If it doesn’t work. Go to the institute for Christian studies webpage. Use the drop down menu and choose Repository. Then just search Harry Kits masters thesis.
While there stay and read —it’s postmodern central. Read ther purpose statement
Here is a resource that might interest you. It's from a conference at Redeemer College (Hamilton, Ontario) in 1985 called "Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy in the Reformed Community today" file:///C:/Users/dlfre/Downloads/orthodoxyandorthopraxis%20(1).pdf
The chapter called "The Changing Face of Truth" (which starts on p. 33)by John Cooper interests me, as it might you. In that essay, Cooper tries to make the case for propositional truth, and says that if his (the CRC) denomination doesn't change course, it will hasten its own demise."
"My thesis throughout is that, although we must be continually reforming our doctrine and our practice according to the Word of God, essential to this is a biblical, Reformed
understanding of the traditional notion of truth. Opting for a newer model will not promote biblical reformation, but only hasten our demise."
This is ironic, since I'm pretty sure that that is the same John Cooper quoted by Plantinga in his blog on the Reformational Movement (quote copied below) in order to show how the Reformational idea of presuppositionalism (postmodern subjectivism) was now the common position in the academy.
It seems clear to me, a lay person with no philosophy or theology background, that the obvious course will be from presuppositionalism to abandonment of propositional truth.
The place where this progression is clearest where Kuyper's ideas have taken hold: the Reformed Church in the Netherlands and the CRC of North America. To me, there is nothing surprising about it; I see the fruits of it everyday in the little Dutch town in which I live.
What follows is a quote by John Cooper copied from part 1 of Plantinga's blog, The Reformatioanl Movement: Does it need a history?
"In those early days, I could not avoid the conclusion that certain of the claims and theses of the reformational philosophers had gained a degree of currency in the broader university world. Of course this was a development to be applauded, but it also meant that some of the wind had been taken out of our sails. My friend and former classmate John Cooper had a similar experience when he studied at the University of Toronto. Cooper had thoroughly learned the lesson that theoretical thought is not autonomous or neutral, and he was eager to impart this insight to others. He writes:
... the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition ... does not attempt rational demonstration of the faith but instead challenges the alleged autonomy, neutrality, and self-sufficiency of human reason. This approach has demonstrated that scientific modernism is not self-justifying and that it therefore has its own presuppositions and prejudices that are ultimately religious in character.
These were some themes that had been drilled into Cooper as a Calvin undergraduate, for he had been exposed to quite a parade of heady ideas as articulated
... in Abraham Kuyper's discernment of the antithesis in science, in Herman Dooyeweerd's transcendental critique of theoretical thought, in Cornelius Van Til's presuppositionalism, with different accents in the teaching of Henry Stob and Evan Runner, and more recently in the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It is what I learned as a philosophy major at Calvin College during the 1960s.
As a Christian graduate student he set out to impart these stirring insights to others. But he discovered that
... times are changing. I learned this the hard way. It was at the beginning of my Ph.D. work at the University of Toronto in a seminar on hermeneutics led by Paul Ricoeur. Gathering courage, I trotted out my best Reformed arguments that reason and knowledge are not neutral but dependent upon basic commitments, presuppositions, and perspectives. I was ready for a fight, but everyone just stared at me as though I had announced that the Pope is Catholic. "Yes, yes ... go on," Ricoeur encouraged, interested in the validation of presuppositions. But I had nothing left except a personal testimony about my religious beliefs. My best Reformed philosophical arguments were mere truisms to these people. I'll never forget the consternation I felt. [NOTE cooper33]
And so, to be reformational in those days meant not only opposing positivism but, more specifically, opposing the inclination of the analytic philosophers (I now know that there are some exceptions, such as Quine) to cut down philosophical problems to the tiniest dimensions and address them one by one, thereby ignoring the role of history in coming to a proper understanding of those problems. All Runner students will recall fondly that he was constantly "going back to the Greeks"; indeed, this impulse on his part became something of a joke among us. But there was a valid point behind it. All human thought -- philosophy is no exception -- is constrained by presuppositions, only some of which are known to the person who holds them. If this is true, it makes sense, when studying any problem or philosophical text, to look for those presuppositions. Where are they to be found? How did they get set in the first place? Where did they come from? Part of the answer is that they stem from the past. And so one is constantly driven back to earlier sources and thinkers -- back to the Greeks!"
The CRC didn't change course! You can see from the CRC's Yearbook statistics
that membership went from a high of 316,415 in 1992 to 195,704 in 2023. Average sunday attendance is even worse at 129,546 in 2023 (not measured in 1992).
