Kuyper Quotes

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God.

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

If you first take a minute, an hour or a month to let go of feeling annoyed, frustrated or critical of the person or situation that may be driving you crazy, you set yourself up for much greater leadership and personal success.

The question is not if the candidate's heart is favorable to Christianity, but if he has Christ as his starting point even for politics, and will speak out His name!

Whatever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand - in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science - he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of God. He is employed in the service of his God. He has strictly to obey his God. And above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God.

God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.

The curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life.

Your private self must become the same as your public self.

When you have nothing but love, you have everything. This means you must live as if you have nothing to hide, nothing to prove and nothing to lose.

Each of us is the best we can be when we are fully present, focused yet relaxed, curious yet non-judgmental, committed yet flexible.

In its highest form, not judging is the ultimate act of forgiveness.

the holy art of “giving for Jesus’ sake” ought to be much more strongly developed among us Christians. Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior. The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work. The government cannot take the place of Christian charity. A loving embrace isn’t given with food stamps. The care of a community isn’t provided with government housing. The face of our Creator can’t be seen on a welfare voucher. What the poor need is not another government program; what they need is for Christians like me to honor our savior.

To have faith in the Word, Scripture must not grasp us in our critical thought, but in the life of the soul.

You cannot do what's important now for you if your mind cannot accept what is happening in this present moment.

To not judge is to be like a peach. We shrink our space by giving up controlling others. Instead, we focus on controlling ourselves. We set others free to be who they are.

When you are present, you are not needy.

Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the church upon every aspect of human life.

There is one undeniable truth about our body: it only exists in the present moment.

When you are authentic without an intent to harm others, you give yourself an awesome feeling which is the feeling of self-love.

Judgments are like a snowball. They stick to you. As time rolls along, the snowball becomes a boulder and then an avalanche.

A judgment with an evil design comes about when we compare a person to our pre-conceived beliefs about what is right or wrong and then condemn that person.

A charity which knows only how to give money is not yet Christian love. You will be free of guilt only when you also give your time, your energy, and your resourcefulness to help end such abuses for good, and when you allow nothing that lies hidden in the storehouse of your Christian religion to remain unused against the cancer that is destroying the vitality of our society in such alarming ways.

Our failure is not that we chose earth over heaven: it is that we fail to see the divine in the earth, already active and working, pouring forth grace and spilling glory into our lives. Artists, whether they are professed believers or not, tap into this grace and glory. There is a "terrible beauty" operating throughout creation. If Christ announced his postresurrection reality into the darkness, even into hell, as the Bible and Christian catechism suggests, then, as theologian Abraham Kuyper put it, there is not one inch of earth that Christ does not call "Mine!

Sun, moon, and stars beckon people to worship the Creator—until people lose sight of the living God and begin to worship the sun, moon, and stars themselves.

The present moment is the definition of eternity. It has never not been the present moment. This isn't scriptural or unscriptural - it is merely a logical fact.

Free love may try to dissolve, and the concubinate to desecrate, the holiest tie, as it pleases; but, for the vast majority of our race, marriage remains the foundation of human society and the family retains its position as the primordial sphere in sociology.

Calvinism is an all-embracing system of principles... It is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and form that specific religious consciousness there was developed first a particular theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life.

We cannot let go of the past enough to live in the present unless we are able to grieve our losses. We must deeply feel our emotional pain in order to accept that what is happening is not what we wanted.

The present is what is happening when you strip away all the resentments of your past and all the worries you have about your future.

It is impossible, Bible in hand, to limit Christ's Church to one's own little community. It is everywhere, in all parts of the world; and whatever its external form, frequently changing, often impure, yet the gifts wherever received increase our riches.

The other parties campaign for parliamentary seats, more or less. We campaign for our principles!

One of the greatest joys of not judging others is becoming capable of discerning God's will in a difficult situation.

Knowledge (curriculum) and behavior (pedagogy) are embedded in everyone’s core beliefs about the nature of God, humanity, and the world.

The Holy Scripture is like a diamond: in the dark it is like a piece of glass, but as soon as the light strikes it the water begins to sparkle, and the scintillation of life greets us.

The domain of Calvinism is indeed far broader than the narrow confessional interpretation would lead us to suppose.

What is hell other than a realm in which unholiness works without restraint in body and soul?

