Creation: Launchpad or Limit?

A few weeks ago in this space, Daniel Meeter asked whether there was room for Kuyperians in the Reformed Church in America.

His answer was an emphatic “Yes!” and his rationale was clear and detailed. So were the “yes-but” cautionary remarks about Kuyperian theology that he and Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell offered in discussions on the post. 

I’ll get back to a couple of Daniel’s proposals in a minute, but first I’d like to revisit his observation, and Steve’s too, that with its fixation on “creation norms,” Kuyperian theology tends to be backward-looking rather than eschatological, that it yearns for the restoration of creation rather than the coming of the new heavens and the new earth.

The charge may be largely true for Kuyperians but only half true, at most, about Kuyper himself. Which leads us to the equally important question of when and why disciples truncate their master—more generally, of how and why fiery movements come to congeal. It helps to approach both questions in light of the surprising original relationship between the man, Kuyper, and the denomination, the RCA. 

Kuyper’s RCA Dream  

When Kuyper planned his grand tour of the United States in 1898, his primary States-side contacts were leaders of RCA background and/or affiliation, and his primary target—aside from Presbyterian circles around Princeton Seminary, where he delivered his fabled Stone Lectures—were churches and cultural institutions in and around the RCA.

Kuyper approached America as a Christian land with particularly Calvinistic foundations, and he sought to rejuvenate that heritage for a looming battle with theological Modernism and secularism. The RCA was a presence in—not a central presence like the Presbyterians, perhaps, but certainly within the larger orbit of—the national Protestant establishment that was strategic to this purpose.

These hopes were dashed. Tellingly, Vice President Gerrit Hobart, of New Jersey Dutch heritage, got him an invitation to the White House, but Kuyper went away deeply disappointed in President William McKinley. The second half of Kuyper’s journey featured lectures to mainline Protestant audiences in Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, and New Brunswick, coolly received. Nor would he leave much lasting in the RCA itself. These parties neither shared Kuyper’s apprehensions nor the strategies he proposed to relieve them. He came off as an Old World curiosity, quaint if energetic, but out of touch with the blessed prospects of God’s chosen country.

Kuyper’s CRC Reception

Instead, Kuyper was lionized by bright and ambitious sons of the Christian Reformed Church, many of them immigrants themselves or of the second generation. He urged their enthusiastic ranks in Grand Rapids and elsewhere across the Midwest to get involved in American life—contradicting the insular advice of many of their parents—but to do so from the distinctive point of view and with the distinctive measures of Calvinism, not generic Protestantism. That message over the next generations would launch a thousand careers and high aspirations. 

Ridiculously high sometimes, grandiose, rife with over-generalizations about Calvinism, America, and modernity. But never complaisant, prompting deep dives into big issues and key questions, and kindling an activism that over the years would make their numbers punch way above their weight. Kuyper injected into the CRC an energy and a vision that burst through its combination of immigrant insularity and pietistic negations, its world flight, its denial—crucially—of the enduring significance and worth of creation. 

Creational Development

Contrary to Kuyperians’ reputation, Kuyper did not think that restoring God’s creation should be the aim of Christians’ work in history. Rather, creation was a launchpad for “rich historical development” (a favorite phrase of his), development that would realize the immense potential inherent in every domain of life: social, economic, intellectual, technological, you name it. “Creation norms” there were, but these were as much internal gyroscopes to guide development aright down an expanding vector of human creativity as a tether to keep things in tight check.

Kuyper’s lifetime (1837-1920) was the North Atlantic world’s great century of progress. In his first pastorate he saw the railroad and telegraph come to town, the Netherlands’ last cholera epidemic, and the beginning of a steady decline in the country’s 20% rate of infant mortality. It was also, to be sure, the great century of European and American imperialism and of great leaps forward in scientistic (note, not just scientific) and humanistic pretensions. The effect was to leave Kuyper deeply cross-pressured, both acutely anxious yet ever hopeful in a faithful God.

What Happened?

The progressive side of this picture was shattered by World War I, and the deaths of Kuyper and neo-Calvinism’s co-founder Herman Bavinck soon afterward (in 1920 and 1921, respectively) deepened his followers’ gloom. Kuyper and Bavinck’s successor in the theology chair at the Free University was the utterly forgettable, and regrettable, Valentijn Hepp, a devotee among other things of a literal six-day creation. 

Kuyper’s successor in politics was Hendrik Colijn who made his bones in the Dutch army’s vicious suppression of rebellion in the East Indies, then moved over into the oil trade to become CEO of Royal Dutch Shell. As prime minister during the Great Depression he kept the Netherlands on the gold standard long after most other countries had left it, with dire consequences for the Dutch economy. To imperialist war-making, devotion to fossil fuels, and deluded notions of finance, Colijn added conservative dogmatism in theology and reflex suspicion regarding cultural innovation. The combination would not be without parallels on the American side. 

More broadly, Kuyper’s movement fossilized within the matrix of “pillarization” that marked the Netherlands from the 1920s into the 1960s. Dutch Calvinists took to defending “their circle,” with boundary maintenance a top priority. Ethno-confessional cocooning served the same purpose in the CRC. “Creation norms” as dynamic principles became fixed limits to ward off error, security blankets amid strange and scary winds. In sum, “Kuyperianism” took on the character of Daniel and Steve’s critique after Kuyper was dead and gone.  

Back to Theology

None of this negates Daniel’s critique of creation norms—whether progressively or restrictively taken—from the standpoint of biblical theology. Others more qualified than I can adjudicate that question, though his case strikes me as compelling. But circling back to that initial Kuyper-RCA contact might ease another challenge that Daniel foresees on the path forward, the need for theological translation. 

For one, Daniel observes, where Kuyperians speak of common grace, RCA folks see the work of the Holy Spirit. So, exactly, did Kuyper. As Cornelis van der Kooi, Kuyper’s descendant in systematic theology at the Free University, observes, Kuyper’s massive The Work of the Holy Spirit anticipated much of what he laid out in his equally massive Common Grace some years later. Every good thing in human life bears the influence of the Spirit, Kuyper argued, and not just in individuals’ conduct but collectively, in the behavior of peoples and nations and cultures. 

Secondly, over against Kuyperians’ (and New England Puritans’) ambition to be a city on a hill, Daniel imagines St. Paul invoking Jesus’ injunction to be the salt of the earth. Here Kuyper goes one better, favoring the third piece of that triad from the Sermon on the Mount. Light is “superficial,” Kuyper noted (always an epithet), and salt is “merely” preservative. Leaven gets to the heart of the matter, pervading and transforming the whole.

A Cheer-and-a-Half for Creation

With “transformation” we come upon a whole different can of worms, one best left for another occasion. I’d like to bring up historical context one last time and end with 1.5 cheers for “creation” in light of the CRC’s American neighborhood across the 20^th century. The guideline here was: “Modernists are our enemies, Fundamentalists are our cousins.” Erring cousins, to be sure, notably in their Arminian revivals. Faulty too on the frontier of eschatology with their world-denying dispensationalism, but that differed in technical details, not in prevailing mood, from Dutch pietist suspicions of “the world.” Together the two parties could recite 2 Peter 3:10’s forecast of the final judgment, when “the elements shall melt with fervent heat [and] the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

That is surely not the eschatological vision Daniel and Steve are recommending. But it was the alternative long—and still—on order among the CRC’s closest kin. In that context Kuyperians’ emphasis on creation has served as a saving grace. In broader scope Daniel’s final summation that “the new heaven and earth where righteousness dwells” is a place where creation is redeemed not as a “restoration” but as “an advancement” would get a hearty Amen from Father Abraham himself.