A. Life Is Religion⤒🔗

While Pope Leo XIII was voicing his protests against the social injustices of his times and advocating a solution to the social question along moralistic Thomistic lines, his contemporary Abraham Kuyper also began to deal with these same problems in the light of his Reformed and scripturally directed philosophy of man in society. Thanks to his genius Kuyper came to see the social question facing modern Western society within a much larger context than either his own Calvinist predecessors such as Groen van Prinsterer, De Costa, and Bilderdyk, or recent Roman Catholic leaders.

Unlike the popes, Kuyper could not accept the Roman Catholic bifurcation of reality into the temporal and spiritual or the natural and super-natural, the higher and lower spheres of life. Instead, fol­lowing the biblical teaching, he understood the spiritual as the religious direction of man's temporal life. Out of the heart of man Kuyper saw arise all the issues of life. The heart is the concentration point, the religious root of man's entire temporal existence. Out of it arise all his deeds, thoughts, feelings, and desires. In his heart man gives an answer to the most profound and ultimate questions of life, and in his heart his relationship to God is determined.

According to Kuyper man is not to be defined, as Aquinas taught, as an individual substance of a rational form, nor will he accept the Thomist teaching that the soul is the form of the Body. Instead of any such temporal qualifying functions, Kuyper teaches that man is to be defined in terms of his "heart" in which all temporal functions are transcended and concentrated. Man alone of all created beings transcends time, since he alone is created in the image of God. Kuyper therefore rejects the Thomistic idea that man is a mixture of two substances, an "individual substance of a rational form," since the problem as to what causes the mixture to become one substance remains unanswered. Moreover, in the Thomistic conception, the soul as a rational substance does not transcend time. It is a complex of normative spheres abstracted from the temporal nexus of meaning. While recognizing that there is a distinction between the human heart and the human body, Kuyper refuses to accept any dualism. The "heart" refers to the direction taken by man's "bodily" life, i.e., his temporal activities.

Human existence, though it functions in all aspects of God's creation, is not qualified by any of these, since it transcends the modal diversity in its religious center, which in the profound biblical language is called the "heart" of man, out of which arise all the issues of human life. As the Scriptures tell us, "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he" (Prov. 23:7) This individual religious center of hu­man existence is the human selfhood in its primary religious relation to its Divine Creator which has been perverted by man's radical fall into sin, but which is restored by man's radical redemption by Jesus Christ as the new spiritual root of mankind. Kuyper's greatest pupil, Herman Dooyeweerd, expresses this Reformed view of the relationship between the religious center of the human selfhood and the aspects of human experience as follows:

When one asks (the sciences which are concerned with the study of man): "What is man himself, in the central unity of his existence, in his selfhood?" then these sciences have no answer. The reason is that they are bound to the temporal order of our experience. Within this temporal order human existence presents a great diversity of aspects, just like the whole temporal world, in which man finds himself placed … every special science studies temporal human existence in one of its different aspects.

But all these aspects of our experience and existence within this order of time are related to the central unity of our consciousness, which we call our I, our ego. I experience, and I exist, and this I surpasses the diversity of aspects, which human life displays within the temporal order. The ego is not to be determined by any aspect of our temporal experience since it is the central reference point of all of them. If man would lack this central I, he could not have any experience at all.¹

Dooyeweerd stresses that this central human selfhood must not be viewed as a metaphysical substance. As the individual concentration point of human existence and experience it is nothing in itself, i.e., apart from the three central relations which, according to the order of creation, determine its meaning. These are, firstly, the relation of the human selfhood to its divine Origin in whose image man has been created and upon whose service of love man should concentrate all his temporal functions according to the central commandment of love. Secondly, there is the central communal relation to the persons of one's fellowmen as image-bearers of God, whom man should therefore love as himself in accordance with the central commandment. Thirdly, the human selfhood is related, as central individual reference point, to the temporal world in which man finds himself and which he only transcends in the religious center of his selfhood. Since the first relation embraces the second and the third, Dooyeweerd speaks of the human ego as the religious center of human existence which, as the central seat of the image of God, has the innate religious impulse to direct itself to the Absolute. In the state of sin this impulse takes an apostate direction by absolutizing that which is only relative, with the result that man in this state has lost the real knowledge of God as well as genuine self-knowledge and a true view of reality, since the latter two are dependent on the first.

The direction taken by the human heart is determined by its acceptance or rejection of God. The human "heart" can never remain neutral. It loves God or it is hostile to him. It is renewed by God's grace in Jesus Christ or it continues to live in apostasy. For this reason Kuyper was compelled to reject the Roman Catholic teaching that faith is a super-imposed gift of God to the "natural" man.

Faith is an essential aspect of human nature and thus no duality can ever divorce it from nature. Religion is therefore common to all men.

No man can claim to be constitutionally devoid of the semen religions which God, together with the sensus divinitatis, has implanted in every man. The religious organ is to be found, not in a part of our being, for example, in our intellect, will, or feelings, but in our whole being, at that point where all the human faculties are drawn together in a unity. As Kuyper puts it: "The heart is to be under­stood not as an organ of feeling but as that point from which God acts and from which he acts on the understanding."²

From this it follows that there is no aspect of our existence which can be considered to be indifferent or neutral to religion. God is absolute sovereign, all life belongs to him and is created by him according to its own proper law and nature. The sovereignty of God over the whole cosmos and over every aspect of human life is thus the keystone principle of the Reformed philosophy of life.

Everything created has been furnished by God with an unchangeable law for its existence. These laws or ordinances of creation we may call laws of nature, provided that by this term we mean, not laws originating in nature, but laws imposed upon nature. From this doctrine of God's sovereignty over all aspects of creation, Kuyper and Dooyeweerd have developed the conception of sovereignty in each sphere, applying it especially to their view of the temporal social spheres of human society.

B. The Scriptural Framework for Science←⤒🔗

According to both Kuyper and Dooyeweerd all truly scientific thinking about God's creation must take its point of departure in the biblical ground motive or basic presupposition of the creation of the cosmos by Almighty God, man's fall into radical sin in his "heart" and his equally radical redemption by the Lord Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit. This biblical ground-motive operates through the Spirit of God as a dynamic power in the religious root of man's temporal existence, namely in his "heart." It brings about of necessity a radical change in the direction of one's life and thus of one's attitude towards everything that exists as well as in one's vision of the temporal world. As Augustine pointed out, the logic of Christ provides those who accept Him as their Lord and Savior with a radical revision of their first principles as the only valid presupposition to an adequate cosmology, anthropology, and sociology. The basis for the revision of classical naturalism and hu­manism, Augustine held to lie in the logos of Christ, conceived as a revelation to man, not of new truth, but of truth as old as the hills. As he once said, "I believe in order that I may understand."³ Unfortunately for mankind, Augustine never carried through his program of reforming the basic categories of classical science in the light of the ordering principles of God's Word. As a tragic result, Western civilization continued to develop along lines unreformed by the Word of God. An attempt was made at synthesizing the classical view of man in society with the biblical view, with disastrous consequences for Western culture. As a direct result of this medieval accommodation between "nature" and "grace" there was no longer felt any need for a distinctive Christian philosophy of law, politics, economics, and society. The social sciences as well as the natural sciences were in fact abandoned to the influence of the pagan Greek ground-motive of "form" and "matter" in their external accommodation to the Christian philosophy of man in society. After Aquinas had fused the teachings of Aristotle with those of Scripture, the tendency increased to elucidate the first principles of social and natural science without any reference whatsoever to the principles of God's Word for human society. Why bother with God's reve­lation if the human reason can discover the principles governing "natural" human society as Aristotle had believed it could? If man can of his own rational faculties and by means of his scientific method build a successful social and legal order, why bring religion into life? From Aquinas' incomplete view of the biblical fall there has flowed the most serious consequences. Man's intellect was viewed as autonomous or independent of God. This so-called autonomy pro­vided the basis for the secularization of Western philosophy, law, politics, art, science, and, above all, Western education. As a tragic result "nature" began, so to speak, to eat up "grace" and Christ, as it were, was driven out of Christendom.

While Aquinas himself never drew such unchristian conclusions, it did not take long for his successors at French, German, Italian, and British universities to do so. Such a process of the secularization of the social sciences or the humanities as they were then called inevitably developed out of the distinction first drawn by Aquinas between the order of faith and the order of natural reason.

One of the great tragedies of the Protestant Reformation was the failure of the Reformers to reverse this secularizing process in Western legal, economic, and social thought by developing a social and natural science in the light of a scriptural view of reality. The Reformers did not bring about any radical revision of first principles in the spheres of political science, economics, and sociology for the simple reason, as August Lang showed in his essay, The Reformation and Natural Law,⁴ that they were so involved in the theological disputes, religious controversy, and the very struggle for survival that they simply did not have any time left in which to develop a truly scriptural view of society.

Luther confused matters by his doctrine of the higher and lower realms. Calvin did bring the two realms of grace and nature together, but he did not bring out the full implications in his scriptural insights as these applied to such matters as politics and economics. The main error set in during the second and third generation of the Reformation, when a new Protestant accommodation with Aristotelianism took place in the thinking of such men as Melancthon, Thomas Beza, and then later, during the seventeenth century, in the work of the Dutch Reformed theologians and American Puritans such as Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards. Pierre de la Ramee (Peter Ramus) did attempt to provide Protestants with a new logic, which he set forth in his famous work, Dialecticae libri duo, which substituted a simple logic for the complicated Aristotelian logic taught in most European universities. But this new method did not bring about any inner reformation of science.⁵ Of this failure of the Reformation to reform Western science Dooyeweerd says:

In the domain of science, the Reformation had, by the grace of God, a great opportunity to effect a basic reform of university instruction in the countries which had aligned themselves with it. Quite unfortunately the Reformation did not take hold of this opportunity. The magnificent program of Melancthon for the reform of education was not at all inspired by the biblical spirit. On the contrary, it had a humanistic philological spirit, which was accommodated to Lutheran doctrine and which gave birth to a new scholastic philosophy. The latter, in turn, prepared the way for the humanistic secularization at the time of the Enlightenment. In Calvinistic universities Theodore Beza restored Aristotelianism as the true philosophy, adapting it to Reformed theology.

