Southern-Fried Kuyper? Robert Lewis Dabney, Abraham Kuyper, And The Limitations Of Public Theology

By Sean Michael Lucas

[Sean Michael Lucas is assistant pastor at Community Presbyterian Church (PCA), Louisville, Ky.]

In 1998, in light of the grand celebrations accorded to the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Kuyper’s Princeton Seminary Stone Lectures, Kuyper seemed more relevant than ever. Princeton Seminary, Free University of Amsterdam, and Calvin Seminary each hosted conferences proclaiming Kuyper’s historical and continuing importance, and several publications about Kuyper and his work were published, including a centennial Kuyper reader edited expertly by James Bratt, a fine study of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures by Peter Heslam, and an entire issue of the Calvin Theological Journal dedicated to Kuyper’s continuing legacy. All of this attention that Kuyper received in 1998 has not abated, for the three sets of conference papers were published shortly afterward, an important biography on Kuyper appeared in 2000, and John Bolt’s massive study of Kuyper’s public theology finally appeared in 2001. Most recently, in 2002, Princeton Seminary inaugurated the Abraham Kuyper Institute for Public Theology, headed by noted theological ethicist, Max Stackhouse. All of this “Kuyperiana” made James Skillen’s question at the end of one conference collection appear incredibly rhetorical: the question “Why Kuyper Now?” did not need to be answered, for most Reformed and even non-Reformed academics confessed that Kuyper’s thought provided “Christian insight and motive for action in today’s world.”[1]

With all the attention showered on the Dutch Reformed Kuyper, perhaps it is little surprise that another centennial anniversary passed barely noticed in 1998—the death of southern Presbyterian theologian, Robert Lewis Dabney, who passed away at age seventy-seven on January 3, 1898. To mark the centennial of Dabney’s death, no major seminary or university held a conference in

Dabney’s honor; no publications were issued to mark the occasion; not even the Westminster Theological Journal bothered to remember or assess Dabney’s importance and lasting legacy. While Dabney’s books remain in print, it is due primarily to the services of Banner of Truth Trust, the Scottish reprinter, and Sprinkle Publications, a tiny Virginia publisher that specializes in Calvinistic and Confederate books. If a major scholar had bothered to ask, “Why Dabney now?” he would have been hooted off the stage before he even got a chance to answer. While the official academic position on Dabney remains that he was “a racist, a strident reactionary, and an embittered man. .. not the most attractive of historical figures,” still it is strange that such a pivotal figure in American Presbyterian history, a revered theologian in a tradition that exalts theology, is remembered mainly by those who advocate keeping the stars and bars above southern state houses or those who believe in contemporary forms of patriarchy.[2]

Dabney’s poor reputation is especially striking when set against the high estimation accorded Kuyper. For as the recent work makes plain, Kuyper had his patriarchal, racist moments. And while Kuyper’s career was multifaceted, the same could be said of Dabney’s. While Dabney is most widely known for his thirty-year tenure at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, first as professor of ecclesiastical history and polity and then as professor of systematic and polemical theology, he also read as widely in politics and science as in philosophy and theology and was not shy about writing on issues that seemed far afield, such as public education or political economy. In addition, Dabney had a similar journalistic interest as Kuyper: upon graduating from the University of Virginia in 1840, Dabney had been offered the editorship of a Calhoun newspaper in Petersburg, Virginia; he later served as a co-editor of the Southern Presbyterian Review for several years after the Civil War; and he wrote widely for the southern Presbyterian papers as well as the public prints and journals. To top it off, Dabney authored the only complete nineteenth-century southern Presbyterian systematic theology; he was a founding faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin and Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary; and he served in prestigious positions within his denomination, including moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) General Assembly in 1870. While Dabney did not hold political office like Kuyper, he did something Kuyper did not, serving as chief-of-staff for Stonewall Jackson for five months during the American Civil War. While Kuyper’s wide-ranging experience is rightly applauded, Dabney’s career was similarly varied but much less celebrated.[3]

A comparison between Dabney and Kuyper is thinkable not only due to the similarities in their careers but also in their theological thought. Dabney and Kuyper were Reformed kin, near contemporaries though separated by an ocean. Kuyper loudly proclaimed his loyalties to Calvinism, both as the highest point of theological development as well as the safeguard of political liberties, and Dabney himself opined that “the Reformed Protestant theology reached its zenith in the seventeenth century.”[4] Particularly striking, though, are Dabney and Kuyper’s substantive similarities in the area of public theology. Both were profoundly conservative, viewing the egalitarianism unleashed by the 1789 French Revolution to be the disastrous spirit of modernism, blurring distinctions between classes, races, and sexes. Modernism was both ideology and praxis, both poisonous philosophical underpinning and dangerous practical outworking.[5] The leveling spirit of modernism had to be opposed by Christians through a consistent antimodern stance—where the culture said there was no God, Christians had to assert God’s sovereignty over all life and God’s divine order expressed in various sovereign spheres, such as church, state, and family. As a result, both Kuyper and Dabney withstood “anti-biblical theories of rights” while championing God’s moral order.[6]

These theologians responded to modernism by constructing public theologies that emphasized “ordered liberty.” Believing that social life was ordained by God’s will in creation and providence and taught to humankind in scripture, Kuyper and Dabney identified the household as the basic integer of society and the irreplaceable institute of public life. Households, headed by male representatives, taught subordination as well as separate gender spheres. They also served as “little States” where women, children, and servants were represented authoritatively in the master’s public work and suffrage. The rights of the household, particularly in the sphere of education, had to be protected. The state did not have the right to dictate to household heads how children should be educated. Rather, household heads had to be free to educate their children as they saw fit, as Christian households associated together for Christian education. Localism in education as well as other spheres of life was the only protection against the state’s continual craving for centralization and power.[7]

Above all, Kuyper and Dabney together teach well the limitations of public theology and the contorted relationship between theology and cultural analysis. Both promoted significant and viable visions of social order; both were motivated by Calvinism’s best thought; both were influential in their churches and societies. Yet both visions—Kuyper’s Dutch Calvinist Whiggery and Dabney’s southern Presbyterian conservatism—failed. Kuyper’s vision was rejected soundly by the end of his term as prime minister in 1905, while Dabney was forced into geographic and ecclesiastical exile in Texas in the 1880s. The failure of both men was due to the manner each blurred the lines between the secular and the sacred. While Kuyper boldly called for Christians to redeem every sovereign sphere for the Lord’s glory, such a transformationist stance at times lost the biblical antithesis between the church and the world. The secular and sacred thus blurred, the sacred became secularized and the keepers of the Kuyper vision eventually would fall into a culture-Protestant malaise. In contrast, Dabney so identified his social vision and organization with God’s own—one later southern historian expressed shock at the way Dabney identified God as a “southern partisan”—that there was no room to exercise self-criticism. By sacralizing the secular, identifying God’s will with southern institutions, Dabney’s vision led him to a deep and abiding despair at the end of his life. By failing to maintain the antithesis between sacred and secular, both Dabney and Kuyper’s public theologies demonstrate crucial limitations.[8]

I. Modernism: The Root of All Modern Evils

In constructing their public theologies, both Dabney and Kuyper recognized the great enemy to the faith to be modernism. For these theologians, modernism was a worldview, a philosophical perspective that portended destructive consequences for church and society. According to Kuyper, the modern worldview sought “to build a world of its own from the data of the natural man, and to construct man himself from the data of nature.” In similar fashion, Dabney observed that “the real tendency of all false philosophy must, in the end, be against good morals and religion.” The modern philosophy was false because it denied God’s existence and God’s creational and providential order in the world. In God’s place, modern philosophers substituted humankind and the sensory data gathered by humans. Hence, modernism was at its basis anti-Christian and engaged in “moral combat” with Christianity.[9]