The introduction of Groen Van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution, by Harry Van Dyk (the translator)jdescribes the importance of Groen to Kuyper. In summation:
"These six seminal ideas would become pillars in the neo-Calvinism spearheaded by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and would be refined and made operational in the reformational philosophy associated with the Amsterdam scholars Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven (1892-1987)"
That is why Runner named his club "The Groen Van Prinsterer Society" and not the "Abraham Kuyper Society."
I consider sphere sovreignty to be important, but peripheral. To me, the most important thing that Kuyper did was to change the Gospel itself. Kuyper asserts that Christ's sacrifice was not primarily to redeem individual men, but to redeem creation. See page 282, 283 of Kuyper's Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology.
" From this difficulty there is no escape, until special Revelation is no longer viewed as directed soteriologically to individual man. Revelation goes out to humanity taken as a whole. Since humanity unfolds itself historically, thus Revelation also bears a historic charcter. . . .And as individuals partake of this human life only in relation to humanity as a whole, so also in relation to this whole along is Revelation of any significance to individual man. By this we do not deny the soteriological aim of special Revelation, but merely asseret that salvation of the individual man is not its rule. . . .. but the aim and thereffore also the end, of all this, is to make us see how God has loved His world, and that therefore the creation of the cosmos, even in the face of sin, has been no failure . . . .The subject of this action is not the individual person, but the general Ego of beleiveing humanity."
From this you get Kuyper's concept of "all of life redeemed," and his "not one square inch over which he does not cry "Mine".
So if all of creation is redeemed, "man began to understand the subjjection of all nature with its hidden forces and treasures to himself as a holy duty, imposed upon him by the original ordinances of Paradise: "Have dominion over them. Henceforth, the curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it ". . .from Lectures on Calvinism, p. 30.
This became for Kuyperians "the Creation Mandate" or "cultural Mandate." (today nothing less than Cultural Marxism)
And because the Bible tells us that the natural man cannot discern the things of the spirit (But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned., 1 Cor 2:14), natural man cannot understand the world (apart from Common Grace).
To the Kuyperians, there is no Natural Law, no universal truth that any man can know, because everything is "of the Spirit." They completely reject the concept of objective reality.
Kuyperians hold everything up to the dialectic of redeemed/unredeemed (their concept of idolatry).
This is why I call it a gnostic cult.
I live in the heart of the "Reformed" wold. This poison has moved through and has consumed the CRC (and probably the RCA as well, I haven't studied them),
One last thing, here is a link to Harry Kits 1988 Master's Degree Thesis at the Institute for Christian studies (W O R L D V I E W S A N D SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT
A Proposal -for Classification of Canadian Neo-Calvinist
Social Involvement 1945 - 1988). It describes the Kuyperian Dutch coming to Canada post WWII and their incorporation into the American CRC and some of the problems. Very interesting!!
I have a lot more. I’ll float it your way periodically.
If you read Plantinga’s blog, make sure to read the endnotes as well. And the “cast of Characters. And “the Institutions” it’s unfortunate that he died before completing more.
And make sure to look at The Institute for Christian Studies” (Toronto) . It’s the Institution that Runner envisioned and his students founded. Read their mission statement. They feed “intellectuals” into the rest of the CRC
FYI—per my comments on other posts: it was Van Til who encouraged Evan Runner (a Scott’s-Irish Presbyterian) to learn Dutch and go to the Netherlands and study. Runner did do that—once under Klas Schilder, known for redemptive history (Hegelian) and after WWII, at the Free University under Dooyweerd’s B-I-L Vollenhoven. Runner got his Ph.D. Under Vollenhoven.
The Club Runner sponsored at Calvin College spawned “the Reformational Movement” which had three aspects: Kuyper, Dooyweerd, and Redemptive History (in later years, the concept of Shalom neo-Calvinism has been added)
The one for Kits? I’ll try again:
https://ir.icscanada.edu/bitstream/handle/10756/288520/Kits_Harry_J_1988_MPhilF_Thesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
If it doesn’t work. Go to the institute for Christian studies webpage. Use the drop down menu and choose Repository. Then just search Harry Kits masters thesis.
While there stay and read —it’s postmodern central. Read ther purpose statement
And notice, in the second quote by John Cooper that I posted, whose class he is sitting in: Paul Riccoeur
Here is a resource that might interest you. It's from a conference at Redeemer College (Hamilton, Ontario) in 1985 called "Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy in the Reformed Community today" file:///C:/Users/dlfre/Downloads/orthodoxyandorthopraxis%20(1).pdf
The chapter called "The Changing Face of Truth" (which starts on p. 33)by John Cooper interests me, as it might you. In that essay, Cooper tries to make the case for propositional truth, and says that if his (the CRC) denomination doesn't change course, it will hasten its own demise."
