The confession of the Christian life is: Jesus is Lord. Paul wrote to the Romans:
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9)
What better summary of what we believe that that? He is Lord. Jesus reigns. “God has made Him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), Messiah and Master. As we considered previously, there is not one thumb’s width (’un dimebrrate) in all of creation that Christ doesn’t claim as His own. This is what we confess, what we celebrate, and also a large part of what motivates us as His disciples. Where can we go from His Spirit? Where can we flee from His concerns?
It is, however, not only possible, but also confirmed, that in some circles, Christians agree with teaching about the Lordship of Jesus who nevertheless limit the implications of His Lordship to spiritual matters alone (as defined in ironically worldly ways). Jesus cares about our beliefs, that they be biblical. He cares about our conduct, that we be obedient. And He cares about our worship, that we be loving. But it is still possible to define our Christian lives in unbiblical categories.
For example, in no verse in the Bible does God say that a good Christian must have quiet times with the Lord or follow a Bible reading program. I think this was mostly because copies of God’s Word were not available for most people throughout most of Church history. We take our access to Scriptures for granted, and such saturation is a good problem to have. But “somehow” the disciples honored the Lord without a New Testament. David spent time with the Lord, Jesus spent time alone with His Father, and I don’t know where I’d be apart from some private time with the Lord each day. But minutes in prayer is not the measure of one’s godliness any more than gas in the tank is the measure of how far you’ve driven.
For that matter, it has often been the case that in churches where the Bible is loved (which is a good thing), that the mark of having arrived at spiritual maturity is teaching a Bible study or a Sunday School class. On one hand, Colossians 3:16 says that the word of Christ should dwell in all of us richly (though again, that is not necessarily reading it) so that we will be naturally “teaching and admonishing one another.” This is one-another encouragement from the “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” because lyrics would be memorable, easier to pull out in a conversation in order to bless a brother.
This is a different sort of teaching than the more formal teaching position that many ministries push people toward. Yet James explicitly says, “Let not many of you be teachers”! This is due to the difficulty of not sinning with one’s tongue; it’s hard. But in the name of teaching the Bible how have we Bible people so blatantly disobeyed the Bible? Not only that, if most people are NOT to be teachers, how are the actual teachers supposed to teach in such a way as to help the non-teachers become “complete in Christ”? This means that there must be a lot of ways to be like Christ.
This is why the adjective “Kuyperian” can be so helpful. It intends to take intentionally and seriously the Bible’s teaching that God is interested in His image-bearers being interested in a universe worth of things. Yes, we are not God, so our capacity for interests will be finite. But we ought to purposefully seek to increase our capacities and also to maximize our interests for His sake. That’s one of the ways we become more “complete in Christ.” Abraham Kuyper was a guy who worked to apply this truth and to spread it into the corners.
God is sovereign in salvation: Calvinism. God is sovereign everywhere: Kuyperian Calvinism. John Calvin started with the truth of God’s control in the universe, Kuyper just continued to roll out what that means.
[T]he persuasion that the whole of a man’s life is to be lived in the Divine Presence has become the fundamental thought of Calvinism. By this decisive idea, or rather by this mighty fact, it has allowed itself to be controlled in every department of its entire domain. It is from this mother-thought that the all-embracing life system of Calvinism sprang.
Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 25-26
Seeing the cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28, human beings, and especially redeemed human beings who know and follow the Lord, have stewardship responsibilities in all their daily work. What happens in the theology department must not stay in the theology department.
In the final chapter of Lectures on Calvinism Kuyper makes a distinction between the world’s understanding of (natural) selection (survival of the fittest) and the Calvinist’s understanding of (divine) election (sovereignty of the Father). It’s a one letter difference, but a worldview apart.
When we look around, why are things different? “There is no life without differentiation, and no differentiation without inequality….Whence are those differences?”
Calvinism dared to face this same all-dominating problem, solving it, however, not in the sense of a blind selection stirring in unconscious cells, but honoring the sovereign choice of Him Who created all things visible and invisible. The determination of the existence of all things to be created, of what is to be camellia or buttercup, nightingale or crow, hart or swine, and, equally among men, the determination of our own persons, whether one is to be born as girl or boy, rich or poor, dull or clever, white or colored, or even as Abel or Cain, is the most tremendous predestination conceivable in heaven or on earth; and still we see it taking place before our eyes every day, and we ourselves are subject to it in our entire personality; our entire existence, our very nature, our position in life being entirely dependent on it. This all-embracing predestination, the Calvinist places, not in the hand of man, and still less in the hand of a blind natural force, but in the hand of Almighty God, Sovereign Creator and Possessor of heaven and earth; and it is in the figure of the potter and the clay that Scripture has from the time of the Prophets expounded to us this all-dominating election. Election in creation, election in providence, and so election also to eternal life; election in the realm of grace as well as in the realm of nature.
Lectures on Calvinism, 189
We believe that the world is filled with givens, things that the Lord chose things to be one way and not another. We can, and should, receive the givens with thanks, and then respond accordingly to what God has chosen.
Gender is a given, not a cultural idea or social contract. Marriage is a given, not a pragmatic agreement among citizens. God chose how things work. His sovereign concerns are not limited to spiritual things, salvific issues, or church relations alone. His sovereignty extends out of our private places and into the public square. To be a disciple of the Lord is to seek to obey Him in a lot more places that we’ve previously acknowledged.
A Kuyperian acknowledges Jesus as Lord in all the wide wide world. A Kuyperian does his work as to the Lord because he thinks that the Lord actually cares about what he does with his time, not just that the worker be honest on his time card.