This Protestant reform of scientific knowledge cut a miserable figure when it again took up the dualistic maxim: "For faith one must go to Jerusalem; for wisdom one must go to Athens." It was equally discouraging to see in the seventeenth century the celebrated Reformed theologian, Voetius, protesting as a champion of Aristotelianism against the innovations of Descartes. The truly biblical spirit which had inspired John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion was conquered by the scholastic spirit of accommodation, which had been imbibed from the anti-biblical motive of nature and grace. It was the driving force of this dialectical motive, the heritage of Roman Catholicism, which stunted the force of the Reformation and which for more than two centuries eliminated the possibility of a serious adversary to the secularization of science.⁶

It was to combat such a secularization of science that Abraham Kuyper founded the first truly scripturally oriented Reformed university in the world, namely the Free University of Amsterdam, which was founded in 1880. In the great address Kuyper delivered upon the official opening day of this first truly Reformed University Kuyper significantly delivered a speech which he called Sovereignty in Its Own Sphere.⁷He needed the principle suggested in this title as a basis for the elimination of state-monopoly in Dutch higher education. However, Kuyper placed his argument for the right of Reformed Christians to establish their own university in a larger setting. His social conception was part of a life's effort to revitalize and renew the reformational biblical outlook on man's life in this world. Kuyper found his immediate inspiration in Calvin's teaching. When he presented the substance of his thought in the Stone Lec­tures at Princeton University in 1898, he chose as the title of his lectures: Calvinism.⁸He insisted that the significance of the sixteenth century Reformation could not be confined to the ecclesias­tical affairs of the church institution if it were to remain a potent force in modern culture. Instead, he took up the reins of cultural leadership and formation where Calvin had left them and brought Christ back into everyday modern life.

Kuyper realized that the social problems facing his age were not just limited to the relations between church and state, as Pope Pius XIII supposed, but also with the mutual relationships between all social institutions. How does one distinguish social institutions from each other? he asked. He answered only by observing the diversity of authority. To Kuyper social friction arises when the authority proper to one social sphere goes beyond itself to control another social sphere and hence cause life in both spheres to suffer the damage resulting from such a conflict. It has occurred repeatedly that those in authority in one social sphere have interfered with the office-bearers in another social institution. In this way the states and churches of Europe have more than once intruded into each other's affairs. Whenever this happened, things have gone wrong in the practical conduct of affairs. One has only to think of the struggle for power during the Middle Ages between the emperors of Germany and the medieval popes. As Kuyper saw it, social problems are fundamentally problems involving the structure or "set-up" of the social spheres. If social harmony between church and state, state and education, state and industry is to prevail in modern society, then it is necessary to understand the true nature and origin of social institutions. As a true Calvinist, Kuyper finds the true nature and origin of social institutions in the sovereign plan and purpose of the Sovereign God of the Scriptures. That is to say, he grounds his social and political doctrine in God's creation ordinances and law structures, rather than in Aristotle's doctrine of the reasonable nature of the so-called "natural" man. For Kuyper there is no "natural" sphere of life somehow apart from God, but there is only God's creation as it unfolds itself in history.

As both Kuyper and Dooyeweerd see it, a true knowledge of reality is only possible in the light of a true knowledge of God provided in the Bible. If a person does not have this knowledge of God within his heart, then he cannot hope to know the truth about God's works in creation in their full coherence, unity, and diversity. The truth about the structures of creation is bound up with the truth about the Creator. For both men, God is the ground of all that exists and therefore the source of all truth. Christ as the perfect revelation of God is the fulness of the meaning of Truth. Apart from this transcendental basis and fulness of truth in Christ the Logos of God, the a priori temporal dimension of truth has no meaning or validity. In other words, it is only by accepting God's special reve­lation in the Bible that we can hope to understand the meaning of any fact in the world. Facts are what they are in the last analysis only by virtue of the place and function they occupy in God's sovereign plan and purpose. Every fact is a God-created and a God-interpreted fact.⁹

Apostate humanistic science has tried by its own "scientific method" to give man command of the so-called "facts," but without a scriptural framework for their interpretation these "facts" only re­main disintegrated bits of information that in themselves are not real knowledge but only what Michael Oakeshott calls in Experience and Its Modes¹⁰ "arrests in experience." Only when they become integrated into the fullness of our personal experience of God, each other, and the world can they enter into our knowledge of reality. The question of knowledge thus has everything to do with the question of meaning. Unrelated "facts" as such have no meaning. Before facts can become part of our knowledge, they need to be related to each other in terms of some basic ordering principle and framework of interpretation or total view of the world. Brute facts simply do not exist. They only become meaningful in an order; they can only speak to us when they have been structured. To know anything worthwhile about "facts" one must first have an awareness of order. Facts require norms and structural principles for their existence and a frame of reference for their adequate interpretation.

Kuyper and Dooyeweerd teach that all truly scientific thought must take its point of departure in God's Word rather than in man's fallen reason before it can become truly scientific. God is the in­escapable premise of all valid human thought. Man either faces a world of total chance and brute factuality, a world in which no fact has any meaning or relationship to any other fact, or else he accepts the world of God's creation, subject to his sovereign law. Only on this presupposition, Dooyeweerd holds, is a valid natural and social science possible.

For this reason they would agree with R. J. Rushdoony, who writes in The Mythology of Science¹¹ that "the non-Christian is able to formulate and discover only because he operates on secretly Christian premises while denying that faith," as well as with Robert Reymond's judgment that "No fact is truly known unless its createdness in the biblical sense is owned by the scientist."¹²

The Book of Genesis reveals that man has been called to be a scientist as well as a worker in God's creation as part of his great cultural mandate. Thus Adam was given the task of "naming" everything in God's creation, i.e., to classify it (Gen. 2:19-20). Such intelligent predication would have been impossible unless God existed as the reference point and ground and origin of all meaning.¹³God's Word alone can provide man with a unified field of knowledge.

In the light of this scriptural perspective upon science we can understand the problematics and dilemmas of apostate contemporary natural and social science, especially in the fields of sociology, economics, and political science. On the one hand the empiricists try to reduce the meaning and structure of social "facts" to mere factors of heredity and environment and to find in the verification principle the only criterion of truth.¹⁴ Under the influence of their apostate faith in science as man's only savior, many modern sociologists have supposed that they could establish and examine social relationships as pure "facts" apart from any normative view starting from the order of God's creation. Thus Emile Durkheim tried to look for "things" in the social world which he could classify into species in the same way that biologists classify plants and animals.

It is in fact very difficult to find an empirical characteristic which might serve to demarcate the social law-sphere of God's creation from the other aspects. Even Durkheim himself recognized this in practice, for his own definition of the social involves a complex theoretical complex. According to him social facts are to be distinguished from other kinds of fact by the fact that they are external to the individual and exercise restraint over him. It is this coercive feature of society which Durkheim saw as its chief characteristic. For Durkheim sociology is the study of such social facts, which he defined in his Rules of Sociological Method¹⁵ as ways of acting, thinking, and feeling general in a society, which exert coercion upon the individual to conform. Clearly this definition does not tell us by what empirical characteristics social facts may be recognized, though by confusing the perspective of the scientist with that of the observed participant (who can distinguish the social from the non-social in this way?) Durkheim gives us the impression that it does. But even he recognizes that it is unsatisfactory, for he goes on to give a second definition of a social fact as, "every way of acting, which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing independently of its individual manifestations!"¹⁶ But this definition is no more satisfactory than the first, for, though in its first part it seems to offer an empirical means of differentiating the social from the non-social, Durkheim insists that this alone would be an in­sufficient characterization of the social. Everything therefore turns on the second part of the definition, but here we are faced with a metaphysical conception which Durkheim claims to have avoided in his search for an objective "neutral" approach to his subject. For this reason the writer would agree with John Rex's statement in Key Problems of Sociological Theory¹⁷ that "Durkheim's attempt to pro­vide a purely empirical criterion of the social is a failure. And this is not surprising. For the fact of the matter is that the actual data with which sociology is concerned, and which it seeks to explain, consists of human behavior and the products of human behavior, the same data with which psychologists, economists, and historians have to deal. The difference lies not in the data, but in the different theoretical frame of reference, in terms of which the data are interpreted. It was Durkheim's great merit as a sociological theorist that he saw and insisted upon the distinctiveness of sociological, as contrasted with psychological explanations. Unfortunately, however, his empiricist bias as a methodologist prevented him from clarifying the true nature of the difference."¹⁸

While Durkheim tried to explain human society in modes of thought derived from biology, the German scholar Max Weber tried to do so in historical and logical categories. According to Weber, in whose analysis of the fundamental concepts of sociology the notion of "action" plays a central part, the defining feature of human action is its "meaningfulness." Thus in his famous definition he writes in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, "in action is included all human behavior insofar as the actor attaches a subjective meaning to it."¹⁹ Weber distinguishes between four types of action:

1. Rational action in relation to a goal.
2. Rational actional action in relation to a value.
3. Affective or emotional action.
4. Traditional action.²⁰

Weber thus starts with a frankly subjective approach to sociological theory unlike Durkheim, who claimed to be objective in his approach. He defines rationality in terms of the knowledge of the actor rather than of the observer, as Durkheim does, and he conceived of sociology as a comprehensive science of social action, which would render man's social, economic, and political behavior in societies past and present more intelligible. As a methodological device he made use of his famous "ideal" types to make social action more intelligible. Weber distinguished his ideal type sharply from Durkheim's notion of the average type and insisted that its purpose is not descriptive but explanatory. He also insisted that it is a construction of the scientists, rather than something which emerges in a simple way from the facts.

