.
Schreiner, Susan E. The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the
Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Books, 1991.
Pro Rege—March 2009
31
Editor’s Note: This speech was presented at the Christian Education Association annual convention in South
Bend, Indiana, in 2007.
Reverence, Mystery, and
Christian Education
T
by James Calvin Schaap
Dr. James Calvin Schaap is Professor of English at Dordt
College and the author of 25 books of various genres. His
stories and articles have been honored by the Associated
Church Press, the Evangelical Press Association, and the
Iowa Arts Council. He authored Dordt’s Jubilee play,
Vision at Work and Play, a history of the Christian Reformed
Church; Our Family Album; as well as devotionals and the
World War II biography of Diet Eman, Things We Couldn’t
Say. His novel Touches the Sky was given an Award of Merit
by Christianity Today in 2004, as was his Startling Joy, a collection of Christmas stories, in 2005. His most recent
book is Sixty at Sixty: A Boomer Looks at the Psalms, as well
as an essay on creative non-fiction in the newly released A
Syllable of Water, and a two-part essay on Indian boarding
schools in Books and Culture. He has been teaching literature and writing at Dordt College for thirty-one years.
32
Pro Rege—March 2009
wenty years ago, when she was ten, my
daughter defined Christian education in a way
that left her parents chuckling, sort of. The State
of Iowa’s largesse toward parental and parochial
education includes free bus rides, so from our back
door to the sidewalk running up to the Christian
school she attended, she and her friends were in
the company of twenty or more public schoolers, most of whom attended churches confessing
the same catechism as we did and do. What was
obvious to my daughter, however, even at ten, was
that those kids were different.
“Only public school kids have cable TV,” she
said, one night, over supper, very matter-of-factly,
as if the assertion had been passed by a Christian
school legislature.
Today, her parents have cable, as she does; and
while there may have been some lag-time, within
a year or two the line she drew in the sand was
washed out by the appeal of Nickelodeon, The History
Channel, and a host of other options. But, for a
time back then at least, my daughter and her friends
could proudly define the character of Christian
education—after all, the little heathens on the bus
all had cable. Not so the righteous.
Moralism is really entry-level Christianity, but
a significant stop on every believer’s pilgrimage.
I know it in myself: when I was my daughter’s
age, my friends and I were assaulted by a bunch
of public school kids who snowballed us nearly
to death, then wrestled us down and gave us face-
washings. They could just as well have left us on
the street buck naked. I thought them pagans,
myself a Stephen. Not so many years later, they
were my best friends.
It’s easy—and it’s even right at times—to fill in
the lines between the city of God and the city of
man with our own definitions.
Moralism is really entrylevel Christianity but a
significant stop on every
believer’s pilgrimage.
Just last summer, I heard a Lakota lay pastor
narrate the story of his escape from alcoholism.
To him, being unburdened from booze meant
being freed from sin. At a flea market in Brazil
several years ago, I picked up a wood-carving,
perfectly elegant, of Madonna and child. My
hosts, evangelical Christians, very devout, made it
very clear that I shouldn’t buy the enemy’s graven
image. I put it down, then bought another—much
costlier—when I was out of their company at the
airport.
I spent countless hours, not long ago,
interviewing Southeast Asian refugees who’d
become Christians. They brought me into worlds
I never would have known without hearing their
stories. But their perception of the Christianity
they’d embraced—often far more passionately
than I do—began with a definition of what they
weren’t: no longer smokers and drinkers, no longer
promiscuous at parties, no longer spending time
daily at the casino. They’re Christians now: they
worship God, and they don’t do dirty things.
Is there really anything more “unReformed,” if
I may use that word, than the cute little oldie but
goldie, “Be careful little eyes what you see?” I think
it’s possible to argue, oddly enough, that the Christian
Reformed Church, the denomination of which I
am a part, was probably never quite as “modern”
as it was in the famous Synodical decision of 1928,
when it tried to stamp its individual members with
a behavioral bar code for quick and easy check-out,
by warning its members against the evils of playing
cards, social dancing, and the movies. For several
generations, that kind of moralism came to define
its denominational members, even when they
broke the roles. Moralizing, such as my daughter’s
well-meant directive about cable TV, effectively
demystifies faith, making it a children’s game of
chutes and ladders.
The truth is, of course, all of us eventually
graduate from Sunday school, and it’s well that
we should—not because Sunday school’s moral
directives are necessarily wrong but because the
risk of abuse is so great: only the heathens have cable.
Let’s investigate roots. Several generations
ago, people in my faith tradition used to talk about
“the antithesis” as if it were—as it probably is—
the kissing cousin of the biblical precept of “the
straight-and-narrow.”
No one in the Reformed tradition has trumpeted
ye olde concept of “the antithesis” as heartily as the
CRC-born-and-reared but Westminster Seminaryassociated Cornelius Van Til, who spent much
of his theologian’s life asserting the diametrical
opposition between belief and unbelief and
therefore between belief and any compromise of
revealed truth.
Honestly, I have no quarrel with the doctrine.
It’s impossible to argue—especially from the
great themes of Scripture—that the reality of the
antithesis is erroneous—wrong.
But in my own lifetime, I can remember dozens
of moments when “the antithesis” morphed into
snap judgments and self-righteous blackballing,
the measure of what my daughter applied to the
not-so-well-integrated school bus she rode in—
categorization that became “us and them.”
And, it’s important to own up to the facts. Today,
for better or worse, we live in a different age. In
an age that celebrates, even worships diversity, “usand-them” thinking is in very bad taste, verboten. It’s
blessedly easy for me to take on cheap moralism, to
blast away at “us-and-them,” even an honored old
theological concept like “the antithesis,” because
nothing is more righteous today than inclusivity,
as bringing people in, bringing us all together and
finding a place for everyone. “We worship at the
altar of the bitch goddess of tolerance,” Charles
Colson says, shockingly, in a recent Christianity
Pro Rege—March 2009
33
Today. I certainly wouldn’t have said that, but it’s
clear that nothing is as despised as keeping people
out.
