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{"id":18507,"date":"2016-11-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=247"},"modified":"2016-11-11T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T00:00:00","slug":"dooyeweerdian-impasse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/11\/dooyeweerdian-impasse\/","title":{"rendered":"Dooyeweerdian Impasse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n an essay on radical Augustinian social critique in his Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation<\/a>, Lambert Zuidervaart summarizes the social vision of Herman Dooyeweerd with two themes: spiritual antithesis and structural differentiation. The antithesis is, for Dooyeweerd, \u201cuniversal, comprehensive, and deeply spiritual,\u201d running \u201cright through the Christian life itself.\u201d History is a life-and-death struggle between antithetical \u201cground motives,\u201d ultimately a struggle between \u201ca spiritual orientation for which life, culture, and society are God\u2019s redeemed and redeemable creation, and one for which God\u2019s creative and redemptive work are irrelevant or nonexistent\u201d (224-5).<\/p>\n

Dooyeweerd accepts Kuyper\u2019s view of sphere sovereignty, and elevates it into a \u201ccreation-wide principle\u201d through his theory of modal aspects. Thus, Dooyeweerd \u201cendorses the differentiation of institutions in the modern West but resists the secular spirit that helps drive this process.\u201d He opposes totalitarianism and premodern ecclesial dominance of society, but because of his opposition to secularism he stands against mainstream liberalism (225). For him, \u201cmodern structural differentiations among, say, the church, the state, the economy, and civil society are historical achievements worth preserving and advancing\u201d but he thinks they ought to be advanced by a process \u201cimbued with a holy spirit\u201d (226).<\/p>\n

In the Epilogue to his collection of essays, Zuidervaart links this problem to Dooyeweerd\u2019s failure to reckon with the reality of \u201csocietal evil\u201d alongside natural and moral evil. Dooyeweerd didn\u2019t \u201cplumb the depths of societal evil in the West because he gave normative priority to structural differentiation in society. He turned the idea of sphere sovereignty . . . into a creational principle that lies beyond critique. Hence Dooyeweerd could not seriously ask whether the Western differentiation of social institutions, such as government, corporations, and universities, might itself embody and foster societal evil.\u201d As long as differentiation functions as \u201ca structural hypernorm,\u201d it is impossible to \u201cassess the environmental, cultural, and interpersonal costs of this process\u201d (320-1).<\/p>\n

Zuidervaart spies a tension here: \u201cThe apparent dominance of a secular spirit since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment raises the question of whether the modern Western differentiation might be more deeply misdirected than Dooyeweerd recognizes. At the same time, the apparent legitimacy of modern Western differentiation raises the question of whether spiritual redirection is as crucial to societal well-being as he insists\u201d (226). Perhaps, in other words, modern differentiation reflects a ground motive antithetical to Christianity\u2019s; and, if differentiation is all to the good, would it be a good thing for the spiritual \u201csphere\u201d to direct the whole of society, as Dooyeweerd seems to want.<\/p>\n

Dooyeweerd\u2019s disciples tend to follow one or the other directions of this unresolved tension: \u201cThose who are distressed as the spiritual malaise of the West tend to become reactionaries who see little of worth in contemporary society\u201d; they stress the antithesis. \u201cOthers who are enthusiastic about modern differentiation end up white-washing the evil that besets Western societies and that these societies inflict on others\u201d (226).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"