For Kuyper, the modern worldview was represented by “pantheism,” a broad term that included most of nineteenth-century philosophy. Pantheism did away with transcendent deity and imbued the progress of the period with divine attributes. In doing so, pantheism denied both a beginning and ending point to human history; matter was involved in eternal process. Hence, the pantheism of the modern age was materialistic, bereft of any hope for the human spirit. While academic pantheistic philosophy was in general disrepute due to the rise of Nietzsche, Kuyper believed that the general ethos of modern culture was characterized by belief in a process-God that was leading humankind to higher stages of development. Because the modern ethos was pantheistic, the evolutionary theory, which represented “one of the most fertile ideas of pantheism, that of never-ceasing process,” was perfectly fitted for the temper of the age. Darwin’s argument, Kuyper observed, was not “a compelling, tightly argued proposition”; rather, it was “a hypothesis supported by a highly deficient process of induction whose general acclaim is rooted not in incontestable facts, still less in complete proof, but in a general cultural mood.” By virtue of the fact that modern men and women wanted “to rid [themselves] of God,” Darwin’s “purely atheistic” theory was widely trumpeted.[10]

Dabney also identified the modern worldview with materialistic philosophy. For Dabney, the modern philosophy was “sensualistic,” which represented a radical empiricism that “resolves all the powers of the human spirit into the functions of the five senses.” The sensualists were generally positivists, who divorced metaphysics from physics, who maintained that truth could be gained solely through a careful consideration of phenomena alone. These philosophers claimed that scientific laws could only be established through inductive data gained through sensation, without resort to metaphysical hypotheses. As a result, positivists regarded any resort to intuitive powers, primitive judgments, or a priori laws to be metaphysics and beyond the realm of true science. Likewise, laws of consciousness and psychology were deemed to be beyond the pale of scientific investigation. Pushed to its ultimate extreme, the sensualistic philosophy appeared to be a rank form of materialism, stripping human beings of an immaterial essence that survived death. Of course, such would also eliminate any spiritual being, like the Christian God, who could not be empirically verified through the five senses; positivism also sought to eliminate the possibility of the supernatural, such as miracles, which also could not be empirically verified. Dabney’s attack on positivism also merged with his opposition to evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory was “anti-Christian science” that attempted to account for the origins of the universe by reference to physical data alone, without appeal to divine causation. As a result, Dabney charged evolution with stark materialism, claiming that the theory merely posited eternal matter, “blind chance,” and long stretches of time to be necessary for creation. Eternal matter’s endless process might be trendy science, but Dabney claimed that it was pure “atheism.”[11]

However, modernism was not simply abstract philosophical theory confined to European universities or northern salons. Dabney, as well as Kuyper, was concerned that many had unconsciously adopted the materialist position without being fully conscious of doing so. Both held that the most important conduit for modernism was not academic philosophy, but the social attitudes and political economy associated with the French Revolution. As often noted, Kuyper heaped scorn upon the French Revolution, claiming that “the principle of that Revolution remains thoroughly anti-Christian.” It was rooted in “the odious shibboleth, ‘No God, no Master,’” and sought nothing less than “the liberation of man as an emancipation from all Divine Authority.” The French Revolution introduced “a change of system, of political organization, of general human theory.” The Revolution “broke down” the social bonds of “an organically integrated society” and “left nothing but the monotonous, self-seeking individual asserting his own self-sufficiency.” Above all, Kuyper claimed that “the Scriptures were unraveled and the Word of God shamefully repudiated in order to pay homage to the majesty of Reason” by the Revolution. The spirit of the modern age—independence from God and exaltation of humankind—was the spirit of the French Revolution.[12]

Dabney also scored the French Revolution for similar reasons. He traced the “decadence of political, commercial, and domestic virtue” in America to the fact that “the philosophy of Comte, Stuart Mill, and Darwin has been rapidly gaining ground.” And the sensualistic philosophy led ultimately to the views of natural rights promoted by the French Revolution and its “Reign of Terror.” The maxim of the radical social theory taught by the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 was that “all men are born free and equal.” These “Jacobins” believed that every human had natural liberty, which Dabney defined as “freedom to do whatever he wishes,” and civil liberty, “the remainder of his natural prerogative not surrendered to the social contract.” Hence, it was a sin against nature “to withhold from any adult person by law any prerogative which is legally conferred on any other member in society.” Under this theory, equality was “mechanical as well as moral.” What was particularly problematic with this view of natural rights was the way the supporters of the Revolution grounded their rights. Rather than appealing to God, the Jacobins rooted natural rights in human beings themselves and in a social contract whereby citizens willingly gave up some portion of their natural rights—such as self-defense or the limitation of markets during economic crisis—in order to exist with one another. As a result, through the necessary corollary of the social contract, the radicals held that human government was a natural evil, entailing the restriction of natural liberty, as well as a human creation, liable to revolution in each generation.[13]

Because the modern worldview exalted human beings to the place of God, broke the socially organic bonds that held society together, and promoted a radically egalitarian view of natural rights, modernism led to the blurring of traditional distinctions of gender, class, and race. Both theologians stood opposed to the manner in which modernism sought to redraw the spheres that had “traditionally” separated women and men.

Kuyper, for example, worried that “an attempt is being made to transform the two sexes, masculine and feminine, into a neutral hybrid of the two.” Moreover, women were invading spheres traditionally reserved for men—particularly, university education and politics. In order to shore up the wall between the sexes, Kuyper sought to reestablish marriage, which he fretted was being transformed into “free love,” as the proper female calling and sphere. In order to uphold marriage, Kuyper “dichotomize[d] the cultural mandate by gender.” As feminist scholar Mary Stewart van Leeuwen has demonstrated, Kuyper held that God urged women to be fruitful and multiply, while men were to subdue the earth. One fine example of this type of Christian womanhood, according to Kuyper, was the Boers: “The Boers consider fecundity a blessing of the Almighty, and the wife-mother rejoices without a shadow of feminisme in her unquestioned predominance in family life and social arrangements. Free from all desire of luxury, Boer women are almost exclusively devoted to their husbands and their children.” In addition, Kuyper strongly opposed the movement for woman’s suffrage in the Netherlands, which he identified with the French Revolution’s emphasis upon radical individualism and egalitarianism. Kuyper warned that if women forsook their “biblical” callings for the public sphere, their natures would become “masculinized” and “the essential power of the woman over the man” would diminish. Kuyper blamed nineteenth-century feminism for participating in the blurring of the boundaries that separated women and men, an example of the evil effects of the French Revolution.[14]

In the same way, Dabney opposed the late-nineteenth-century American feminist movement. As early as 1871, Dabney held that the “women’s rights women” had two goals. First, the feminists wanted the legislation of the United States not to recognize any “natural distinctions of the sexes” but to award “the same specific rights and franchises to both in every respect.” Second, and more dangerously, these women wanted to be “released from every species of conjugal subordination” in marriage. This, in turn, led to “assimilation” in clothing, the workplace, amusements, and recreations. To abandon gender distinctions in this way, Dabney warned, would produce a woman who was “unsexed and denaturalized, shorn of the true glory of her femininity,” appearing to men “as a feeble hybrid mannikin, with all the defects and none of the strength of the male.” A few years later, Dabney feared that women were attempting to invade the pulpit as well. Proponents of women preachers claimed that because women were equal to men in piety, calling, and spiritual gifts, they should be allowed to preach. Dabney, however, upheld the home as the proper sphere for a woman: “God has assigned to her a private sphere sufficiently important and honorable to justify the whole expenditure of angelic endowments—the formation of the character of children. This is the noblest and most momentous work done on earth.” Dabney passionately believed that the female desire to escape her God-ordained feminine private sphere in order to advance into the masculine public sphere arose from the spirit of the age and from the faulty political axiom that “all men are by nature equal.” Ultimately, however, the movement for gender rights was actuated by “a Satanic ingenuity” to “destroy Christianity and civilization in America.” If women adopted the prevailing radical doctrine of natural rights, then Christians must “surrender our Bibles and have an atheistic government” and expect the home to be ruled by “that most abhorrent of all phenomena, an infidel woman.”[15]