I really believe I could make a good argument
that the parentally-run Christian school movement
needs a good shot of “us-and-them” thinking, but
I don’t have to. That kind of strategy is very much
alive and kicking, perennially, in the question of
proper attire for school—should Christian schools
adopt school uniforms? In an age when cleavage is
on display on the floor of Congress, when t-shirts
say just about anything, when the only loose tops
in the world are burkas, what should Christian
children wear to Christian school? The antithesis
is alive and kicking, even if and when—as they
are today—the lines in so many discussions are
immensely blurred.
You may think I’m running in circles here, but
the topic I am addressing—what is the difference
between teaching in a Christian school and teaching
in a public school?—aside from the knee-jerk
answers is not particularly easy to think through
because I’m quite sure of this: what makes my
teaching “Christian”—at least what I’d like to think
makes it thus, God alone being both witness and
judge—is far more than what I don’t say, what my
students don’t read, what ideas are verboten, negatives
absolutely not entertained in my classroom.
Definition by negation is something we all
do—“I’m a Christian school kid because I don’t
have cable television,” “a believer because I’m
not a drunk or adulterer or drug user.” I’m a
Christian because my little ears don’t listen to things
they shouldn’t and my eyes don’t look at naughty
things.
There is legitimacy to those definitions. I swear
there is. But being a Christian teacher, a Christian
teacher in language arts, in literature and writing—
for me at least, at the college level, but even, as
I once was, at the high school level—is about far
more than can be defined by negation, by what we’re
not. Nobody really believes that uniforms are going
to make what happens under the roof of a school
for Christian instruction any more “Christian.” It
may well make our students look better; they may
even perform better, and, goodness knows, they’ll
look much better to an outside world to whom
we’d love to market our enterprise. But is a plaid
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Pro Rege—March 2009
skirt going to teach kids to see all of his life as
belonging to Him? I doubt it.
All of this is to say that I’m sure of at least
this so far: my teaching is not “Christian” simply
because of what I don’t teach. Community standards
may well apply here; there are many, many places in
Christian school circles today where Hillary Clinton
is as much a part of the Evil Empire as Iran. But I
hope no one would want to assert that a Christian
school is a Republican field base. Definition by
negation is as handy as it is useful. But it can’t
justify Christian education. We are more than what
we aren’t.
Let’s go another direction. Let me introduce
you to two teachers I used to teach with. One
of them—I’ll call Drew—taught history with a
passion, constantly looking for creative ways to
make kids interested in stories from the past that
thrilled him. And then there was Janice, who taught
a course titled Family and Marriage. Students loved
her. She gave herself completely to the task.
It was the mid-seventies, and drug use was still
high throughout my generation, despite the fact
that Sixties types like me were already into the work
force. Drew used to smoke-up before school in the
morning, get high on his way. It was more habitual
with him than bothersome, I believe—and, of
course, it was illegal. But the buzz would be gone
soon enough, I’m sure, and he’d do his thing in the
classroom. He was a terrific teacher, worked hard
at his profession.
Janice had been married twice and was
presently living with a guy, all of which she was
quite proud of. Her perspective on issues in family
and marriage was undoubtedly different from that
of professionals in the Christian schools down
the block—and it was different from my own, her
colleague. But she was a very fine teacher, as was
Drew.
Here’s an application for that old song—“Be
careful little eyes what you see.” As a child of a
distinct religious tradition headstrong about its
righteousness, once upon a time I found it very
difficult to “see” that people who did bad things
or didn’t see things as I did could be good teachers.
But then, as we all know, common grace runs
headstrong into the antithesis because people who
don’t measure their behavior by our definitions of
satisfactory ways can be very, very fine teachers.
Maybe my own experiences in public education
were less than beneficial to me. Maybe I’d have
been better off through life had I not noted that
good teachers came in a variety of “professions.”
I don’t know.
But I do know this: “Christian” teaching is
not just good teaching. Nope. I’ve known a ton of
good teachers in my time, and lots of them weren’t
believers. I have no idea if they were atheists, but I
know they had very little concept of what I thought
of as “the straight and narrow,” at least in the ways
that I’ve defined it throughout my life.
I think I could play negation all day, continue to
say what Christian education isn’t, but that would
be a dodge. The question I’m dancing around is,
“What does it mean to be a Christian teacher in
language arts—in literature and writing?” “How is
my teaching distinctive?”
I know this: my own teaching style did not—I
repeat did not—change all that much when I left
public education. Those truths I used to couch
in personal idiosyncrasy in the public school—by
law—as in, “Now, if you want to know what I
believe,” I might well say in the same way today,
teaching in a Christian college. You may disagree,
but, at least at my level, teaching isn’t preaching—
or at least it shouldn’t be. Let me rephrase that
in deference to the preachers: teaching is not
inculcation. Blasting at the surface yields very little,
at least not at the level I teach—not only that, I
wouldn’t want it to work. God wants every part of
us, including our wills.
I’m still working on some kind of definition—
as I’ve said, this is not an easy question, despite
my own long and blessed tradition of Christian
parental education.
Let me give you an example that thrills me
from a student’s paper, a response to “The Father’s
Story,” by Andre Dubus, a fiction writer whose
work just about always carries his deep Roman
Catholic faith within it. Simply, it’s the story of a
man named Luke Ripley, who has known his own
trials and tribulations but who still talks to God,
despite his questions and lack of assurance. By my
estimation, that story is unforgettable, and most of
my college students would say the same thing—
“that story was the highlight of the reading.”
On an assignment last year, one student wrote
that several times during the reading of that story,
he was so moved that he was struck to his knees
to pray:
There is a point in “A Father’s Story” when Luke
Ripley goes through his morning routine and
talks to God. As I sat and read this early morning act of devotion, I felt as though the golden
sunlight of my early evening shone right through
my window and through this story. The Lord’s
My purpose is to address
the presence, significance,
and motivations of a
category of continuing, often
long-term players in the
American political process.
Prayer, writes Dubus, “whether recited or said
with concentration, is always an act of faith.”
This was the first moment in the story when I
put the story down and prayed. As the focus drew
closer and closer on Luke’s concluding challenge
to God, my prayer grew stronger and more clear.
Something in “A Father’s Story” found the part of
me that wants to someday be a dad, and the depth
of its insight sparked with life that future father
part inside of me.
