Lectures on Calvinism - Part 4

Kuyper identifies three required conditions for any all-embracing world and life view. They are:

1. Our relation to God

2. Our relation to man

3. Our relation to the world

He then demonstrates how Paganism, Islamism, Romanism, Modernism, and Calvinism all relate to man to these three entities and how Calvinism is the only one that really satisfies these conditions.

With regard to our relation to God:

A. Paganism surmises, assumes and worships God in the creature.

B. Islam isolates God from the creature in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.

C. Romanism teaches that God enters into fellowship with the creature by means of a mystic middle-link, which is the Church

D. Modernism essentially says there is no God.

E. Calvinism proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit. This is even the heart and kernel of the Calvinistic confession of predestination.

With regard to our relation to man:

A. Paganism teaches that God dwells in man, and therefore whatever is high among men is observed as divinely superior – thus it moves to a sort of hero-worship. But while what is high is exalted, what is low is demoted and thus leads to a caste-type system.

B. Islamism dreams of its own paradise and sensuality ultimately usurps public authority and thus woman becomes the slave of man.

C. Romanism, which took root in Christian soil, overcomes the absolute character of distinction, and renders it relative, in order to interpret every relation of man to man hierarchically. Aristocratic thinking then becomes the cultural ideal.

D. Modernism attempts to abolish every difference until man becomes woman and woman becomes man. It kills life by putting human relationships under the ban of uniformity.

E. Calvinism places our lives immediately before God and it follows that none of us as lost sinners has the right to lord it over another. We stand as equals before God. It recognizes no distinction among men except such as has been imposed by God himself. Those that do have more authority in their offices or those who have been given greater wealth or greater abilities have it as their mission to serve those who have fewer gifts and fewer possessions and in so doing serve God.

With regard to our relation to the world:

A. Paganism takes too high a view of the world and to a certain extent stands in fear of it and loses itself in it

B. Islamism places to low an estimate upon the world and makes sport of it as it strives for a world of sensual paradise [heaven for many Muslims is seen as a place where a man has seventy virgins].

C. Romanism with its hierarchical thought pits the church against the world. Everything outside of the church is under the control of demons. Hence in a Christian country, the entire social life of the nation must be covered by the church.

D. Modernism: None given.

E. Calvinism in placing itself before the face of God has not only honored man for the sake of his likeness to the Divine image, but also the world as a Divine creation, and has at once placed to the front the great principle that there is a particular grace that works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammeled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator. Thus, we must in every domain of this world that is to be honored discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life.

So we see that Calvinism is the only world and life view that has a sufficient starting point with regard to each of these areas in which to live meaningful life.

It is interesting to see how true these things are still today in the twentyfirst century. Some things are changing, because the Modernism of Kuyper's day is in many places morphing into a kind of neo-paganism, but for the most part, this still describes the competing ideologies today. The one other thing that could be added is that many conservative Christians in America don't necessarily fall into any of these categories simply because they fail to think.