Weber's Ideal type is related to his notion of comprehension of social action, in that every ideal type is an organization of intelligible relations within a historical reality or sequences of events. Again, the ideal type is related to a characteristic of both modern society and modern science, namely a process of rationalization. The construction of ideal types was an expression of Weber's attempt to render the subject matter of history, economics, and sociology more intelligible by revealing or constructing its internal rationality, or meaning. Finally, the use of such ideal types helps us, Weber claims, to obtain a better comprehension of man's past and present experience. According to Raymond Aron in Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Weber used his ideal types to designate three kinds of concepts. Aron lists these as follows:

1. First, ideal types of historical particulars, such as capitalism of the Western (European) city. These two examples represent a species of ideal type, namely the intelligible reconstruction of a global and particular historical reality, global since the term capitalism designates a whole economic regime; particular since according to Weber capitalism as he defines it has been fully realized only in modern Western societies. The ideal type of a historical particular remains a partial reconstruction since the sociologist selects a certain number of traits from the historical whole to constitute an intelligible reality…
2. A second species is that of ideal types which designate abstract elements of the historical reality, elements which are found in a large number of cases. In combination, these concepts enable us to characterize and understand actual historical wholes.
   The difference between these two kinds of concepts will be clearly seen if we take capitalism as an example of the first species and bureaucracy as an example of the second. In the first case we are designating an actual historical entity unlike any other, whereas in the second we are referring to an institution, or an aspect of political institutions, which does not cover a whole regime and of which one finds many examples at different moments in history. These ideal types of elements characteristic of society occur on various levels of abstraction, of which I shall indicate only three.
   First, such concepts as bureaucracy or feudalism. Second, the three types of domination, rational, traditional, and charismatic. Each of these is defined by the motivation of obedience or by the nature of legitimacy claimed by the leader … The third and highest level of abstraction is the level of the types of action: rational action with reference to goals, rational action with respect to values, traditional action, and affective action.
3. The third species of ideal types includes those that constitute rationalizing reconstructions of a particular kind of behavior. For example, according to Weber, all propositions in economic theory are merely ideal-typical reconstructions of the ways men would behave if they were pure economic subjects. Economic theory rigorously conceives economic behavior as consistent with its es­sence being defined in a precise manner.²¹

The "ideal" type is for Weber neither a judgment of value nor one of fact. It is a pure hypothesis on the basis of a large number of social facts. It is a historical and logical construction, and therefore not a structural principle governing sociological data.

Dooyeweerd points out in his New Critique of Theoretical Thought that such types cannot really give us any real understanding of the inner nature of the state, of a university, of a church, of an industrial enterprise. The reason being that none of these social institutions can be identified with the variable and changing factual relationships in which their internal structural types are realized in the course of history. The structure of individuality of all these social structures has been laid down in principle at the beginning of the creation and they urge themselves upon man and cannot be changed by him. "This is why the real structural principles of human society can never be replaced by constructed "ideal types," in the sense of Max Weber." ²² Weber's "ideal" types in fact reflect his basic his­toricism, that is, his tendency to explain all the other aspects of God's creation in terms of the historical aspect, which he then absolutizes.

As long as social scientists hold to such a conception of "ideal" types they preclude themselves from obtaining a real insight into the basic problem of sociology, namely, that of discovering a total view of human society. Lacking such a total view or ordering principle, they are forced to interpret social phenomena in terms of one particular aspect of reality, such as biology or history or psychology, which they then deify. According to Dooyeweerd, it is this lack which accounts for the emergence of the various schools of apostate modern sociology.

Such apostate scholars tend to suppose that the nature of man, and in it the nature of all temporal things, finds its center and root in the human "reason." Yet, as Dooyeweerd has shown, this reason is in reality nothing other than a composite of our temporal functions of consciousness, functions of our self, only an aspect of our heart in the full scriptural sense. Temporal organic life, sense of beauty, man's function in historical development, in language, in legal, economic, and social life – all these are also functions of the human heart in this profound biblical sense.

Fallen man, however, falsely supposes that human existence has its origin in "reason" as man's supposed supra-temporal center, and even that God himself is Absolute Reason. As a result, he comes to identify the findings of his reason in scientific abstraction with the "whole" truth and excludes all naive or integral experience of God's creation as mere ignorant opinion.

At the same time, apostate scholars must still have their absolute, even if this means that they must distort what their observation discloses only to be relative. Their rational analysis of social phenomena is accompanied by a deeper drive, which in their unregenerate state as sinners requires a distortion of the very facts they are in process of analyzing. As we have seen in the case of contemporary sociology, apostate scholars do not agree on what they thus absolutize. The various schools of modern sociology are characterized by this absolutizations of a specific modal aspect of God's creation in their attempts to grasp the nature of human society in a theoretical view of totality. Such absolutizations cannot be corrected by other absolutizations. The very problem is how a general sociology may avoid them, that is, to say from what standpoint a sociological view of the totality of the different modal aspects of God's creation is possible.

According to Herman Dooyeweerd, only the Word of God can provide the scholar with a sure point of departure for his theoretical life. Only by accepting God's Word as the ordering principle of his scientific work, can the scientist hope to make any sense of the vast array of the facts around him. God's Word alone can provide him with a sure frame of reference and point of departure for all his thinking about reality. It does so by working in the human heart a true knowledge of God, of one's self, and of the Law-Order of the creation. The Word of God is the power by which the Holy Spirit opens up the human heart to "see" things as they really are. True knowledge is thus made possible by true religion, and it can only arise from the knowing activity of the human heart being enlightened through the Word of God by the Holy Spirit. The biblical motive of creation, fall into sin, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy spirit is thus the key to the knowledge of God and of the self which alone can open to us the revelation of God in the Scriptures and in all the wonderful works of His creation.

In the light of this scriptural perspective upon science we can now understand the problematics and dilemmas of contemporary social science. On the one hand, the school of empiricists have tried to reduce the meaning and structure of social facts to biology. On the other hand, the functional and historical schools of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Robert K. Merton have sought to explain so­cial behavior in terms of action theory and of ideal types.²³ This conflict in sociology between empiricist and historical and functional­ist corresponds to that of vitalist and mechanist in modern apostate biology. It only arises from an apostate and therefore false way of "seeing" social reality. Without a true ordering principle in God's Word, empiricists, functionalists, behaviorists, idealists, and histori­cists are unable to explain satisfactorily the behavior of man in societies past or present, or the relations which should exist between the various communities and associations of human society. Instead, they tend to reduce the social aspect of creation to historical, logical, psychological, and biological modes of explanation.

C. Reformed Doctrine of Sphere Sovereignty←⤒🔗

1. Sphere Sovereignty in Science←↰⤒🔗

Such reduction in science can be avoided only by understanding the biblical doctrine of sphere sovereignty. The expression "sphere sovereignty" stems, as far as we know, from Abraham Kuyper. When Kuyper first used this term he mainly conceived of it in terms of God's creation ordinances for practical societal institutions, such as the church as an institution, the state, the school, university, and industry. In his view there is no one social institution such as the state of which all the others are merely parts. On the contrary, each social structure has been instituted by God to carry out its own specific task, and it derives its authority over the individual directly from God and not from any other social institution. By "spheres," therefore, Kuyper understood exclusively societal institutions. He conceived of these spheres not modally but regionally, because he did not distinguish clearly between sovereignty and autonomy. In spite of this limitation, the real scriptural character of his view should be recognized. The diversity of authority in the social spheres is in direct correlation with the diversity of authority. It does not find its origin in arbitrary human choice as apostate social scientists have supposed, but in the wealth of God's creation activity.

Had it not been for Kuyper's practical sociological pluralism, the struggle for educational freedom, which still remains undecided in the English-speaking world, would never have been achieved in the Netherlands. Thanks to Kuyper's doctrine of sphere sovereignty, the Dutch electorate was persuaded to grant full educational freedom to Christians as well as socialists and humanists.

It remained for Kuyper's successors at the Free University to draw out the full scientific and philosophical implications of his greatest doctrine. Thanks to the work of Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven, it is now recognized in Reformed circles that sphere sovereignty operates socially, ontically, and epistemologically. The diversity of authority in the social spheres is paralleled by the modal diversity of the great modal spheres or law-aspects studied by science.

Kuyper lived in the high noon of positivism in science. This tendency in Western thought, in common with the rationalist tradition of the seventeenth century, overrated mathematics and physics as the ideal sciences towards which all others should seek to approximate. Along with this similarity, however, there also emerged a difference, which should not be neglected. Descartes and Leibniz had limited themselves to the study of subjects below the analytical law-sphere. (See Chart at the end of this book.) For this reason, the thinkers of the Aufklarung or Enlightenment who developed an intense interest in subjects above the analytical law-sphere, such as history, language, social communication, the state, ethics, and theology, saw no possibility for including these fields or subjects in science or for ascribing them to Kant's "practical reason."²⁴

The positivists such as August Comte and Spencer, who also shared such broadness of interests with the men of the Enlightenment, rejected the solution of expanding the boundaries of science beyond the mathematical and physical so as to include these newer social sciences. Instead, they demanded the positivization of the social studies. Thus Comte in his Cours de Philosophie Positive spoke of the law of the three stages of human evolution and the necessity for a new classification of the sciences.²⁵ The law of the three stages consists in his assertion that the human mind passes through three phases. In the first, the mind explains phenomena by ascribing them to beings or forces comparable to man himself. In the second phase, that of metaphysics, the mind explains phenomena by invoking abstract entities like "nature." Finally, in the third phase, man is content to observe phenomena and to establish the regular links existing among them. He abandons the search for the final principle behind the facts and confines himself to establishing the laws that govern them.

But this transition from the theological age to the metaphysical age and thence to the positive age does not occur simultaneously in all the varied intellectual disciplines. In Comte's thinking, the law of the three stages has no precise meaning unless it is combined with the classification of the sciences. For it is the order in which the sciences are ranked that reveals the order in which the intelligence becomes "positive." The positive method was adopted sooner in mathematics, in physics, and in chemistry than in biology. There are reasons why positivism is slower to appear in disciplines relating to the most complex matters. The simpler the object of study, the easier it is to think positively. Writing of this analysis of the development of "positive" science, Raymond Aron says in his Main Currents of Sociological Thought:

The combination of the law of the three stages and the classification of the sciences leads to Auguste Comte's basic formula: the method which has triumphed in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology must eventually prevail in politics and culminate in the founding of a positive science of society, which is called sociology … Comte's sociology was meant to resolve the crisis of the modern world, to provide a system of scientific ideas which will preside over the reorganization of society.²⁶

While Comte was surely correct in demanding the inclusion of disciplines relating to man in society within the domain of science, he was in error in supposing that the methods which had proved so successful in natural science would prove equally valuable in the study of human society. Instead of relating the diversity of subject matter dealt with by such disciplines as history, law, ethics, economics, sociology, and theology to a diversity of methods of research, Comte called for one method, namely, the mathematical physical method of observation, classification, and measurement in terms of causal laws. Inspired and driven by his faith in the modern humanist science ideal, he became blinded to the great diversity of God's modal law-spheres and the consequent need for a multiplicity of areas of research. As such Comte has been described by F. A. Fayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science as guilty of the methodological fallacy of scientism. Scientism is, briefly, the illegitimate extension to the treatment of the social sciences of the methods which have succeeded so well in the natural.²⁷ It is assumed without question that these methods are universally appropriate. Hence, as Hayek puts it, "the scientistic, as distinguished from the scientific, view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it."²⁸ But in fact Hayek claims there are radical differences between the subject-matters of the natural and social sciences. For example, the natural sciences make a distinction between appearance and reality. The stick in water looks crooked, but, says physics, is straight. The fire seems to have heat, but, says science, this heat is nothing but the rapid movement and collision of non hot molecules. This habit of distinguishing between appearance and fact has gone so far that the language of contemporary science is no longer able to describe the appearances of things except in so far as they can be expressed mathematically.