When I first read that line, I wondered whether,
like the priest Levi, the baby Jesus in his arms, I
could simply tell my fellow teachers that I had now
seen enough to quit the profession. In a way, I
didn’t want to read that student’s confession in
the essay since the assignment was not to tell the
prof some personal narrative of his own faith
pilgrimage; what he said in the paper didn’t belong
in the essay—and I told him as much. On the
other hand, reading that was just about the best
gift I received as a teacher that semester.
The reason I think of that paper now,
however, is the immense satisfaction—as a lover
of literature—I had in knowing that a short story
Pro Rege—March 2009
35
(could have been a poem or a novel or a play)
actually affected this student so deeply that it
pushed him, awe-filled, to his knees. The kid was
19, not 50+, like Luke Ripley; but something in
that story brought him closer to God. All I did was
assign the story. I didn’t ballyhoo it, didn’t market
or cheerlead. I simply assigned it, and the beauty
of the medium morphed into worship.
Perhaps I’ve stumbled on something here:
maybe what we Christian teachers want out of our
students is worship, not in a church, not in some
prayer closet somewhere, not in the security of
their own bedrooms—although I’d be happy
for that too. Maybe what we want from them is
worship, which is to say, I think, awe—reverence, an
attitude of mind that may well be in short supply
with the Y-Generation, as prone as they are, by
their affluence, and ours, to sheer narcissism. My
student got pushed to his knees by the strength of
that story, and his aging prof, me, in the confines
of my office, amid a blizzard of papers, just about
lost it when I read that it happened.
I’m going to push this for a minute here by
reading you a little essay of mine which appeared
in a number of places several years ago, an essay
about an outing that I regularly take with my
advanced writing students to a place on the prairie
where no one is around.
“That Unforgettable Morning, on the Prairie”
Out here in Iowa where I live, on the eastern
emerald cusp of the Great Plains, on some balmy
early fall days it’s not hard to believe that we are
not where we are. Warm southern breezes sweep
all the way up from the Gulf, the sun smiles with
a gentleness not seen since June, and the spacious
sky reigns over everything in azure glory.
On exactly that kind of fall morning, I like to
bring my writing classes to what I call a ghost town,
Highland, Iowa, a place whose remnants still exist,
eight miles west and two south of town, as they say
out here on the square-cut prairie, a village that was,
but is no more. Likely as not Highland fell victim
to a century-old phenomenon in the farm belt,
the simple fact that far more people lived out here
when the land was cut into 160-acre chunks than
do now, when the portions are ten times bigger.
What’s left of Highland is a stand of pines
36
Pro Rege—March 2009
circled up around no more than twenty gravestones,
and an old carved sign with hand-drawn figures
detailing what was once a post-office address
for some people—a Main Street composed of
a couple of churches and their horse barns, a
blacksmith shop, and little else. The town of
Highland, Iowa, once sat at the confluence of a
pair of non-descript gravel roads that still float out
in four distinct directions like dusky ribbons over
the undulating prairie.
I like to bring my students to Highland because
what’s not there never fails to silence them. Maybe
it’s the skeletal cemetery; maybe it’s the south wind’s
low moan through that stand of pines, a sound
you don’t hear often on the treeless Plains; maybe
it’s some variant of culture shock—they stumble
sleepily out of their cubicle dorm rooms and wake
up suddenly in sprawling prairie spaciousness.
I’m lying. I know why they fall into psychic
shock. It’s the sheer immensity of the open
land that unfurls before them, the horizon only
seemingly there where earth seams effortlessly
into sky; it’s the vastness of rolling land William
Cullen Bryant once claimed looked like an ocean
stopped in time. Suddenly, they open their eyes
and it seems as if there’s nothing here, and that’s
what stuns them into silence.
This year, on a morning none of them will
ever forget, when we stood and sat in the ditches
along those gravel roads, no cars went by. We were
absolutely alone—20 of us, alone and vulnerable
on a swell of prairie once called the village of
Highland, surrounded by nothing but startling
openness.
That’s where I was—and that’s where they
were—on September 11, 2001. My class and I
left for Highland at just about the moment Atta
and his friends were steering the first 767 into
the first World Trade Center tower, so we knew
nothing about what had happened until it was over.
While the rest of the world stood and watched in
horror, my students and I looked over a landscape
so immense only God could live there—and were
silent before him.
No one can stay on a retreat forever, of course,
so when we returned to the college we heard the
news. Who didn’t? All over campus, TV’s blared.
But I like to think that maybe my students were
best prepared for the horror of that morning, not
by our having been warned but by our having been
awed.
Every year it’s a joy to sit out there and try to
describe the character of the seemingly eternal
prairie, but this year our being there on September
11, I’m convinced, was a blessing.
I wonder if reverence isn’t the key to what we
want to do in Christian education in general: create,
nurture, and model reverence—reverence, in my
case, for writing, for literature, for story, for speech,
for clarity of expression, for all things bright and
beautiful—and even for things that are not. Things
like cynicism, from which much of the world’s
great literature derives. Things like investigative
journalism, without which our freedom could be
much more easily imperiled. Things like doubt, as
deeply a part of the music of the Psalms as praise.
Things like the blues, the utterance of an emptied
soul and heart.
I wonder if reverence isn’t our goal, somehow—I
mean along with a ton of things the state requires
and our students simply need to get along in this
world. Much of the work of an English teacher—
by far, most of it—is doing a job that must get
I wonder if reverence isn’t
our goal, somehow—I mean
along with a ton of things
the state requires and our
students simply need to get
along in this world.
done: teaching vocabulary, sentence structure,
thesis-writing, the characteristics of an Elizabethan
sonnet, writing a clear business letter. But I’m
wondering if reverence might not be some kind of
key to things, the beginning of difference, at least
in my profession.
It’s sometimes painful for me to remember that
the most crucial objective of Freshman English
at Dordt College is to help the students write
clearly—how mundane! But I wonder if I don’t do
that job more proficiently when I lead my students
toward writing that stuns them like that Dubus
short story, that shocks them with its clarity and
precision and beauty. Or, therapeutically, if I show
them that writing is a way of knowing, as it’s always
been to me—and as it was to Flannary O’Connor.