In order to live in the present, we have to learn how to feel safe even when a situation feels threatening to us.

Learning how to recognize and act on your Inner Knowing is the greatest tool for discovering what's important now by living in the present.

The Paradox of Change: People can only change when they feel accepted as they are now.

That Christ's Baptism was not a mere form, but the fulfilling of all righteousness, proves that He descended into the water burdened with our sins.

To live in the present, you need to act or accept but never stay stuck.

...as long as you are motivated by the approval of others, you cannot know with confidence whether the decisions you are making in your life are what's right for you...

No man has the right to rule over another man, otherwise such a right necessarily, and immediately becomes the right of the strongest. As the tiger in the jungle rules over the defenceless antelope, so on the banks of the Nile a Pharaoh ruled over the progenitors of the fellaheen of Egypt. Nor can a group of men, by contract, from their own right, compel you to obey a fellow-man. What binding force is there for me in the allegation that ages ago one of my progenitors made a ‘Contrat Social,’ with other men of that time? As man I stand free and bold, over against the most powerful of my fellow-men. I do not speak of the family, for here organic, natural ties rule; but in the sphere of the State I do not yield or bow down to anyone, who is man, as I am.

Every State-formation, every assertion of the power of the magistrate, every mechanical means of compelling order and of guaranteeing a safe course of life is therefore always something unnatural;

Art cannot be excused from following God’s law, and art disgraces itself by seeking that freedom. Anything that cannot be put into an image or onto a canvas without demanding the sacrifice of modesty or injuring shame must simply be eschewed. Art is not autonomous. Art is one of the more refined human life expressions, and all these life expressions are organically related and stand continuously under God’s ordinance.

We believe that our salvation depends solely upon God's work in us, and not upon our testimony; and the little child with stammering lips, but wrought upon by the Holy Spirit, will precede vain scribes into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The greatest gift a church can receive is to have a group of families who take their responsibilities with such Christian seriousness that they are willing to completely alter their lifestyle to raise up disciples for Jesus Christ.

When you do what's important now for you, you create a past that leaves you ready to handle the present. By default, the future is taking care of itself as you make decisions that are acceptable to you no matter what happens tomorrow.

Kuyper notes that the scholar is distinct in setting the scope of his stewardship on the mind itself. “Not merely to live,” he writes, “but to know that you live and how you live, and how things around you live, and how all that hangs together and lives out of the one efficient cause that proceeds from God’s power and wisdom.

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.

Modern science is dominated by distrust when it comes to our own deepest sense of life, and that distrust is nothing but unbelief.

it may never be said that like the state and the church, science arose because of sin and thus from an intervening grace.

But “To Be Near Unto God” in the midst of busy avocations yields its sweetest blessedness when it is cultivated in the face of sin and the world, as an oasis in the desert of life.

all authority of governments on earth originates from the Sovereignty of God alone.

When you are living in the present, you know what's important now for you and you act on that knowing.

God creates history, while people create an epic or a drama, drawn either from God’s history or from unreality and pure fiction.

Though it was not right, and never can be, we understand what went on in the heart of those who sought escape from the world, in cell or hermitage, for the sake of unbroken fellowship with God. It might have been efficacious, if in withdrawing from the world they had been able to leave the world behind. But we carry it in our heart. Wherever we go it goes with us.

For, indeed, without sin there would have been neither magistrate nor state-order; but political life, in its entirety, would have evolved itself, after a patriarchal fashion, from the life of the family.

Non-judgment softens the heart and opens the ears. When you are non-judgmental, you are letting God participate in the decision. The Lord works miracles when you give Him space to reveal His power and glory. You become His instrument, not His replacement.

I have no doubt that Mother Teresa would gladly endorse Kuyper’s manifesto: “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’” She knew that Jesus has conquered sin . She believed deeply in the ultimate triumph of the cross . But Mother Teresa did not see the square inches Jesus has redeemed as territory that we must now triumphantly claim as our prize . She knew that many of those square inches are presently occupied by people with stinking, rotting flesh, by grieving parents, by frightened children—the abused, the abandoned, the persecuted and the desperately poor . And she was convinced that our “claiming” those places in the name of Christ means that we must go out to join him “in the distressing disguise” as he makes the agony of the suffering ones his very own . The square inches for which Christ died are still often very lonely and desolate places . And we must be willing to take our place in those situations, knowing that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us .

