Abraham Kuyper

Abraham Kuyper unquestionably had his failures and his blind spots. But he also labored to find balanced and faithful Christian realist positions on international affairs. We would do well to imitate those principles today.

We have an introductory, if provisional, picture of anti-Revolutionary foreign policy and Abraham Kuyper’s platform coming into the highest political office in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century. How did this platform fair? What “necessary adjustments” (as Kuyper called them) did he need to make between his Calvinistic international theory and the actual work of foreign policy?

While much has been made of Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinistic contributions to domestic political theory, very little (in English) has been said of his foreign policy.

Simon Polinder and Govert Bujis advance a new school of Christian international relations thinking that they call “The Amsterdam School.” Time will tell if this distinctively Neo-Calvinist international relations approach is possible.

It could be easy to be cynical about Neighborly Faith and the organization’s interfaith conference that took place on November 1 and 2 at Wheaton College.

For Kuyper, governance is an opportunity to plant Christian truth in another part of the world’s soil. It is about giving others a chance to flourish.