It follows that what man thinks about – namely, the external world of things – constitutes for the physicist an initial obstacle to his inquiry which has to be overcome; it is never a datum for his inquiries. Now contrast the social sciences; these deal not with the relations between things but with the relations between men and things and, still more, with the relations between men and men. Hence, for them, what matters is not so much what things are "as what the acting people think they are." This is not merely to say that the social as opposed to the natural sciences deal with "the phenomena of individual minds" and not directly with "material phenomena"; it is to insist that the data of the social sciences "cannot be defined in the objective terms of the physical sciences, but only in terms of human beliefs." Hayek illustrates his argument with examples.

Neither a "commodity" or an "economic good" nor "food" or "money" can be defined in physical terms, but only in terms of the views people hold about things. Economic theory has nothing to say about the little round discs of metal as which an objective or materialist view might try to define money.²⁹

Is it not then obvious, Hayek asks, that to apply the methods of the natural to the social sciences is to extend them to a subject matter with which they may be wholly unfitted ordeal?

While welcoming Hayek's insights regarding the difference between natural and social science, the writer cannot accept the humanistic philosophy underlying Hayek's own position. Just as Comte is driven by the science ideal of the modern nature-freedom ground motive, so Hayek himself is in the grip of the personality pole of this selfsame motive. No more than the positivists can Hayek accept the existence of a structural unity in diversity of created reality. The very idea of structure, given to "nature" apart from man's creative freedom, is something which all humanists, whether idealist or positivist, must reject. For both wings of apostate humanism man through his reason or through his autonomous freedom must create this structure for himself.

Until Hayek accepts the creation structures given by God, he will not be able to account adequately for the diversity of the subject matter of the various scientific disciplines. The diversity of methods in science arises not in the human reason, as Hayek supposes, but in the diversity of God's great law-spheres.

In Renewal and Reflection Herman Dooyeweerd points out:

The created reality displays, in the order of time, a great multiplicity of aspects or modes of being in which its religious root breaks open into a wealth of colors, just as the unbroken light is broken up into the gamut of colors of the rainbow when it passes through the prism.

These modes of being are the aspects of number, of space, of movement, of energy, of organic life, of psychical life, of logical differentiation, of historical cultural development, of symbolic meaning, of social relations, of economic value, of aesthetic harmony, of law, or moral worth, and of the assurance of faith.

These aspects of reality constitute the provinces of research of the differentiated processional sciences, of mathematics, of the physical sciences, of biology, of psychology, of logic, of history, linguistics, sociology, economics, of aesthetics, jurisprudence, of ethics, and of theology. Each of these sciences views reality only in one of its aspects.

Suppose for a moment, that science without the light of a true knowledge of God and of self directs itself upon the investigation of these various spheres of reality. That science would then be in a position similar to a man who views the colors of the rainbow without having knowledge of the unbroken light which is broken up by a prism into these colors. These colors seem to blend. Would such a man, if he were to ask himself where the different shades of color originate, not be inclined to proclaim one color gamut as the origin of all the others? And would he then be able to discover the exact mutual relation and coherence between the colors? And if he were not able to do so, how then would he be able to become acquainted with each one of the color-gamut's as to their own inner character?

If he is not color blind, he will indeed continue to distinguish, but he will take as a starting point the shade most striking to him and view all the others as shades of the absolutized one. Such is the man who believes to find in science the basis and starting point for his view of temporal reality. Repeatedly such a man will be inclined to identify a certain aspect of reality, e.g. that of organic life, or that of emotion, or that of the historical cultural development, with the total reality and to reduce all other aspects to the various modes of revelation of that one, absolutized aspect … Take modern "materialism," for example, which traces the whole temporal reality back to the movement of material particles. Or take the modern naturalistic philosophy of life, which views everything in the one-sided light of the organic development of life. In truth, it is not science as such which drives man towards such absolutizing, but the idolatrous, religious ground-motive which has taken hold of his thought processes.

Science can only teach us reality in the theoretical explanation of its many aspects. It teaches us, as such, neither the knowledge of the more profound unity, nor the origin of these aspects. It is religion which motivates us to search for this unity and origin because it compels us to concentrate all that is relative upon the absolute ground and origin of all things, because it continually drives men to the knowledge of God and self.

As soon as an idolatrous ground-motive takes hold of us it compels our thought to absolutize that which is relative, and to deify that which is created. On account of this, false religious prejudices obscure our conception of the structure of reality.

He who absolutizes created reality according to one of its aspects can no longer comprehend any one of its aspects in their own inner character. He has a false view of reality which, however, in no way prevents him from discovering various important moments of truth. However, these moments of truth are taken up by him into a false total view of reality. As a matter of fact, it is exactly in this false view of reality that they become the most dangerous and poisonous weapons of deception.³⁰

These sovereign law-spheres are the ways in which created reality exists, and so Dooyeweerd calls them modes or modalities. Since these never appear as separate entities but are always aspects of indi­vidual things, he calls them law-aspects. Since they appear only with things existing in time, he calls them functions. They are not to be confused with Kant's so-called transcendental postulates or categories of human thought. And thus they are irreducible and may not be brought back to more basic modes, as is done, for example, in rationalism, in which the aspects which are higher than the analytical are considered as mere constructions postulated by the human mind. Similar reductions can be found in historicism, in which all reality is subsumed under the category of historical modes of thought or biologism or Marx's dialectical materialism.

Since these aspects are "ontic" (existing apart from man's mind), they cannot be reduced to each other, and thus we can rightly speak of the relationship of these aspects or law-spheres as "sovereign in their own orbit." Each law-sphere has a status rooted in its divinely instituted nature, which cannot be infringed upon without harm and falsity resulting since each sphere of existence has received from the Creator its own peculiar nature and has been created "each after its own kind." The capacities of one sphere may not be transferred or appropriated by another sphere. This constitutes its modal sovereignty, in virtue of which each modal sphere is equal, with its own distinctive part to play in the great economy of creation.

At the same time these various spheres of the creation function in an unbreakable coherence with each other within the framework of the cosmic order given and upheld by God. Thus the scriptural principle of sphere sovereignty not only teaches us the mutual irreducibility, but also the indissoluble interrelatedness and mutual coherence of all aspects of reality in the order of temporal becoming. No aspect is a thing cut off from the other aspects; in each aspect we find a modal expression of the integral and radical character of the religious fulness of meaning of created reality.

As an illustration we may give the "aesthetic" aspect of a concrete work of art. A painting or a symphony cannot exist without a number of parts. Yet that number is not number in the sense of arithmetical number, but an aesthetic mirroring of the aspect of number; the parts are still aesthetic parts. There must also be aesthetic space, movement, economy, etc.

This creation principle of sphere-universality is what has supplied whatever grounds apostate scholars have been able to adduce for their attempts to find the whole meaning of reality in what is actually but one aspect. Yet the mirroring of all the sides is not the same thing as all the sides. It is here, therefore, that all the "isms," e.g., materialism, historicism, psychologism, legalism, moralism, and aestheticism arise and find a specious legitimacy, but ultimately flounder. Each seems to have something important to say for itself; yet in the light of a scriptural framework of science is seen in fact to be only an apostate religious distortion of the religious fulness of meaning, of reality. Only when the scriptural ground-motive completely directs our thinking can we hope to "see" reality in its true nature and structure by showing us both the inner character of each law-sphere and its coherence with all the other spheres.

The modal spheres do not, however, exist only in horizontal de­pendence of each other, and vertical dependence upon God. They exhibit, Dooyeweerd teaches, an order of increasing complication in accordance with the order of the succession of the spheres in the temporal coherence of meaning. Because immanentistic apostate philosophy could not grasp this idea of a cosmic order of modal spheres, and thus necessarily eliminated the temporal order and inter-modal coherence of the spheres, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the relation between the different aspects of reality, and tends to "see" it merely as one of increasing logical complexity. But the modal spheres may never be identified in this way with the so-called "categories of thought" or with any arbitrary theoretical delimitation or reduction.

Each law-sphere is characterized by a certain specificity, a modal moment or kernel which guarantees it irreducible specific meaning. Thus the faith modality is characterized by the modal moment or kernel of transcendent certainty regarding the Origin of all being and meaning, the ethical modal moment by love of one's neighbor, the juridical by retribution, the aesthetic by harmony, the economic by thrift or economy, the social by social intercourse, the linguistic by symbolic signification, the historical by the cultural process of development of human society, the analytical by theoretical distinction, the psychical by feeling and sensation, the biological by organic life, the physical by energy, the kinematic by movement, the spatial by extension, and the numerical by discrete quantity. This irreducibility does not imply that a law-sphere exists in and by itself. It is, rather, an aspect of empirical reality whose modal meaning can only reveal itself within the inter-modal meaning coherence with all the other aspects. Each modal sphere is a refraction of the religious fulness of meaning; consequently, the temporal order of the modal spheres must be expressed in each sphere. Each sphere has a modal moment, irreducible to that of any other, which safeguards its orbital sovereignty. But surrounding the modal moments are a number of analogical moments, some of which refer back to the modal moments of preceding or substratum spheres, others to the modal moments of succeeding or super-stratum spheres. The first are called modal retrocipations, the second modal anticipations. Both analogical moments are qualified by the modal moment of their sphere.

The retrocipatory moments are constitutive of a modality. The anticipatory moments are regulative; they open up and deepen the meaning of the aspects. The fundamental concepts of a science are formulated by the analogies between the modalities which "precede" the particular science being studied, e.g., in the case of the juridical modality the numerical through to the aesthetic law-spheres and the juridical modality itself.

In the study of jurisprudence Dooyeweerd thus distinguishes be­tween the concept of justice and the idea of justice. The former is formulated by discovering the analogies between the lower modali­ties and the juridical modality. The idea of justice is formulated by discovering the relation between law and the higher functions, namely those of ethics and faith.

In its relation to the lower aspects of reality we must thus think of the legal modality in its restrictive function. If legal life develops only in relation to these lower aspects, then it remains closed, e.g., the primitive idea of corporate personality and the custom of blood vengeance against the whole clan, family, or tribe to which the individual murderer belonged. But as soon as law develops in relation to morality and faith, then we discover a deepening of legal life, e.g., the principle of equity before the law is a moral deepening of legal rules, so that the individual factor can be given a greater play; the introduction of the notion of guilt and of individual responsibility are both moral refractions upon the law.