"My thesis throughout is that, although we must be continually reforming our doctrine and our practice according to the Word of God, essential to this is a biblical, Reformed
understanding of the traditional notion of truth. Opting for a newer model will not promote biblical reformation, but only hasten our demise."
This is ironic, since I'm pretty sure that that is the same John Cooper quoted by Plantinga in his blog on the Reformational Movement (quote copied below) in order to show how the Reformational idea of presuppositionalism (postmodern subjectivism) was now the common position in the academy.
It seems clear to me, a lay person with no philosophy or theology background, that the obvious course will be from presuppositionalism to abandonment of propositional truth.
The place where this progression is clearest where Kuyper's ideas have taken hold: the Reformed Church in the Netherlands and the CRC of North America. To me, there is nothing surprising about it; I see the fruits of it everyday in the little Dutch town in which I live.
What follows is a quote by John Cooper copied from part 1 of Plantinga's blog, The Reformatioanl Movement: Does it need a history?
"In those early days, I could not avoid the conclusion that certain of the claims and theses of the reformational philosophers had gained a degree of currency in the broader university world. Of course this was a development to be applauded, but it also meant that some of the wind had been taken out of our sails. My friend and former classmate John Cooper had a similar experience when he studied at the University of Toronto. Cooper had thoroughly learned the lesson that theoretical thought is not autonomous or neutral, and he was eager to impart this insight to others. He writes:
... the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition ... does not attempt rational demonstration of the faith but instead challenges the alleged autonomy, neutrality, and self-sufficiency of human reason. This approach has demonstrated that scientific modernism is not self-justifying and that it therefore has its own presuppositions and prejudices that are ultimately religious in character.
These were some themes that had been drilled into Cooper as a Calvin undergraduate, for he had been exposed to quite a parade of heady ideas as articulated
... in Abraham Kuyper's discernment of the antithesis in science, in Herman Dooyeweerd's transcendental critique of theoretical thought, in Cornelius Van Til's presuppositionalism, with different accents in the teaching of Henry Stob and Evan Runner, and more recently in the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It is what I learned as a philosophy major at Calvin College during the 1960s.
As a Christian graduate student he set out to impart these stirring insights to others. But he discovered that
... times are changing. I learned this the hard way. It was at the beginning of my Ph.D. work at the University of Toronto in a seminar on hermeneutics led by Paul Ricoeur. Gathering courage, I trotted out my best Reformed arguments that reason and knowledge are not neutral but dependent upon basic commitments, presuppositions, and perspectives. I was ready for a fight, but everyone just stared at me as though I had announced that the Pope is Catholic. "Yes, yes ... go on," Ricoeur encouraged, interested in the validation of presuppositions. But I had nothing left except a personal testimony about my religious beliefs. My best Reformed philosophical arguments were mere truisms to these people. I'll never forget the consternation I felt. [NOTE cooper33]
And so, to be reformational in those days meant not only opposing positivism but, more specifically, opposing the inclination of the analytic philosophers (I now know that there are some exceptions, such as Quine) to cut down philosophical problems to the tiniest dimensions and address them one by one, thereby ignoring the role of history in coming to a proper understanding of those problems. All Runner students will recall fondly that he was constantly "going back to the Greeks"; indeed, this impulse on his part became something of a joke among us. But there was a valid point behind it. All human thought -- philosophy is no exception -- is constrained by presuppositions, only some of which are known to the person who holds them. If this is true, it makes sense, when studying any problem or philosophical text, to look for those presuppositions. Where are they to be found? How did they get set in the first place? Where did they come from? Part of the answer is that they stem from the past. And so one is constantly driven back to earlier sources and thinkers -- back to the Greeks!"
The CRC didn't change course! You can see from the CRC's Yearbook statistics
that membership went from a high of 316,415 in 1992 to 195,704 in 2023. Average sunday attendance is even worse at 129,546 in 2023 (not measured in 1992).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oQamXOdPoL6AEs3WOCCZqbImu8SJIUCOIzpswny7Gx8/edit?pli=1#gid=0
It's easy enough to see what has happened to the church in the Netherlands on Wikepedia.
You see more theoretical, I see how it works out everyday , so if my input isn't of interest to you, just say so.
The introduction of Groen Van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution, by Harry Van Dyk (the translator)jdescribes the importance of Groen to Kuyper. In summation:
"These six seminal ideas would become pillars in the neo-Calvinism spearheaded by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and would be refined and made operational in the reformational philosophy associated with the Amsterdam scholars Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven (1892-1987)"
That is why Runner named his club "The Groen Van Prinsterer Society" and not the "Abraham Kuyper Society."
I consider sphere sovreignty to be important, but peripheral. To me, the most important thing that Kuyper did was to change the Gospel itself. Kuyper asserts that Christ's sacrifice was not primarily to redeem individual men, but to redeem creation. See page 282, 283 of Kuyper's Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology.