Both theologians also opposed the way modernism blurred distinctions between classes. As van Leeuwen has observed, Kuyper took it “for granted that middle-class households will have servants, and that lower-class families will prepare some of their children for their service.” These class distinctions were rooted in the divine will. Kuyper held that “God himself has divided unequally the wealth of his creation.. .. Among people there is no equality and there can be none. Everything differs. People from people, station from station, and even in the same social station family to family.” To be sure, Kuyper championed the “little people”; still, it is not clear that he believed that social mobility was the solution to the social problem. Moreover, while Kuyper worried about the injustice that the modern economy perpetrated against the poor and feared the potential for cataclysmic upheaval if the poor attempted to annihilate distinctions between wealth and poverty through revolution, he still affirmed a providentially ordered society where every citizen knew his or her place.[16]

Dabney was, perhaps, more class conscious than Kuyper, due in part to the former’s attachment to the southern genteel ideal, with its emphasis upon honor, mastery, and gentility.17 Still, Dabney feared the way egalitarian principles, derived from the modern worldview, threatened to undo paternalistic hierarchies in the American South. Dabney was convinced that “God has made a social sub-soil to the top-soil, a social foundation in the dust for the superstructure,” which utopian egalitarianism could not destroy. Society must have a laboring class, which did not read but worked, and an elite class, which guided social and political life. Dabney’s view of societal change essentially embodied a “trickle-down” theory: “It is one of the most important and best established maxims of social science that influence descends. Hence, if you would permeate the whole popular mass with any wholesale influence, the wise plan is to place the element of good at the top, that it may percolate downwards.” Rather than attempting to elevate the lower classes through philanthropic means, or protecting their rights through the organization of labor, Dabney claimed that society would be better served to “provide for the rise of the superior class” who would then diffuse civilizing influences throughout the social organism.[18]

However, for Dabney, the potential radical leveling of classes was not primarily concerned with the streams of immigrants flooding northeastern urban centers but with the abolition of slavery and the prospective elevation of African-Americans to a position of equality with southern whites. Keeping the classes in their respective “places” actually meant consigning blacks to society’s bottom rung. In order to insure that blacks remained a “laboring class,” Dabney demonstrated an intense racial antipathy that helped set the stage for the South’s postbellum racial orthodoxy.[19] For example, after the Civil War, Dabney opposed any equality of African-American Presbyterians within the PCUS, warning that black ordination would lead to race mixing which in turn would lead finally to social amalgamation and miscegenation. By admitting African-American males into the sessions and the presbyteries of the church, southern Presbyterians were one step away from race-mixing, for “you must have this negro of yours reviewing and censuring the records of white sessions, and sitting to judge appeals brought before you by white parties, possibly by white ladies!” In the same way, Dabney opposed postbellum attempts in Virginia to educate African-Americans and to extend the franchise to them. Political equality—granted through black suffrage and education—would lead to social equality, which in turn would lead to miscegenation and amalgamation. “The curse of mixed blood” and the fear of the “bestial black man” were potent bogeymen to rally whites to Dabney’s position. That these fears had the potential to become realities were the disturbing yet seemingly inevitable results of the modern worldview.[20]

Kuyper did not share Dabney’s race antipathy, but he still wobbled on racial issues. While Kuyper held that “Calvinism condemns not merely all open slavery and systems of caste, but also all covert slavery of women and of the poor,” he also believed that blacks were outside the organic method of human advancement, “the commingling of blood.” While the descendents of two sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth, “have been the sole bearers of the development of the race,” Kuyper believed that “no impulse for any higher life has ever gone forth from the third group,” that is, the descendents of Ham. Kuyper also claimed that the inhabitants of Africa represented “a far lower form of existence” that failed to participate in the developing life-stream of humanity. As a result, Kuyper strongly defended the dealings of the Boers with their black African neighbors. When the Boers instituted race-based slavery earlier in the nineteenth century, they “were compelled to take effective measures to safeguard their families.” South African slavery was not as harsh as in the American South; rather, the Boers “have treated their slaves as good children. They have habituated them to work and have softened their manners.” In fact, the Boers “understood that the Hottentots and the Bantus were an inferior race and that to put them on an equal footing with whites, in their families, in society, and in politics would be simple folly.” Equality for Africans would ultimately lead to “the danger of mixed liaisons,” the “scourge” of amalgamation and miscegenation. Separating the races in South Africa would prevent the same disastrous race relations experienced in America from occurring, where black “racial passion” led them to seek “conquest over the white man.” Kuyper concluded that “between blacks and whites there will never be lasting reconciliation.” As D. Th. Kuiper noted, Kuyper’s racist perspectives differed little from other “scholars and sociopolitical movements (liberal-conservative and Marxist movements included) during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century.” More to the point, Kuyper’s fears of racial equality were fueled by the potential for social convulsion that would result from the “co-mingling” of “black and white” blood, a type of equality and fraternity promoted by that most modern of revolutions, the French Revolution.[21]

II. A Public Theology of “Ordered Liberty”

Modernism, then, had the potential to remake society completely in both the American South and the Netherlands. Springing from a principle that substituted human in place of divine authority, the modern worldview was attempting to de-Christianize the West with disastrous results. In order to preserve the permanent things of Christian civilization, Dabney and Kuyper both articulated public theologies that stood for “ordered liberty.” For both theologians, ordered liberty defined natural rights and civil liberties not in a framework offered by modernism’s “anarchic individualism” fashion, but in terms of the “social bond individualism” taught by God through general and special revelation and providentially established in local institutions, especially the household.[22]

Both theologians were confident that social life was not haphazard, left to chance or to the will of human beings. Rather, each held that the Bible was the chief source for political economy and sought to ground public theology in the Christian Scriptures. For example, Dabney maintained that Scripture taught “those equitable principles on which all constitutional governments are founded.” In particular, in the Bible God told all humankind that God’s preferred political order was “a confederation of little republican bodies represented by their elderships,. .. the representative republic as distinguished from the leveling democracy.” In place of a centralized, omnipotent Leviathan state, Dabney envisioned a society that started with the household and ascended representatively to the state. This “Bible republicanism” was taught not only by the great English and American constitutional scholars, but also by Job and the Apostle Paul. To stand against Bible republicanism in favor of the progressive doctrine that “all men are born free and equal” was to adopt a social theory that was “anti-biblical” at the core, challenging the very inspiration of the Scriptures. Dabney’s counsel for Christians in the New South was to adopt the “one safe position,” namely, “to stand on the whole Scripture, and refuse to concede a single point.”[23]

Kuyper shared Dabney’s assurance that Scripture revealed truth for ordering public life. In castigating pantheism’s blurring of distinctions in modern life, Kuyper turned from the human authority trumpeted by modernism to the divine authority found in the Bible. The Scriptures were “a cedar tree of spiritual authority” for modern life, Kuyper claimed. And the Scriptures demarcated “a life-sphere of our own on the foundation of palingenesia, and a life-view of our own thanks to the light that the Holy Spirit kindles on the candelabra of Scripture.” What is more, as theologian John Bolt has noted, Kuyper’s “Christian-historical imagination” was “rooted in divine revelation”; as a result, Kuyper honored the past “by reappropriating its ‘truth’ through creative application to the present, with the visionary promise of future blessing.” Most often, for Kuyper, Calvinism as a life-system assumed the priority of Scripture in public theology. As a result, when Kuyper upheld the “absolute sovereignty of God” as the basis for civil liberty, he assumed that divine sovereignty was to be demonstrated by the self-revelation of God in Scripture.[24]

From this foundation of Scripture, both Dabney and Kuyper claimed that God had revealed certain social principles that had to be established for a properly functioning social organism. Dabney’s Bible republicanism rested on the belief that the Bible taught “by precept and implication, those equitable principles on which all constitutional governments are founded.” The Bible, particularly in the Fifth Commandment, constituted a “civil society of superiors, inferiors, and equals, making the household represented by the parent and master the integral unit of the social fabric.” In addition, the Scriptures “established between all men a moral, but not a mechanical equality. Higher and lower hold alike the same relation to the supreme ruler and ordainer of the commonwealth, God; yet they hold different relations to each other in society, corresponding to their differing capacities and fitnesses, which equity itself demands.” Equality before the law did not mean equal opportunity, station, or result; rather, it meant that the same law equally protected both the upper class and the laboring class, whites and blacks, men and women. Further, equality before the law did not rule out social inequality. Dabney believed that caste distinctions were not “essentially sinful” and, in fact, could “be righteous.” And because God ordained a “republican” society, with an established and ordered hierarchy, a different definition of natural liberty emerged. According to Dabney, the biblical view of natural liberty was “freedom to do whatever [a person] has a moral right to do,” not whatever a person pleased. Different classes of citizens, created by God and ruled by God’s providence, had differing moral rights, which were founded upon “eternal moral distinctions.” A white male master had different rights from his slave or his wife, and he enjoyed these rights because he was “morally and intellectually qualified” to do so.[25]

