Review: Recovering a Forgotten Legacy
Second Quarter 2001
When the 2000 presidential election ran into a Florida roadblock on November 8, the media, attorneys, and citizens across the country suddenly had to learn or relearn the function of the Electoral College and learn, perhaps for the first time, about 19th-century presidential elections that also took unusual courses.
During the last three decades of the 20th century, a growing number of political, social, and cultural roadblocks forced many Americans to reevaluate the meaning and quality of the American experiment. And many Christians found themselves searching the past for legacies that might help to explain contemporary dilemmas and point the way toward a more constructive future.
One of those legacies that attracted, and is still attracting, attention is that of Abraham Kuyper (1834-1920), a Dutch Christian statesman, university founder, theologian, and journalist. Kuyper's insights into the plural structure of society, public religion, and modern politics, as well as his many public initiatives, hold promise for people in many parts of the world today. That promise is captured in a new book from Eerdmans Publishing Company (phn. 800-253-7521), titled Religion, Pluralism and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper's Legacy for the Twenty-First Century (2000), edited by Luis E. Lugo. This remarkable book contains essays first prepared for a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1998, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Kuyper's Stone Lectures at Princeton.
The conference was organized by four institutions: Princeton, which had invited Kuyper to speak in 1898; the Free University of Amsterdam, which Kuyper founded; Calvin College, which is the oldest American college influenced by Dutch Calvinist immigrants of the Kuyper tradition; and the Center for Public Justice, which has made use of some of Kuyper's social and political insights ever since its founding in 1977.
Speakers from around the world, including Catholic and Jewish contributors, were invited to evaluate Kuyper's impact and weigh the contemporary promise of his vision. Experts thoroughly familiar with the man are featured in Part I: "Kuyper: The Man and His Context." Part II focuses on "Theology and Public Discourse"; Part III on "Spheres of Justice and Civil Society"; Part IV on "Religious Pluralism and the Demands of Democracy"; and Part V on "Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Society."
Luis Lugo, a Cuban-American who now directs the Religion Program at The Pew Charitable Trusts, was introduced to Kuyper's thought in the 1970s and went on to complete his doctoral studies on Latin American politics and religion at the University of Chicago. He taught for a number of years at Calvin College and served for a year as associate director of the Center for Public Justice. He and a number of other contributors to the book, reflect Kuyper's considerable impact beyond Dutch borders.
Two paragraphs from the book's Preface hint at the promise of Kuyper's legacy for our century and help to explain why so many speakers and participants (nearly 500) came together for the 1998 conference. The author of the Preface is Max Stackhouse, Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton seminary and one of the conference organizers.
"In his own time, Kuyper was deeply disappointed with the ways in which Europeans, especially Christians in his own land and tradition, were adopting the secularizing ideologies of the French Revolution, particularly as these were being spread by socialists and anarchists among urban and rural workers. Many thought that the Enlightenment's revolutionary ideology held more promise for the future than the faith of their forebears and were abandoning what Kuyper believed to be the wider, deeper, longer, and higher insights of the Christian tradition....
"In the face of all this, Kuyper indefatigably advocated an intellectually rigorous, biblically based, reformed perspective that sought to bring a 'Christian worldview' to bear on personal piety, church polity, cultural and economic life, and a pluralist public square. Kuyper was much appreciated by several of the great scholars of his day... Kuyper also approved of much that Leo XIII said in his pioneering social encyclical, Rerum Novarum. All these, like Kuyper, sought to identify a reliable foundation for a pluralist, democratic, morally sound and spiritually meaningful social order, and they all thought a religious renewal was necessary if it was to be gained."