From the vantage point of its aspectual structures, reality reveals itself in this way as a modal diversity in intermodal cohesion. In principle, the respective modal spheres determine the border lines between the various special sciences. The elementary basic concepts employed in each science are ultimately oriented to these analogical moments, that is, the points of inter-connection between the modal moment of the aspect being studied and the other modalities.

The following is an example of the modal moment, modal retrocipations and anticipations as exemplified in the analytical logical law-sphere.

MODAL MOMENT: rational distinction
Retrocipations:	logical apperception
	logical thought life
	logical movement of thought
	logical thought-space
	logical unity and multiplicity
Anticipations:	logical domination (ruling by systematic theoretical concepts of logical forms)
	logical symbolics
	logical commerce
	logical economy of thought
	logical harmony
	logical right
	logical eros (platonic love)
	logical certitude.

2. Sphere Sovereignty in Society←↰⤒🔗

Just as in the natural world God has created everything after its own kind and with its own peculiar nature, so in man's social world he has ordained that what man constructs in the domain of culture and history shall have its own peculiar nature and structure. In his­tory and culture we find the institutional embodiments of the created order. In the Reformed view creation is not a temporal event. It is the "calling into being" of all things by the Creator. But this refers to the order of reality, and it does not imply that all things, e.g., the state, already exist in actuality at the beginning, for history is the unfolding of God's creation order in time, so that in history the state, the business enterprise, the labor union appear as the factual expressions of God's creation order. Here Dooyeweerd distinguishes between (a) the law-side and (b) the subject-side. The state, the labor union, the business enterprise, etc., were (are) present in creation with respect to the "law-side" but not with respect to the "subject-side" (i.e., the empirical reality).

Just as our view of reality as a whole will be determined by our religious presuppositions regarding the origin and nature of this world, so our view of the peculiar character and mutual relationships of the different spheres of society will be governed by our initial religious and philosophical starting point. The scriptural ground-motive of creation, man's fall into radical sin, and his equally radical redemption in Jesus Christ alone enables us to understand the various aspects of society in their true character, mutual relationships, and coherence.

What then, in the light of this biblical ground-motive, is the true root unity of society? Is it the Church as Roman Catholics believe, or the state as Communists and Socialists believe, or Big Business as capitalists believe or the individual as anarchists suppose? It is none of these institutions or persons. Instead, Christians believe that Christ alone is the root unity of human society. As Dooyeweerd says in answer to our question:

It is the religious root-community of mankind, which fell in Adam, but has been restored in communion with God of Christ. With this revelation of the eternal root communion of mankind which is fundamental to all temporal societal relationships the Christian religion places itself in an absolute antithesis with every view of society which absolutizes and deifies any one particular temporal societal form or institution … Only if man understands the true religious root-unity of mankind will he be able to perceive the essential nature, the correct mutual relationships and coherence of the distinct spheres of human society. This relationship is again the relationship of sphere sovereignty which can only reveal itself in an indissoluble relationship of all spheres.

What does the term "sphere sovereignty" mean with regard to temporal human society? It guarantees to each of the social-spheres an essential nature and life principle of their own; and so it has a sphere of original authority and jurisdiction. This authority is derived from God's sovereign authority; it is not derived from the authority of one of the other spheres.³¹

The divine order for human society manifests itself in a great variety of specific ordinances or creation structures. All these ordinances not only find their origin in God, but they are continually upheld by Him in His divine omnipotence and temporal conserving common grace. In Him they find their ultimate purpose. They are the instruments through which God executes His lordship and activates human life along stable ways. In and through these ordinances or social structures the Lord God confronts man. That is to say that they are not a "natural datum" like the laws of physics, but rather they are laid upon man as norms to be realized, actualized, or positivized in history. Or, to put it another way, God calls man into His service as His co-worker in the realization of a righteous, just, peaceful, and holy political, economic, and social order. "The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord's; but he has given the earth to man." These words of the psalmist put the focus on man's function and place in God's creation. Man is God's office-bearer in God's creation. Man is called to be God's steward. As Paul G. Schrotenboer well says:

In the broadest sense the idea of office refers to man's administration of the entire world which God has given to him to manage. The creation account in Genesis clearly states that God placed man over the world to rule it in obedience to his Maker…

The idea of office refers to the way God uses man to administer the world. Man's office in the world is his stewardship of life, that is, the way he orders his life and all things given him to control…

The office of man is his position in relationship. His position, as it relates to God, constitutes him a servant who is called to obedience. As it relates to fellow man it makes man a guardian, who must bring his charge to maturity. As it relates to the world it constitutes man a steward who must faithfully exercise dominion in the name of God…

God intended that man's life in its entirety would be service. To that service God appointed him, for that service he gave him the gifts he needs and of that service God calls man to give account. Man in office is always considered "before the face of God."

In his relation to fellow men, man the office bearer is a guardian and a member. He is put in charge of others, e.g., as parent, as teacher, as ruler … God has arranged men in a relation of higher and lower. Some rule, others are ruled…

In his relation to the world man is a steward to whom God entrusts the entire creation. He must use it, exercise lordship over it and give God a record of what he does with what he has received … Every man has an office. Being a Christian and an office-bearer are one and the same. Individually and as a group Christians are incorporated in the "body" of which Christ is the head.³²

According to God's Word, then, human culture is the fulfilment of the great cultural, scientific, economic, and political mandate given to man at the beginning of his history. "Replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over it" (Gen. 1:28).

The social ordinances given by God are laws of structure which determine man's task as office-bearer in God's creation as well as of the various relationships of society in terms of which this task has to be carried out. As office-bearer man functions in a multiplicity of institutions such as the family, the state, the political and legal order as well as the church as an institution. Each of these structures has its own divinely planned order or "set-up," whether or not those who take part in these social groupings acknowledge this order, either in theory or in practice. Each of these social structures stands in God's world with its own specific task to perform, which cannot be arbitrarily changed by man. If he tries to do so, then he comes under God's judgment. A great historian has recognized this truth in his dictum, "The history of the world is the judgment of the world." Arnold Toynbee has counted at least twenty civilizations that have come under God's judgment for failing to obey the laws for their various social structures.

Each of these social groups displays in its broadest outlines a constant structure, and each is subject to its own specific law of structure, which it cannot negate without suffering disintegration and loss. Thus does the living God of the Bible maintain His sovereignty over human society.

The developments within Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 are a striking confirmation of this biblical doctrine of society and its divinely given social ordinances. The Communist leaders, in spite of their apostate godless theories of free sex, trial marriage, easy divorce, and the common ownership of property, were forced by the resulting social confusion and breakdown of family and economic and social life to re-acknowledge, at least to a certain extent, the intrinsic significance of marriage and family life as well as that of private property and the need for economic incentives. Here in the midst of man's rebellion against God's creation ordinances for human society, something of His righteousness and superior power was revealed.

3. Norms and Directives←↰⤒🔗

The divine act of creation established the order which determines the nature of all "natural" and "social" structures and "facts."

Dooyeweerd expresses this fundamental teaching of the Christian religion in terms of a basic distinction between the "law-side" and the "factual subject-side" of creation. The law-spheres, in turn, reflect this distinction; in each modal aspect there is a correlation between modal laws and the respective modal functions of facts subject to these laws (cf. e.g., the different modal sense of physical, biological, sensitive, economic, and juridical facts, etc.) In the pre-analytical aspects the modal laws have the character of "natural" rules; in the analytical and post-analytical aspects they have the character of norms.

Thus plants and stones and animals, though subject to God's law, function according to God's law without being addressed by Him in the same manner as God addresses man. They have no option but to live in accordance with the law of their own created being and nature. Neither animals nor plants function subjectively in the analytical and following law-spheres, but only objectively. Only man functions in these modalities as a person created in God's holy image. For this reason these modalities may be termed normative law-spheres in contrast to the preceding law-spheres which are a-normative (see chart), because the law in these spheres is given to man in the man­ner of a norm, principle, or directive which requires his obedient positivization in history.

Only in terms of this distinction and within this scriptural frame of reference can we hope to solve the intractable problem of "facts" and of "values" in the social sciences. Within the normative law-spheres "facts" assume axiological qualities which are constitutive for their modal meaning within these aspects. In other words, without values there are no facts in the post-analytical law-spheres. Without the use of structural principles, categories of explanation and postulates we cannot obtain any understanding of any social fact. It is impossible, for example, to explain monogamy merely in terms of custom. Before we can intelligently discuss any marriage custom we must have a prior idea or standard of marriage in our minds in terms of which we can evaluate the particular expression of marriage. Of this necessity for value in social science Dooyeweerd writes:

One has to keep in mind that the factual social relations in human society can never be determined apart from some essential social norms. This implies that the causal explanation is impossible in sociology and economics without applying social norms. By way of example, we wish to maintain that the causal explanation of increasing criminality from factors (such as the wrong kind of social environment, the bad-housing situation, economic crises, etc.), relates facts of an obviously normative character. If one tried to eliminate consistently all normative adjudication, one will discover that one is left with no essential social facts at all.³³

If being under God's law is what gives meaning to the creation, it follows that facts and values are intimately intertwined and related. Nowhere are there any loose facts that are unrelated facts. A fact is always related to God's law for the creation, whether the fact is a thing, a relation, or an evaluation, and from its relation to God's law it derives its value at all times. It is impossible to ascertain factual ethical relations apart from the ethical norms. There is no pure, neutral, objective knowing of the facts. "Brute facts" do not exist. Facts are only meaningful in an order, they speak when they are structured. To know anything about a fact, one must have an awareness of order. As James H. Olthuis points out in his important article "Values and Valuation" in Philosophia Reformata (now published in Facts, Values and Ethics):

Valuation is necessary in an establishment of the facts. Facts require norms for their very existence. Norms take on subjective form in facts. Apart from the normative structures, there is no way to acknowledge the constant structures one confronts in reality, such as, state, church and family. The relationship or correlation of fact and norm is explicit, for example, when one talks of a good family. But it is just as real, although implicit, when one names a certain group of individuals a family. How does one know that this particular group is a family? There is only one answer: it meets the norm for the family. Insight into the facts takes place in the light of norms; therefore, no light, no sight! … In place of facts one could speak of "states of affairs." Facts are states of affairs in which norms have been realized … We ought to talk of economic, or ethical, etc., norms and economic, ethical, etc., states of affairs in which these norms are being realized.³⁴

The norms governing man's life on earth form one whole in spite of their great variety. But what makes these norms into one whole, one complex? It is the fact that they can all be traced back to one and the same origin in God's plan for mankind. God has laid down these norms as the directives along which human life should be conducted if it is to be blessed.

