Only this past Friday I published a short piece in which I looked at Abraham Kuyper's distinction between the church-as-institute and church-as-organism. A book chapter updated by Ruben Alvaro had occasioned my thoughts. I suspected that Alvarado might be right--Kuyper's doctrinal innovation may have unintentionally accelerated the secularization of Dutch society--but I withheld full concurrence. After all, I mused, there was much more Kuyper to canvass than Alvarado's chapter considered.
The next day the algorithm powering academia.com emailed a suggestion that I should read "The Kuyperian-Schilderian Option: A Synthesis of Abraham Kuyper and Klaas Schilder That is Better than Saint Benedict" by Dennis Greeson (here). Quite a mouthful.
In brief (because I lack sufficient interest to pursue the issue further), Greeson anticipated my hope that someone would take up a fuller oeuvre of Kuyper's work and provide a definitive resolution to the contention Alvarado raised. Only in pages 19-21 does Greeson explicitly address institute vs. organism; his burden focuses on Kuyper parallel innovation of the doctrine of common grace. Still, there's enough in the paper to give me greater confidence that both innovations contained enough ambiguity to permit some of Kuyper's heirs to take them in wrongheaded directions. The evolution of Kuyper's thoughts about common grace and his unsystematic, occasional form of writing opened the door both for active acquiescence in the Nazi regime of 1940-1945 and cooperation in progressive governments (and secularizing the university he founded) thereafter.
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