Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace and the Diversity of God's Creation
Presentation to Faculty and Students of Dordt College March 12, 2001
According to Nathan Glazer, "we are all multiculturalists now." Well, maybe. Historically America has been the great melting pot, the great assimilator that eliminated the "dross" of other nations. The result was a new kind of human being for Crevecour or for Israel Zangwell, "the American." Remember the words from Emma Lazarus, the words enscribed on the statue of liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, those yearning to breathe free." This bespeaks of an open America, virtually advertising for immigrants and workers from foreign soils.
For others, the sentiment is probably captured in the popular boundary line declaration, "enough already!" But, they keep on coming, by the millions. Some by boat, others by train or plain. Many just wade over the Rio Grande, or are packed into trucks and vans, and for steep prices, are smuggled over the border. Still, THEY keep coming. There is a mural in Pilsen, as the Lady of Guadalupe (the mestizo appearing Virgin Mary), watches over many as they wade across to America. "You will be amazed at what you will find," reads the caption in Spanish. In the late nineteenth century, nativists and descendents of the so-called "Know Nothing Party," were very fearful of the immigrant. In the 1850s, Chicago had a descendent of Daniel Boone as Mayor, Levi Boone. Levi was an evangelical Protestant and was a fanatical supporter of blue laws, no drinking on Sundays. By 1855, Chicago was over half Irish and German. These groups came from drinking cultures in Europe, and Boone was going to close down the saloons, if only for a day. The Irish were known for their hard drinking ways, and the Germans, especially after revolutions in 1848 were fearful "Red Republicans," guilty by association for leaning towards socialism, and this was before Marx. Riots occurred, three people were killed, and the effort to close the saloons down in lusty Chicago, an abysmal failure. Boone was a one term mayor by the way.
In the late nineteenth century, another group of immigrants came. Unlike the Irish or the Germans, the "new immigrants" as they were called were from Southern and Eastern Europe. The Irish and the Germans were "okay" by then. At least they brought with them urban skills. The Irish worked on the railroads, built our canals, but really understood urban politics. The Germans virtually established the first symphony in Chicago, and were also known for their business acumen. Now comes the new group. The Near North Side was no longer "Kilgubbin," belonging to the Irish; but was now known as "Little Sicily." Today, on the Near North Side, the area known after WWII as Cabrini Green, is being assimilated into the Gold Coast in Chicago.
It seemed to many of our Protestant crusaders that the Italians had a particular bent to organized crime, not true of all, but true of many. Besides, the Italians, Sicilians, Poles, Greeks and other Slavic cultures were considered unmeltable. Just a few years ago, Michael Novak's famous book was released, called The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. Speaking of himself and his own heritage, the Southern and Eastern Europeans were more rural, very Roman Catholic, and spoke languages that didn't translate well, like French or German did. Besides, the new cultures that were "invading" our fair land were very unused to urban ways. Yes, immigrants were historically our proletariat, and the Poles and Lithuanians who came were hard workers, and worked in our steel mills and in packingtown, but could they be assimilated?
Josiah Strong didn't think so, in his book, Our Country, an 1885 "warning" of the perils of immigration, and the place where these "aliens" and "foreigners" seemed to congregate. He wrote:
Notice that Strong was still worried about the Irish and the Germans, by 1885 arguably assimilated into Americana. From 1890 to 1920, 23.5 million immigrants came to America, 600,000 per year, almost 6 million per decade (before the National Origins Act of 1924 restricted immigration to those from N and W Europe, and before a Great Depression and a Second World War further curtailed immigration). From 1900 to 1910, 8.2 million immigrants landed on our shores, mostly through Ellis Island, and 70% of this group was from Southern and Eastern Europe. If you put all the Europeans together, in 1890, 86% of the immigrants were from Europe, and Europe still dominated our immigration patterns as late as 1960, when 75% came from Europe, and only 9% came from Latin American and only 5% from Asia.
