Unity and Engagement in the Modern World

In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.