“I don’t know what it is I think until I write it,” she
once said. There’s a magic to writing that some
of us know and feel; that’s why many of us teach
language arts.
And in a way it’s a joy to have entered the era
of Facebook and blogs because today—unlike
any other time in human history—everyone has a
room of their own, a place to write, an opportunity
to present themselves to the world via words and
ideas. Today, it seems, more than ever, our students
can learn the sheer joy of expression, not simply
as a classroom exercise, but with a real or even a
virtual audience, a readership.
But how do we teach awe? How can we better
nurture reverence?
Rubber-meets-the-road kind of question, isn’t
it?
Tell you what. Let’s import one of the ground
rules of great writing here: show don’t tell. What
convinces in good writing is illustration, is example,
is explanation, not platitude. I’m quite sure—and
I’m closing in on 40 years of teaching—that if we
aren’t reverent, if we aren’t thrilled by what we like
like Andre Dubus, if we aren’t really taken with the
beauty and grace of good writing, no matter what
the genre, our students won’t be either. What I’ve
discovered on a decade of annual jaunts out to
the open prairie is that if I’m not silenced by the
expanse of God’s wonderful creation, my students
won’t be either.
It seems to me that in addition to all of the
matters which must be accomplished in teaching
literature and writing—“what on earth is a
dangling participle?” “who was this eccentric Poe
anyway?”—that characteristic which most defines
us as Christian educators, no matter what the
field of study, is reverence as a primary behavioral
objective of what we do from day to day in the
classroom. And that is a character attribute we all
have to show, not tell.
Here are this morning’s literary headlines, at
least in England: “Sales of a book titled Skinny
Pro Rege—March 2009
37
Bitch soared by 674 per cent on Amazon after
Victoria Beckham was spotted with a copy in Los
Angeles, a book the news article calls “a vegan diet
with a bit of attitude,” supposedly a diet plan for
skinny girls “who want to stop eating crap and start
looking fabulous.”
I don’t want to be disingenuous here. The
fact is, I’d love to have any book of mine move
up 674 per cent in sales in one day. I’d love it if
Paris Hilton was spotted at a party toting a copy of
Romey’s Place. Wouldn’t that be grand? Sure.
But I’m thinking, once again, of Cornelius Van
Til, and the antithesis, the wide gulf which still
separates city of God from the city of Man, the
Celestial City from Vanity Fair.
The more I think about my peculiar task as a
Christian teacher of literature and writing—and
much of it remains mystery to me—the more I’m
confident that what we do in Christian education
is counter-cultural because nothing may be more
radical, more shocking in education today, than
teaching our students to be humble, which is an
attitude of mind prerequisite to awe; than teaching
selflessness, the polar opposite of narcissism; than
teaching servanthood, which is to say denial, in the
pattern of Christ himself.
That task, as all of you know, is made immensely
more difficult by our own affluence. How can
we nurture awe in our students when they and
their families spend spring break in Bermuda or
Christmas in Vail?
One quick story: Many here remember Rev.
Tony Van Zanten, who ministered faithfully at
Roseland, suburban Chicago, before he was called
home. Tony took a number of his parishioners
from Roseland to a performance of Our Family
Album several years ago, a drama telling the story
of the Christian Reformed Church. He said he
wanted to know what they thought; he wanted to
hear their reviews. And he was surprised, he said,
when on the trip back from Chicago’s west side,
they were silent. What had surprised them was
the fact that the people celebrated in that show
were, at one time, desperately poor. They had no
idea. They’d always thought of the people from
my tradition, the white people, as being immensely
rich.
I wish I could pass a magic wand, create a
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Pro Rege—March 2009
couple of tools that would inspire your students
to awe and worship, but I can’t. What I can do
is refresh your own deeply felt attitudes with this
kind of formulation: that, as Christ himself said,
it is easier for a rich man to pass through an eye
of a needle than it is to enter the kingdom of
God, which means, very practically, in terms of
what I’m telling you today, that our task—if I’m
right in asserting that awe may be the most blessed
behavioral objective of all in Christian education—
that our task is truly and deeply counter-cultural,
inasmuch as it humbles us and reveres just about
everything that isn’t us.
In no way does that statement make our task any
easier, but at least we can understand it for what it
is and really always has been. Perhaps the worst fate
for Christian schools is that eventually they morph
into elitist sanctuaries for the privileged. Those
of you who’ve been around for awhile know very
well how easily that can happen, and how it already
has—ever since the seventeenth century, in fact.
I’m no prophet of doom, so let me also bring
up another characteristic of our culture today that
is worth considering. Some call our age “postmaterialist” because as a culture we’ve changed into
idealists, in a way. Example? Recently, I heard a
marketing executive talk about the history of media
advertising, which began with a direct pitch that
attempted to do nothing more than sell a product
on the basis of its attributes (think early TV, if
you can—soap that cleans your hands). Then, he
said, advertising moved into a different era—the
marketing of a lifestyle: beer commercials that
proclaim “you only go around once.” But today,
he said, we’ve entered an age that’s anti-materialist
because the goods corporations have to promise
an almost spiritual vision—in many cases, that they
not leave an dirty footprint. The American public,
he said, is becoming more concerned about a soap
being biogradable than whether it gets their hands
clean or leaves a glow that seduces the lover they
desire.
One more example. Of all the states of the
union, Iowa is most altered, topographically, from
what it was at the beginning, say, of the nineteenth
century: the tall-grass prairie is all but wiped out by
row crops. Of Iowa’s 99 counties, Sioux County,
where I live, is, I’m told, the most altered. When I
took some visitors around a few years ago, I told
them I lamented the fact that none of that tallgrass prairie was around anymore, that nearly every
square inch was under cultivation. But go back
fifty years with me, for a minute: if I’d been giving
a tour in 1957, say, I would likely have trumpeted
the joy of how the good Christian farmers of
Sioux County, Iowa, had taken this verdant land
and made it produce food for the world. My values
today are shaped by the anti-materialism of the age,
without a doubt. I’d much prefer a beautiful chunk
of native prairie somewhere in the neighborhood.
It’s important for us to see that our affluence has
nurtured our anti-materialism. If I were hungry, if
my grandchildren were starving, I wouldn’t think
much about the mystic beauty of an ancient ocean
of grass.
