From Lectures on Calvinism:
"Everything that has been created was, in its creation, furnished by God with an unchangeable law if its existence. And because God has fully ordained such laws and ordinances for all life, therefore the Calvinist demands that all life be consecrated to His service, in strict obedience. A religion confined to the closet, the cell, or the church, therefore Calvin abhors. With the Psalmist, he calls upon heaven and earth, he calls upon all peoples and nations to give glory to God. God is present in all life, with the influence of His omnipresent and almighty power, and no sphere of human life is conceivable in which religion does not maintain its demands that God shall be praised, that God's ordinances shall be observed, and that every labora shall be permeated with its ora in fervent and ceaseless prayer. Wherever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand, in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science, he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of his God, he is employed in the service of his God, has strictly to obey his God, and above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God." (p. 53)
You are intent on reminding me why I love Kuyper so much!
ReplyDeleteI have found that the practical reality of a Two-Kingdoms view is that God and his glory are not on one's mind when one pursues one's cultural labors. One forgets, as one prepares a rat for experimentation, to bow the knee to pray God would grant fruitful scientific understanding. One forgets, as one advises one's assistant supervisor about the prevailing conditions in a therapy clinic, to urge her against secretly disobeying the general supervisor's standing instructions. The mind is conditioned, by modern Two-Kingdoms thought, to compartmentalize life, and to leave the secular sphere to its own autonomous standards of quality and ethics, and to baptize this with the rationalization that one is entering the "temporal kingdom," governed by "natural law." But only the ancient confession that Jesus alone sits crowned with all authority on heaven and earth (Mt. 28), and that his law-word is binding on Caesar and all Caesar's conduct, and that the Church has the responsibility of reminding Caesar of this--only this confession unifies the mind under the single banner of Jehovah, in work or in worship.