Kuyper’s Calvinistic Life System as a Matrix for Glory-ology

A Life System

This week I began reading an abridged version of Abraham Kuyper’s 1898 Stone Lectures. In Lecture One, he speaks about life systems as that which explain humanity’s relation to God, one another, and the world. Kuyper argues that only Calvinism adequately explains humanity’s proper relations. We relate to God as the Sovereign Creator, who came to us intimately in the Incarnate Son. We relate to one another as God’s image bearers. We relate to the world both as fellow creatures and as having dominion, serving God as prophets, priests, and kings.

Driving Integration

This framework for a Christ-centered worldview is lofty: lofty enough to drive the hard work of interdisciplinary integration. Since God is the Sovereign Creator, we enter the task of integration with a simultaneous wonder and fear that can fuel proper care and overcome distraction. Since we are both creatures and image bearers, we enter the task of integration with humility before God and a longing to share in his reflected glory. Since we stand before God and for the world as prophets, priests, and kings, we take the task of integration seriously, taking up the challenge to understand, explicate, and proclaim the glory of God reflected in his multifaceted creation.

A Matrix for Glory-ology

This call challenges me to make my writing and conversing clearer communications of God’s glory. Writing is thinking and if all my writing is focused on me or an assignment, however important or mundane, then is not my thinking likewise focused? This blog can provide a training ground of sorts, practicing my glory-explication skills. The same question of focus can be applied to conversation. Sunday morning brunch is one such conversation. Without making it something so structured as to drive out the relaxed friendliness, how can our conversation be more about proclaiming God’s glory and less about mundane dailies?

Reference
Kuyper, Abraham. Christianity: Total World And Life System. The Plymouth Rock Foundation (1996, 1898). 121 pages.