Abraham Kuyper’s Critique of Theological Modernism

In a popular address of 1871, Kuyper famously spoke of modernism as ‘a fata morgana in the Christian domain’. It was Kuyper who made the term ‘modernism’ (modernisme) current at the time. His argument was more along the lines of philosophy of religion than of dogmatic theology. In fact, Kuyper compared worldviews and argued for the superiority of his own system of thought, which was allegedly geared to reality, whereas modernism to him represented a dishonourable compromise with the spirit of the times, based on a superficial understanding of reality. Modernism was in his view a heresy, denying special revelation. The rhetorical power of the 1871 speech lies predominantly in the suggestion that modernism (although a necessary phase in the course of history) would perish and ‘we’ would prevail. The speech turns on the double meaning of ‘real’ and ‘realism’. Kuyper argued that by making a compromise with the predominant ‘realism’ of the nineteenth century, modernists actually bypassed reality: no real God, no real prayer, no real sin, and no real church.