An accidental blog

"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.

Friday 29 January 2016

#Kuyperania January 2016

I have updated the Kuyper pages on allofliferedeemed. There is now:


Do let me know if there is anything out there I've missed.


The latest edition of Transformation has two papers looking at Kuyper and Dooyeweerd:

Thomas Harvey. 2016. Sphere Sovereignty, Civil Society and the Pursuit of Holistic Transformation in Asia. Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 33: 50-64, doi:10.1177/0265378815595246

Timothy Keene. 2016. Kuyper and Dooyeweerd: Sphere Sovereignty and Modal Aspects.  Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 33: 65-79, doi:10.1177/0265378815625441

Brian Collins over at Exegesis and Theology has a brief review of Bratt's Abraham Kuyper.

James Bratt takes a brief relook at Kuyper's most famous quote over at The Twelve:

To recapitulate briefly: “every square inch” can be taken as our claim of possession—worse, of entitlement—as if all the earth belongs to us good Christians. In fact, Kuyper said, it belongs to Christ, a different proposition altogether. Plus, the philosophically informed physicist in the room this week pointed out that Kuyper’s original statement exercises a double negative which springs from a particular stream of continental thought and which is essential to its meaning: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
My own pet peeve is that this quotation typically comes without a hint of Kuyper’s strategic thinking, or—far worse—of Jesus’ own directives on the matter. In the first instance, “every square inch” can be taken to rubber-stamp whatever I want to do; after all, it’s all God’s work, and if it fits my ambition and salary demands, all the better. As to the second, here’s how Jesus dispatched his disciples into square-inch land: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Finally, from Kuyper’s own angle, we should rehearse another word he uttered in the same speech in which the square-inch statement appears, so as to take due recognition of who occupies our brave new world: “It cannot be said often enough: money creates power for the one who gives over the one who receives.” American politics anyone?
In short, we cannot capture Kuyper in just one quotation, even if it’s his most famous. 

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