1. Sphere Sovereignty
Abraham Kuyper’s big idea about society was sphere sovereignty. For Kuyper, there was only one absolute sovereign, only one to whom all authority on heaven and earth had been given (Matthew 28:18), Jesus Christ. All earthly authorities were subject to the rule of Christ and their authority was limited in scope and function.
Looking back to the book of Genesis, Kuyper saw that parents have a responsibility to care for, educate and raise their children which is prior to the existence of government. Echoing Peter and John’s words to the Sanhedrin in Acts 5:29 “We must obey God rather than human beings!”, Kuyper was clear that the church has a responsibility to proclaim and live out the gospel with which government ought not to interfere. In short, the family and the church have their own authority, given directly by God, and separate from the authority given to government. From these biblical ideas, Kuyper reasoned by analogy that there were other spheres in society whose institutions had their own proper authority: education had its schools and universities, health its hospitals, commerce had its businesses, journalism had its newspapers, science had its institutes, the arts had their concert halls, theatres, libraries and museums. There are different goods which human beings have been given to pursue (the goods of love, learning, health, economic flourishing, communication, discovery, culture, faith and order) and a society is healthy when the institutions in each of these spheres are given the liberty to pursue these goods in an appropriate way.
Kuyper clearly saw the danger of the over-powerful government, the absolute State, whether a personality cult like that of Louis XIV or Napoleon of France, a militarist collective like Bismarck’s Prussia, or a revolutionary republic like the one established by the French Revolution in 1792.
Kuyper’s idea of sphere sovereignty limits and clarifies the role of government. The goods which government exists to pursue are those of order and justice. Government is to provide a framework for the orderly interaction of the different social spheres and their institutions, government is to regulate the institutions operating in their different spheres, and government is to protect the weak who may be abused in any particular sphere.
2. The Anti-Revolutionary Party
Born in 1837, Abraham Kuyper grew up in the shadow of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquest of mainland Europe. He was only 10 when the 1848 Year of Revolutions began. The Netherlands was just one of 50 polities affected by a wave of political change more dramatic and widespread than that of the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012. The outcome of the 1848 revolution in the Netherlands was the establishment of representative democracy, but in many other places the revolutions were suppressed at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
When Kuyper went into politics, he called his political party, the Anti-Revolutionary Party. Commentators have sometimes criticised his choice of name, suggesting that he committed the besetting sin affecting Christian involvement in politics, that of declaring most clearly what we are against rather than presenting a positive vision of what we stand for. This criticism is unfair. Through the choice of name, Kuyper was signalling that his party would be progressive but that it believed in the importance of change being gradual and organic, a development from existing traditions rather than a sudden, violent disruption and dislocation of what had gone before.
Like his contemporaries in Victorian England, Kuyper recognised that the world was changing rapidly. Though he was deeply concerned to maintain Reformed orthodoxy, his vision for society was progressive, seeking to identify a framework of principles within which technological and societal development could be shaped for good. Kuyper’s view of politics was similar to that of Edmund Burke, politics is an art in which law-makers whose judgment is fallible attempt to make rules to govern the behaviour of a people who are fallible. Revolutions are destructive because their ideological justification is hubristic, the fatal assumption that we, the revolutionaries, know best and can govern perfectly. Kuyper’s fallibilism is of a piece with his idea of sphere sovereignty. Because it is not safe for any human being or group of human beings to have total sovereignty, God has, in His wisdom, distributed authority among different groups and institutions, in order that these might limit and temper the excesses and failures of each other. Because of the dangers of concentrated power and dangers of erroneous judgment, laws should optimise liberty of conscience, association and expression. This form of fallibilist liberalism might therefore appropriately be described as “limitism,” because of its strong emphasis on the limitations on government.
3. Common Grace
The idea of sphere sovereignty requires that there be limits to law in order that the institutions in different spheres have freedom to pursue their distinct goals according to their own best judgment. Kuyper’s fallibilism acknowledges that no-one has all the answers as to what laws should be made or how the different goals of human life are to be pursued. Kuyper’s social vision is therefore a pluralist one; it is a “live and let live” approach in which a nation is united by its commitment to a common set of institutions and to a common framework rather than to a single overarching social vision.
On Kuyper’s approach, therefore, politics is the art of finding common ground and forming alliances in order to advance the common good. Some theologians understand God’s covenant with Noah in Genesis 9 as God’s authorisation for post-lapsarian politics. Kuyper drew attention to another feature of that chapter: the rainbow. Kuyper saw the rainbow as the sign of God’s grace given to all, regardless of whether they are yet followers of Christ or not. Because our world is God’s world, something of what God has created as good for human beings is accessible to everyone. Kuyper called the idea that everyone knows something of how God wants human beings to flourish, “common grace.”
Fallibilism means that, because of the Fall, no-one (Christian or not) knows God’s will fully. Common grace means that, despite the Fall, no-one (Christian or not) is wholly ignorant of God’s will. As a result, Christians can humbly participate in the making of laws, working with others and learning from others, in order to find the optimal solutions to the problems of regulating our common life.
Conclusion
Laws were, for Kuyper, rules which promoted justice and the common good. Because of God’s common grace, all have the capacity to participate in the adoption of just laws. Because of the Fall, changes in the legal order should be organic developments from existing traditions rather than revolutionary changes. Because God has distributed authority among different institutions, justice is about ordering the interactions between institutions from different spheres, providing a necessary framework of regulation for institutions in their own spheres, and protecting the weak against institutions abusing their authority.
Dr David McIlroy is Chair of Trustees at KLC. He is a practising barrister and is Adjunct Professor at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in England. He is the author of various books, most recently The End of Law: How Law’s Claims relate to Law’s Aims (2019). Visit his website: theologyoflaw.org.
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