Abraham Kuyper

The nineteenth century was one of great system builders, and although we are perhaps more familiar with British or German architects, James Bratt examines for us Abraham Kuyper's efforts to construct a Dutch society for modernity, an atlas for the Dutch Calvinist world. What made Kuyper so remarkable was his equally prodigious talents at intellectual system-building, organizational founding, and grassroots mobilizing. These talents propelled him into numerous leading roles: pastor, university founder and professor of theology, newspaper publisher, leader of a secession church, spiritual writer, political party organizer and parliamentarian, and eventually prime minister of the Netherlands. Any of these roles would make him of interest; all of them combined make Kuyper a monumental figure, as well as a challenge for a historian. James Bratt has succeeded very well in meeting that challenge. Bratt's biography is a persuasive combination of intellectual and social-political history, and only that combination could adequately capture Kuyper's life. With a figure as dynamic as Kuyper, one challenge is to provide some order to the mass of events. Bratt offers a three-part framework that makes good sense of Kuyper's life. He begins with Kuyper's early life and background and moves quickly into his intellectual formation at the University of Leiden, where he encountered the foremost liberal thinkers of his day. Here, early on, a trajectory was set of attempting to reconcile Calvinism and modernity. Bratt's research is thorough, revealing, for example, Kuyper's early doubts about the incarnation (one way to reconcile Calvinism and modernity) in letters to his fiancé Jo Schaay. In the second part we find Kuyper constructing his own system of thought and the institutions that would instantiate it. Throughout the book, Bratt sets Kuyper alongside contemporaries of all sorts, social theorists such as Max Weber, philosophers such as F. W. J. Schelling, all kinds of political actors, and even a spiritualist such as Sir Author Conan Doyle. In such company, Kuyper does truly appear larger than life. Bratt also places Kuyper amid larger social forces and economic conditions—for example, the economic difficulties, personal and national, of Kuyper's early life and the prosperity of the Netherlands during the 1890s, which coincided with Kuyper's most progressive outlook. Bratt's sweeping vision enables us to understand Kuyper's place on the world stage as well as in the Netherlands's particular history.

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