Abraham Kuyper

The Kingdom, on the other hand, encompasses the believing community in all of its complex life of participation in a variety of spheres.

Kuyper’s convictions on this subject led him to a very personal decision at one point in his career. He had started off his life as a leader as an ordained Dutch Reformed minister. But when he became active in politics, seeking election in the Dutch parliament, he gave up his ordination. From that point on he was a member of the laity. This decisio

“pluriformity.”

sphere sovereignty

In thinking about things on this deeper level, Kuyper wanted to be sure that we keep the very basic differences among these created spheres in mind. To talk simply about “civil society” is to ignore the rich diversity of the created spheres. Families are different than churches. Art guilds are different than groups of scientists working on a common

The great error of unbelief, then, is the pretense that we are on our own, that we are not accountable to our Maker for anything that we do. The Christian community must live out its calling in the conscious recognition that secularism is false.

Government, he explains, has a “threefold right and duty”: first, to adjudicate disputes between spheres, “compel[ling] mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each”; second, to defend the weak against the strong within each sphere; third, to exercise the coercive power necessary to guarantee that citizens “bear personal and financial burdens for t

The secularist perspective rightly wants to liberate these spheres from the church’s control. Where it goes wrong is in its insistence that to do so is also to take them out from under the rule of God. If there is a God, the secularists have said, he can have the church—but we will liberate everything else from divine control. Kuyper’s own view—his

Kuyper meant, among other things, to counter the idea that such entities as the state or the family or the market system exist only because the state grants them the right to exist. Governments do not grant these rights; they are called to recognize rights. We have families and churches and economic systems because they are grounded in creation its