For Kuyper, both of these models embody a fundamental error. The medieval perspective rightly acknowledged God's rule over all cultural activity, but it mistakenly thought that this rule was to be mediated by the church. The secularist perspective rightly wanted to liberate culture from ecclesiastical control, but it wrongly insisted that to do so was to take it out from under God's rule. Kuyper's alternative is summarized in the "not one square inch" manifesto. God's soverign rule extends over all of our lives. All that we do takes place-to use a favorite kuyperian phrase-Coram Deo before the face of God.

Without the doctrine of the covenant, the doctrine of election is mutilated, and the frightening lack of the assurance of faith is the valid punishment resulting from this mutilation of the truth. If separated from the confession of the covenant, election in isolation attempts to take hold of the Holy Spirit without honoring God the Son. The Third Person in the Trinity does not allow that violation of the honor of the Second Person. Christ himself testified that the Holy Spirit “will take what is mine and declare it to you” [John 16:14]. Anyone who presumes to trample upon this divine ordinance will not escape the severe anguish with which this unshakeable ordinance wreaks its misery of soul.

That which is good in fallen man by the dogma of common grace

Islam isolates God from the Creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.

If Christianity is to be presented as the hope of the future, then it must be presented to men as a total life and world view.

Not faith and science therefore, but two scientific systems or if you choose, two scientific elaborations, are opposed to each other, each having its own faith.

If the believer's God is at work in this world, then in this world the believer's hand must take hold of the plow, and the name of the Lord must be glorified in that activity as well.

This 'regeneration' breaks humanity in two, and repeals the unity of the human consciousness… [The result is] an abyss in the universal human consciousness across which no bridge can be built.

Principle must again bear witness against principle, world-view against world-view, spirit against spirit…we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power.

Sin, indeed, is an absolute darkening power, and were not its effect temporarily checked, nothing but absolute darkness would have remained in and about man; but common grace has restrained its workings to a very considerable degree; also in order that the sinner might be without excuse.

Now then even the unbeliever can be of service to us as in Christ we re-undertake the original mandate given to Adam. We see now that history is a coherent process with the Cross as its center, a process in which every nation has its task, and the knowledge of which may be a blessing to every nation.

Faith gives highest assurance, where in our own consciousness it rests immediately on the testimony of God; but without this support, everything that announces itself as faith is merely a weaker form of opinion based on probability, which capitulates the moment a surer knowledge supersedes your defective evidence.

It is, indeed, by means of the cognitio specialis that the cognitio naturalis becomes useful. Only in the light of Scripture is the sinner enabled to account for the semen religionis in his heart and of the glory which is patent in the world: where the light of Scripture is hidden I know no more than 'the unknown God' even on the Areopagus.

A person endowed with faith gradually will accept Scripture; if not so endowed he will never accept it, though he should be flooded with apologetics. Surely it is our duty to assist seeking souls, to explain or remove difficulties, sometimes even to silence a mocker; but to make an unbeliever have faith in Scripture is utterly beyond man's power.

The Christian Religion and Paganism do not stand related to each other as the higher and lower forms of development of the same thing; but the Christian religion is the highest form of development natural theology was capable of along the positive line; while all paganism is a development of that selfsame natural theology in the negative direction.

The purest confession of truth finds ultimately its starting-point in the seed of religion, which, thanks to common grace, is still present in the fallen sinner; and, on the other hand, there is no form of idolatry so low, or so corrupted, but has sprung from this same semen religionis. Without natural Theology there is no Abba, Father, conceivable, any more than a Molech ritual.

There is no man that seeks, and seeking finds the Scriptures, and with its help turns himself to God. But rather from beginning to end it is one ceaselessly continued action which goes out from God to man, and operates upon him, even as the light of the sun operates upon the grain of corn that lies hidden in the ground, and draws it to the surface, and causes it to grow into a stalk.

Sin unbridled would have resulted forthwith in the total degeneracy of human life. But God arrested sin in its course in order to prevent the complete annihilation of his handiwork, which naturally would have followed. By his common grace God restrains the working of sin in the natural man. By common grace he tames men as wild animals may be tamed and become attractive as domestic animals.