And I say this because I believe it’s terrifyingly
easy sometimes for believers to fall into woe and
not awe. Dickens may well have written better
than he knew, because these times may well be the
best of times and the worst of times, and it’s not
at all “normative” for us to assume, simply, either
that there was a golden age sometime in the misty
past, or that we’re somehow sliding off toward the
apocalypse. Nobody knows the time or day, even
though good, strong believers have believed they
did for dozens of centuries.
If awe—deep regard for the Lord God of
Heaven and Earth and the redemptive work of his
son, Jesus—if reverence and worship for that Lord
of all is the vital difference between Christian and
public education, then we need to see that that God
doesn’t leave us stranded; currents in our age may
offer more help than we might immediately assess.
One aspect of our era worth noting is the
significant change in the levels of spirituality that
tangibly exist in our schools, a level of spirituality
that makes it easier than it used to be—not harder—
for an old man like me to visit your schools and
lead chapels. Believe me, it’s easier today than it
was when late-’60s cynicism was observable in
abject disregard. I don’t have to tell you that doing
Christian high chapels should have earned me
combat pay twenty years ago. For the most part
it’s not that way today.
An observable rise in spirituality—and I’m not
saying that’s always a blessing—might well make
it easier for us to call our students to awe and
humility, to worship.
But let’s not fool ourselves. Can anything be
more politically incorrect in America today than
saying and actually believing that we are not our
own, but belong, body and soul, to our faithful
savior, Jesus Christ? Honestly—and I’m saying
this as a sinner, saved by grace—that’s a task that
Only by his grace—our
thankfulness—can we hope
to be truly Christian—which
is to say humble, reverent
servants.
is beyond us, but ours nonetheless. Only by his
grace—our thankfulness—can we hope to be
truly Christian—which is to say humble, reverent
servants.
What comes to mind as I finish up is that
excoriating monologue that brings the book of Job
to a thundering close, where God says,
Where were you when I created the earth?
Tell me, since you know so much!
Who decided on its size? Certainly you’ll know
that!
Who came up with the blueprints?
How was its foundation poured?
and who set the cornerstone
While the morning stars sang in chorus
and all the angels shouted praise?
Who took charge of the ocean
when it gushed forth like a baby from the
womb?
That was me!
I hear those roaring rhetorical questions and
that blistering response because nothing is at once
more humbling and more reassuring than giving
our joys and sorrows, than giving away our selves,
into the safekeeping of that God.
Pro Rege—March 2009
39
Book Reviews
Hauerwas, Stanley. The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 222 pages. ISBN-978-1-4051-6248-7. Reviewed by Jason Lief, Instructor of
Theology and Youth Ministry, Dordt College, Iowa.
What are universities for? Whom do they serve? These
two questions provide the foundation of Stanley Hauerwas’
book The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and
the Knowledge of God, a collection of his essays focusing
upon the significance of the university for the Christian
community. According to Hauerwas, who is the Gilbert
T. Rowe Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University,
all institutions of higher learning should wrestle with these
questions in order to become aware of their purpose and
influence. Although many slogans and mantras herald the
ideals of education, seldom do institutions, both public
and private, acknowledge the dissonance between rhetoric
and praxis. In asking these questions, Hauerwas prods the
Christian community to examine its answers in the context
of the biblical narrative.
Throughout these essays Hauerwas engages the
thought of a variety of individuals, including Yale
president Richard Levin, Cardinal John Henry Newman,
Gregory of Nazianzus, and Rowan Williams. He discusses
such topics as monastic remnants in Ireland, stone cutting,
and the war in Iraq. In the context of this diversity, three
interconnected themes develop: (a) the culpability of the
university in establishing a language that has undermined
the possibility of discourse, (b) the use of that language in
legitimizing Constantinianism (both within the Christian
community and modern secularism), and (c) the role of the
university in the moral formation of the people it serves.
In his essay titled “What Would a Christian University
Look Like?” Hauerwas discusses the ideas of Wendall
Berry, a critic of the modern university, who believes
that the “…violence of education is…to be found in the
destruction of language and community” (99). According
to Hauerwas, the language of the university has been
used to describe the world in a particular way, “securing
power” and legitimizing current political, economic, and
social structures. “Objectivity” and “specialization” have
rendered the language and traditions of local communities
impotent, emphasizing the validity of objective, scientific,
truth as proclaimed by specialized experts. In the context
of the university, such language results in a disconnected
curriculum focused upon the investigation of so-called
objective truth. The result is the formation of a “public”
consisting of free—meaning disconnected—individuals.
Hauerwas believes this abstraction allows for the influence
of money, of which he writes, “there is no ‘abstraction’ more
40
Pro Rege—March 2009
abstract then money”(98). This is demonstrated by the
fact that the “disciplines that flourish in the contemporary
university are those that study money (economics), are the
source of money (sciences), or are linked, often it seems
mistakenly, to future chances of being in an occupation or
profession that promises a high earning standard”(84).
Sadly, Christian institutions use language in a similar
way, employing Christian rhetoric to legitimize the status
quo. The curricula of many Christian institutions are just
as disconnected as their secular counterparts—a situation
that Hauerwas believes contributes to the number of
college-educated people who abandon the faith. He
writes, “That students took course after course in which
there was no discernable connection to Christian claims
about the way things are surely created the conditions that
made the conclusion that Christianity is at best irrelevant,
and at worst, false”(47). Hauerwas contends that for many
Christian institutions, the “Christian” aspect is reduced
to the student’s personal life, expressed in residential life
programs. Thus, rather than being challenged to cultivate
a language that describes the world from the perspective
of the gospel, Christian higher education legitimizes the
present order by preparing students to take their place
within the structures of the status quo. All of this reflects for Hauerwas the influence of
“Constantinianism”–a term he uses to describe the
appropriation of Christian symbols and language by the
dominant culture to support and legitimize the present
order. The privatization of Christianity in this context
means that theological language, such as the “kingdom
of God,” provides divine confirmation of the status
quo. He also refers to “secularization” as the universityproduced form of “neo Constantinianism.” Hauerwas
writes, “Universities, whether private or public, have been
the crucial institutions for developing the knowledges to
legitimate this understanding of the secular . . . Now the
university is expected to produce people educated to serve
the bureaucracies of modernity in which it is assumed
the state is crucial for an ordered world” (179). In the
context of modernity the language of “secularism” drains
Christianity of its eschatological power, establishing a
university-supported “neo Constantinian” paradigm,
which works to maintain the status quo.
