Month: January 2019

Kuyperian: A High-Altitude Definition against Dualism

Maybe better than anyone else at seeing God’s love for the cosmos and how God ordered it for humans to use in honoring God was Abraham Kuyper. His quote about the Lordship of Christ is only the thumbnail of his entire body of work about the Bible’s revelation about all revelation.

Dapper. And no dualist!

In the last few posts we were starting to answer the question: What is a Kuyperian? Using the adjective as a description of those who see what God says about creation in the Bible a Kuyperian is a Calvinistic Christian who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord over the wide, wide world. A Kuyperian is wide awake (different from the current fad of “wokeness”) with wide eyes to the wide range of Christ’s concerns.

A Kuyperian asks, What is salvation for? A Kuyperian recognizes that his body and his wife and his kids and his lawn and his job may not last forever but how he fulfills his responsibilities and is faithful in his relationships will last. A Kuyperian gets that nothing is neutral, that without Christ was not any thing good that was good (see John 1:3). A Kuyperian commits to avoid indifference to God’s creation, and repents of dualism that seeks to avoid, let alone abuse, God’s creation.

A Kuyperian worldview means that:

  • our vision of what God is interested in is increased. So our imaginations are fired up to ideate ways to reflect Him.
  • there is no guilt for enjoying or using the things of earth. Actually, there is guilt for not enjoying and using them. We ought to give thanks and recognize that we will give account as stewards of all His gifts.
  • the glory of man is weightier. To be created by God to reflect His likeness is to be stretched out and grown up, to be brought further up and further in, as we learn to walk well in our Father’s shoes.

The label “Kuyperian” is useful, if not vital, because there are many two-dimensional image-bearers in the church, whose worldview is as thin as a printed word, reading only what they think are the “spiritual” parts of the Bible. Many Christians have read the wisest man in the Scriptures—Solomon, have read the first chapter of the Bible—Genesis 1, have even embraced Paul’s inspired goal of ministry—Colossians 1:28, and still missed it. I did. It is a hermeneutic irony that Dispensationals, who pride themselves on reading the Bible, misread the Bible on this point. The “Kuyperian” adjective is important because we are supposed to love everything that God loves.

There is still more to see in the Bible’s teaching about God’s interests. Soon.

Losing as a weapon

All the posts so far at the KuyperDispy have been short articles; they’re the guts of the idea (and there are more guts to share). But we also wanted to have another category of posts that are quotes or links or shorter thoughts, and for now we’ll categorize those as gloss, as in, providing an explanation or paraphrase or annotation.

This quote is a great place to start, and it ought to be a great encouragement to the church:

“Losing does not disturb us; it does not unsettle our faith. This is something the Church generally does really well. Speaking frankly, we frequently lose successfully far more often than we succeed successfully. Losing is our secret weapon.”

Douglas Wilson, Same Sex Mirage, pp. 258-259

This was written by a passionate postmillennialist, thinking in terms of downward cycles in the flow of church history I’m sure. But doesn’t it do an even better job of explaining how a dispensational premillennialist can be optimistic about the progress of the gospel and the “success” of the church while still thinking the world is going to hell? We don’t think the church keeps losing and coming back again, we think the church will eventually “lose” and then Jesus comes back again.