According to Dabney, the institution where these differing rights were learned was the household. In the household, each member had his or her sphere of influence and responsibility. While the father served as master over the household and the mother served in her sphere, children were akin to slaves, minors under the tutelage of the master. In many ways, the household operated as a little commonwealth. For women and children, their situation was similar to slaves within the household: “The family is his State. The master is his magistrate and legislator.. .. He is a member of municipal society only through his master, who represents him. The commonwealth knows him only as a life-long minor under the master’s tutelage.”[26] Moreover, Dabney’s household was a school within which the most important principles of public life were learned, such as authority and subordination. “Every human being,” Dabney claimed, was “born under authority (parental and civic) instead of being born ‘free’ in the licentious sense.” Parental authority over the household was wide-ranging and complete. Dabney observed, “Parental authority is the most remarkable and absolute one delegated by God to man over his fellowman. Consider: it authorizes the parent to govern the child for a fourth of his life as a slave.” Subordination, “the natural state of man,” was learned within the household as well. Every human being existed within a hierarchy, as taught by the household: there was an “equitable distribution of different duties and rights among the classes naturally differing in condition, and subordination of some to others, and of all to the law.”[27]

Most importantly, the household served both as the basic integer of society and as the social bond for individuals. Dabney argued that “the integers of which the commonwealth aggregate is made up, are not single human beings, but single families, authoritatively represented in the father and master.” Against social contract theorists, Dabney held that the American founding fathers, in using the phrase “consent of the governed,” did not mean that “the consent of each particular human being, competent and incompetent” was necessary in order for government to exist. Rather, “they intended the representative commonwealth as a body, the ‘populus,’ or aggregate corporation of that part of the human beings properly wielding the franchises of full citizens.” White male masters represented their households in the public square through their franchise, granted to them as a trust, and locally elected masters represented an area’s households in state and national legislatures. Hence, the household was the basic integer of the state and provided the order for liberty.[28]

Kuyper held that ordered liberty was best established by recognizing God’s sovereignty over social spheres and each sphere’s delegated authority to develop its own organic life without interference from the state. Human beings had liberty within the order of the spheres to develop their associated life to the fullest. This provided a key difference between the vision of Kuyper and the French Revolution: “In the French Revolution a civil liberty for every Christian to agree with the unbelieving majority; in Calvinism, a liberty of conscience, which enables every man to serve God according to his own conviction and the dictates of his own heart.” While the liberal nation-states, modeled on the revolutionary political economy of the French, denied that authority came from God and rather insisted that it resided coercively in the nation-state, Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist sphere sovereignty sought liberty of conscience from the intrusion of the state. To be sure, the principle of “sphere sovereignty” never received the definitive outworking by Kuyper that it later received by Herman Dooyeweerd.[29] Yet in much of Kuyper’s discussion of sphere sovereignty, he made it clear that the household was a basic sphere, more so than the spheres of church or state, the chief mode of human relationship in the world. This was true because household was the first order of creation; God created man and woman and charged them to multiply and to subdue the earth. From this original creation sphere, God ordained other cultural spheres, such as government, art, science, and church. For Kuyper, however, the household was foundational and supported these other spheres.[30]

As a result, Kuyper defended “houseman’s suffrage” as the best means of representing the people against those who advocated either state-sovereignty or popular sovereignty. As political philosopher Henk Woldring noted, Kuyper believed that “families make a nation a nation and they nourish the ‘public spirit’ of the people. [Kuyper] argues that the heads of households are representatives of the ‘public spirit’ of the people that is the vital and formative power of a nation.” Families themselves represented the basic organic sovereign sphere of society; as a result, families participated in the sphere of the state through their household heads. “By that same Word of God,” Kuyper observed, “the family is portrayed as the wonderful creation through which the rich fabric of our organic human life must spin itself out.” Societal organization was rooted in the family, in the household. Though Kuyper recognized that universal popular suffrage was an irresistible eventuality, he advocated “houseman’s suffrage” to the end of his life.[31]

Another example of the foundational nature of the household was the intense debates over education in which Kuyper participated. Kuyper argued that state-controlled education was a secularized education in which the state overstepped its bounds and usurped the parents’ role; it was “counter-church” and served as “a sectarian school of modernism.” In order to challenge state-controlled education, Kuyper forged a Christian School Society that sought “the wholesale destruction of state-controlled education in favor of parentally guided education.” Eventually, the movement for Christian schools outside of state control helped to establish the framework for Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party. However, it must be noted that Kuyper was not interested in church-controlled education either. At the establishment of Kuyper’s Free University, he urged that “we must therefore resist tooth and nail any imposition upon learning by the church of Christ. At the real risk of suffering at its hands, the church must insist that learning never become a slave but maintain its due sovereignty upon its own ground and live by the grace of God.” Kuyper’s determination to maintain the boundaries between church and school evidenced itself during the church merger discussions in the early 1890s. The context of the debate was whether the theology department of a university or a separate theological school was the proper place for ministerial training. Kuyper argued that due to the scientific nature of academic theology, it deserved a department within a Christian university where it was free from church control; yet, such a theological department could adequately train ministerial candidates. The important point was the separation of spheres—the church had to do with worship, catechesis, and creeds; the university had to do with scientific learning. And the university was overseen by trustees and faculty, who acted in loco parentis.[32]

Dabney took a similar stance on education, upholding the central role of the household in the education of children. Opposing the postbellum establishment of public schools in Virginia, Dabney claimed that state schools embraced “the pagan, Spartan theory, which makes the State the parent,” denying that God had ordered society in such a way that parents determined “the social grade and the culture of children on their reaching adult age.” Instead, public education premised that parents could not effectively educate their own children as well as the state could in centralized public schools. Dabney warned that this centralization would be abused by those who sought to control the public schools for nefarious ends. The public schools inevitably would be “wielded by the demagogues. .. in the interests of their faction.”[33]

Dabney also objected to public education on religious grounds. The state was pledged not to establish religion and yet the public schools implicitiy established a generic, ethical Protestantism, exemplified in teacher-led Bible reading and prayer. Dabney pointed out that such an establishment of religion at public expense violated the consciences of Roman Catholics and Jews, who rightly would protest against being taxed to support Protestant public schools. In addition, the state did not have the right to educate because all education must lead to moral action; it was “impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions.” In order to instruct in ethics, one had to adopt theological language and sources, particularly those related to the Christian doctrine of redemption. The state could not teach the Bible in their tax-financed schools nor could the state adequately instruct in matters of redemption. Thus, Dabney concluded, “the State is unfit to assume the education function.” State education might attempt to stand in a non-Christian position and not to inculcate moral training; however, there was no “neutrality”—”any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian.” The only solution was to leave education in the hands of parents, whom God ordained to provide training for their own children.[34]

As is evident from Kuyper and Dabney’s opposition to public schools, both theologians made important points for localism and against centralization in their public theologies. John Bolt demonstrated that when Kuyper developed the platform of his Anti-Revolutionary Party, he stood for decentralized power and the importance of localism, putting him fairly close to the Jeffersonian stream in American political economy. In article ten of the platform, Kuyper held that “it is the desire [of the Antirevolutionary Party] that local and municipal autonomy be restored by means of decentralization, insofar as this does not conflict with the requirements of natural unity or violate the rights of individual persons.” This article bore an uncanny similarity to the tenth article of the United States Bill of Rights, which reserved powers not delegated to the federal government to the individual states. Both Kuyper and the American constitution stood for localism in order to protect the rights of citizens against the coercive power both of the church and state. As James W. Skillen recognized, Kuyper urged a principled pluralism, which rose from his belief that “human beings ought to submit directly to God’s ordinances, which are given for the healthy development of a diverse creation order.” Hence, in arenas under the domain of the household, such as education, neither the church nor the state could interfere. Rather, the “good order of creation” for education came “not through mediation by ecclesiastical authorities but by the directly sustaining, immediately experienced, common grace of God in every sphere of life.”[35]

