Sublime

Calvin the doctrine of the “magistratus inferiores.”

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.

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

This dominating principle was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but, in the widest sense cosmologically, the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. A primordial Sovereignty which eradiates in mankind in a threefold deduced supremacy, viz., 1. The Sovereignty in the

the state had only a derivative authority as a minister of justice under Christ and His word. The political source of law, then, traced back, not to Caesar, but ultimately to Christ and God’s law.1

He founded a newspaper, a university, a political party, and a denomination. Nor was he content to start something and then move on to a different project. During his career, which lasted from his ordination in the 1860s until his death in 1920, he regularly wrote articles for his newspaper; he taught theology at the Free University; he led his