I can't think of anyone in modern times that com­pares to the great Abraham Kuyper. Pastor, statesman, journalist, theolo­gian, educator and university founder are some of the titles this amazing man held at one time or another during his lifetime. I'm probably miss­ing a few, since I know this great saint more by reputa­tion than by reading his work. I have only an old edi­tion of Kuyper's Princeton lectures on my bookshelf; most of his corpus is available only in Dutch, which is Greek to me.

Was there ever anyone like Kuyper, men of God who also were men of the world? There was puritan John Milton in the 17^th century, a multi-lingual scholar, Oliver Cromwell's public relations man, and the greatest epic poet writing in English. There was Jonathan Edwards in 18^th century America, pas­tor, theologian, logician and literary genius, and the first president of Princeton University. In the 20^th cen­tury, the closest approxima­tion may have been Teddy Roosevelt, not for his schol­arly abilities but for other attributes of "holy worldli­ness." This Reformed churchman was a military leader, administrator, states­man, author of multiple vol­umes (still worth reading), and, oh yes, President of the United States.

This is important, not mere­ly to show that Christians can achieve excellence in their callings, but that through this excellence they can leaven the world and leave an imprint that can last for gen­erations. Although history has yet to weigh in, it's hard to think of modern, that is, contemporary, parallels to these men. In our age of hyper-specialization, no one readily comes to mind. Perhaps Chuck Colson comes closest, but when he was con­verted to Christianity he left politics and wrote books declaiming statecraft as "illu­sionary," after Jacques Ellul. Bringing "reality" to the political process is a com­pelling reason for a Christian with political experience to stay there, one would think!

Kuyper and these other worldly saints lived what we in the Reformed world today talk a lot about, whether on audio tapes, in articles, or at conferences and seminars: taking every thought captive for Christ. For men like Kuyper it was not enough to have his own thought taken captive by the Savior. This was merely a precursor to his lifelong labor to see the thought of man in his society so taken captive as well. As a latter 20^th century Reformed Christian, all I can say to this is, "Wow!" Kuyper excites me, but that his brand of Christianity is so unusu­al today also is cause for grief.

Capturing the Culture⤒🔗

Since the great fundamental­ist divide earlier in this centu­ry, the faithful church has sought to differentiate itself from the liberals, who were always "doing" good things, even while they were in the process of throwing over the truth. If this were the case, then how "good" could their doings really be? This is a sound question. The funda­mentalist reaction, however, was less than completely sound. It was to guard the truth to ensure it wouldn't be thrown over, but its doctrinal preoccupation was so great that the faithful did precious little else than stay on guard duty. The result was pre­dictable: while we were talk­ing, chiefly among ourselves, the liberal "doers" had taken the culture. They have set the priorities, solidified the standards, and have written the rules of engagement. And we let them.

Now, like the Eastern European samizdat writers in the 1980's, we author books and magazine articles about how wrong these agendas are, but are ourselves unprac­ticed at setting new ones, and so offer no alternatives, no real ones anyway. We re­state the truth, but abstractly, not practically, except if by "practical" we mean only personal sanctification, which we usually do. Salvation by grace through faith for this one or that one is treated as though it were an end in itself. The job is done; now we turn our attention to oth­ers. Salvation, of course, is not the end, it's the beginning. But the beginning of what? Godly cul­tural dominion through one's calling(s) regard­less of what that calling may be, one would hope, but this seems too ambitious a goal for most lat­ter 20^th century Christians.

The results have been evi­dent. We write Christian news but know of few Christian daily city newspa­pers (If there are any, they are very well kept secrets). We declaim modern state­craft but have no Christian statesmen, or if we do, have a hard time identifying them. On the education front, we're starting to do better, thanks largely to Van Til's apologet­ics, which is beginning to seep into our approach toward various disciplines. We're starting to understand that a discipline — ­whether something as lofty as philosophy or as mundane as business — can and should be completely defined in principle and method by the Bible, and not sim­ply accepted as the humanists have dished it to us with some Christian sprinkling here and there.

Thank God for the progress we are making. May it please the Lord that the next gener­ation is even more adequate­ly equipped so it can get busy in our culture, instead of inventing yet another para­church subset of it. Kuyper was leaven leavening the whole lump; we're leaven wrapped in the package com­plaining that the lump has no leaven in it! The package, however, is beginning to open.

Reclamation Project←⤒🔗

As a Reformed Christian who is highly fallible though informed (or so I'd like to think), I have a few recommendations that may help us on the road toward reclaiming "holy worldliness," which has become a relic replaced by unholy worldli­ness or humanism on the one hand and unworldly holiness or pietism on the other. For what its worth, consider the following:

1. We need a "worldly" future orientation. For many Christians, the only future prospect is retire­ment and heaven. I am not saying this is not the most glorious consummation of the Lord's work on our behalf, and ours in Him (I mean heaven, not retirement!). Of course, it is. But what do we labor, hope and pray for the Kingdom of God to be when we're gone? Or does that matter? We've too easily bought into dispensational Baptist sensationalism that sees the end of the world in every dire newspaper head­line. We've lost perspective. With this Chicken Little way of thinking, there is little incentive to even contem­plate taking on what Kuyper did. Why bother if the sky is falling? In 1 Cor. 15, however, the Apostle says that "He must reign until all His ene­mies are under His feet." The last enemy is death; then the end will come and Christ will hand over the Kingdom to His Father. Do we see all His enemies under His feet? Could it be that we are the means by which this is to happen? If so, is it likely that His coming is around the cor­ner? The Church has its work cut out for her, and it's not until its work is done in history that it will enter into its rest when history closes. Besides, the truly consum­mate glory in heaven is when we are with the Lord body and soul. That won't happen until the whole kit and kaboodle is over, which is bigger than any one of our retirements or even any one of our passing to be with the Lord until the last day.

2. We need to fear God more than we fear men. Every Christian has a line that he will not cross. Most of those lines are too far out. In a culture that prides itself on relativism— ­that everybody's right and nobody's  wrong  Christianity should not be "nice," but should stick out like a sore thumb, not only because of its evangelical wit­ness (Need it be said that this should be going on both inside and outside the church all the time?), but because of the insistence, indeed the intolerance, of its ethical character. The Ten Commandments are not only applicable to me because I'm a Christian, but not to you because you're not. They are simply applicable, and we should not tolerate that they be broken, first in our own lives, then in our families', and for church leaders in the church, but for all of us, that they not be broken any­where. Does the breaking of God's law outrage us, and do we make our outrage known — not because we are offend­ed so much as because of the offense to God? Jealousy for God's honor through the keeping of His Law will ener­gize our evangelistic fervor, not dampen it. We should draw the line, and draw it publicly where we know it must be drawn. Then push. This will offend men and make our dealings with them difficult, but it will also make our light shine like the noon­day sun and may actually cause some progress. If enough of us practiced this, maybe Christians would be listened to more often instead of being considered kooks and oddballs.

3. We need to develop more "ministries of the deed." Reformed churches have historically always been big on the "min­istry of the word," as they should be. But there has been precious little "ministry of the deed," whether in teaching life and work skills to the outcasts in our sordid urban trenches, offering agri­cultural advice on a foreign mission field, or finding someone who can't speak English a job. There are sev­eral reasons for this. One is "the fundamentalist fear (and I write as a doctrinal funda­mentalist) that somehow "doing" works will dilute, or perhaps even obliterate, the Gospel, as mentioned above. The thinking is that if the church is doing anything other than preaching the Gospel, and perhaps opening a Christian school, then it is somehow flirting with "works salvation" and the Galatian heresy. This assumes that grace and works (other than the attitudes engendered by the fruit of the Spirit) is an either/or proposition, even though James' letter tells us quite the contrary. The paucity of the "ministry of the deed" is evident in our churches. Whereas church deacons in centuries past built hospitals, our deacons take weekly offerings and organize the annual spring cleaning. We need to get over our hang-ups about helping only people that come to church. If we for­malized helping ministries as extensions of grace in some of our changing communities instead of running away from them to only plant churches in the wealthy suburbs, our churches could be agents rather than objects of cultural transformation (Rom. 12:1).