A Theology Well Lived

Abraham Kuyper was home schooled by his parents for much of his early life. His father was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, and had several pastorates. When Kuyper was twelve he had some secondary education at a small school, though his primary education still took place at home. His teachers at school thought he was dull, but he surprised them by going to Leiden University and graduating with high honors. He took classes in a well-rounded variety of topics, including literature, theology, philosophy, physics, and Arabic.

He was promoted to doctor of Theology in 1863 after writing a dissertation in which he compared the views of John Calvin and Jan Łaski, showing preference for the more Liberal Łaski. He was twenty-six when he received his doctorate.

A year later he began his ministry, following in his father’s footsteps by pastoring a Dutch Reformed Church in Beesd. About that same time he married his wife, Johanna, with whom he would have eight children. He met a simple farmer’s wife named Pietje, whose simple Reformed faith inspired him and led him away from his more Liberal tendencies to orthodoxy. He began to dislike that the Dutch Reformed Church was a state Church, and believed the Church was losing its Reformed distinctives. During this time he became editor-in-chief of several newspapers, and his opinions began to become more widely known.

In 1874 he was elected as a member of the lower house of Parliament. He founded the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880. He was having an impact in every sphere in his country – in the Church, in education, in literature, in public speaking, in the government, and in the press.

After a great deal of controversy, Kuyper became increasingly unhappy with the loss of many Reformed distinctives within the Dutch Reformed Church, and left the Church. Hundreds of Christians left with him, forming the Doleantie Churches. Within three years there were over two hundred Doleantie Churches. Kuyper sought union amongst these Churches, and it came about in 1892 and the result was the formation of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands.

In 1898 he visited Princeton Theological Seminary, and gave what are known as the “Stone Lectures.” In these lectures he laid out his conception of a life-system for man that was centered around the truths professed in the Reformed Faith. These lectures were later titled “Calvinism, a Life System”; “Calvinism and Religion”; “Calvinism and Politics”; “Calvinism and Science”; “Calvinism and Art”; and “Calvinism and the Future.”

In 1901, Kuyper became the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, an office he held for four years. Afterwards he spent over a year traveling the world, and recounted his travels in his book “Around the Old World Sea.” The entire first edition of the book sold out before it was even printed. He then became the Minister of State. By this time he was seventy-five, but he was far from finished. He wrote three hundred and six articles over six years in a series he called “Van de Voleinding.” He then started to write once more in a work on the Messiah, but he was unable to finish that work as he died in 1920, at the age of eighty-three. He had written over two hundred works.

Kuyper was such an influential figure in every sphere of life that the newspapers, upon his seventieth birthday, noted that the biography of Abraham Kuyper was in many ways a history of the Netherlands. Kuyper was no fraud or hypocritical celebrity, however. His close friend Dr. John Hendrick de Vries said, “Dr. Kuyper knew something of the holy art of love. . . it is remembered by many with admiration and gratitude, that however pressed by his multifarious labors, he never refused audience to any that came to him for counsel and help.”

Kuyper’s strength and indefatigability came from his understanding that God is the Ruler of every sphere of life. “The whole of a man’s life is to be lived as in the Divine Presence,” said Kuyper. He perceived Modernism to be a counter-life-system that would ruin society, science, education, religion, and every sphere of life. Kuyper believed his own life-system was much stronger: the life-system of Reformed Christianity, what he called “Calvinism.”

(Biography adapted from the Biographical note in "Lectures on Calvinism" by Abraham Kuyper, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1931.)