Jessica R. Joustra and Robert J. Joustra, eds. 2022. Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. xx + 224 pages.

Calvinism for a Secular Age is precisely what its subtitle says it is: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. It features a preface by Kuyper biographer James D. Bratt, an introduction by Robert J. Joustra, and a chapter on each of Kuyper’s Stone lectures: life-systems (Richard J. Mouw); religion (James Eglinton); politics (Jonathan Chaplin); science (Deborah B. Haarsma); art (Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin); and the future (Bruce Ashford). These are augmented by an additional chapter on race (Vincent Bacote) and the fascinating story of the text of Kuyper’s lectures (George Harinck). The book ends with a conclusion by Jessica R. Joustra.

The doctors Joustra served as the book’s editors, and their influence is clear and beneficial. With the exception of Harinck’s textual history, all of the chapters follow the same structure: introduction; “What did Kuyper say?”; “What did Kuyperians do?”; “What should we do?”; and further reading. Combined with the common primary text that unites them, the chapter sections ensure a consistency between each contribution too often missing from other edited volumes. As J. Joustra put it in her conclusion, it “has sought to introduce not all of Kuyper’s thought, but a particular work of Kuyper’s, his Stone Lectures” (201). As such, it succeeds at its goal, and I recommended it for any course on Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism. It is, put simply, an excellent book and, moreover, a far better book than most other works of the same kind.

That said, I have some comparatively minor criticisms that I offer here as, perhaps, notes toward a second edition. The other source I would recommend for the same imagined course would be Peter Heslam’s Creating a Christian Worldview, yet Heslam’s book receives surprisingly little citation, with the exception of Harinck and J. Joustra. Since 1998, Heslam’s has been the only other book-length work focused specifically on Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. An introductory work like Calvinism for a Secular Age needs not comprehensively survey the last 125 years of secondary literature, but I would want each chapter to at least identify what it adds on top of Heslam’s contribution, which remains a helpful guide to Kuyper’s lectures and is logically the chief competition to this new volume.

Additionally, I wish each chapter had included an introductory section on “What Did Kuyper Read?” This would help better situate his thought in his own time (including problematic elements like his views on race). For example, while Eglinton and Ashford mention Kuyper’s criticisms of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, among others, it is really only Bratt, in his preface, who notes Kuyper’s positive appropriation of German philosophy. This is unfortunate because readers could get the impression of a Cornelius-Van-Til-esque Kuyper, opposing the Christian and the worldly in too sharp a dichotomy. Yet one might reply, what about the antithesis? Does not Kuyper say as much?

Well, no, not on his own terms. Surveying the relevant, contemporary philosophical background to his thought, including concepts like the antithesis, could have clarified this and other seeming ambiguities. In particular, both Haarsma and A. Chaplin repeat a common confusion among Kuyper scholars: that Kuyper’s principles of the antithesis and common grace are in “tension” and must somehow be “balanced” in a prudential manner by Kuyperians today. But Kuyper, drawing, it seems clear to me, upon German philosophy and theology in general and perhaps even F. W. J. Schelling in particular, specifies that the antithesis is when a sphere of life, rightly liberated to exist in itself in the realm of common grace (as was art from subjugation to the church in the Reformation), then asserts its will to exist for itself apart from God. There is no “tension” in this framework, no “balancing” needed, just the clear vision of a well-informed worldview.

As Heslam put it, Kuyper’s “ideas” on art “ran counter to ‘art for art’s sake’” (Heslam 1998, 197). Why? Because, following the above dialectic, “art for art’s sake” is the antithesis of art as it is meant to be. So, too, we may add, politics for politics’ sake, science for science’s sake, business for business’s sake, and so on. Only when a sphere turns away from its ultimate end, the glory of God—whether through atheistic nihilism or idolatrous pantheism—does it become a sinful expression of the antithesis and, acknowledging no power above itself, diabolically asserts itself above all other powers.

Thus, either more attention to Heslam or to Kuyper’s contemporary intellectual context could have greatly improved this already excellent book. But, I reiterate, it is an excellent book. In addition to solid introductions to the lectures; a stellar preface, introduction, and conclusion; and a careful grappling with some of Kuyper’s real shortcomings throughout each chapter but especially in Bacote’s—Harinck’s chapter on the complicated history of the text of the Lectures on Calvinism is the icing on the cake. It is an excellent piece of historical scholarship, bringing together personal correspondence, secondary literature, and other archival sources to convincingly correct Heslam’s (and others’) understanding of the lectures’ origins. Any second edition of Calvinism for a Secular Age should leave Harinck’s contribution exactly as it is, as it makes the book an essential resource for any future scholarship on the Stone Lectures for years to come.

Beyond its value for Neocalvinist studies, Calvinism for a Secular Age is a model for what all multi-author edited volumes ought to strive for: each chapter with a distinct and coherent topic, structure, boundaries, and goal, each together contributing to a whole greater than itself and, truly, to the glory of God. Now, what might have inspired something like that?

Dylan Pahman