Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper, the two chief architects of the theological movement known as neo-Calvinism, are no doubt having a moment in the North Atlantic English-speaking world. With increased scholarly attention and a shocking amount of excellent new translations, these two 20th century Dutchmen, household names of their own time and country, may not yet be household names on this side of the “pond,” but are certainly much more well-known than even a decade ago.
Their capacious, catholic, biblically bound, and culturally engaged theological vision, insisting, in the words of Herman Bavinck that the good news of the gospel is “a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person but also for humanity, for family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation,”[1] has an important word for many aspects of our faith and life. Here, I want to zero in on just one of the contributions they offer us in our own cultural moment, one filled with political polarization, strife, and confusion.
Church and State
It’s no surprise that questions of church and state would be important for Bavinck and Kuyper. Both, in their own ways, contributed significantly to the political landscape of their country and the political theology of their tradition, as theologians (both Kuyper and Bavinck were taught, lectured, and wrote on theology, including theology and politics) and politicians (Kuyper as Prime Minister of the Netherlands and Bavinck as a member of the First Chamber, or Senate).
They have a lot to offer us, beginning with the definitions they uphold, for both church and state. These definitions – for them and for us – are no doubt only the beginning of a conversation, but an important one nonetheless.
For Kuyper and Bavinck, God’s sovereignty loomed large. Kuyper is well known for his famous claim that “There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine!” In his Lectures on Calvinism, he again affirms the central place this God’s sovereignty has for theology. The “dominating principle” of Calvinism, he argued, was not soteriology but rather “the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.” [2]
Bavinck and Kuyper’s emphasis on sovereignty has an immediate implication for their understanding of church and state: both church and state are spheres that operate coram Deo, before the face of God, and thus, both are spheres that can – and should! – be properly ordered according to God’s will and way.
Definition: The State
In his Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper readily affirms that politics is not simply postlapsarian, that is, a concession by God to structure human life on account of our sin. Politics, he argues, has a creational, prelapsarian purpose and design that continues, despite our sin, on account of God’s common grace.
Importantly, Kuyper distinguishes between the prelapsarian politics and the postlapsarian state.[3] These two concepts are importantly connected, but not the same. He writes:
For, indeed, without sin there would have been neither magistrate nor state-order; but political life, in its entirety, would have evolved itself, after a patriarchal fashion, from the life of the family. Neither bar of justice nor police, nor army, nor navy, is conceivable in a world without sin; and thus every rule and ordinance and law would drop away, even as all control and assertion of the power of the magistrate would disappear, were life to develop itself, normally and without hindrance, from its own organic impulse. Who binds up, where nothing is broken? Who uses crutches, where the limbs are sound?[4]
By state, Kuyper means the coercive state, whose power is backed by the sword. He claims that the state in this sense, that is, coercive, is not original with creation; instead, it has been instituted “by reason of sin.”[5]
As Jonathan Chaplin described, the state was instituted “after the fall to restrain the disruptive and violent effects of sin.”[6] The function of the state in this way is an important aspect of God’s common grace. It is no surprise, then, that humanity might – sometimes, or even very frequently – experience the state’s coercive power as “unnatural.”
While a coercive state is not original to creation, politics is, Kuyper argues. Even without sin, he argues, humanity would still need a sense of regulation and ordering; our life together would still need patterning and regulation, although in a prelapsarian state, such regulation would be non-coercive.[7] Thus, as Richard Mouw describes, politics does not include merely coercive state power, but “life-giving” politics.[8] Even as we live post-fall, there is “something about government, when it is functioning properly, that fits nicely into God’s basic creating design for human life.”[9] It can be – and is – a good gift from God.
As such, Kuyper and Bavinck also affirm that the state both has God-given authority and does not have ultimate authority, which belongs only to God. Part of its God given authority, they continue, is to have a unique responsibility toward other spheres (by this they mean “an arena where interactions take place, and where some sort of authority is exercised”[10]), given its primary role as “God’s servant called to maintain justice in society.”[11] The state is to: (1) mitigate conflict between the spheres, (2) protect individuals from abuse of power by spheres, and (3) ensure citizens contribute to good government.[12]
With this definition of the state, as a divinely instituted sphere and a limited authority Kuyper sought to honor “the authority of the magistrate” and honored the authority of the other spheres that God has ordained.[13] In a delightfully mixed metaphor, he articulated this responsibility and limitation of the state in this way:
The State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life. It must occupy its own place, on its own root, among all the other trees of the forest, and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life which grows independently in its own sacred autonomy.[14]
For Kuyper, the good of politics, and the authority of the state are necessary, as are its bounds. Both must be held together. Such a view mitigates against excessive statism, leads towards the condition of religious pluralism, and situates the state as a realm in which Christians can – and should! – participate.
