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.

For one thing, he saw in Calvinism’s evolving support for the idea of religious freedom—the advocacy of the rights of diverse churches to pursue their various patterns of life and worship—an implicit endorsement of the idea of ecclesiastical pluriformity.

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

In the three-part mandate of Genesis 1:28, the first thing God tells them is to “be fruitful and multiply.” That is about reproduction. He wants them to procreate, to have children. But when the Lord immediately goes on to tell them to “fill the earth,” that is a different assignment. This “filling” mandate, as viewed by Kuyper and others in the Re

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 fact is, Kuyper insisted, that the true church “can reveal itself in many forms, in different countries; nay, even in the same country, in a multiplicity of institutions.”

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

“Each sphere has its own identity, its own unique task, its own God-given prerogatives.

One of Kuyper’s favorite terms was “pluriformity.” He had a fondness for many-ness.