Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Library of Religious Biography

by James D. Bratt, Mark A. Noll (Foreword)

"The definitive biography of Abraham Kuyper, giant of Dutch Calvinism" This is the first full-scale English-language biography of the highly influential and astonishingly multifaceted Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)—theologian, minister, politician, newspaper editor, educational innovator, Calvinist reformer, and prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. James Bratt is the ideal scholar to tell the story of Kuyper's remarkable life and work. He expertly traces the origin and development of Kuyper's signature concepts—common grace, Christian worldview, sphere sovereignty, Christian engagement with contemporary culture—in the dynamic context of his life's story. Based on voluminous primary and secondary Dutch sources, Bratt's Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat will prove to be the go-to biography of this major figure whose ideas and influence extend far beyond his own time and place.

Genres: Biography, History, Church History, Theology, Biography Memoir, Politics, Christian

499 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2013

Reviews

[James Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fantastic read. Engaging, dramatic narrative in which Bratt exhibits mastery of archival materials. A sufficiently complex portrait of a conflicted figure. Highly recommended.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The publishers have described this as the first full-scale biography in English. Though, it is certainly not the first English biography, it is certainly the definitive one.

We have been reasonably served with Kuyper biographies, ranging from the hagiographic (e.g. Frank Van den Berg's 1960 Abraham Kuyper a translation from the Dutch) and under critical (Praamsma's Let Christ be King - another translation) to the over critical (e.g. Koch's yet to be translated Abraham Kuyper: Nu ook voor Kleine Luyden!). Bratt steers a middle course. The first biography written in English was by McGoldrick, God's Renaissance Man drew largely upon Van den Berg and Praasma and focuses primarily on Kuyper's theological views. Bratt's perspective is wider.

The chapter titles will give some flavour of the scope of Bratt's biography and of Kuyer's life and influence; these include: Political theorist (ch 7); Church reformer (ch 8); Theologian of the church (ch 9); Theologian of culture (ch 10); Christian democrat (ch 11). Inevitably, a 450-page book will have its limitations. I would have liked to have seen a little more on Kuyper as founder of the VU University. The VU and education played a key role in Kuyper's strategy and this seemed to me is slightly played down in Bratt's approach.

In his introduction Bratt notes that Putchinger gave him some advice: "First you'll love the man, then you'll detest him, finally you'll understand him. Then you're ready to write" (p. xxv). Bratt has gone through those stages and has a realistic view of the man: a "great man but not a nice one" (p xxi). This puts Bratt in a good place to write about Kuyper.

He does an excellent job of placing Kuyper in his cultural and political context. He examines many of Kuyper's influences and explores the parallels between Kuyper and his contemporaries. Bratt draws upon many of the key Dutch works by Kuyper and others. There is a 14 page index and the bibliographic notes stretch to 44 pages. Particularly helpful are the descriptions and evaluations of Kuyper's writings, especially those not yet translated. Bratt is very good at placing these in the cultural milieu.

One frustration was the way the references have been done - there are no footnotes or end notes, but a brief bibliographic essay for each chapter at the end of the book, this makes finding the source of a quote rather difficult. Though it does have the advantage of not breaking up the text with references.

The book is eminently readable. If you want to know more about Kuyper this is perhaps the best place to start. I shall certainly be returning to it again and again. Bratt notes that it has taken many years to complete - it has been worth the wait!

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

You have to give Bratt kudos for such an erudite work on a thinker whose works were legion. However, there were some things that, for an American audience, might seem to be a bit tedious. Thus, some young Calvinists with no Dutch roots might be disappointed at the surprising amount of detail into Kuyper's political life, but that is the genius of Kuyper: his Calvinism was not just soteriological but cosmological. Let the reader understand.

[Miroslav Balint-Feudvarski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Works of biography

Very Hood overview of Kuyper's thought and life. I heartily recommend it for a student of Kuyper. Worth the time and the effort

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abraham Kuyper is one of those "larger than life" figures. He was a pastor, writer of over 20,000 newspaper articles, multi-volume theological treatises, the founder of a university, a politician and a Prime Minister.

He was, in James Bratt's assessment "a great man but not a nice one" (p.xxii). As a young man, he put his fiancee' through a rigorous tutelage to prepare her to be a minister's wife. He often could be more generous to political opponents than to party members who challenged him on details. He was a shrewd political organizer but a difficult one to wrest control from--really only physical decline and death did this. He was a monumental intellect who drove himself to physical and mental breakdown at several points in his life. Bratt explores this paradoxical man in all his complexity.