Man, however, has been created as a responsible being, and he must therefore from these directives discover the norms that should apply in his daily life; for the Creator gives directives only, not rules for the concrete situations of life. Motivated by the central law of love, mankind is called to the discovery, recognition, and concretization or positivizing of the structural laws inherent in the cosmos. The resulting positive laws form the "bridge" between the central command to love God and "thy neighbor as thyself" and the structural law. The normative laws, as distinct from the a-normative, require human recognition and actualization in accordance with man's historical development before they are subjectively binding. All positive human laws derive their validity and their binding force upon the individual conscience from the firmness and steadfastness and truth of the divine law-order faithfully maintained by God the Father in Jesus Christ. Unless human laws are thus anchored to God's law-order, positive law soon is adrift, and sooner or later is dashed to pieces on the apostate rocks of historicism, relativism and subjectivism. Thanks to God's temporal conserving grace this "breaking to pieces" is always hampered, and ultimately defeated, by the presence of the anchor. Without the divine law-giver there can be no valid law.

Before norms can become effective in human life, they must be rendered positive. The element of positivizing is an inherent part of the post historical law-spheres. It is the historical analogy of these spheres underlining the point that positivation depends on the stage of man's cultural development. Olthuis rightly suggests that we should view this 'positivization' as a subjective act in which the resultant (the concretized posited law) rather than the formative human will is taken up on the law side … The possibility (as well as the fact) that human 'positivization' acquire normative status rests as a given in the creation order. It stands as the corollary of the 'built-in' inherent requirement of the norm-laws of creation that they be recognized and concretized before they are subjectively binding. The glory of man's task as man consists in this fact that he is called to take a free, responsible, spontaneous role in the opening-up of the meaning of creation.³⁵

Such positivization does not take place only when the state formulates some new legal ruling such as the abolition of slavery in the United States after the Civil War in three amendments to the Constitution. It can take place when a heathen family adopts a new mode of life after becoming Christian, or when an apostate labor union changes its constitution in accordance with biblical norms of justice. Family, church, industry, as well as the state, all have a law of their own, qualified in each case by the typical characteristics of the community concerned.

Of all the norms which should control the development of human society none has proved of greater importance for human well‑being than that of the sovereign spheres of society. Upon its application and concretization in human history has depended whatever personal freedom individuals have been able to enjoy. Throughout history first one social sphere then another has sought to dominate all the others with disastrous consequences for human happiness.

The Bible rejects all theories of society which view social institutions such as the family, the school, the labor union, or the church institution as part of a greater whole such as the state. It teaches that no earthly relationship can embrace or give expression to the religious unity and community of mankind. The basis of all true community between men lies not in the state nor in big business but only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Adam "who to our rescue came." By revealing to us the religious root of mankind in creation, fall, and redemption by Jesus Christ, God's Word has also revealed to us the real meaning of human community, in opposition to all forms of collectivism, individualism, nationalism, church imperialism, and the deification of the state in both ancient classical and modern humanist paganism. Neither the family, the church as an institution, the state, the labor union, nor the business corporation may demand of the individual the absolute loyalty he can give only to God. Instead, each institution and organization of human society is under divine charge to give expression – each in its own unique way – to the radical religious unity and community that alone exists in Jesus Christ.

For this reason neither collectivism nor individualism can do justice to the real nature of social relationships. The dilemma posed by all apostate theories of society can be overcome only in terms of the scriptural conception of human society, in which all societal relationships are related back to their origin and firm basis in Jesus Christ.

In the religious center of his experience alone can man transcend all of the modal structures of individuality. This conception has had profound implications for man's understanding of human society. It inspired the English Puritans to take up arms against King Charles II, who sought to impose upon the people of England the absolutist pattern of government of King Louis XIV of France. It led the Thirteen Colonies to defend their hard-won freedoms against encroachment by the English King and Parliament which, claimed to be omnipotent and sovereign over all aspects of North American life. Thus Rushdoony points out:

In the American tradition, the word "sovereignty" has a theological connotation; sovereignty is an attribute of God alone. The Constitutional Convention of the United States avoided all reference to the word and concept in framing the U. S. Constitution. In one of the more famous addresses of American history, on "The Jubilee of the Constitution" in New York, April 30, 1839, John Quincy Adams associated concepts of omnipotence and sovereignty as essentially one. The former President declared that the Americans had resisted the concept of Parliamentary omnipotence. "From the omnipotence of Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the God of battles." Adams then spoke of "The grossly immoral and despotic doctrine of despotic state sovereignty, the exclusive judge of its own obligations, and responsible to no power on earth or in heaven" as a revival of the old doctrine of Parliament's omnipotence. The concept of sovereignty, he pointed out, was totally alien to the American political tradition … The term "sphere sovereignty" as used by Dooyeweerd has reference to the sovereignty of God and His law spheres over man, not that man has any sovereignty in various spheres of human action. This distinction is basic and needs to be stressed.³⁶

Such an American fear of entrusting too much power into the hands of any earthly "sovereign" state can be explained only by the Puritan doctrine of God's total sovereignty over human life as well as by its teaching of the total depravity of human nature due to man's fall into sin. As Lord Bryce pointed out in The American Commonwealth:

Someone has said that the American Government and Constitution are based on the theology of Calvin and the philosophy of Hobbes. This at least is true that there is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut. Compare this spirit with the enthusiastic optimism of the Frenchmen of 1789. It is not merely a difference of race temperaments; it is a difference of fundamental ideas.³⁷

It is this recognition of God's sovereignty and man's sinfulness which distinguishes the American Revolution from both the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. While the latter revolutions were the political expression of apostate men's arrogant faith in their own reason, the former expressed the Christian conviction that the state is limited under God.

No less a thinker than Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the vital role which had been played by religion in the development of American society. The fundamental theme of his great study, Democracy in America, is that in the last analysis freedom depends on the manners and beliefs of the men who are to enjoy it. The decisive factor in these manners is religion. American society was, in Tocqueville's eyes, the society able to combine the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty; and were we to seek a single reason why in America the survival of liberty is probable while in France its future is precarious, the answer, according to Tocqueville, would be that American society combines the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty, while French society is torn by the opposition between church and democracy, or religion and liberty.

According to Tocqueville, it is the conflict in France between the modern spirit and the church which underlies the difficulties democracy encounters in remaining liberal and that on the other hand the kinship of inspiration between the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty is the ultimate foundation of American society. Thus Tocqueville writes:

I have said enough to put the character of Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the result (and this should be constantly kept in mind) of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent disagreement, but which the Americans have succeeded in incorporating to some extent one with the other and combining admirably. I allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

The settlers of New England were at the same time ardent sectarians and daring innovators. Narrow as the limits of some of their religious opinions were, they were free from all political prejudices. Hence arose two tendencies, distinct but not opposite, which are everywhere discernible in the manners as well as the laws of the country. Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.³⁸

It was Christianity alone which proved strong enough to break down the ancient classical doctrine of the totalitarian all-embracing sovereign city-state and Roman Empire. As Dooyeweerd points out:

From the Christian transcendance standpoint the radical unity of all temporal societal structures is only to be found in the central religious community of mankind in its creation, fall and redemption by Jesus Christ. This starting point excludes in principle every collectivist sociological view, which seeks the unity and all-embracing totality of all types of societal relationships in a temporal community of mankind … This was the firm starting point from which Christianity by the spiritual power of its divine Master broke through the pagan totalitarian view of the Roman Empire, and cleared the way for a veritable and salutary revolution of the social world-view. The radical meaning of this Christian revolution would be frustrated by identifying it with the Stoic idea of mankind as a temporal community of an all-inclusive character.³⁹

From the scriptural point of view there is not one "monistic" radical type of social structure which embraces all the other various social spheres as its parts. The Bible knows nothing of the pagan doctrine of the sovereign state which, as Harold Laski pointed out in A Grammar of Politics, "makes of right merely the expression of a particular will, without reference to what that will contains."⁴⁰ For this reason the writer entirely agrees with Bernard Zylstra in his study of Laski's political thought titled From Pluralism to Collectivism that the "alternative to the pitfalls of both an individualistic conception of the state as well as of a universalistic or collectivistic monism can be found in political pluralism. Max Beloff's statement is as relevant today as it was when he commented on Laski's career: "Clearly, political pluralism is still a vital need nationally, as well as internationally."⁴¹ Zylstra then points out that "A revitalized social pluralism requires a more stable foundation than Laski offered (in his early 'pluralist' phase of thought). His 'quantitative' pluralism must give way to a 'qualitative' conception, based on a general inquiry into the qualitative inner nature of the different social structures inclusive of the state."⁴²

Neither collectivism nor individualism can provide us with such an analysis, since both ignore the structures of individuality of the divine order of creation which alone present a solution for the problem of the relation of the individual to the group or other various groups to each other. Outside the scriptural frame of reference for natural and social science apostate thinkers have to construct society rationally out of the wills of sovereign individuals or of some absolutized sovereign social institution, be it church, state, or big business. The principle of sphere sovereignty alone presents us with a proper insight into the connection willed by God for man and his social forms, since the individual is never absorbed into any one temporal bond because he is ultimately responsible to God. These temporal bonds of society are limited in the expression of their authority over the individual by their own peculiar structure of individuality.

D. The Structures of Individuality←⤒🔗

The full significance of sphere sovereignty as a philosophical basis for a "qualitative social pluralism" cannot be grasped apart from Dooyeweerd's theory of the structures of individuality and the "enkaptic" intertwinements between them. He distinguishes the structures of individuality from the individual things of naive or integral everyday experience themselves. The latter are the subjects; the structures of individuality signify the cosmonomic principle of the subjects, the "structural type."

