Eight years ago my friend Ruben Alvarado published a chapter titled "The Kuyper Option: Kuyper's Concept of the Church in the Context of Strategic Christian Action."* Alvarado updated his chapter in 2021 (here).
Alvarado identifies two innovations in Kuyper's doctrine that warrant scrutiny: his doctrine of common grace and his distinction between the church as an institute from the church as an organism. Alvarado concludes that, whatever were Kuyper's intentions, both innovations led to deprecation of the preeminence of the Church in the Netherlands and thus acceleration of the secularization of that society. Alvarado focuses on the institute vs. organism distinction and I will limit my remarks to it.
Kuyper retained the traditional Protestant distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. Not all persons baptized into the church are in fact ultimately joined to Christ, the head of the Church. Baptized hypocrites and apostates have always existed. Kuyper's additional institute/organism distinction makes a different point: (i) the life of Christians as Christians extends beyond the institutional boundaries of the church-as-institute, (ii) extra-institutional living necessarily assumes associational forms (business entities, labor unions, universities, political parties, social clubs, etc.), and (iii) the expression "church-as-organism" identifies and reifies this latter state of affairs.
As Alvarado observes, few Christians deny propositions (i) or (ii). Alvarado, however, following a later Dutch theologian Klass Schilder, identifies the associational life of Christians simply as service while living in a society and at the same time as a member of the church-as-institute: "The two aspects of institute and organism cannot be separated from each other in the way that Kuyper does. They are correlative and concurrent, two sides of the same coin."
Well. Okay. Of what significance might be such theological hairsplitting?
Alvarado identifies two problems downstream of Kuyper's originality. First is the "freedom" of the church-as-organism from the doctrines and discipline of the church-as-institute. The members of the amorphous church-as-organism can come together across confessional lines to form associations that take positions that are inconsistent with the doctrines of the church-as-institute. For example, a Kuyperian Christian political party formed by persons who identify as members of the church-as-organism will be drawn inexorably to thin its distinctive claims in favor of increasing its numbers to accomplish what all political parties want: political power.
Second is the practical result that the place of the church-as-institute is depreciated in favor of Christian associations cobbled together by the church-as-organism. Big, powerful, and socially influential associations will attract more attention than the traditional and confessionally-circumscribed church-as-institute. But only the latter has the keys to eternal life. Kuyper's innovation may thus have had the unexpected effect of turning traditional two kingdoms theology on its head.
In Kuyper's defense, the increasingly pluralistic religious and political landscape called for some reconfiguration of the increasingly complex forms of social life. The complicated relationship among the national church, more powerful forms of business (and labor) associations, and an increasingly democratically-minded citizenry defied the old forms of resolution. The forces of modernity were dissolving traditional forms of Dutch life
In any event, Alvarado's concerns are well taken if the foregoing is an accurate account of Kuyper's distinction between between church-as-institute and church-as-organism. And it may well be. It certainly strikes me as plausible given what happened with Kuyper's denomination, university, and political party in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century. But I'm not ready to commit.
While writing this short chapter, Alvarado did not have access to the complete corpus of Kuyper's political and theological writing in English. Thanks to the Acton Institute and Lexham Press that corpus (all twelve volumes of it!) are now available in English in both print and digital editions. I suspect that there's a dissertation waiting to be written that examines Alvarado's argument in light of all that Kuyper wrote.
* Bradford Littlejohn, ed., For Law and for Liberty: Essays on the Transatlantic Legacy of Protestant Political Thought (Davenant Press 2016).
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