Dabney’s public theology, too, stood for localism and against the totalitarian impulses of both church and state. In the debates over public education in Virginia, Dabney held that both the Bible and “sound political ethics” taught that “the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents.” To advocate the intervention of the state in the parental sphere was to promote a “dangerous and agrarian” position, which would lead to state sovereignty. Likewise, Dabney held that parochial education, such as advocated by the Old School Presbyterian Church during the 1840s, was dangerous because it established a “practical popery,” involving the church in secular education and making the session a virtual pope in matters of Christian liberty. In contrast, Dabney defended parent-run local schools where a “voluntary association of Christian patriots, of Presbyterian patriots if you will” acting in their capacities as private individuals could found schools with shared Christian values and principles. In the same fashion, Dabney argued that “all the business of colleges and academics ought to be left.. . to the wisdom and enterprise of the communities interested in them and to the warm, gushing, Christian benevolence of individual pious hearts.” Private association, which recognized the parental responsibility to educate and differing local contexts, was the way to educate. By preventing the dangerous attempts of state or church domination, Dabney stood for localism and the rights of the household.[36]

III. Limitations of Public Theology

Not only did Dabney and Kuyper present similar antimodern critiques of the modern worldview and its social results, but both crafted public theologies that resembled one another in surprising ways. Granted, Kuyper’s public theology appeared much more sophisticated with the appropriation of the concepts of worldview, antithesis, and sphere sovereignty, not to mention the added stress upon common grace. And Kuyper’s public thought has generated far more admirers, disciples, and academic attention man Dabney. Still, the two theologians’ rejoinders to the modern worldview and the net result of these public theologies shared fundamental commonalties: the avowed biblical basis, the reliance upon Calvinism, the basis in creation orders, the centrality of households, and the emphasis upon localism.

Of course, there were differences between these two theologians as well. For example, Kuyper was a Romantic, while Dabney imbibed little in the way of German thought.[37] Kuyper was, for all intents and purposes, a Whig, a devotee of New England and Alexander Hamilton; Dabney was a Democrat, an ardent southerner, a follower of Thomas Jefferson and, especially, John C. Calhoun.[38] Kuyper’s name became associated with “neo-Calvinism,” a modernization of the old faith; Dabney abhorred all those who innovated from the older Calvinist creed.[39] More substantially, though Kuyper attacked secular and liberal monisms, he appropriated one of his own (in the form of “the Calvinistic worldview”) for his strategic purposes. Dabney, by contrast, despised monism, and clung to the American version of the Scottish philosophy to the end of his career.[40]

But the most consequential difference between Dabney and Kuyper was the goal of public theology. Kuyper’s worldview approach, coupled with his doctrine of common grace, led irresistibly to a transformationist approach to culture. This was most famously expressed in his statement that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” The ultimate end in view for Kuyper was “re-Christianizing the Netherlands; the renewal of a Christian, national culture.” Hence, while his thought attempted to set forward a principled pluralism, and while his ideas were always functional in nature, still Kuyper’s commitments contained the seeds of a theocratic, or better theonomic, temptation. If Christian duty emphasized “serving God in the world” and realizing “the potencies of God’s common grace,” whereby nature was transformed by grace, then Kuyper’s Calvinistic life-system would not be satisfied until there was “a Science which will not rest until it has thought out the entire cosmos; a Religion which cannot sit still until she has permeated every sphere of human life; and so also there must be an Art which, despising no single department of life adopts, into her splendid world, the whole of human life, religion included.” This expansive vision of Calvinism’s import could turn theonomic, a demand that one privileged view of God’s will be established in every human sphere.[41]

In contrast to Kuyper’s transformationist approach, Dabney’s public theology was always a defensive maneuver, not a rationale for transforming social structures. The Bible did speak to public issues, but where the Bible was silent there was liberty. Dabney claimed that all human actions fell into one of three classes: actions that the Bible commanded; actions that the Bible prohibited; and “actions which Scripture leaves indifferent.” In the first two areas, church courts were to follow the Scriptures and enjoin or prohibit what God did. But “in the third case, they are to leave the actions of his people free to be determined by each one’s own prudence and liberty, and this because God has left them free.” The church could not bind Christian conscience where there was no biblical command. Many evangelical church leaders “overstepped” the “metes and bounds between the kingdoms of Christ and of Caesar,” Dabney held, “because there have always been churchmen greedy of power, worldly-minded and dictatorial.” God granted Christian liberty, which ought not to be thrown away by those who would “betray the cause entrusted to them.” Ultimately, it was not the task of either individual Christians or Christianity in general to transform society, Dabney believed. Rather, the Christian’s sole task was “to deliver the whole revealed will of God for man’s salvation.” Anything more confused the spheres of Christ and Caesar; anything less was unfaithfulness to the Gospel.[42]

Ironically, though Dabney attempted to maintain a defensive posture while Kuyper had an offensive pose, their public theologies both ended up in essentially the same place. Though Kuyper himself used language of the antithesis, his later followers, particularly in the United States and Canada, more often emphasized the other two intellectual contributions of the Kuyperian vision: common grace and the ordering structures of sphere sovereignty. As common grace came to override Kuyper’s emphasis upon the difference that the palingenesis made—with its two kinds of people and two kinds of science—the secularization of the sacred not only became a possibility, but actually happened at places such as the Free University of Amsterdam. As a result, American neo-Calvinists continue to worry that their institutions committed to Kuyper’s ideals could follow Free University’s path, and such concern is warranted.[43] As historical work on late-nineteenth-century American Protestantism has demonstrated, when Protestants came to believe that the progressive “spirit of the age” was actually the work of the Holy Spirit, so that progress and divine immanence merged, there was no place from which to launch a critique against the capitulation of the church to the mores of an increasingly secular age. In a similar fashion, as modern Kuyperians attempted to transform culture by obeying God’s law in every human sphere and by cooperating with God’s common grace, the temptation became the identification of social “progress”—however defined from either the Left or Right—with God’s activity. As the sacred was secularized, or as things common were identified with the continued unfolding of redemptive history, the public positions that Kuyperians held looked suspiciously like moderate-to-liberal American politics granted divine sanction.[44]

Ultimately, Dabney ended in a similar position as Kuyper although he arrived there in another way. For Dabney, the social order of the antebellum South was God-ordained. To deny that southern patriarchy not only paralleled Abrahamic patriarchy but also replicated biblical norms concerning representative governments and the centrality of households was to “surrender the inspiration of the Scriptures to [the] assaults of a social science so-called.” During and after the Civil War, Dabney participated in southern mourning over the “Lost Cause,” and though he recognized that a New South had to rise, he was by no means happy about it. Rather, he emerged as part of a coterie of southern religious leaders who defended the Confederate cause, attacking those like George Washington Cable who besmirched the memory of the Old South while fanning the fading flame of southern separatism during the waning decades of the century.

Hence, Dabney’s public theology failed by sacralizing the secular. By assuming that God was a southern gentleman, by embracing a form of culture-Protestantism, Dabney had no place from which to exercise his considerable critical abilities upon southern culture and his own public theology.[45]

Thus, the limitation of public theologies such as Dabney’s and Kuyper’s can be traced to their failure, oddly enough, to maintain the antithesis between church and world. Both theologians ought to have known better, for they both had resources that would have maintained the distinctions between the secular and the sacred. Dabney had the resources of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, which restricted the church’s work to creed, liturgy, and polity while leaving room for individual involvement in the public sphere. Kuyper’s doctrine of the antithesis, added together with his belief in the separation of church and state, could have produced a spirituality of the church doctrine similar to that of the southern Presbyterians. Further, both had other options at hand: Dabney could have used American Reconstruction as an opportunity to seek racial and social justice within the courts of the PCUS; Kuyper might have coupled more chastened attitudes toward the possibilities of cultural transformation with a nuanced view of the abiding brokenness of sovereign spheres, which would not be healed until the consummation of the age.