In the structures of individuality, the modal aspects of the creation are grouped to form an individual totality, which as a unity overarches the modal aspects. The modal structures thus lie at the foundation of the individuality structures. This does not mean that the modal aspects assume an identical or an equally important function in the individuality structures. A structure of individuality functions in all the modal law aspects of creation, either as subject or as object. In the language of the philosophy of the cosmonomic law-idea a thing has a function of subjectivity in all the spheres to which it is subject, but in a later sphere it has a function of subjectivity. Thus the bird's nest has a function of subjectivity in the first three spheres, but a function of objectivity in, for example, the psychological sphere in so far as it can be an object of concern to the bird, or in the aesthetic sphere, if it forms part of the aesthetic structure of a painting or a poem. The tree, again, has a function of subjectivity in the first four spheres, but a function of objectivity in the legal sphere, if it is the cause of a law suit, or in the aspect of faith, if it becomes the object of worship of some heathen cult.

But a structure of individuality is not simply a sum of the different modal spheres in which it has a function of subjectivity. It has an original modal individuality, Dooyeweerd states, situated in its last sphere of subjectivity, which he terms the qualifying function of the structure. This function discloses the anticipatory moments of the structure. So complete is the control of, say the biological function of the tree, that the whole tree reveals an individual structure and internal unity.

It is the biological modality which qualifies a tree, because the last modality in which it functions as a subject is the biological sphere, and it is from this sphere that a tree claims its peculiar nature and original individuality. A tree is clearly qualified by its organic life function, as the function of its internal destination. Under the guidance of this qualifying function the pre-biological functions open, in a typical way, their meaning within the internal structure of the tree. Although the numerical, spatial, kinematic, and physical functions maintain their own modal structure or character, since their modal meaning kernel cannot be reduced to that of the biological aspect, they do indeed receive a typical biological qualification within the life processes of the tree. Thus the bio-physical and biochemical processes occurring within the living organism are biologically qualified. Only by means of such an analysis can we avoid the dilemma posed by the controversy between vitalism and mechanism.

The biological function therefore occupies a cardinal position in the structure of individuality which constitutes a tree a tree and not a rock or star. This defining or qualifying function Dooyeweerd calls the leading or pilot function, since the earlier aspects are typically directed to this function in the structure of individuality of the tree.

However, the reality of a thing is not shut off in any single modality. Thus the structure which constitutes a tree as a thing is also expressed in the higher as well as the lower modalities. In all the post-biological spheres, however, a tree functions as an object. The tree therefore functions in all aspects of temporal creation; but within this total structure of the tree the aspects are ordered or grouped into a particular unique individual whole around the leading or pilot function. This unique grouping around a specific function, Dooyeweerd terms the structural principle or law to which the individual thing is subject and which makes its existence possible. The structural principle of individuality or structural type has constant validity within the temporal cosmos.

Each structure of individuality shows a descending order after higher and lower structural types in which it is gradually more and more individualized. Dooyeweerd refers to the most comprehensive type as the radical type of individuality-structure; it embraces all of the entities whose internal structure is qualified by the same modal aspect. On this basis he depicts three radical types of prelogical qualifications: the realm of inorganic nature, the realm of plants, and the realm of animals. Within these "radical-type realms" one discovers a wide variety, first of sub-types, and finally of elementary types which comprise only individual entities. An additional distinction, applicable to all individuality structures, is made between genotypes and variability types. The former belong to the constant inner nature of an individual whole. The latter do not arise out of the inner nature of the individual entity but out of its intertwinement with entities of another nature.

E. The Social Structures of Individuality←⤒🔗

Since man in his temporal existence is not typically qualified by a particular modal function, Dooyeweerd holds that it is theoretically unwarranted to speak of "mankind" as an ontological realm in the way one can speak of a realm of inorganic matter, of plants, and of animals. In the religious center of his existence man transcends all of the modal and individuality structures. Zylstra points out that such a conception of man "has profound implications for one's view of the temporal social spheres. Because of its biblical starting point the philosophy of the cosmonomic law idea rejects sociological 'monism' in a radical manner."⁴³

With reference then to plant and animal life we may say that the internal principles of the relevant individuality structures constitute the typical structural "laws" which condition the factual existence of the individual entities as far as their inner nature is concerned. A similar state of affairs obtains in human society, with this fundamental difference, however, that the radical types of the social spheres are of a normative character.

This implies that the individuality structures comprised of these radical types, in so far as they concern the invariable inner nature of the social spheres, are normative structural principles. As such they require a process of factual human cultural formation and positivization in accordance with the cultural level of a given society. This process gives rise to the variable social forms in which the structural principles of the social spheres are realized and which differ in accordance with the various cultural areas and the level of historical development of the latter. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Natural Law with its insistence on the recognition of unalterable, external norms, valid at all times and places, not only renders absolute the function of the human reason, but also underestimates the value of man as a culture-forming creature. Our world is subject to continuous change; new social structures emerge as, for example, when capitalism replaced feudalism. Such new social structures require new legal systems. Changes in the historical situation may require the application of new legal principles. When this happens, we do not logically deduce these from the historical givens – as the schools of realism and historicism suppose – but we do discover them in the meaning structure of the legal and economic modality. This does not mean that a certain legal or economic norm is no longer valid; it only means that at different times and places it requires a different formulation. Only in this way can we do justice to the principle of cultural development of the potentialities still hidden in God's creation, which it is one of the tasks of man, created in responsibility, to make explicit in his historical cultural formations. If this requirement is not fulfilled, positive human law can fall into disuse, and it can even become an injustice, when it is no longer the correct embodiment of a legal, economic, or social norm, e.g., changes in the law of property in America and Britain and in the legal status of women before the law since primitive Germanic tribal days when property was collectively owned and women treated as chattels and the slaves of men.

According to Dooyeweerd the structural principles which govern physical reality also define human social relationships and institutions. They are the transcendental conditions of our experience of the variable factual relations which come into existence in history. Within human society these structural principles are of a normative character.

It is remarkable that one particular aspect always functions in a qualifying and one in a foundational manner for each of the social relationships.

Though every social relationship functions in all aspects of creation, there are always two modal aspects which play a special defining role. We may speak of these qualifying modal aspects as "the typical foundational function" and the "typical leading function."

As an illustration let us take the human family. The family is essentially a typical community of love between parents and their children, but it rests upon the basis of biological sexual procreation upon the part of the parents. The moral aspect of love plays the leading role, and the biological aspect the foundational role, in the internal structural principle of the family. In considering the rela­tionships within the family and its relation to other social units, it is essential that we take the family's individuality structure into account. It's founding and leading functions give a peculiar individuality to all of its aspects. Again, the founding and the leading functions cannot be isolated from each other. The communion of love between husband and wife cannot be separated from their sexual union. In married life the communion of love and sexual union are always interacting, either stimulating and reinforcing the marriage bond or weakening it.

The family has a structure of authority which is peculiarly its own. The responsibilities of a father to his children are different from those of the same father to the children of his brother or sister. Likewise, the individuality of the family is apparent in the relationships of authority and subordination which pertain within it. According to God's Word, the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church. Both have authority over their children (Eph. 6:1; Col. 3:20). However, such authority must be exercised lovingly, and fathers are admonished "not to discourage their children" (Eph. 6:4).

Likewise, the foundational function of the church as an institution is historical, since it rests upon its own historical organizational form as a Christocracy while its leading function is qualified by faith in the Triune God of the Scriptures. The labor union too is founded in history and qualified by moral considerations. Of this we shall write at greater length.

Dooyeweerd also distinguishes between communities and intercommunal or interindividual relationships. He defines these as follows:

By "community" I understand any more or less durable societal relationship which has the character of a whole joining its members into a social unity, irrespective of the degree of intensity of the communal bond.

By interindividual or intercommunal relationships I mean such in which individual persons or communities function in coordination without being united into a solidary whole. Such relationships may show the character of mutual neutrality, of approachment, free cooperation or antagonism, competition or contest.⁴⁴

A second social category relates to the level of cultural development of both categories of social relationships; here the fundamental distinction between undifferentiated and differentiated social bonds is drawn. The process of historical development of human society is one of increasing differentiation of the social spheres with the consequence that the initial primitive undifferentiated and closed condition of these spheres is broken through.

With respect to the communal relationships, Dooyeweerd makes two additional distinctions. First, there is the difference between natural and organized communities. The former, such as the family in its natural sense, are based on organic life-relations between the members. These do not need an organized foundation and can be realized at all times and places in human history, though in variable social forms. The latter, however, presuppose a cultural power-organization in human history. An organized and differentiated community, such as the state or the church, is therefore bound to certain historical conditions for its realization.

In the second place, communal relationships can be distinguished into institutional and non-institutional. This division overlaps the one between natural and organized communities. The former Dooyeweerd describes as follows: "By 'institutional' communities I understand both natural and organized communities … which by their inner nature are destined to encompass their members to an intensive degree, continuously or at least for a considerable part of their life, and such in a way independent of their will." ⁴⁵ Examples of this type are the natural family, the state, and the church, but also many undifferentiated organized communities such as sibs, guilds, etc. The individual is usually a member of a family or a state by birth; not by the exercise of any choice in the matter. For this reason, the family, the state, and the church must never be placed on the same level of authority as the free associations of society. In the unfolding process of Western cultural formation the distinction was drawn for the first time in the history of mankind between the state and society, largely due to the power struggle between church and state. At the Reformation Calvin was thus able to liberate the whole realm of culture from the tutelage of both church and state, by proclaiming the existence alongside church and state of a third realm which he called the sphere of the adiaphora, the things indifferent. This belonged to the court of conscience, where no pope or king held sway. This area Calvin did not restrict to a few insignificant matters of taste and opinion among individuals. It included music, architecture, technical learning, and science. In short, Calvin thought of society as the broad field of personal freedom outside of the control of the authoritative structures of church and state in which men and women may associate with each other freely as individuals.⁴⁶ Such free associations have in the course of modern history given rise to an innumerable number of associations, clubs, and fellowships, and these also must be recognized as sovereign in their own sphere. As a result of the process of differentiation in these interpersonal social relations, the individual citizen of the Western world has gained a sphere of private liberty in his private life outside of all the institutional communities.

Recognition of the religious unity of mankind in Christ as well as the essentially limited place and function of all such authoritative institutions as church and state alone can guarantee the free development of such an "open society" through which the individual's freedom to respond to his divine calling can express itself.⁴⁷ At the same time this development confronts man with the corporate responsibility to develop and integrate every institution and social organization in such a way that they may become expressions, each in its own particular way, of the Body of Christ.