If special revelation assumes that in consequence of sin the normal activity of the natural principium is disturbed, this implies of itself that the natural principium has lost its competency to judge… Being as he is, he can do nothing else than dispute your special revelation every right of existence; to move him to a different judgment you should not reason with him, but change him in his consciousness; and since this is the fruit of regeneration, it does not lie with you, but with God.

One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. And sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.

At no single point of the way is there place, therefore, for a support derived from demonstration or reasoning…What God Himself does not bear witness to in your soul personally (not mystically-absolutely, but through the Scriptures) can never be known and confessed by you as Divine. Finite reasoning can never obtain the infinite as its result. If God then withdraws Himself, if in the soul of men He bears no more witness to the truth of His Word, men can no longer believe, and no apologetics, however brilliant, will ever be able to restore the blessing of faith in the Scripture, Faith, quickened by God Himself is invincible: pseudo-faith, which rests merely upon reasoning, is devoid of all spiritual reality, so that it bursts like a soap-bubble as soon as the thread of your reasoning breaks.

Against all such efforts the words of the Psalmist are ever in force: "In Thy light shall we see light," and also the words of Christ: "Neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomever the Son willeth to reveal him." Presently your demonstration may have a place in your theological studies of the knowledge that is revealed, and in your inferences derived from it for the subject and the cosmos; but, observation or demonstration can never produce one single milligramme of religious gold. The entire gold-mine of religion lies in the self-revelation of this central power to the subject, and the subject has no other means than faith by which to appropriate to itself the gold from this mine. He who has no certainty in himself on the ground of this faith, about some point or other in religion, can never be made certain by demonstration or argument. In this way you may produce outward religiousness, but never religion of the heart.

Indeed, man is incapable of doing any good. Are all unbelievers then wicked and repulsive men? Not at all. In our experience we find that the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find pages that you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by his noble tone and stirs in you holy sentiments…It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the splendor of talent, which excites your pleasure in the words and actions of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness, and their sense of honesty. Who of us has not been put to the blush by the virtues of the heathen? It is thus a fact, that your dogma of total depravity by sin does not always tally with your experience in life. Well, my friends, by its doctrine of common grace Calvinism can hold on to both what the Bible teaches on human depravity and to what experience teaches about the virtues of the heathen.

In Calvinism my heart has found rest. From Calvinism have I drawn the inspiration firmly and resolutely to take my stand in the thick of this great conflict of principles.

Kuyper called upon Christians to wage a struggle against all compromises with truth in every area of life and learning.

Paul Washer put it well when he noted, “Five years ago, I was amazed as I saw the young, restless, and Reformed crowd at conferences talking about their latest encounters with Spurgeon, Calvin, Kuyper, and Machen… now they’re all talking about Christian Smith, Jemar Tisby, and Robin DiAngelo.” Granted, most of the men mentioned above believe firmly in the sufficiency of Scripture and have done so for decades. I am not talking about the liberal, openly social gospel/liberation theology wing of the CSJ movement. (At least not in this chapter.) In fact, many of the men to whom I am referring here have been on the front line of the battle against liberalism, mysticism, and pragmatism for many years. That is why the allusion to an unofficial new canon is so disturbing.

Hence while Warfield held that it was the task of apologetics to lay the foundations for theology, Kuyper took the opposite view and regarded theology as the starting point for apologetics.

It is a symptom of spiritual poverty if the church of Christ is afraid to address the burning problems of the day… every burning problem, after all, and above all the social problem of the working classes, arises from dire needs, wretched conditions, and painful woes, and therefore calls for the healing balm on a hurting social wound. How could one conceive of a church of Christ that had no heart for such suffering and had that did not feel the urge to let her Savior shine in this area with the majesty of his redeeming love?

Finally Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.

Sin has, in the realm of politics, broken down the direct government of God, and therefore the exercise of authority for the purpose of government, has subsequently been invested in men, as a mechanical remedy.

It is a sovereignty of the people therefore, which is perfectly identical with atheism. And herein lies its self-abasement. In the sphere of Calvinism, as also in your Declaration, the knee is bowed to God, while over against man the head is proudly lifted up. But here, from the standpoint of the sovereignty of the people, the fist is defiantly clenched against God, while man grovels before his fellowmen, tinseling over this self-abasement by the ludicrous fiction that, thousands of years ago, men, of whom no one has any remembrance, concluded a political contract, or, as they called it, “Contrat Social.