" From this difficulty there is no escape, until special Revelation is no longer viewed as directed soteriologically to individual man. Revelation goes out to humanity taken as a whole. Since humanity unfolds itself historically, thus Revelation also bears a historic charcter. . . .And as individuals partake of this human life only in relation to humanity as a whole, so also in relation to this whole along is Revelation of any significance to individual man. By this we do not deny the soteriological aim of special Revelation, but merely asseret that salvation of the individual man is not its rule. . . .. but the aim and thereffore also the end, of all this, is to make us see how God has loved His world, and that therefore the creation of the cosmos, even in the face of sin, has been no failure . . . .The subject of this action is not the individual person, but the general Ego of beleiveing humanity."
From this you get Kuyper's concept of "all of life redeemed," and his "not one square inch over which he does not cry "Mine".
So if all of creation is redeemed, "man began to understand the subjjection of all nature with its hidden forces and treasures to himself as a holy duty, imposed upon him by the original ordinances of Paradise: "Have dominion over them. Henceforth, the curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it ". . .from Lectures on Calvinism, p. 30.
This became for Kuyperians "the Creation Mandate" or "cultural Mandate." (today nothing less than Cultural Marxism)
In "Historic Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism", https://www.westminsterconfession.org/resources/the-doctrines-of-grace/historic-calvinism-and-neo-calvinism/, William yound says that Kuyper is "at risk" of preaching a different gospel--in my opinion, he really did preach a different gospel.
And because the Bible tells us that the natural man cannot discern the things of the spirit (But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned., 1 Cor 2:14), natural man cannot understand the world (apart from Common Grace).
To the Kuyperians, there is no Natural Law, no universal truth that any man can know, because everything is "of the Spirit." They completely reject the concept of objective reality.
Kuyperians hold everything up to the dialectic of redeemed/unredeemed (their concept of idolatry).
This is why I call it a gnostic cult.
I live in the heart of the "Reformed" wold. This poison has moved through and has consumed the CRC (and probably the RCA as well, I haven't studied them),
Hi Hiram,
When it comes to Kuyper's presuppositionalism, this is again a concept that he picked up from his mentor Gulluame Groen Van Prinsterer.
This article, The Intellectual Milieu of Herman Dooyweerd” might interest you.
(It was Kuyper and Kant)
https://ir.icscanada.edu/bitstream/handle/10756/607230/LHD_01_Wolters_1985.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
You mentioned that Kuyper was inconsistent. There is a good analysis of this from Prof Hanko explaining the early Kuyper and the late Kuyper. A
sad history. https://common-grace-considered.blogspot.com/2009/04/dr-abraham-kuypr-and-common-grace-11.html?m=1
One last thing, here is a link to Harry Kits 1988 Master's Degree Thesis at the Institute for Christian studies (W O R L D V I E W S A N D SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT
A Proposal -for Classification of Canadian Neo-Calvinist
Social Involvement 1945 - 1988). It describes the Kuyperian Dutch coming to Canada post WWII and their incorporation into the American CRC and some of the problems. Very interesting!!
file:///C:/Users/dlfre/Downloads/Kits_Harry_J_1988_MPhilF_Thesis%20(3).pdf
"Tensions soon arose, however, between the American home
missionaries and their charges, between the recent and earlier
immigrants, and between the Canadian part of the CRC and the U.S.
part. The congregations were served by American ministers until
1952 when the Dutch immigrant pastors began to arrive.[293 The
Am erican pastors, like much of the CRC in the United States,
tended to be Confessional Re f or m ed in their w o r l d view. T h e
Dutch pastors, like many of the new immigrants, tended to be
Neo-Calvinists." (p. 37 of Kits)
I have a lot more. I’ll float it your way periodically.
If you read Plantinga’s blog, make sure to read the endnotes as well. And the “cast of Characters. And “the Institutions” it’s unfortunate that he died before completing more.
And make sure to look at The Institute for Christian Studies” (Toronto) . It’s the Institution that Runner envisioned and his students founded. Read their mission statement. They feed “intellectuals” into the rest of the CRC
FYI—per my comments on other posts: it was Van Til who encouraged Evan Runner (a Scott’s-Irish Presbyterian) to learn Dutch and go to the Netherlands and study. Runner did do that—once under Klas Schilder, known for redemptive history (Hegelian) and after WWII, at the Free University under Dooyweerd’s B-I-L Vollenhoven. Runner got his Ph.D. Under Vollenhoven.
The Club Runner sponsored at Calvin College spawned “the Reformational Movement” which had three aspects: Kuyper, Dooyweerd, and Redemptive History (in later years, the concept of Shalom neo-Calvinism has been added)
I consider it to be a gnostic cult.