Definition: Church
One may rightly ask, then, if the state and the church are separate spheres, with differing authorities, how did Kuyper and Bavinck understand their roles as both churchmen and statesmen?
To understand their answer, we need to grasp a key distinction both Kuyper and Bavinck make within their definition of the church: the church as both institute and organism.
“From the very beginning,” Bavinck argues,
the church appears on the scene in a dual form. It is a gathering of the people of God in a passive as well as an active sense; it is simultaneously a gathered community and the mother of believers, or, in other words, an organism and an institution.[15]
Kuyper similarly argues that the church is both “rooted and grounded.”[16]
For them this means that the church ought to be understood as an institute and organism. The church is a “local congregations of believers, groups of confessors, living in some ecclesiastical union, in obedience to the ordinances of Christ.”[17] It includes, as Louis Berkhof describes, “the offices, the administration of the Word and the Sacraments, and in a certain form of church government.”[18] For most Christians, this definition of church, what Kuyper and Bavinck understand as the church as institute, is what we intuitively and instinctively think of as church.
The church does indeed function as this institute, but Kuyper and Bavinck argue that it is not only as an institute. The church is also organism. Drawing upon his understanding of all things existing coram Deo, Kuyper argues that “it remained the special trait of Calvinism that it placed the believer before the face of God, not only in the church, but also in his personal, family, social, and political life. The majesty of God, and the authority of God press upon the Calvinist in the whole of his human existence.”[19] Again, Louis Berkhof brings clear definition to this aspect of the church: it is “the communal life of believers and in their opposition to the world.”[20]
The church as institute remains a separate sphere from the state; both have important, but necessarily differentiated tasks to do, each coram Deo. But as an organism, the church is invited to participate in every sphere of life, including the state. This ecclesial distinction guards against two extremes: a Christendom model that embraces a “confessional civil society” and “confessional state”[21] and a pietistic model that understands faith to be merely a concern of individualistic expression and meaning. It undergirds a model of church that could and must function within a secularizing and pluralized society.
With this distinction, neo-Calvinism championed a robust sense in which Christians (and those holding other religions and worldviews) could and should bring their religious convictions into the public square, and into the state. While the church as institute is a separate sphere from the state (and thus does not control or confessionalize the state), the church as organism is actively engaged in the state, and ought to have an important influence on it (and thus is not merely relegated to personal conviction and practice).
No doubt there is much more to say, but these basic definitions and distinctions provided deep fodder, impetus, and boundaries for Bavinck and Kuyper’s work as both churchmen and statesmen, and can offer important wisdom to us today, too. They give us guardrails and guidance for our engagement in a way that seeks to affirm God’s sovereignty over every aspect of his creation, including church and state.
[1] Herman Bavinck, “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,” trans. John Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992): 224.
[2] Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 79; emphasis original.
[3] Here, Kuyper is using “state” as a broad reference to an organized political authority or government, a postlapsarian reality long before the modern nation-state.
[4] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 80.
[5] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 81.
[6] Jonathan Chaplin, “Kuyper and Politics,” Calvinism for a Secular Age, ed. Jessica Joustra and Robert Joustra (Intervarsity Press, 2021), 59.
[7] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 79-81; see also: Richard Mouw, Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 51.
[8] Mouw, Abraham Kuyper, 53.
[9] Mouw, Abraham Kuyper, 54.
[10] Mouw, Abraham Kuyper, 23.
[11] Herman Bavinck, “General Biblical Principles and the Relevance of Concrete Mosaic Law for the Social Question Today,” trans. John Bolt, Journal of Markets & Morality 13.2 (Fall 2010): 446
[12] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 97.
[13] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 94.
[14] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 96-97.
[15] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, trans. John Vriend, ed. John Bolt (Baker, 2008), 330.
[16] Abraham Kuyper, Rooted and Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institute (Christian’s Library Press, 2013).
[17] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 62; emphasis original.
[18] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (GLH Publishing, 2017), 482.
[19] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 69; emphasis original.
[20] Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 482.
[21] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace, vol. 2: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, ed. Jordan J. Ballor and Stephen J. Grabill (Lexham Press, 2019), 36.3.