Lectures on Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper resists reducing diverse biblical genres to one prosaic master-truth, arguing with rhetorical flourish that “no Calvinist ever allows the critic to dash out of his hand, for a moment, the prism itself which breaks up the divine ray of light into its brilliant tints and colors.

For the rest the Anabaptist's standpoint was: ( I ) that the unbaptized world was under the curse, for which reason he withdrew from all civil institutions; and (2) that the circle of baptized believers– with Rome the Church, but with him the kingdom of God–was in duty bound to take all civil life under its guardianship and to remodel it; and so John of Leyden violently established his shameless power at Munster as King of the New Zion, and his devotees ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam. 11 Hence, on the same grounds on which Calvinism rejected Rome's theory concerning the world, it rejected the theory of the Anabaptist, and proclaimed that the Church must withdraw again within its spiritual domain, and that in the world we should realize the potencies of God's common grace.

Cornelius Van Til, under whom Schaeffer studied at Westminster for two years, used Kuyper’s notion of the antithesis (i.e., that an absolute antithesis exists in all of life between the believer and unbeliever) to develop his presuppositional apologetics.

The real, heavenly, invisible Church must manifest itself in the earthly Church. If not, you will have a society, but no church.

It[Calvinism] is therefore a political faith which may be summarily expressed in these three theses: 1. God only– and never any creature–is possessed of sovereign rights, in the destiny of the nations, because God alone created them, maintains them by His Almighty power, and rules them by His ordinances. 2. Sin has, in the realm of politics, broken down the direct government of God, and therefore the exercise of authority for the purpose of government, has subsequently been invested in men, as a mechanical remedy. And 3. In whatever form this authority may reveal itself, man never possesses power over his fellow-man in any other way than by an authority which descends upon him from the majesty of God.

As Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!

Het slapengaan werd uitgesteld. Aanleiding daartoe waren: de Muggen. De horren konden de beestjes niet tegenhouden. Er zaten overal gaatjes in. Dus werd gebruik gemaakt van een wondermiddel, 'citronelle' genoemd. Het werd royaal over de kussens gesprenkeld en, zo beweerden de volwassenen, de muggen zouden hen nooit meer bijten. Doch de muggen bleven de kinders steken. En elke ochtend opnieuw zaten ze vol met jeukende gezwellen. De citronelle had na een paar dagen haar magische werking verloren. Het kinderbloed was zoet en in overvloed aanwezig. Men ging dan over op azijn. Het gebeurde weleens dat een van de kinders in opstand kwam en verklaarde niet te zullen gaan slapen alvorens de laatste mug gedood was. Er begon dan een systematische verdelgingingsjacht. De muggen werden tegen het behang geplet, dan viel op hoeveel in vroeger jaren gedode beestjes hun sporen daarop al hadden achtergelaten. Alleen was het spatje bloed niet zo rood meer als van de vers-gedode beestjes. Het zag nu zwart-bruin. De muggenjacht was steeds een jolige aangelegenheid die de kinders nogal opwond en er werd door zijn moeder dan ook radicaal een eind aan gemaakt. Ze zouden nu vast en zeker allemaal dood zijn. Ze hadden er op z'n minst wel twaalf gevangen. Doch het mocht niet baten. 's Anderendaags had hij een gezwollen lip, zagen de benen van Nicole eruit als de Alpen en zat ook zijn moeder weer vol. Ze had een te kinderlijk bloed bewaard. Jeannot had medelijden met haar en met hen. Maar muggen maakten deel uit van de vakantie, daar was nu eenmaal niet aan te ontsnappen.

As most Van Tilians realize, Van Til fought diligently to purge the Reformed tradition from the remnants of scholasticism that remained in the thought of Old Princeton, Kuyper, and Bavinck. In light of that purging, presently it seems that those Van Tilians influenced by Frame are unsatisfied with Van Til’s view that the sole Archimedean point of a Christian epistemology is the ontological and economic Trinity. Henceforth, these Van Tilians are beginning to supplement the ground of epistemology with something within the creation. As I see it, Frame has been the catalyst for this movement; he is the transitional figure. In this context, I predict that there will be a renewed appreciation for Aquinas and scholasticism, even among Van Tilians.