Perhaps the limitations that these public theologies reveal point to a deeper difficulty with public theology in general. For public theology is a universalizing task, an attempt to apply theological norms to public issues in such a way as to provide a Christian, hence true and required, approach to these concerns. But factors other than theology, such as social location, ethnicity, or education, often appear more decisive in public actions. Maybe it claims too much to believe that the church’s theology can provide norms for the world’s politics, that somehow theologians can redeem the hallways of the United States Congress. In addition, by investing public concerns with theological language and authority, the stakes for the public square are raised quantum-fold. Part of the challenge of contemporary culture wars has been the way participants have made their positions carry religious freight with appropriate anathemas for those who disagree. By presenting one’s public views and affiliations as religiously derived and required for Christian faithfulness, not only is there little wiggle room when things go differently than planned, but above all, there is no place for self-criticism, no opportunity to recognize the possibilities of self-deception, no chance to extend charity to fellow believers who see things differently—in a word, no liberty.[46]

If nothing else, comparing Kuyper with Dabney provides contemporary neo-Calvinists with plenty of gristle to chew on. After all, was Kuyper actually that revolutionary a thinker? As this article makes plain, Kuyper’s “modern anti-modernism” was in line with intellectual trends on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly the intense animus against the French Revolution and its effects. Historians who study Kuyper confess that the Dutch leader borrowed his distinctive ideas—sphere sovereignty, antithesis, and even common grace—from others. Much of Kuyper’s public theology was run-of-the-mill Whiggery: organicism, the centrality of households, patriarchy, anti-public education. Plus, though Kuyper proponents attempt to distance the Dutch leader from nineteenth-century racism, it appears that he was a child of his age in this area as well. Perchance Kuyper’s genuine historical significance is not as a public theologian but as a public man, a politician who knew the importance of rhetoric, imagination, and strategic use of ideas and who reshaped the face of Dutch politics. By contrast, do southern Presbyterians, such as Dabney or his near contemporary James Henley Thornwell, have something to contribute to contemporary reflections on public theology? To put it another way, should conferences be devoted to asking “Why Dabney Now?” Perhaps not; after all, too much of Dabney’s thought was given to defend the indefensible in the name of God, even when some of his insights seem to point out important flaws in the modern worldview. Still, if Jonathan Edwards, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Pope Leo XIII get invited to the intellectual table by historians and theologians to interact with Kuyper, Dabney should be invited as well, for the similarities between these two theologians provide striking clarifications about public theology and religious conservatism. In the end, though, the question might be rightly raised whether either Dabney or Kuyper represents the best approach that the Reformed tradition can offer on the intractable relation between theological formulation and the public sphere. Rather than turning to either theologian for guidance, Reformed believers might better heed the one who said, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21).[47]

