Reformed Politics: Abraham Kuyper

From Abraham Kuyper: A Christian Worldview.

1. The idea that people decide what is normative in life (called popular sovereignty) is opposed to the Word of God, which teaches that God is sovereign as the final lawgiver.

2. Christians confess the relevance of God’s Word even for politics, rejecting a vague concept of natural law or human reason.

3. The office of the state has been ordained to be God’s minister for justice through the conscience of public officials who believe in his ordinances.

4. Educational responsibility rests with parents and not with the state. The idea that, for financial reasons, Christian people have only a secularist public school open to them must be rejected.

5. A Christian political movement such as the Anti-Revolutionary Party must maintain its independence (from all forms of humanism and nonbiblical political views), based on the Bible.

This is an excellent pattern for what a Christian political movement in our day should look like. We need to oppose Enlightenment ideas of absolute popular sovereignty, because it only works when the public is seeking God’s will. I would like to respond to a lot of what I’ve been reading in Rousseau, but it’ll have to wait until after final exams.