Why Abraham Kuyper’s Vision Still Shapes Reformed Theology and Education
from the Summer 2025 issue of The Forum Magazine
by Jordan Ballor, Executive Director of the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy at First Liberty Institute; General Editor of the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology; Coordinator of the Kuyper Conference and Prize; 2015 Calvin Theological Seminary PhD Alum
The Dutch theologian, politician, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) is best remembered for his rousing declaration: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not call out: ‘Mine!’” Kuyper delivered this statement in his opening address at the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam, an institution of higher education intended to be free of institutional control by church or state and formed according to Reformed theological principles.
Kuyper rooted his approach to cultural formation and political action in a robust understanding of God’s sovereignty, which he identified as the “dominating principle” of Calvinism, theologically as well as socially and politically. Kuyper professed “the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.” This comprehensive understanding of God’s power and providence led Kuyper to help found an intentionally Reformed university, a daring undertaking in the Netherlands of the late 19th century.
And while Kuyper’s “square inch” quotation is justly famous, less well known is the part of the sentence that immediately precedes it. The famous lines appear at the close of a lengthy section of the speech in which Kuyper defends a uniquely Christian view of the human person as having surpassing significance for every branch of scholarship. “Man, be he a fallen sinner or an evolving product of nature, shows up in every department and every discipline as ‘the subject that thinks’ or ‘the object that invites thought,’” said Kuyper. “Not one segment of our intellectual world can be hermetically sealed off from the others,” and he continues by invoking Christ’s kingship over all things.
This vigorous view of God’s sovereignty and its implications for Christian scholarship would be enough to explain why Kuyper still serves as a worthy inspiration for any faithful institution of higher learning. But while the Christian Reformed Church in North America would found its seminary in 1876, predating the Free University by four years, the Dutch Reformed in the United States also found in Kuyper a figure who not only spoke a language with which they were familiar but who also served as a touchstone and guide for their own theological, ecclesial, and institutional development.
Indeed, the ties between the emerging CRC in the United States and Kuyper’s denomination in the Netherlands were strong throughout the end of the 19th and well into the 20th century. Kuyper paid a visit to America in 1898, giving the Stone Lectures at Princeton but also making a pilgrimage to Grand Rapids during his stay. Over the ensuing decades, many professors at Calvin College (now University) and Calvin Seminary were trained at Amsterdam’s Free University, cultivating strong intellectual as well as spiritual bonds as well as forging a tight-knit transatlantic relationship between these two nations, churches, and sets of institutions. And late in the 20th century when the Free University loosened some of its ties to the Kuyperian tradition, Calvin Theological Seminary launched its own doctoral program with a vision to train up generations of leaders in the church and academy who would continue the faithful conviction of God’s sovereignty over all things.
Abraham Kuyper has been an ever-flowing wellspring for the Reformed world and life view from the earliest days of Calvin Seminary to its current moment. In his lifetime, Kuyper heeded the call to “go back to the living root of the Calvinist plant, to clean and to water it, and so to cause it to bud and to blossom once more, now fully in accordance with our actual life in these modern times, and with the demands of the times to come.” In gratitude for his vision and conviction, we still can find in Kuyper a powerful model and inspiration to recover and apply anew the Reformed tradition and its robust sense of God’s sovereignty over all things in these “times to come.”
