When Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) was born on the 320th anniversary of Martin Luther's manifesto at Wittenberg everybody agreed on one thing: he was in possession of an unusually large head. This is the first and last endearing observation James D. Bratt pulls from a wholly unamused life, a life of a nineteenth-century multihyphenate man who labored, mightily and seriously, to bring Christian thinking actively into the modern public sphere. James D. Bratt has written a biography that is relentlessly comprehensive in its explanation of Kuyper's work, and loudly quiet on his subject's humanity. This is not because Kuyper lacked a personality; it is because that personality was so unappealing that the best route through his epic story is to focus where Kuyper himself focused, namely on his public contributions and published thought. To focus anywhere else is to find a detached person whose efforts to make a better world seemed inversely proportional to his capacity to be an intimately compassionate person. Rather than meditate, then, on the brutish features of Kuyper's personal negotiations (though anyone seeking data need only read Bratt's account of Kuyper's civilizing mandates to his wife, Jo), Bratt takes us instead into Kuyper's prolific pen: his pages upon pages of thought, all of which mapped his vision for a better modern Netherlands and beyond.
Who is the parallel to Kuyper in America? The easiest analogy is William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) whose political career in the Democratic Party and House of Representatives and touring role as moral gadfly mirrors Kuyper's ambition to use theological arguments in the political arena. “Kuyper took Calvinism to be neither the fixed fund of propositional truth that the Reformed scholastics made it nor the historically continuous development that the nineteenth century prized,” Bratt writes, “He cultivated a baroque voice to overcome Victorian sentimentality; he clung to Victorian order to enter the Modern age; he used the Modernist moment to cultivate a Calvinist stance” (256). Like the industrial barons against whom he often situated himself, Kuyper saw no limit to his dominating capacities. In this organizing fervor, he distinguished himself from Bryan, since Kuyper did not only lead a party, he invented one; he didn't just reflect theology, he authored one; he didn't just dream of national leadership, he achieved it as prime minister of the Netherlands for nearly four years. In all of these ways, Kuyper invented the context to which his theologies could be applied. He invented the theology that begat the denomination that motivated the political party that manifested the platform that conveyed his nationalist ambitions.
Given the limits to his charisma, how was Kuyper able to enjoin thousands to follow his call? Bratt's answer focuses squarely on his theology. Kuyper designed a God that was “first of all a sovereign, a lawgiver” (xix). Such a divinity produces a “system of theological reflection, moral discipline, and church organization” (9). Kuyper authored a God, and designed a world into which to insert God's actions. This is how “Kuyper met Modernism on its own grounds of human religious experience,” namely in the ways that Kuyper constructed an alternative encounter between God and human conscience that did not deny human capacity but rather emboldened human agency to render theological life actionable (49). Kuyper refused doubt as a reply to wonder and confusion. He reworked Calvinism to make it equal to modernism as an answer to late-nineteenth century cultural crisis. Too many “Dutch churchgoers seemed addicted” to a theological half-heartedness and hair-splitting (94). To this, Kuyper said: the church is still present.
Kuyper meant this, literally. He loved the high church style of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), a work that reflected a multinational impulse towards churchly revival. More specifically, Kuyper hoped to turn the theological clock back to days when the sacrament meant something specific, powerful, and culturally salient. “One need not be a devotee of bygone days to be saddened by how flat, unexpressive, and impotent we look compared to the striking figures on Remrandt's canvases,” Bratt quotes Kuyper as saying (239). Kuyper wanted to “enforce Trinitarian language against Modernist deviation;” he wanted to empower local churches that were “progressive and orthodox, confessional and activist, democratic and disestablished” (55, 56). He sought to develop a religious outlook that could be stout-hearted enough to counter Modernism with a specific Christianity. “Christ does not tolerate our living a double life: our lives must be one, controlled by one principle,” he would write (58).
Why was Kuyper so possessed by the re-assertion of a specifically orthodox Christ? Because the secularists seemed to have everything else. Any student of secularism ought know Kuyper, and know him well, since he offered in his political theology an astonishing account of the world into which religious epistemology was an exigent intervention. “Kuyper directed his audience's attention to the secularists' road to power: their command of government, public opinion, the arts and science,” Bratt explains. “The faithful were called to work in those same venues, Kuyper reasons, even—no, especially—from their place on the margin” (196). This is why the fight for Christian schooling became so important to Kuyper and his political allies. “His political philosophy made freedom of conscience the heart of national culture, made education a function of conscience—that is, of religion—and of the family, and made the family the first counterpoise to the engrossing state” (116). If public education served as a primary location for the training of collective identity, Kuyper wanted to make sure that identity was not merely that of a Hollander, but that of a Calvinist. In an era of consolidating national and ethnic identity, Kuyper pressed for a moral identity that would supersede all other divisive frames of human interpretation.
This is why Kuyper would found a university, and this is why he would develop a political party: so he might generate licensed communities to counter the emerging secular consensus. Kuyper wanted a “good, Christian revolution” that would not simply bring a new moral piety to public life but also a social concept. (78) Here Kuyper got specific about the economic order a right moral vision would authorize. His political platform required a new law code for labor empowered through collective organization and arbitrated by the Congress, as well as a diversification of the educational system to provide trade skills for an internationally competitive labor force. This was “a Christian-democratic shape” for governance, one premised on a petit bourgeois vision: “the channeling of sexual desire within marriage and family relations, the availability of reliable, dignified work, and minimal dependence on welfare subsidies” (231, 227). “He had over the years worked out a grand pincer movement, bringing his political left and theological right arms together to form a consistent Calvinistic whole,” Bratt explains (257).
All of this suggests an intellectual coherence to Kuyper's project. Indeed, if one were merely to take the print culture of Kuyper's output as evidence, then such modal coherence would be proven. His was a career documented through fifty years of daily journalism and over 200 books and pamphlets. Despite two nervous breakdowns and the death of his nine-year-old son, Kuyper was unstoppable in his energies. More than anything else, Kuyper valued control over the world—over his anxieties and over the inevitable inconsistencies of interpretation. This is perhaps why the best chapters in Bratt's biography are those where he delves Kuyper's written work, such as those that explore The Work of the Holy Spirit, or his oration for the opening of Free University, titled “Sphere Sovereignty.” It is worth underlining, however, that this biography—however thoroughgoing in its research—rarely explains any of the essential theological concepts or political issues addressed by Kuyper; the premise of Bratt's writing is a familiarity with Christian concepts and conflicts. This is not the biography that will introduce Abraham Kuyper to the wider audience his significance deserves but it is the biography that will inform historical scholarship on him for the years to come.
More challenging to the contemporary reader are later chapters in which Bratt wrestles with Kuyper's death and aftermath: his failure to retain political power, his declining health and increasingly dyspeptic spirits; and the ways Kuyper's thinking effected twentieth-century Dutch politics, especially the ways he was invoked to support apartheid. Bratt is clearly inspired by the early Kuyper, and less worried about his confused inheritors. In the introduction, Bratt writes, “It is revealing to think about Kuyper as a type of liberation theologian, galvanizing faithful followers of the Lord to throw off the belittling consciousness imposed by their oppressors and build a new order with justice for all” (xix). This is a hopeful sketch, one which is sometimes visible in Kuyper's political platforms, but never quite perceptible in his engagements with the world. Even as Bratt carefully distinguishes Kuyper's biblical racialism from the Afrikaners, this reader is hardly convinced that if followed properly, Kuyper's hope for a Christian democracy would only have had inclusive ends. Recently George Marsden suggested in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (2014) that Kuyper offers a model for contemporary political efforts by religiously minded peoples. Marsden accurately depicts one of Kuyper's central observations, namely that it is not the task of religious peoples to compel everyone to their view, but rather to participate in the identification of common principles among inevitably diverse participants. Yet Marsden—and Kuyper—fail to recognize how important, and how difficult, it is to be mutable in a plural world. It is all well and good to imagine Christians could serve as the moderating ethicists in a given plural world; it is another thing altogether to imagine actual human people trying to identify a common cause as they hold incontrovertible (to them) positions about themselves and the world. A true moderate must be not just interested in what other people have to say, but also actually willing to change their mind based on that hearing. It is clear from this account that the thinking Kuyper was most interested to produce, reproduce, print, and reprint, was his own. The autocracy of his Christian rationalism is a poor model for any national future, as we continue to wrestle with the real crevasse of difference and the pain inflicted on those who are not heard, and heard well, by instruments of purported political reason.