The solution, according to Hauerwas, is for Christians
to reclaim their identity as an alternative prophetic witness
to the world. In his essay “Carving Stone or Learning to
Speak Christian,” Hauerwas compares Christianity to the
stone-cutting trade; to be “Christian” means to be immersed
in a community with particular stories, symbols, and
language that are reflected in a particular way of living. In
this context, the Christian university must be a place where
people are formed by and for the Christian community.
Here, a way of speaking is developed that redefines and
confronts the world. Within such a university, disciplines
converse with, challenge, and correct each other, and faith
engages the academic realm as we seek to know truth. Such
a place forms and shapes people to become like Gregory
of Nazianzus, who not only wanted to “do something
for the poor” but loved the poor and worked to create
“liturgical action in which the poor and the leper, through
the power of beautiful words, were made the center of a
city ruled by Christ” (197).
Overall, Hauerwas makes a strong argument, engaging
a variety of ideas while effectively utilizing analogies and
stories to support his points. Hauerwas’ ideas reflect
the influence of John Howard Yoder, as well as the neoorthodoxy of Karl Barth, and some might take issue with
the implications of these theological foundations. Yet,
his message transcends traditional interpretations of the
“Christianity and culture” debate with a universal call for
the Christian community to reflect upon the purpose and
function of the university in the context of the gospel.
What is missing, however, is a discussion concerning the
relationship between the Christian community and existing
social structures. In calling for Christians to establish an
alternative culture, he does not discuss the nature of such
structures (are they inherently good or bad?) or whether
they might be transformed by the gospel. In creating
its own material culture, does the Christian community
copy the existing structures of the dominant culture,
or do we create entirely new ones? Further, Hauerwas
minimizes the role of Christian educational institutions
in forming graduates who participate in the structures of
dominant culture as a witness to the gospel. Although it
is much easier to maintain an alternative community in
separation from the dominant culture, Hauerwas’ call for
the Christian community to “remain in” and “exist for”
the world necessarily means that influence will go both
ways. The Christian community cannot influence the
world without the world in turn exacting some degree of
influence upon the community. Hauerwas believes that the
university must play a significant role within the Christian
community for establishing a material culture in contrast
to the dominant culture. He does not, however, provide
a realistic description of how this can be accomplished
without falling into “Constantinianism.”
Regardless, this collection of essays represents a
significant challenge for all Christians involved in higher
education, from presidents and professors to students and
constituents. Hauerwas passionately demonstrates the
need for the Christian community to reclaim the university,
not just for job training but as a place to develop a different
way of speaking and living in the world. Too often Christian
educational institutions at every level utilize Christian
jargon to legitimize the status quo. Methods of teaching,
course offerings, athletic programs, and administrative
policies are at times influenced more by movements within
the dominant culture than by faithful obedience to the
gospel. As money increasingly becomes the driving force
in all forms of higher education, Hauerwas prophetically
calls Christian institutions with millions of dollars invested
in infrastructure, athletic programs, and endowments to
become institutions for the poor. He may not give us a
clear picture of how this might be accomplished, but
through this book Hauerwas summons institutions of
higher education to reclaim their place within the Christian
community, being informed not by the political, economic,
and cultural forces of the dominant culture but being
formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Robinson, Marilynne. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 322 pp. ISBN 978-0-37429910-1. Reviewed by David Schelhaas, Emeritus Professor of English at Dordt College.
I must confess that rarely have I looked forward so
eagerly to a new novel as I have to Marilynne Robinson’s
Home, her sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.
(Robinson is a professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop,
and in addition to being a teacher and novelist, is highly
regarded for her writings on the work of John Calvin.) As
it turns out, Home is not a sequel. Even though it is set in
the town of Gilead and has the same cast of characters,
it does not tell us what happened next in the lives of the
Reverends Ames and Boughten or the other characters. It
tells us what was happening at the same time to the same
characters but from a different point of view—something
for which I have no name. Perhaps we could call it a
“simulquel.”
At first glance this seems an audacious undertaking.
How can she set the same cast of characters in the same
small, dull Iowa town in almost exactly the same span of
time and expect to make a second novel that engages her
readers? Yet Robinson does engage us and enlightens
us about the power of place, the paradoxical nature of
home, the complexity of relationships between parents
and children and between siblings, the mystery of good
and evil, the wrestling of unbelief with belief, and finally,
the wonder of love and grace. She does it with the sheer
power of her language and an imagination that provides
marvelously subtle insights into the psyches of her
Pro Rege—March 2009
41
characters.
I have said that I was eager for Home to come out,
and that was because I found such delight in Gilead. It is
the most beautiful book I know. I cannot read it (and I
go back to it often) without having my spirits lifted. The
first-person narrator, Rev. Ames, is that rare thing in life
and literature, a good and thoughtful man who has loved
his life and is able talk about his delight in language that
is profound and simple. Reading Gilead reminds one that
life is a sumptuous gift that can be cherished in spite of its
pain and hardship. One cannot read two pages in Gilead
without coming upon an observation by Ames about the
mystery and beauty in the most ordinary experiences. He
sees two young men
propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting
up their cigarettes. . . .They were passing remarks back
and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked
way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an
amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort
of takes over them. . . . I wonder what it is and where
it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of
your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done,
like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is
much more easily spent. (Gilead 5)
Just two pages later Ames says, “You can know a thing
to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it.
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still
be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual
incomprehension” (Gilead 7).
Again and again we are delighted by these kinds of
observations in Gilead, but in Home we see the world
through the perceptions of Glory, the daughter of Ames’
dear friend Boughten (though from the third person limited
point of view rather than Ames’ first person). She does
not possess the wisdom or the settled peace that Ames has,
and so the book is not shot through with those light-shafts
of wisdom we see in Gilead.