This biography traces his life from his early pastorates to his entrance into politics, his engagement on the question of the place of church in education and other issues of the day and his establishment of the Free University of Amsterdam. It narrates his leadership of the Doleantie exodus from the Dutch Reformed Church, his political organizing in building up the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Christian Democrats), his Prime Ministership, and loss of power after one term and the gradual decline of his powers.

But above all, this is an intellectual biography. We begin with the formation of thought under Johannes Scholten and his studies of Kant and Jan Laski. We see his turn to a warm-hearted Calvinism as his former professor turned more to theological Modernism, and as he had an experience of spiritual renewal at Brighton. The rest of his life was a project of working out the implications of Calvinism, not simply in the church but for all of life. Kuyper practically gave us the language of world and life view that many in Reformed and Evangelical streams use today. He saw that God was Sovereign over all of life, and he expounded this in his inaugural speech for the Free University of Amsterdam in these famous terms:

"Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and 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!'"

Kuyper further extended these ideas through the conception of "sphere sovereignty" in which various parts of life were meant to operate autonomously under the sovereign grace of God -- church, state, education, commerce, the arts, and so forth. The sovereignty of one sphere was not to intrude on others. In Kuyper's thinking this allowed for Christian presence in a pluralistic society as Christians in sphere's of politics, or say education, made common cause with those who held differing beliefs. In each, Christians would bring a Christian mind and perspective, and yet neither state nor church would control any sphere outside its own. So Kuyper could argue for both the existence and funding of church schools and yet see this as part of a comprehensive educational enterprise.

To read this biography of Kuyper is to understand the intellectual foundations of much of the Reformed and Neo-Reformed movement in this country. His thought has influenced figures like Nicholas Wolterstorff and Albert Wolters in philosophy, Timothy Keller in preaching, and James Skillen in politics and public life. (See my review of Skillen's The Good of Politics as an example of Kuyperian thought.) It is also a narrative of one who was both an accomplished thinker and a skilled politician. For Christians interested in political life, whether you agree with Kuyper's theology or not, this is an excellent study of
Christian political engagement.

For those, like myself, who work in higher education, there are two predominant streams of Christian intellectual engagement of the academy. One is the Catholic tradition both of Aquinas and the Jesuits. The other is the Reformed tradition strongly shaped by Kuyper. Both strongly connect the love of learning and the love of God. If we should differ from either of these, we will be unlikely to improve on their contribution to Christian intellectual life unless we learn from them. Kuyper is one good place to begin.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

The books is consistent with my belief that Constantine did not do any favors to the Church when he gave it political power. Ever since then the Church, or a set of its members, cannot help themselves and get into whatever the politics of the then current government consists, whether monarchy, despotism, or democracy. Inevitably the Church is damaged.

I was familiar with Kuyper through his writings, which are useful even today. I would have preferred for the book to focus more on his theology, and not his politics, since politics comes and goes, but the issues of theology remain.

[Noah Lykins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid biography. Kuyper was and is a controversial figure - yet his contributions to Christian thought are inescapable. Bratt handles both the fruitful and discouraging sides of Kuyper’s career, personality, writings and political influence well.

The notes section after the bibliography- ridiculously helpful!! Wow.

208 - “Worldview was also inherently democratic: that is, it assumed a pluralistic situation, was designed for popular reception, and sought to inspire action. As to pluralism, it was to normalize perennial dis-agreements among schools that Dilthey entitled his definitive essay on the matter "Der Streit der Weltanschauungen," the conflict of the worldviews. Some of Kuyper's latter-day progeny have aptly noted that, whereas "philosophy" at the time made claims to universal truth, "worldview" connoted the particular vision of one group or an-other. Also, philosophy restricted its domain to elite competency, while worldviews aimed to perform philosophy's functions — to provide answers to life's fundamental questions - for a wide range of people. Finally, worldview sought to furnish a feedback loop between convictions and experience, each clarifying the other so as to propel action. We can add that "the wide range of people" in question were often newly literate and newly urban under conditions of industrial-ism, thus living amid an unfamiliar welter of opinion and circum-stance. Worldview was first conceptualized this way by Friedrich Engels; it perfectly fit Kuyper's project.” …

