Abraham Kuyper’s Public Theology Today

By Jordan Ballor

The Acton Institute has launched a new 12-volume series of Kuyper’s works, titled Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology, the goal of which is to bring more of the primary source materials from this virtuoso theologian and statesman into circulation in the Anglophone world.

Mel Flikkema and I are serving as general editors of the series, and I am also serving as a volume editor for the three volumes on Common Grace. You can read more details about the origins, contents, and goals of the series in the General Editors’ Introduction that I posted here. As Mel and I write, “The church today—both locally and globally—needs the tools to construct a compelling and responsible public theology. The aim of this translation project is to provide those tools—we believe that Kuyper’s unique insights can catalyze the development of a winsome and constructive Christian social witness and cultural engagement the world over.”

The first volume to be made available in the series is Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, translated and edited by Harry Van Dyke. This remarkable text is a commentary and elaboration of the principles and convictions of the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands, of which Kuyper was a key leader.

Kuyper has a powerful legacy that has most often been noted explicitly within the context of the Reformed tradition, and particularly Dutch Reformed churches. But it is my conviction that Kuyper has important lessons, many positive and some negative as well, perhaps, to teach us today and to communicate more broadly to the evangelical and even ecumenically Christian world.

As Tracy Kuperus reflects on just the political aspects of Kuyper’s diverse legacy,

Serious, sustained conversations about the importance of cultural, and especially political, engagement are still needed today. Evangelicalism has come a long way in the last twenty years, moving beyond the single-issue, instrumentalist view of political involvement that was prevalent a few years ago. And maybe the ‘square inch’ quote has lost its ‘revolutionary appeal.’ Still, it’s an uphill battle for Christians to see that political institutions might be touched by God’s grace or that political life is part of our humanity that God is redeeming through Christ.

As part of his last recorded interview before his death, here’s what Chuck Colson had to say about Abraham Kuyper and his influence and relevance today:

Originally published at the Acton PowerBlog