While Josiah Strong worried about immigration, specifically the numbers of Germans and Irish in America, the country was concerned enough in the 1920s to restrict immigration to those who come from Northern and Western Europe. After 1964, and by 1999, a dramatic shift has occurred. In 1999, 51% of our immigrants came from Latin America, and 27% from Asia, and only 16% came from Europe. And the numbers are staggering, more than the total that came to this country in the Pre World One era are coming to the USA today. In the 1990s, over ten million people entered America-legally, the most of any decade, including the decade between 1900 and 1910 when over eight million came.
Kuyper and the Curse of Uniformity
I would like to draw your attention this evening to one of the earliest speeches given by Kuyper, a speech entitled "Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life," given on April 22, 1869, a fourth and final lecture he gave to the Christian young men's club during the winter of 1868-1869. As James Bratt summarizes its contents: "Kuyper extols the wild over the tamed, the unplanned over the calculated, the free-forming over the manufactured, the unique individual over the standardized type, and above all, the organic over the mechanical. His celebration of variety, diversity and multiformity echoes the medieval - and anticipates the postmodern."
I believe that Kuyper in this article anticipates what Max Weber and contemporary critical theorists such as Jurgen Habermas were concerned about, namely the perils of modernization. If uniformity and conformity were curses for him, the problems of bureaucracy, corporate organization, modernity, industrialization/ computerization and more generally, "technical rationality," have been hallmarks of late capitalism. Kuyper or course critiqued the French Revolution and its accompanying cultural expressions like individualism or any moral or political philosophy that sought to stand on its on. Yet, on the contrary, Kuyper celebrates the beauty and infinite variety of the created order. He glorifies cultural multiformity as expressing the infinite and boundless stamp of the Creator.
There are some aspects to this essay that are troubling to me. And, since there are so many "kuypers," all of us probably select to a certain extent "their" Kuyper. Like the words of scripture, though infallible, it is possible to have differing readings and interpretations. So, what I am going to give you is no doubt "my Kuyper," and then we can debate if the Kuyper I am giving you is "the real Kuyper." Of course, many of Kuyper's limitations, such as they are, are the result of being born in a particular time and place. Kuyper was, of course, born before women's suffrage, and certainly well before the modern day women's movement. My 19 year old daughter is majoring in women's studies, wants to work for the UN on women's rights issues, and already has her sights on the pursuit of a PhD. She would have a great deal of trouble, as do I, with placing limits on women's roles, though Kuyper does do this in fact. Kuyper writes:
Whatever we think of Kuyper's view, in 1869, of women, this is not the purpose of this particular essay. In this essay, Kuyper is mostly concerned with the problem of modernization, and trends toward what he called "false uniformity." Clearly, he was not against "unity," per se, and indeed so unity as the end of God's great project of human, and cosmic redemption. However, it was the manufactured, coerced "conformity" that seemed to pervasive in 19th century Europe that seemed to him quite troubling. Kuyper believed that ultimately, redemption would move us from diversity to unity, and from chaos to order. However, wrote Kuyper, the world also strives toward unity, and it is, for him, the power of sin that seeks "a well ordered coherence in its manifestations and a regular development in its progress."
Not that Kuyper was against progress or development, but he was concerned about how progress or human development might be grounded. Kuyper noted the many historic attempts at mass uniformity. He cites the story of Babel in the Bible, and the legacies of imperialism. He was critical of what he called "Caesarism," and of empires such as Nebuchadnezzer, Cyrus the Great, the Egyptian Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, most of the Roman Caesars, the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and in his time, the designs of Otto Von Bismark "blood and iron." We could of course continue to cite examples such as Hitler's Germany; Stalin's Russia; Mao's China and the like. For Kuyper, the unity that faith demands, and the unity that nations desire are at enmity.
In God's plan vital unity develops by internal strength precisely from the diversity of nations and races; but sin, by a reckless leveling and the elimination of all diversity, seeks a false, deceptive unity, the uniformity of death. The unity of God is written in the blueprint of the foundations; the unity of the world is merely painted on the walls. Lest Kuyper, or for that matter, the speaker, be here rebuked for dualism, I think Kuyper was arguing that these two views are not dualisms, but incompatible comprehensive doctrines.
And now for some illustrations of what I think Kuyper was arguing for, let us move on. For Kuyper, a "spurious unity" has dominated world history. This seems to include all forms of imperialism. Further, Kuyper ties imperialism (Caesarism) with another problem germane to our discussion, that of the melting pot. Kuyper argues that imperialism, and other examples of "spurious uniformity" are incompatible with diversity as God's creation.
Only when that imperial unity had been achieved by a mighty military arm did the vain attempt to begin to melt that diversity into a single unity. But what does this experience teach? That the unity shattered and the peoples broke apart over and over because the necessary unity and homogeneity of social life was missing. It was precisely national differences, the people's diversity of character, the ineradicable uniqueness of their ethnicity, that time and again broke up imperial unity at almost the moment it was created.
For Kuyper, false unity was epitomized by political, social, economic and cultural efforts to subvert diversity through patterns of uniformity, conformity, unification and centralization. I will address the threats to unity that might be posed by "multiculturalism" a little later, but for now, let us say, that even in this early stage, it is clear that Kuyper prefers a decentralized state with separate spheres that somehow operate together in a unity grounded in a divine teleos, teleology being the study of design, order or purpose to the cosmos.
For Kuyper, the created order was characterized by infinite diversity and plurality, and in this he extols.
If multiformity is the undeniable mark of fresh and vigorous life, out age seeks to realize its curse in its quest for uniformity. Its attempts to blend all shades into the blank darkness of the grave are becoming ever more obvious. Ever more shrilly it cries out that in our modern society, everything, however distinctive in nature, must be shaped by one model, cut to a single pattern, or poured out into one fixed mold. For Kuyper, such "Caesarism" not only "crushes everything fresh and natural by its thirst for the conventional, [but], unable to appreciate the distinctive features of the face of humanity, it grinds away with a coarse hand all the divinely engraved markings on the copper plate of life."
Examples of this are quite prophetic. In the history of planning in America, one remembers with some affection the works of Clifton T. Olmstead's Central Park of New York and Riverside, Illinois, or Daniel H. Burnham's famous Plan of Chicago (1909). To their credit, these individuals recognized the natural landscapes, and argued for curvilinear streets and a built environment that is developed in harmony with the natural environment. Chicago today has 7300 acres, 552 parks, 33 beaches, nine museums, two conservatories16 lagoons and 10 bird and wildlike gardens. But for the most part, Chicago, like most cities, is developed on the grid pattern that is literally forced upon the topography.
In the spirit of an Olmstead, Kuyper noted that the "old Dutch cities" charmed the visitor because the houses and streets reflected the natural landscape and allowed for the individuality of housing development. I have no idea how this would compare with modern day Amsterdam or Rotterdam, but here goes:
Isn't that lovely. Though I have no historic reference as to the veracity of these comments, it does give one a vision for a viable urban community development plan. But, Kuyper, being no fool, was troubled by other trends that he saw in society. Even today in Chicago, downtown redevelopment is going wild, and condos are being put up in a frenzy. In the neighborhoods, there are thousands of cinder block apartments, three to four stories high. They all look the same, and yet are being sold as "condos" for $350,000 a unit. These are examples of gentrification that are plaguing our cities, and perhaps even your towns. They are not unlike the massive high rise public housing complexes, urban futurism, that we built to honor the minds of Le Corbusier, or even Buckminster Fuller.
Apparently, some of the same sins of conformity and sameness were being built even in 1868. Writes our Kuyper in contrast to the curvilinear ideal: You can immediately tell that no shoddy money-hungry developer threw up that line of houses but that every dwelling is the fulfillment of a personal dream….
Kuyper worried about the impacts of "America's new cities…, one of the modern suburbs…," or "modern cities" like Berlin in the 1860s. Kuyper described the "irreproachable straightness of the lines…."
You have to number the streets and count them out so as not to get lost in so featureless a collection of houses. Better, not houses but blocks of tenements that make you think of institutions of mercy or army barracks rather than of the homes of free citizens.
Kuyper rejected the modernization projects that were occurring in Berlin, Wiesbaden and in Paris. He rejected the work of Georges Eugene Haussmann (1809-91). Haussmann built boulevards that cut across old neighborhoods, even as expressways were built in our cities in the 1950s that uprooted millions and paved the way for a massive white flight and suburban sameness. Kuyper lamented the redevelopment of Holland's cities that were also subject to "urban renewal." He noted that "the poetry of our cities vanish…, the plasterer's trowel covers up in grey and white panes around the red bricks, and before long," he wrote, "all diversity has been removed from Holland's cities…. [U]niformity has won the day in the field of architecture."
For Kuyper, the same thing was happening with age differences, gender differences, and ultimately in cultural differences. Today, he would no doubt be concerned with the "cult of youth" in our culture, and also the equalization of the sexes. But these are discussions of another paper. I will rather turn my attention to the second area of my interest, that of cultural diversity. Kuyper was worried that the diversity of cultures was slowly being supplanted by conformity of dress. He noted, that in former times, clothing and attire reflected a more magnificent diversity and display of dress. In matters of style, Kuyper celebrated what might be considered more traditional customs.
I must admit to you, that if dress is a reflection of income inequality or unequal status in society, then I have some serious reservations. However, if it reflects the diversity of cultural traditions, and the infinite variety of ways that humans gird themselves, I am for it. The question of course, is if I can have one without the other, probably not. Even so, it is clear what Kuyper did not want, clothing that was "ill fitting" or "undistinguished." Kuyper seemed to reject attire that was characterized by either "excessive fickleness" or "wooden sameness."
Kuyper worried that "life in our cities evidences no exception to the uniform than the grotesque garments in which the orphanage wraps its charges and the Home of the Aged dresses its crones." He seems to save much of his verbal venom for the bastardization of language, and the cultural uniformity of advertising. "Just read the advertisements at the low levels of our business world-the hodgepodge of private lingo laced with a supply of double-crossed mongrel words they alone are privy to." In addition to the sameness of dress, Kuyper assailed the triviality of a language reduced to slogans, mottos, and empty phrases that compel one to buy an object. The power of "just do it" or "whatever" reveals perhaps contemporary problems with language. Not to pick necessarily on one President, but I can remember how complex domestic and foreign policy issues were reduced to two simple phrases: "just say no" and "be like us." The great mystery is that in this culture in the 1980s, we bought it.
Moving on past the basics of how a culture operates, let us consider Kuyper's view of cultural diversity. Kuyper felt that modernization was undermining the richness of human creativity and what we today call the "cultural mandate." It seemed that, in the modern world, "everything has to be equalized and leveled; all diversity must be whittled down. Differences in architectural style must go. Age differences must go. Gender differences must go. Differences in dress must go. Differences in language must go. Indeed, what doesn't have to go if this drive toward uniformity succeeds?" Kuyper asks. It seemed to Kuyper that the country was "overlaid with a web of uniformity all the threads of which are pulled by a power-hungry centralizing monster." It seemed to him that the "model state," including its educational institutions, was insensitive to cultural differences, "differences in religion, character or aptitude…"
Like us, Kuyper had his own "whipping horse" that he was quite willing to flog. For him, the "iron steam engine" was part of the problem. Also, "the power of capital" had become "a single gigantic wholesaler [that] swallows up the patronage that formerly enabled a number of stores to flourish." Would he say the same thing today about Wal-Mart or Target? It seemed to him that the industrial age was contributing to a vast leveling of society, not its uplift. Instead, "robber barons" were creating for themselves empires of wealth and power, and the multitudes were being reduced to factory wage earners. The result was that "cultural differences" were undermined, "standardized ideas" had robbed people of their soul; and the beauty of language and "national genius… planed away." In short, and this is the kicker, Kuyper seemed to be worrying about the conformity of a globalized culture that was on the way. He foresaw that modernism was paving the way to, and I quote him directly, an "earth [where] there would be just one people and one language-one vast cosmopolis in which there would no longer be any east or west, north or south, but all of human life would be the same because it would collectively bear the uniform features of death." It seems that the battle, then and now, is the analogous "McWorld versus Jihad," or hopefully something else. And, it is probably the something else that both you and I are interested in. But now, to the heart of what I am trying to get at.
For Kuyper, the central problem for modernism what that it corrupted the world as God's creation, and this includes the diversity of the human family. From Genesis, Kuyper noted that God had ordered that the first humans, with other living species, multiply "after its kind." Of course, this reveals some other problems for us. With 6 billion people becoming soon eight or nine billion, one is tempted to say, "enough already." But, Kuyper was not really concerned with the numbers problem that we have today. Rather, I think he would be on the side of those who want to protect the biodiversity of the species, and to strive to preserve species from the treat of extinction. I think he wanted to a global society that honored the diversity of cultures and the variety of ways that humans ordered their lives. This he argued for as part and parcel of the doctrine of creation.
This is an interesting place for the word "capriciousness" which for Kuyper, celebrates the whimsical, unpredictable, impulsive, dynamic, organic, creative nature of the universe we live in and celebrate as God's ongoing creative activity.
For Kuyper, Pentecost reveals better God's intention for humanity than Babel. Rather than forced uniformity, the variety of nation states in the Second Chapter of Acts all descended upon Jerusalem. Jerusalem, from Old Testament times, was to be a city where all nations could come and worship the one true God. They would not have to give up their culture and distinctiveness to do that. Rather, hearing the gospel in their own languages, they could celebrate the diversity of the creation and their part in it through doxologies sung by a vast humanity, diversified in peoples, tribes, nations and tongues, but united in the Light that enlightens all human beings in Christ. For missiologist C. Rene Padilla, the multicultural reality of the world was not a threat to the gospel, but a revelation of "the many faceted wisdom of God."
Of course, Kuyper would later take elements of this early 1869 article and develop them more in his classic writings, especially the Stone Lectures. There, not only is Calvinism extolled as an all-embracing life system, but one that affirms the diversity of human cultures. In Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper writes, "there is no uniformity among men, (generic humankind) but endless multiformity. Kuyper assailed modernism for abolishing differences. And, for Kuyper, multiformity does not mean inequality.
For Kuyper, Christians, especially Reformed Christians, stood not over others in triumph. Nor did they flee from culture and abandon it to competing ideologies. Rather, it stood "by the side of Paganism, Islamism, Romanism, and Modernism, and to claim for itself the glory of possessing a well-defined principle and an all embracing life-system."
In the language of Leslie Newbigen, the gospel is public truth, but for us truth is not imperial or relative. It is to be fought over and argued in a civil arena of competing all-embracing, comprehensive doctrines. Kuyper had confidence that common grace would not just restrain evil, but would also enable the best intentions of human beings to be manifested as creatures of God. Therefore, for Kuyper, there was no race unity or race superiority. Nations and cultures, citing America as a positive example, would profit from an intercultural interaction. Our unity with God is not based on race, but in the gospel. At its best, Calvinism has stood with the oppressed, and has sought to alleviate the burden of the poor. For Kuyper, it was not "racism" that was attractive, in fact he found it abhorrent. Rather, it was the "human race" as a whole, it its magnificent multiformity that reveals the image and glory of God.