278 - “When, after two world wars and a long sojourn in a Fundamentalist counterculture, some conservative Protestants sought to engage the American scene constructively again, the Kuyperian tradition supplied crucial resources for doing so. Among American evangelicals, then, his vision would finally have some of the impact he had yearned for decades before. That his heritage divided left, right, and center shows that the volatility of his vision could cross the Atlantic, too”

381 - “Yet the final test of a thinker might be whether her critical method can be used to expose and correct her substantive mistakes - whether, in Kuyper's language, his principles can work through unhappy iterations to reach a better application. In this regard it is intriguing to recall that one of the leading religious voices against apartheid, Allan Boesak, invoked Kuyper's most famous words to condemn apartheid as a heresy. "Not a square inch of human existence," Boesak testified, not even the system of racial hierarchy and exclusion that South African authorities had set beyond religious critique, stands apart from the sovereign claims of Christ.
More positively, Kuyper's theory of sphere sovereignty has been recommended for adaptation by South Korea's burgeoning evangelical Protestant population as a way to promote civil-society institutions there against a heritage of overweening state power and the rising threat posed by multinational business and financial corporations responsible to no one but themselves. The Justice and Development Party of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demonstrates that a political party with strong Muslim roots and appreciative of the rights and public role of religion can operate successfully under the separation of mosque and state. The success there has entailed overturning rule by a self-perpetuating, secularistic caste (the military), winning fair and free elections, and opening new ventures in economic and diplomatic arenas that redound to the nation's well-being, just as Kuyper proposed for Calvinism in the Netherlands. Beyond pol-itics, the current search by African Christian theologians to explain the phenomenal spread of Christianity on that continent has postulated a complementarity between the new faith and the people's native culture and "primal religion." Such a proposition can find ballast in Kuyper's theology of common grace and especially in his robust endorsement of the created, and creative, value of every culture under the sun. If this is so in Africa, then it might be so anywhere. There is much we can all learn from a person who asked the right questions and gave enduring methods for seeking, and finding, their answers.”

[Greg Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bratt’s book for now is the definitive work on Kuyper’s life in English. It is well-balanced; appreciative and critical. I’m very eager to read Johan Snell’s upcoming book and his planned biography of Kuyper. It will necessarily supplant it; I suspect it will be akin to the multi-volume Ulysses biography.

Bratt’s shortcoming is simple. He too often draws out Kuyper’s significance for American readers, instead of his significance within his own context. This is quite suitable for the chapter that orbits Kuyper’s travel within America, but becomes quickly out of place after his return. His style of endnote is also lamentable (where many endnotes are collapsed into an unnumbered paragraph). It becomes very cumbersome to pursue the original source and at times cultivates a sort of “just trust me” reading experience. Oddly Kuyper’s work on the Heidelberg Catechism (E Voto) a multi-volume set goes unmentioned. That being said, he paints remarkably well the intellectual history that surrounds Kuyper.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. As a Bavinck guy, I have always somewhat overlooked Kuyper, acknowledging him really to be little more than C. Taylor’s ideal “Age of Mobilization” figure, and therefore a man that wore too many hats. A man who was superseded by the dogmatic genius of Bavinck. Unacknowledged in my own mind then was Kuyper’s brilliance. I’m more appreciative of him today than I was a week ago.

Kuyper said this once on what is required in biography:

“Whoever dares to venture upon writing a ‘Life of Jesus’ thereby, in fact, nullifies the mystery of His person. If He were merely a man like other men, then indeed it would be worthwhile to trace all His paths and ways, to listen in on His intimate conversations, to scrutinize His private correspondence, and, after gathering all such data, to form a conception of how His character was shaped and developed, which influences decisively acted upon Him, and how, through ever-deeper inquiry, the entire secret of His personality is gradually unveiled. In such a life, there would have been struggle—an influence of sin and a victory over sin. And all this your pen would record, and your sketch would attempt to render that life. A life thus investigated down to its deepest recesses and explained from its very roots is what is called a biography.” (Kuyper, E Voto Dordraceno, I, 364).

A biography that helps you see a figure clearer, revealing—"the entire secret of His personality is gradually"—, moving you beyond your own historical blindness, and into the "deepsest recesses" is well worth reading.