But Home has a brightness of its own. Having just
returned to Gilead after a heart-wrenching love affair,
Glory is confused about her identity and future, and
her struggle to know herself engages our sympathy and
curiosity. Then there’s her relationship with her brother
Jack and her gradual understanding of and sympathy for
him as well as her management of his fragile relationship
with their father. These character relationships intrigue
us.
Jack Boughten is the black sheep in the otherwise
wholesome Boughten family, the son born, in his mother’s
words, “to break his father’s heart” (56). After a twentyyear disappearance, he has come home to Gilead where
Glory is caring for their father, the Rev. Boughten, who
is rapidly failing but still lives in the hope Jack will return.
Although Jack is an important secondary character in
Gilead, his primary function was to fill out the portrait of
Rev. Ames. In Home, Jack is the central character because
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Pro Rege—March 2009
the central concern of the novel is his estrangement from
faith, family and father.
A dramatic scene that appears in both novels, Jack’s
visit to Ames’ church on a Sunday morning, serves as an
apt illustration of how these novels intersect. Ames’ first
person description of this event in Gilead reveals first of
all that he did not know Jack was going to attend service
that morning and therefore his decision to preach on the
Hagar/Ismael story—so appropriate to certain aspects of
Jack’s sordid past—was not intentional. But Ames also
reveals that his “extemporaneous remarks might have
been influenced by his [Jack’s] sitting there with that look
on his face right beside my wife and child” (Gilead 131).
The saintly Rev. Ames fears that Jack may have designs on
his own young wife after he dies, and he recognizes this
suspicion in his heart. In Home, Jack’s perception of the
sermon is quite different. He returns from the service to
tell Glory that Ames’ intent was “to appall me, that is, to
turn me white, as I am sure he did” (206). Home shows
us that Jack, completely innocent of any designs on Ames’
wife, believes Ames is attacking him for the sins of his
youth. Thus each character’s misperception serves the
book in which it appears.
Jack Boughten has always been an enigma. From his
earliest days—“almost since you were a baby” his father
says—he has been alienated, lonely, a trouble-maker. “I
can’t explain it. I don’t know. I was a bad kid” (114) Jack
tells his father. Even now, back in Gilead, Jack says his
“disreputable” nature is one of the three “central facts of
his existence.” And it is complicated by the fact that Jack
is smart, charming, talented and compassionate as well as
“disreputable.”
So the prodigal son has come home, and there has
been feasting and even a sort of confession of sin by the
son, but not the affirmation of belief which his father
so desperately longs to hear. When Glory wonders if he
couldn’t just lie to their father about his unbelief, Jack, the
former thief and drunk, asks, “Ah, Glory. What would
I be then?” (143). He doesn’t have it in him, he says, to
be a “hypocrite.” This encounter leads eventually to what
seems to me to be the most dramatic scene in the novel,
one that grows out of his response to Rev. Ames’ sermon
and ends up being a discussion of predestination. Jack
tells the two reverends that he has often wondered whether
he might not be an instance of predestination, that is, of
one who was predestined to damnation.
Can a discussion of predestination be high drama? In
Robinson’s hands, yes. We are captivated by the scene, first
of all, because she writes so well. Further, we have come
to care a good deal about Jack Boughten by this time, and
we want him to be reconciled. We care about Jack because
in spite of his flaws, we see him as kind and generous and
desperately longing for a little joy in his life. Finally, the
resolution of this scene is just perfect and wonderfully
simple.
I have said that Jack is the central character of Home,
but an argument could be made that Glory is. Though not
so complex a character as Jack, Glory is engaged in her
own quest for significance, hurt and grieving over her own
recent past, searching for peace and a sense of well-being
in her life. She fears and hopes that she may have come
home for good to Gilead. To her surprise, Jack ministers
to her in her struggle just as she ministers so patiently and
gently to him. Her epiphany at the very end of the novel,
her recognition of the goodness of her life, is immensely
satisfying.
Home is not the kind of novel that rides along blithely
on its plot; it moves slowly, character driven. At some
point you may look back over the last fifty pages you have
read and wonder if anything significant has happened.
But then you recognize that you have been drawn
forward, captivated by the subtle growth and change in
the relationship between Glory and Jack or Jack’s ongoing
struggle to understand his relationship with his father.
Does Home measure up to Gilead? I think it does—as
a work of art. But I do not think it will be as popular
as Gilead, for even though Home wrestles with more
puzzling and challenging questions than Gilead does, its
slow pace will put some people off. Nevertheless, it is a
fine companion piece to Gilead. Both novels move with
a patient gentleness; both are inhabited by characters one
would like to have as friends; and both evoke a sense of
wonder (and sometimes fear) about the deep joys and
sorrows at the core of human existence.
Gaukroger, Stephen. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 12101685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ix + 563 pp., with bibliography. ISBN: 978-0-19-929644-6.
Reviewed by Keith C. Sewell, Professor of History at Dordt College
Almost sixty years ago, Herbert Butterfield published
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), a book that more than
many others helped numerous students make the history
of science central to their understanding of the history of
western civilization. Butterfield’s work was significant for its
“thinking cap” and “lantern slide” metaphors, which were so
suggestive to Thomas S. Kuhn of “paradigm change” fame.
Butterfield also maintained that by uncritically reading our
notions of “science” back into the times of late-medieval
and early-modern Europe, we could be ensnaring ourselves
in all manner of anachronistic misperceptions from the
crude to the subtle. Butterfield was not, of course, without
his precursors and contemporaries—the Americans
George Sarton (1884-1956) and Lynn Thorndike (18821965), and European giants such as Pierre Duhem (18611916) and Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964), had already made
important contributions. Butterfield warned against the
fallacies of anachronism in the history of science as in
other branches of historical study. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, for example, we can find astronomy
and astrology intertwined in a complex web of conjecture,
discovery, and debate. This complex web has led some to
seek the “origins” of our truly “modern” science in the
nineteenth century—after all, while the word “scientia” is of
classical lineage, “scientist” comes to us from the century
of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Yet such a stance
is less than satisfactory. At the very least, it would seem
to under-appreciate the deeper continuities of history; our
“modern science” is, in truth, the result of a long process
of historical maturation.