Such a scriptural perspective on human society stands in radical contrast to all forms of contemporary individualism of the right wing and of contemporary collectivism of the left wing of modern politics as well as to the depersonalizing tendencies of the "technological society" so graphically described by Jacques Ellul in his book with this title.⁴⁸ The biblical view of freedom excludes in principle both collectivism and individualism, and it alone enables us to see the structural patterns in interlacements between the different types of human relationships. Thus the internal sovereignty of the social spheres alone can provide us with a true basis for a harmonius relation between authority and freedom in human society. Man's service of God as his office-bearer in the creation is the condition of man's freedom.

The sovereignty of these spheres of society does not mean that they exist in splendid isolation from each other. Bernard Zylstra reminds us that if this were indeed the scriptural position it would disregard a "formidable body of social data." He then writes:

For an observer of the contemporary social scene is immediately confronted with an amazingly complex system of inter-connections between social spheres of intrinsically different inner nature such as the state, ecclesiastical bodies, families, industrial units, educational and scientific institutions, etc. One of the first ob­stacles which a pluralist social conception must overcome concerns an adequate account of this complexity without resorting to a universalist sociology. In other words, the question is whether the different social spheres can indeed maintain their intrinsic identity in the interweaving processes of modern society; … how can the multiple social relationships be adequately accounted for without considering them as parts of a more encompassing whole? ⁴⁹

The sociology of the Cosmonomic Law-idea answers this pertinent question in terms of its theory of "enkaptic interlacement." Briefly stated this means that the social spheres must be considered as existing in close connection with each other. The social forms, in which the internal structural principles of the social spheres are given a factual concrete shape in human history, are the junctures of numerous intertwinements between social spheres of different inner nature. Just as the human body consists of three enkaptically interwoven yet different structures of individuality, e.g., biological, psychical, and pistical (faith), so society consists of numerous enkaptic intertwinements of different structures of individuality. The family, for example, is typically interwoven with marriage, but the family is also interwoven with the institution of the state which legalizes it and with the church which blesses it in God's name. The family functions enkaptically within the state, and the church yet still remains intact as a family structure. The marriage ceremony establishes the link between the marriage community and the state without disturbing the inner nature of either social structure. Dooyeweerd rightly insists that this relation of enkapsis between two heterogeneous social spheres must be sharply distinguished from the relation of a whole to its parts.⁵⁰ The latter is present, for instance, in the relation between a state and its provinces. But a part-whole relation does not obtain between social spheres of a different individuality structure. That is, if a social bond exhibiting a distinct structure of individuality is bound "enkaptically" within another social bond of a different nature, the former will attain an enkaptic function within the latter, which does not belong to its inner sphere. But within its own inner sphere – determined as it is by its particular structural principle – the social bond has "sphere-sovereignty" and maintains its intrinsic typical character. In short, a civil ceremony of marriage enkaptically links marriage to the state without making marriage a function of the state. Likewise, a university may receive grants from the state without becoming its servant, though such a danger always exists. A trade union may be closely connected with a government department in carrying out labor policy, but this does not necessarily involve the subordination of the former to the latter institution. If these social institutions are genuinely seeking to express their own normative internal structural principles, they will maintain an authentic existence which need not be derived from nor beholden to the state. Here, as in the realm of personal freedoms, the condition of corporate freedoms of such associations is eternal vigilance. Unless the will to be independent of state control exists in the human heart, no institution can hope to resist encroachment by the leviathan state. Such a will to freedom has in actual historical experience been found to arise only out of a living faith in the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. This should not be surprising, for did not Christ tells us, "I am the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6)? Only as we walk in His way, believe in His Truth, and share in His life can we hope to remain free of domination by the apostate forces of darkness which today are seeking to destroy the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

Deep in the fabric of Anglo-Saxon society there is embedded an apostate humanist conviction that religion divides men but reason unites them. Ever since the days of the Cambridge Platonists in England during the seventeenth century there has increasingly taken hold of Anglo-American society a belief in the dogma of the commonness of reason and in the possibility of community between men apart from a common allegiance to the rule of Christ. In this rationalism we have a major historical factor in the rise of the humanist idea of society as being based upon man's sovereign will and reason rather than upon God's. Religion must be confined strictly to men's private lives because it is sectarian and breaks up community between men. Thus in seeking for a basis for human society humanists have sought to find a common ground and field in the non-religious areas of life. Here true unity can be attained and civil liberties safeguarded. All can be satisfied and all can receive equal treatment provided men do not allow their private religious convictions to intrude into the non-religious areas of life.

As an example of this apostate humanist drive to exclude religion from modern life we may cite the 42nd Annual Report of the American Civil Liberties Union, which clearly states: "The best guarantee of religious freedom … is to keep the state out of religious affairs. Neither the public school nor any other agency of government should be used to promulgate any or all religious faith … The practice of religion properly belongs to the church, synagogue and the home."⁵¹

For the same reason, no doubt, the signers of the recent Marlow "Declaration on Social and Industrial Relations" which included the present Archbishop of Canterbury, A. M. Ramsey, and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, saw fit to make no mention of their own faith in Jesus Christ as Lord of industry. Instead, these modernistic churchmen also appealed to some supposed common reason and principle of social utility to bind managers and workers together into community. The Marlow "Declaration" in fact states that: "Society is created by man for man. One cannot take from society without giving in return." No true Christian could possibly subscribe to such a doctrine. Society is created by Almighty God for His glory. The "Declaration" also states:

A happy and smooth working industrial partnership requires that

1. the dignity of man is respected at all times,
2. there is an effective system of negotiation and consultation using all appropriate methods, and
3. responsibility is fully accepted individually and collectively.⁵²

Such a humanistic faith in man's dignity apart from any recognition that he has been created in God's image and apart from the fact that Christ died for him is a sorry basis upon which to rebuild indus­try. As J. S. Whale has well written in the Protestant Tradition:

If there be no living God, the sovereign Creator and Redeemer in whose image man is made, why should the individual take precedence over the mass; over Party, or Nation or Race? Why should the ant be more important than the ant-heap? Take away faith in the living God who made man for himself, and who overarches the whole human scene in his transcendent sovereignty – and the special status of the individual is gone. That place of honour which liberal philosophy claims for him is his only because Christ died for him … It is precisely in those countries which care nothing for Christ's death that in a very short space of time they come to care nothing for a man's life…

It has become increasingly evident to us that the sacred right of the individual human person is a sacred right, but only because it presupposes dogmatic faith in a revelation from on high. The sanctity of the free personality of man is going to depend in the future, as it has done in the past, not on the so-called decencies of man, nor on the benevolent paternalism of the welfare state, nor on the tender mercies of private enterprise, nor on the visionary operations of inevitable progress, but on the vitality of supernatural religion; in short, on the vindication of the Crown Rights of the Redeemer in His Church. Protestants stand for the two ideas of supernatural religion and liberty; for these two ideas in combination; and for the historic conviction that in the long run you cannot have either alone. You must have both together, or neither; since God's service is perfect freedom, and since it is only in freedom that God can be truly served.⁵³

Unfortunately, today the apostate humanists are bent on keeping God out of both the public school and the field of labor relations. In North America both the public school and the "neutral" union adhere in principle to majority rule and both fail to honor the rights of the minority. Both offer fringe benefits to the minority; the public school permits those having conscientious objections to be released from class. The labor "bosses" permit those having conscientious objections to the union to seek work elsewhere. Neither gives an answer to the question: How can there be freedom for parents to educate their children according to their religious convictions on an equal footing with non-Christians if their convictions do not agree with those of the government schools? There can only be freedom and justice for all in the realms of civil rights, education, and labor when all men recognize that life is religion and that religion does in fact penetrate all areas of life and will not stay confined within the limits in which the apostate humanists have tried to enclose it.

In The Politics of Mass Society, William Kornhauser reminds us that the mere fact of a multiplicity of associations in a society does not necessarily provide the conditions of pluralism that alone can assure the survival of personal and communal freedoms. The population of a society could be organized into a set of associations that merely served the interests of the state as in the case of the Hitler Youth movement. He therefore argues that what is required for a pluralist society is a multiplicity of affiliations, wherein no one group is inclusive of its members' lives. Thus labor unions have members of various ethnic and religious groups, churches cut across class lines, and political parties draw from a heterogeneous range within the population. Such extensive crosscutting affiliations prevent one line of social cleavage such as class from becoming dominant. In Kornhauser view the essential condition for a liberal democracy is the existence of a number of autonomous secondary associations which reduces the vulnerability of their members to domination by elites. In other words, it is the pluralist type of society which we have advocated in this chapter to which Kornhauser's turns as a protection against any trend towards totalitarian democracy. He writes:

In summary, a liberal democracy requires widespread participation in the selection of leaders, and a large amount of self-governing activity on the part of non-elites. It also requires competition among leaders and would-be-leaders, and a considerable autonomy for those who win positions of leadership. The basic question arises, what kind of social structure will meet these conditions of liberal democracy? The theory of mass society expounded in the present study implies that social pluralism is a social arrangement which performs this function. A plurality of independent and limited-function groups supports liberal democracy by providing social bases of free and open competition for leadership, widespread participation in the selection of leaders, restraint in the application of pressures on leaders, and self-government in wide areas of social life. Therefore, where social pluralism is strong, liberty and democracy tend to be strong: and conversely, forces which weaken social pluralism also weaken liberty and democracy.⁵⁴

While welcoming Kornhauser's thesis we would conclude this chapter by pointing out that liberty and democracy first require a recognition of God's sovereignty and the will to remain free and independent of enslavement by the state, which the Spirit of Christ alone can provide.

Types of Social Structures
Structural Functional Criterion	Authoritative Communal Relationships	Non-authoritative Social Relationship	Free Social Relationships
Natural Communities	The Immediate Family	The Extended Family	Primitive Barter
Undifferentiated Bonds	Clan, Tribe	Guilds or Sib	Tribal Warfare
Differentiated Bonds in the process of history
Qualifying Function
Faith	Church as an Organized Community	Sectarian Group	Women's Society
Ethical	Masonic Lodge	Labor Union	Red Cross
Juridical	The State	Jurymen	Legal Professional Association
Aesthetic	Marine Band	Orchestra	Concert Audience
Economic	Revenue Department	Business Corporation	Stock Exchange
Social	American Army	Athletic Club	Baseball Spectators
Lingual	Government Information Service	Reuters News Agency	Ham Radio Group
Cultural	Soviet Ministry of Culture	Royal Society (Science Research)	Tourists
Analytical	Soviet Academy of Science	College Faculty	Student Debate

(Adapted from M. Vrieze's Introduction to Sociology syllabus lectures delivered at Trinity Christian College, Chicago, in 1968.)