Many people set faith aside in a private compartment and live by different rules at work, in politics, or in culture. Abraham Kuyper vehemently disagreed with that divide. For him, there was not a single square inch of human existence exempt from the lordship of Christ, not even politics or the press.
Born in 1837 in Maassluis, the Netherlands, the son of a Reformed Church pastor, Kuyper studied literature, philosophy, and theology at Leiden University, then dominated by theological liberalism. He earned his doctorate in theology in 1862, with a thesis comparing the ecclesiology of Calvin and Jan Laski, who by then had already drifted from Reformed orthodoxy.
In 1863, by then pastor in the small town of Beesd, he was confronted by a simple parishioner, Pietje Baltus, who refused to attend his services because she considered them empty of doctrine. Their conversations led him to reread Calvin’s Institutes and embrace the orthodox Reformed faith that would mark the rest of his life. That same year he married Johanna Hendrika Schaay, with whom he had eight children; she would die in 1899, during a trip to Switzerland.
In 1872 he founded the newspaper De Standaard, a platform he would use for decades to discuss politics in light of the faith. In 1879 he founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party, the first modern political party in the Netherlands, championing the right of Christians, Catholics, and other groups to run their own schools with equal public support.
In 1880 he founded the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, free from the oversight of the state and the official church. In his inaugural address, he coined the phrase for which he is best known: there is not a single square inch of human existence over which Christ does not cry out that it belongs to him. Thus was born his idea of sphere sovereignty.
In 1886 he led the Doleantie, a schism within the Dutch Reformed Church that would result in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. In 1898 he brought his ideas to the United States, delivering the Stone Lectures at Princeton, published as Lectures on Calvinism, a work that spread neo-Calvinism throughout the English-speaking world.
Between 1901 and 1905 he served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, a period marked by educational reforms and, in 1909, by a scandal involving the granting of a royal honor to a donor of his party, of which a parliamentary commission cleared him the following year, although the episode ended his career as head of government.
Those same 1898 Lectures on Calvinism contained passages in which Kuyper openly defended a hierarchy among peoples, placing the Western Calvinist world above Africans, Chinese, and other peoples he described as inferior, and he went so far as to publicly support the violent suppression of uprisings in the Dutch East Indies, then a Dutch colony. Decades later, apartheid theorists in South Africa would appropriate his idea of sphere sovereignty to justify racial segregation, a use he did not live to see but one rooted in positions he himself held.
Kuyper died in The Hague in 1920, at the age of 83, after decades devoted to the church, the press, the university, and government. His conviction that every sphere of life belongs to Christ continues to shape Christians today who seek to live out their faith fully, inside and outside the walls of the church, even though his legacy also includes positions on race and colonialism now recognized as a grave error of his time.