In this work, Stephen Gaukroger, Professor of History
of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of
Sydney, Australia, demonstrates two: to account for how
modern science emerged in the West, and to explain why
scientific knowledge came to be regarded as the basis upon
which all other claims to knowledge should be assessed.
These questions cannot be settled with reference to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone. Moreover, as
soon as the longer term is taken into consideration, the
immense impact of Aristotelian thinking in the latemedieval and early-modern periods must be traversed
with care. Accordingly, Gaukroger takes the long view,
commencing his discussions with the Paris condemnations
of Aristotle in 1210 and 1277 (70 f.). In truth, the synthesis
of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology
that we so rightly associate with Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274)
enjoyed no smooth path to official (Papal) sanction as
latter-day “Thomism”; instead, it encountered repeated
challenges from both old Platonism and as well as from
varieties of the new Nominalism (80 f.).
This volume traverses the broad late-medieval and
early-modern periods. It ends with the beginnings of
modern-style reflections on the antiquity of man, which
also anticipated the development of scientific geology
(496-503), to a point where we find ourselves on the brink
of Newton’s Principia Mathematica of 1687 (352-6, 462-8).
Gaukroger is nothing but thorough; he peers
into the nooks and crannies, explores half-forgotten
byways, and surveys dead-ends, for these all exhibit their
instructive moments. He helps keep us from the pitfalls
of anachronism by using the term “natural philosophy,”
reminding us that this was not a single uniform enterprise
but exhibited diverse articulations in fields such as
mathematics, mechanics and optics (35, 253 ff.). As befits
the author of a full length biography (see his Descartes: An
Intellectual Biography, 1995), Gaukroger is particularly strong
on Descartes (1596-1650), whose philosophical project
was a response to the perceived failure of Thomism.
That failure was already evident in the writings of Pietro
Pomponazzi (1462-1525), who had decisively called into
Pro Rege—March 2009
43
question the tenability of Aristotelian natural philosophy
“in its Christianized version” to “serve in the role of a
philosophical foundation for . . . systematic theology”
(102).
The relationship between the Christian religion and
the pagan thinking of classical Greece remains one of
the greatest questions confronting Christian thought
and scholarship. Gaukroger does not write explicitly as a
Christian, but he is more fully aware of the problems than
many contemporary Christians (7, cf. 50). More readily
than some of our contemporary scholastic theologians,
he recognizes that so-called “Christian Aristotelianism”
is an “amalgam” and not intrinsically Christian (77, 80).
His assessment is that Catholicism’s adoption of Thomism
as “the official Church philosophy” represented a “finely
balanced compromise” ultimately destined to unravel (823). As he puts it later, “Aristotelian natural philosophy …
never presented a wholly satisfactory conception of the
natural realm as far as Christian theology was concerned,
because it failed to capture the single origin of the natural
world …” (507). Only when “natural philosophy” learned
to abandon Aristotle (186, 324) was it possible for what
we call “scientific progress” to emerge and achieve a
continuous momentum. Contra-Aristotle, men such
as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) came to understand the
truths of “natural philosophy” as practical and not merely
contemplative (228). The result was an outlook that we can
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Pro Rege—March 2009
recognize as more decidedly modern, marked by a shift
from how best to live in the world to how the world might
be changed for the better.
For all his insights, not all of Gaukroger’s assertions
will pass unchallenged. Certainly, the first Jewish Christians,
both at home and across the Diaspora, were subject to
varying levels of Hellenization, but not all readers will
be ready to concur that the canonical authors Paul and
John should be numbered among the Hellenizers (61, cf.
83). There is an issue of New Testament interpretation
here that should not pass unchallenged (see also 3778 and 397-9), especially as Gaukroger adumbrates his
view that it was not the physical sciences that eventually
were to threaten the faith but the emergence of a certain
kind of historical-mindedness (3, 23), perhaps because—yet
also in spite of—Christianity itself being so historically
grounded. And across the extensive vistas he commands,
it is not altogether clear that our author here achieves his
objective of explaining precisely why scientific knowledge
came to be widely regarded as the basis upon which all
other claims to knowledge would be assessed by the end
of the seventeenth century. Gaukroger is philosophically
formidable, but something seems to be missing here
historically. However, the “Preface” informs us that this is
but the first of five projected volumes, so patience will be
in order as we expectantly await his conclusions.
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double-spaced, using MLA or Chicago Style Manual documentation. Subjects should be
approached from a Reformed Christian perspective and should treat issues, related to
education, in the areas of theology, history, literature, the arts, the sciences, the social
sciences, technology, and media. Please include a cover letter with your e-mail address
and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Send your submission to the following:
Pro Rege
c/o Dr. Mary Dengler, Editor
Dordt College
498 4th Ave. NE
Sioux Center, Iowa 51250
Dordt College is a Christian liberal arts college in Sioux Center, Iowa, which believes
that the Bible is the infallible and inspired Word of God and which bases the education
it provides upon the Bible as it is explained in the Reformed creeds. Hence, the college
confesses that our world from creation to consummation belongs to God, that Jesus
Christ is the only way of salvation, and that true comfort and reliable strength can be
had only from his Holy Spirit.
Dordt College was established in 1955 and owes its continuing existence to a
community of believers that is committed to supporting Christian schools from
kindergarten through college. Believing in the Creator demands obedience to his principles
in all of life: certainly in education but also in everything from art to zoology.
The Dordt College community believes in the Word of God. God’s revelation in
word and deed finds its root in Jesus Christ, who is both Savior from our sin and Lord
over the heavens and the earth. The Bible reveals the way of salvation in Christ Jesus
and requires faithful thanksgiving to him as the Lord of life, especially when exploring,
coming to understand, and unfolding the diversity of creation.
Dordt College, in its many departments and programs, celebrates that diversity and
challenges students not merely to confess Christ with their mouth but to serve him with
their lives. Empowered by the strength of his Spirit, Dordt College stands ready to meet
the challenge of providing and developing serviceable insight for the people of God.
Pro Rege
A quarterly faculty publication of
Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa
NON-PROFIT
ORGANIZATION
U.S. POSTAGE PAID
PERMIT NO. 6
SIOUX CENTER, IA
51250-1606