Notes

1. James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Cornelis van der Kooi and Jan de Bruijn, eds., Kuyper Reconsidered: Aspects of His Life and Work (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1999); Luis E. Lugo, ed., Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for the Twenty-first Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Markets and Morality 5, no. 1 (Spring 2001) published the Calvin Seminary papers; James E. McGoldrick, Abraham Kuyper: God’s Renaissance Man (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000); John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s American Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); James Skillen, “Why Kuyper Now?” in Religion, Pluralism and Public Life, 372.
2. Charles Reagan Wilson, “Robert Lewis Dabney: Religion and the Southern Holocaust,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981): 89. The exception to this scholarly consensus is historian Eugene D. Genovese, who almost single-handedly has rescued the southern Presbyterian theologians from oblivion and restored some measure of intellectual respect to their work.
3. The only published biography on Dabney is Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney (1903; repr., Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1977). Another excellent source is David H. Overy, “Robert Lewis Dabney: Apostle of the Old South” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1967).
4. Kuyper, “Conservatism and Orthodoxy: False and True Preservation,” in Kuyper Reader, 66–85; Kuyper, “Calvinism: Sources and Stronghold of Our Constitutional Liberties,” in Kuyper Reader, 280–317; Dabney, “The Doctrinal Contents of the Confession—Its Fundamental and Regulative Ideas, and the Necessity and Value of Creeds,” in Memorial Volume of the Westminster Assembly, 1647—1897 (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publications, 1897), 92.
5. Modernism, modernization, and antimodernism are notoriously difficult words and movements to define. For the purposes of this essay, I understand “modernism” to be a philosophical movement that was essentially positivist, arising in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and fleshing itself out in the early twentieth century in literature and art. “Modernization” was the process of social and economic transformation that began early in the nineteenth century, but reached its (second) climax in America during the 1870s and 1880s. It was related to and drew from, but was not equivalent with, modernism. “Antimodernism,” in the way that I am using it, stands for a general revulsion against and dissent from the modern worldview (expressed by modernism or positivism) and the modernization taking place in American life. These three working definitions are drawn from Daniel J. Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” in Modernist Culture in America (ed. Daniel J. Singal; Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989), 1–27; Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3–33; Richard D. Brown, “Modernization: A Victorian Climax,” in Victorian America (ed. Daniel Walker Howe; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 29–44; and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880—1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 4–58.
6. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 96–112; Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” in Discussions (ed. C. R. Vaughan; 1890–1897; repr., Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1982), 3:497–522; Sean Michael Lucas, “At War With His Age: Robert Lewis Dabney’s Antimodern Public Theology and the Postbellum South,” in Virginia’s Civil War and Its Aftermath (ed. B. Wyatt-Brown and P. Wallenstein; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, forthcoming). James Bratt and Ronald Wells characterized Kuyper as a “modern antimodernist” in “Piety and Progress: A History of Calvin College,” in Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Success in the Twenty-first Century (ed. R. T. Hughes and W. B. Adrian; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 143.
7. John Bolt, “Abraham Kuyper and the Holland-America line of Liberty,” Journal of Markets and Morality 1, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 35-59; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 332–39, 393–98; Sean Michael Lucas, “ ‘Hold Fast That Which Is Good’: The Public Theology of Robert Lewis Dabney” (Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2002), ch. 4.
8. McGoldrick, God’s Renaissance Man, 206–8; Hans-Martien ten Napel, “The Post-War ARP and Kuyper’s Legacy,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 283–92; James C. Kennedy, “The Problem of Kuyper’s Legacy: The Crisis of the Anti-Revolutionary Party in Post-War Holland,” Markets and Morality 5, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 45-56; Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Douglas Southall Freeman, The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (New York: Scribners, 1939), 40. The classic categories on Christ and culture come, of course, from H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951); see also George M. Marsden, “Christianity and Cultures: Transforming Niebuhr’s Categories,” Insights 115, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 4-15; and Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).
9. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1931; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 11; Dabney, “The Influence of False Philosophies Upon Character and Conduct,” in Discussions, 4:568–69. It should be noted that Dabney himself does not use the term “worldview,” but does discuss the connection between philosophical precommitments and conduct in a way that parallels “worldview” thinkers. Compare with David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
10. Kuyper, “The Blurring of the Boundaries,” in Kuyper Reader, 371–72, 377; Kuyper, “Modernism: A Fata Morgana in the Christian Domain,” in Kuyper Reader, 101; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 18–22.
11. Dabney, The Sensualistic Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century Considered (2d ed.; New York: Anson, 1887), 1, 118–30, 165–66; Lears, No Place of Grace, 20–25; Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830—1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 182–205. Dabney also developed his opposition to positivism in “Positivism in England,” in Discussions, 3:22–60.
12. Dabney, “A Caution Against Anti-Christian Science,” in Discussions, 3:119; Kuyper, “Blurring of the Boundaries,” 369, 388; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 10–12; Kuyper, The Problem of Poverty (ed. James Skillen; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 44; Kuyper, “Maranatha,” in Kuyper Reader, 212; Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 97–101; James D. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 21; Kuyper, “Uniformity: The Curse of Modern life,” in Kuyper Reader, 24.
13. Dabney, “Influence of False Philosophies Upon Character and Conduct,” 570–71; Dabney, Sensualistic Philosophy, 206; Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 499–500; Dabney, A Defence of Virginia (and Through Her, of the South) (1867; repr., Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1991), 241–49, 263.
14. Kuyper, “Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life,” 28; Kuyper, “Blurring of the Boundaries,” 382; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 27; Mary Stewart van Leeuwen, “The Carrot and the Stick: Kuyper on Gender, Family, and Class,” in Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life, 59–84; van Leeuwen, “Abraham Kuyper and the Cult of True Womanhood: An Analysis of De Eerepositie Der Vrouw,” CTJ 31 (1996): 97-124; van Leeuwen, “The Signs of Kuyper’s Times, and of Ours,” in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese et al., Women and the Future of the Family (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 75–92; Kuyper, “The South African Crisis,” in Kuyper Reader, 332.
15. Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” in Discussions, 4:489–505; Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” in Discussions, 2:96–118; Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 507–9; Dabney, Defence of Virginia, 262–66. See also Rick Nutt, “Robert Lewis Dabney, Presbyterians, and Women’s Suffrage,” Journal of Presbyterian History 62 (1984): 339-53; and Frank J. Smith, “Petticoat Presbyterianism: A Century of Debate in American Presbyterianism on the Issue of the Ordination of Women,” WTJ 51 (1989): 51-76.
16. Van Leeuwen, “Carrot and the Stick,” 74–75; Kuyper, When Thou Sittest in Thine House: Meditations on Home Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1929), 283, quoted in van Leeuwen, “Carrot and the Stick,” 74; Kuyper, “Blurring of the Boundaries,” 382; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 290–91; Kuyper, Problem of Poverty; James D. Bratt, “Passionate About the Poor: The Social Attitudes of Abraham Kuyper,” Markets and Morality 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 35-45. See also Kuyper, “Manual Labor,” in Kuyper Reader, 231–54, which pictures a laboring class that does not ascend into the bourgeoisie.
17. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Weaver, Southern Tradition at Bay; Richard M. Weaver, “The Southern Tradition,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (ed. G. M. Curtis III and J. J. Thompson, Jr.; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 209–29; and M. E. Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised: On the Continuity of Southern Conservatism,” Southern Review 25 (1989): 334-50.
18. Dabney, “The State Free School System,” in Discussions, 4:202–3, 206; Dabney, “The Negro and the Common School,” in Discussions, 4:185; Dabney, “Labor Unions, the Strike, and the Commune,” in Discussions, 4:294–320.
19. Dabney consistently opposed the abolition of slavery for its “anti-biblical theory of natural rights.” In his Defence of Virginia, he devoted an entire section to proving that “abolitionism is Jacobinism,” making explicit the tie between freeing slaves and the French Revolution. See Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 509–14; Dabney, Defence of Virginia, 262–71; and Lucas, “ ‘Hold Fast That Which Is Good,’” ch. 3.
20. H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But.. .: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972), 258–305, esp. pp. 266-67; Dabney, “The Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” in Discussions, 2:206–9; Dabney, “Negroes and the Free Schools,” 185–86. See also Jonathan M. Young, “Psychology of the South: Robert Lewis Dabney, The Race God, and Sacramental Purity” (M. A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1993).
21. Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 27, 32, 34; Kuyper, “South African Crisis,” 337, 339, 340; D. Th. Kuiper, “Theory and Practice in Dutch Calvinism on the Racial Issue in the Nineteenth Century,” CTJ 21 (1986): 51-78; P. J. Strauss, “Abraham Kuyper and Pro-Apartheid Theologians in South Africa: The Former Misused by the Latter?” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 218–27; Peter J. Paris, “The African and African-American Understanding of Our Common Humanity: A Critique of Abraham Kuyper’s Anthropology,” in Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life, 268–72. Compare with Mark Noll, “A Century of Christian Social Teaching: The Legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper,” Markets and Morality 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 147; George Harinck, “Abraham Kuyper, South Africa, and Apartheid,” PSB 23 (2002): 183-87; and, on the Noachic curse, Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23–61.
22. I am indebted to John Bolt for the phrase “ordered liberty.” See Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 162, and Bolt, “Abraham Kuyper and the Holland-America Line of Liberty,” 36. The phrases “anarchic” and “social bond” individualism come from Richard M. Weaver, “Two Types of American Individualism,” in Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, 77–103.
23. Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 498–501, 503, 520.
24. Kuyper, “Blurring of the Boundaries,” 399–400; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 79; Kuyper, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of our Constitutional Liberties,” 306–7; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 79. However one understands Kuyper’s doctrine of scripture, the point here is that Kuyper held that scripture provides an authoritative basis for culture construction; for opposing accounts of Kuyper’s doctrine of scripture, see esp. Harriet A. Harris, “A Diamond in the Dark: Kuyper’s Doctrine of Scripture,” in Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life, 123–44; Dirk van Keulen, “The Internal Tension in Kuyper’s Doctrine of Organic Inspiration of Scripture,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 123–30; and Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., “Old Amsterdam and Inerrancy? (Part One),” WTJ 44 (1982): 250-89.
25. Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 498–99, 505–6; Dabney, Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology (2d ed.; 1878; repr., Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1977), 398–400; Dabney, Defence of Virginia, 254.
26. Dabney, Defence of Virginia, 229; Dabney, Syllabus and Notes, 398; Dabney, “A Mother’s Crowning Glory,” in Discussions, 5:375, 381; Dabney, The Practical Philosophy: Being the Philosophy of the Feelings, of the Will, and of the Conscience, with the Ascertainment of Particular Rights and Duties (1897; repr., Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1984), 338; Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” in Discussions, 4:495. Dabney’s arguments for the centrality of the household paralleled other southern Presbyterians such as Samuel Davies (Douglas Ambrose, “Shaping the Southern Presbyterian Household, 1750—1800,” [paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle, February 2001]) and B. M. Palmer (Palmer, The Family: In its Civil and Churchly Aspects [Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1876]). This and the following two paragraphs draw from Sean Michael Lucas, “‘Old Times There Are Not Forgotten’: Robert Lewis Dabney’s Public Theology for the Reconstructed South,” Journal of Presbyterian History 81 (2003): 149-63.
27. Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” 495; Dabney, Syllabus and Notes, 783.
28. Dabney, Defence of Virginia, 229, 269; Dabney, Practical Philosophy, 348, 401–3.
29. For a sample of the literature on sphere sovereignty, see esp. Gordon J. Spykman, “Sphere Sovereignty in Calvin and the Calvinist Tradition,” in Exploring the Heritage of John Calvin (ed. D. E. Holwerda; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976), 163–208; George Harinck, “A Historian’s Comment on the Use of Abraham Kuyper’s Idea of Sphere Sovereignty,” Markets and Morality 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 277-84; Richard J. Mouw, “Some Reflections on Sphere Sovereignty,” in Religion, Public Life, and Pluralism, 87–109; and James W. Skillen, “From Covenant of Grace to Equitable Public Pluralism: The Dutch Calvinist Contribution,” CTJ 31 (1996): 67-96.
30. Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 109; Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Kuyper Reader, 467, 480.
31. Henk E. S. Woldring, “Kuyper’s Formal and Comprehensive Conceptions of Democracy,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 206–17, quote on 208; Kuyper, Problem of Poverty, 69; van Leeuwen, “Carrot and the Stick,” 67.
32. Abraham Kuyper, Ons Program (4th ed.; Amsterdam: Hoveker and Wormser, 1879), 208, 214, quoted in Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 396; Johan Sturm and Siebren Miedema, “Kuyper’s Educational Legacy: Schooling for a Pluralist Society,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 238–47; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 337; Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 39–46; Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 477; Mouw, “Some Reflections on Sphere Sovereignty,” 101–2; Richard J. Mouw, “The Seminary, the Church, and the Academy,” CTJ 33 (1998): 159-61.
33. Dabney, “State Free School System,” in Discussions, 4:192, 194–95.
34. Ibid., 4:197, 205, 210–14, 216–22; Dabney, “Negro and the Common School,” in Discussions, 4:189; Thomas C. Hunt and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., “Race, Religion, and Redemption: William Henry Ruffner and the Moral Foundations of Education in Virginia,” American Presbyterians 66 (1988): 1-9; Lucas, “‘Hold Fast That Which Is Good,’” ch. 4.
35. Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 285–86; Bolt, “Abraham Kuyper and the Holland-America Line of Liberty,” 39–40; Skillen, “From Covenant of Grace to Equitable Public Pluralism,” 84, 87.
36. Dabney, “The State Free School System,” 194; [Dabney,] “The Last General Assembly,” Watchman and Observer, 17 July 1851.
37. Kuyper’s commitment to Romanticism is a matter of some debate. Edward Ericson argued stringently against the notion (“Abraham Kuyper: Cultural Critic,” CTJ 22 [1987]: 210-27). J. de Bruin, James Bratt, and John Bolt, among others, argue for it: see J. de Bruin, “Abraham Kuyper as Romantic,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 42–52; James D. Bratt, “In the Shadow of Mt. Kuyper,” CTJ 31 (1996): 54-57; Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper: Puritan, Victorian, Modern,” in Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life, 3–21; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 3–79.
38. Kuyper, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of our Constitutional Liberties,” 287; James D. Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper, American History, and the Tensions of Neo-Calvinism,” in Sharing the Reformed Tradition: The Dutch-North American Exchange, 1846–1996 (ed. G. Harinck and H. Krabbendam; Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1996), 100–106; John Witte, Jr., “The Biography and Biology of Liberty: Abraham Kuyper and the American Experiment,” in Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life, 251–52; Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper: Puritan, Victorian, Modern,” 17–20; Johnson, Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 563; J. H. Rice, Jr., “A Lover of the South,” in In Memoriam: Robert Lewis Dabney (ed. C. W. Dabney; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1899), 33–36. Other interesting comparisons for Kuyper and American political figures might include Grover Cleveland (see James D. Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper’s Public Career,” Reformed Journal 37 [October 1987]: 12) and James Henley Thornwell, who was a southern Whig (compare with Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Science, Nature, and Society: A New Approach to James Henley Thornwell,” Journal of Presbyterian History 50 [1972]: 307-25).
39. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 258–61; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 443–64; Sean Michael Lucas, “ ‘He Cuts Up Edwardsism By The Roots’: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Edwardsian Legacy in the Nineteenth Century South,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition (ed. D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 200–214.
40. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 88–96; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 301, 308–9, 345; Dabney, “Monism,” in Discussions, 3:523–35; David Kinney Garth, “The Influence of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy on the Theology of James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney” (Th.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1979).
41. Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 488; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 30, 162–63; Kuyper, Problem of Poverty, 68; Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 266–70; G. van der Kooi, “A Theology of Culture: A Critical Appraisal of Kuyper’s Doctrine of Common Grace,” in Kuyper Reconsidered, 98–99; Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation, 227–55, 312–50 (quotation on p. 327); Harinck, “A Historian’s Comment on the Use of Abraham Kuyper’s Idea of Sphere Sovereignty,” 279; D. G. Hart, “Legitimate, But Edifying?” (a paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, 12 October 2002, Huntington, Ind.), 1. Also, D. G. Hart makes the connection between Kuyper’s famous quote and H. Richard Niebuhr’s transformationist category in Christ and Culture; see Hart, “Christian Scholars, Secular Universities, and the Problem with the Antithesis,” Christian Scholar’s Review 30 (2001): 398-99.
42. Dabney, “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” 521–22. Importantly, Kuyper’s emphasis upon common grace finds no parallel in Dabney. For more on Kuyper and common grace, see Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Kuyper Reader, 165–201; Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1947); William D. Dennison, “Dutch Neo-Calvinism and the Roots for Transformation: An Introductory Essay,” JETS 42 (1999): 271-91; Henry Vander Kam, “Some Comments on Kuyper and Common Grace,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 2 (1986): 51-60; and Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).
43. Kennedy, “Problem of Kuyper’s Legacy”; Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, 204–21; James C. Schaap, Our Family Album: The Unfinished Story of the Christian Reformed Church (Grand Rapids: Christian Reformed Church, 1998); Joel A. Carpenter, “The Perils of Prosperity: Neo-Calvinism and the Future of Religious Colleges,” in The Future of Religious Colleges (ed. Paul J. Dovre; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 196–201.
44. Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880—1910,” Journal of American History 72 (1985): 45-62; Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, 204–21. The point about the left-leaning positions of contemporary Kuyperians can be established by considering the Reformed Journal. A casual glance at volumes of the Reformed Journal demonstrates that, especially during the 1980s, to be Kuyperian meant that one despised Ronald Reagan (e.g., Herbert J. Brinks, “The Unlikely Heretic,” Reformed Journal 37, no. 1 [January 1987]: 4; Ronald A. Wells, “Taking Stock of Reagan,” Reformed Journal 37, no. 11 [November 1987]: 2-3; Harry R. Boer, “So Hollow a Figure,” Reformed Journal 39, no. 2 [February 1989]: 2-3), believed that increased government programs were required for social justice (Ronald A. Wells, “Kinder and Gentler,” Reformed Journal 39, no. 1 [January 1989]: 2-3), held that the church should be active in the environmental movement (Eugene P. Heideman, “Beyond Dung: A Theology of Manure,” Reformed Journal 35, no. 5 [May 1985]: 17-20; Mary Evelyn Jegen, “Galling Us To Our Senses: The Church’s Role in Healing the Earth,” Reformed Journal 39, no. 10 [October 1989]: 13-23), opposed South African apartheid (Nicholas Wolterstorff, “How Much More Blood?” Reformed Journal 37, no. 6 [June 1987]: 2-3) and nuclear proliferation (Ronald A. Wells, “Breaking the Cycle,” Reformed Journal 38, no. 3 [March 1988]: 2-3), stood for gender equality in the church as well as larger society (Donald McKim, “Hearkening to the Voices: What Women Theologians are Saying,” Reformed Journal 35, no. 1 [January 1985]: 7-10; Mary Stewart van Leeuwen, “The Christian Mind and the Challenge of Gender Relations,” Reformed Journal 37, no. 9 [September 1987]: 17-23), and claimed that capitalism as practiced in America was a critically flawed system of economics (Eric H. Beversluis, “Backwards Theology,” Reformed Journal 35, no. 2 [February 1985]: 3-4; Hugh James, “Free Will in a Free Market: Christian Constraints on Capitalism,” Reformed Journal 37, no. 5 [May 1987]: 9-12; Randall Balmer, “Learning from Ivan,” Reformed Journal 37, no. 6 [June 1987]: 4-5). While these positions may or may not derive from a biblical worldview, they all could be identified with the American political left (as Nicholas Wolterstorff admits for himself, “An Open Letter to Ed Ericson,” Reformed Journal 35, no. 10 [October 1985]: 2-4).
45. Dabney, Defence, 104–10; Dabney, “Anti-Christian Theories of Rights,” 503; Wilson, Baptized in Blood; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 47–62; Dabney, “The New South,” in Discussions, 4:15–16; Dabney, “George W. Cable in the Century Magazine,” Southern Historical Society Papers 13 (1885): 148-53; Lucas, “‘Hold Fast That Which Is Good,’” 142–64.
46. Robert P. Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, and Culture,” in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (ed. Mark A. Noll; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 146–71; James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991); D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
47. Genovese, Southern Tradition, and Weaver, Southern Tradition at Bay, do provide a useful way of rehabilitating the southern Presbyterian theologians from a southern conservative perspective. Also, there are striking similarities between Dabney, the twentieth-century Vanderbilt Agrarians, and the contemporary essayist, Wendell Berry; see Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Sean Michael Lucas, “God and Country: Wendell Berry’s Theological Vision,” Christian Scholar’s Review 32 (2002): 73-92. The reference to Edwards, Rauschenbusch, and Pope Leo XIII is to Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation.