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    Rooted & Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution
    Rooted & Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution
    Rooted & Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Rooted & Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution

    By Abraham Kuyper

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    Abraham Kuyper’s Rooted & Grounded is the Word of the Lord for the Christian church today. Christians know the Gospel must permeate every area of life organically, that every vocation is integral and not accidental to the missio Dei, as my friend and colleague Steven Garber is fond of saying. This is what Kuyper means when he talks about the church being rooted in the organism of the Gospel. But Kuyper goes much further, reminding us that the church is “First rooted, then grounded” in an institutional form with core doctrinal, liturgical, and office-bearing responsibilities that norm its vital organic life.

    -Stephen Grabill
    Senior Research Scholar in Theology, Acton Institute

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristian's Library Press
    Release dateMar 24, 2013
    ISBN9781938948558
    Rooted & Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution
    Author

    Abraham Kuyper

    Abraham Kuyper (1937-1920) was a prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian, politician, educator, and writer. His thinking has influenced the Neo-Calvinist movement in the United States and Canada. Many of his writings, including Pro Rege, have never been translated into English.

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      Book preview

      Rooted & Grounded - Abraham Kuyper

      ROOTED

      &

      GROUNDED

      THE CHURCH AS ORGANISM AND INSTITUTION

      ABRAHAM KUYPER

      Translated and edited by

      NELSON D. KLOOSTERMAN

      Foreword and Introduction by

      JOHN HALSEY WOOD JR.

      Christian’s Library Press

      An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2013 by Christian’s Library Press

      CONTENTS

      TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

      FOREWORD

      INTRODUCTION

      AUTHOR’S PREFACE

      1. The Need of the Hour: A Church That Is Both Organism and Institution

      2. The Church as Organism

      3. The Church as Institution

      4. The Struggle within the Church To Be Both Rooted and Grounded

      5. A Call for Freedom To Be the Church

      6. A Call to Defend the Reformed Church As Organism and Institution

      7. Closing Exhortations

      ABOUT ABRAHAM KUYPER

      ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

      ABOUT THE KUYPER TRANSLATION SOCIETY

      TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

      Translating this inaugural sermon of Abraham Kuyper has been a most challenging exercise, largely because of its passion and eloquence. In this piece we hear Kuyper’s heart speaking a language that some have described as baroque, language that suits both the occasion and his subject.

      The arrangement of this piece into numbered segments is entirely our invention, as are all the notes.

      The translated sermon you are about to enjoy owes its readability at many points to Dr. Harry Vandyke, who kindly reviewed the piece and suggested numerous essential improvements. Dr. John Halsey Wood Jr. also deserves our thanks for his thoughtful suggestions.

      Nelson D. Kloosterman

      FOREWORD

      Although he is celebrated for his achievements in the academy and in politics, concern for the church permeated Abraham Kuyper’s career and even preceded these other concerns. Kuyper’s student days were marked by a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation on the history and theology of the church. He then took several pastoral positions in the Netherlands Reformed Church, the broad national church of the Netherlands. Parallel to the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam and the Antirevolutionary political party was Kuyper’s work as an instigator of a secession church out of the national church in 1886. He continued as an active teacher, preacher, and churchman in that church for the rest of his life. In fact, one of Kuyper’s last writings was a series of articles on ecclesiology, which remained unfinished only because of his death.

      This translation of Abraham Kuyper’s Rooted & Grounded anticipates the publication of a larger collection of Kuyper’s writings on the church soon to appear under the imprint of Christian’s Library Press and by the generous support of Rimmer de Vries and the Acton Institute. The complete volume will include selections from Kuyper’s doctoral dissertation on the theology of John Calvin and John a Lasco; various treatises and sermons, such as Twofold Fatherland and Address on Missions; and selections from larger works on the church, such as Kuyper’s commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, and his Antirevolutionary Politics. The centerpiece will be Kuyper’s programmatic statement Tract on the Reformation of the Churches, which takes a unique approach to ecclesiology, particularly its development through the stages of church formation, deformation, and reformation. In addition, two interpretive essays will be included, one theological by Ad de Bruijne and one historical by John Halsey Wood. This larger collection by no means exhausts Kuyper’s ecclesiological reflections, since they were so numerous, but it aims to provide readers of Abraham Kuyper and anyone generally concerned with theology in the nineteenth century and the modern period with a resource on one of the most contentious issues and one of the most dynamic figures of the era.

      John Halsey Wood Jr.

      INTRODUCTION

      Abraham Kuyper and the Challenge of the Church

      John Halsey Wood Jr.

      Abraham Kuyper preached his sermon Rooted and Grounded at a time when the ground was shifting under the feet of the churches in the West. His sermon was, of course, not a comprehensive theological account, but he nonetheless provided in short compass an account of the church that answered the chief questions raised by modern society: What is the church? and What is its position in the emerging society?

      Historiography of nineteenth-century theology, particularly Protestant theology, regularly treats the secularization of the mind, rationalism, as the primary theological challenge, especially when beginning with matters of Scripture and theological prolegomena.¹ Abraham Kuyper, however, perceived the main challenge facing Christianity differently. [A] time like ours, Kuyper said, was a time when especially the church question dominates every other issue.² Elsewhere he said that the church problem was none other than the problem of Christianity itself.³ It should not surprise us, then, to find that Kuyper often thought in terms similar to Max Weber’s and Ernst Troeltsch’s church and sect, since these contemporaries were likewise concerned with the church question.⁴

      Social changes, as much or more than intellectual ones, caused trouble for the church. Mass, democratic culture, the separation of church and state, and religious pluralism were particularly difficult to

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