[Jonathan Chase · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too dense and dry. Would perhaps be a good read for someone already familiar with Kuyper’s life and works, but it did not make for a good introduction. Bratt is clearly well-read on Kuyper—there’s no question about that—but that strength can sometimes prove to be a weakness. The book has too much analysis, and not enough of the original Kuyper. One would be better served by reading some of Kuyper’s works directly. The author is also theologically left of Kuyper, making him unsympathetic to Kuyper’s aims, and at times leaving the reader wondering whether he really even understands Kuyper’s worldview.
On occasion, the author seemed to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the Reformed theology that shaped Kuyper. For example, he defines the infra/supralapsarianism debate as concerning whether “God had chosen the elect before (supra), not after (infra) the human fall into sin.”
In summary, clearly the book is very well-researched, but Kuyper is probably better encountered and understood through his own writings.

[Zach Hollifield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slog, but very much an enjoyable one if you are interested in Kuyper, his thought, and his potential contributions today. Be warned: it will take a certain level of interest to finish. But if you have such an interest in Kuyper you will enjoy it immensely.

[Laurent Dv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complete and academic. Extremely precise (for example in the political and national context, even international) and tough to read. Written by a neutral and critical.

[Coram Deo Church]

Abraham Kuyper is not currently available at local libraries.

[Andrew Boyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bratt seems to go out of his way to hit hard on Kuyper for some reason.

[Ryan Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good biography of Abraham Kuyper. A bit dry and academic but worth reading.

[Brian Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written academic biography of Abraham Kuyper. It does a fine job in setting the context of Kuyper’s life and documenting the intellectual currents which influenced Kuyper. It also is valuable in providing the context for Kuyper’s thought (a particular political situation, for instance). This may affect the evaluation of certain aspects of Kuyper’s thought. Bratt provides a warts and all kind of biography, which is useful when evaluating the thought of an influential figure. The major weakness of this work, to my mind, is Bratt’s own left-of-center viewpoint. There were several occasions in which Bratt declared Kuyper’s thought to be contradictory (and the part deemed the outlier was the conservative part). I often wondered at these points if a right-of-center biographer would have seen Kuyper as contradictory at these points or whether he would have found Kuyper’s thought more cohesive.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the definitive book on Kuyper, and while the worldview of Kuyper undergirds much of the institutional context from which Bratt writes, its not written in the flattering tones of a fan. What is so impressive is Bratt's knowledge of the context and his ability to summarize and critique Kuyper's philosophy within that context. While the politics and culture of Kuyper is of more concern than his biographical details per se, the book is fairly comprehensive and remains interesting to the reader who maintains their curiosity in the big philosophical issues. Sometimes Bratt seems to be too ready to point out Kuyper's contradictions as faults, which I would treat more ambiguously. But the critique comes from decades of patience work, and I would cautiously say it is magisterial in its accomplishment.

[Sean Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive work about one of the most industrious workers in history.

Bratt's final sentence: "There is much we can all learn from a person who asked the right questions and gave enduring methods for seeking, and finding, their answers." I would have liked to read what he learned, a summary from the author's perspective, not only at the end of the book but throughout the whole.

Kuyper was a legend in his own country by the end of his own times, full of weaknesses and strengths. This book reports many of his gains (temporary and lasting, institutions and ideologies) along with many losses (personal and political). Valuable pages on a difficult man.

[Courtney Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am proud to say that I have finished this book! It is an excellent piece of history, Bratt is one of those uncommon academics who lectures exactly how he writes. No frills and the occasional joke or splash of irony. It is not easy to get through, or it was not for me--an avid fan of Father A and his numerous books, articles, and devotions, his personal life, and crusading political life leaves me disappointed, and the slightest bit angry. We are all human after all, and Calvinists/neocals would do good to take this book as a grain of salt next to the all inspiring Princeton lectures, Common Grace, what-have-you.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and thorough biography of a fascinating and important figure in Dutch history and in Reformed theology. Perhaps a little too thorough. I've been slowly chipping away at this doorstop for four months. I would have preferred a biography like Paul Johnson writes-- all the highlights of his life and some insightful commentary, all in 150 pages. Oh well. At least I learned a lot.
It was also interesting to read about how he spoke at Hope College during his trip to America in 1898.

[James Calvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're anywhere near to being a descendant of the Kuyperian tradition, then reading Bratt's bio of Father Abraham is like being given a lens to see more clearly into your own soul and heart and mind. Nothing but praise for this huge effort and accomplishment by Prof. Bratt.

[Радостин Марчев]

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