Spiritual Formation: Abraham Kuyper and the Dissolving Self


In 1907 Abraham Kuyper began a series of 158 articles on the lordship of Christ, collected as Pro Rege.  It is best read, says James Bratt, as “his diagnosis of the West one decade into the twentieth century.”

One of Kuyper's concerns is a “general decline of religious consciousness” in people, which he attributes, in part, to the dissolving of the self,  caused by increasing technology, an unprecedented knowledge explosion, and a preoccupation with mammon, that is, wealth and the accumulation of wealth.

We might respond with a yawn and say, “just another old man who can’t adjust to the changes that time inevitably brings—Wordsworth in the 18th century exclaiming that “the world is too much with us,” that “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Thoreau in the 19th  century lamenting that  “The civilized man has built himself a coach but has lost the use of his feet.”  Schelhaas in the 21st century complaining about Smart phones and Twitter and Instagram.

But before you dismiss Father Abraham as just another cranky old guy listen to a bit more from him:
“The spirit of a person from youth up becomes dispersed and divided over all sorts of things. . . .  Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit. . . . [It] is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.”  But, Kuyper goes on, people “don’t want that anymore.  They’re scared of it.  And they’re too strewn about for it.  The spirit is always too full, too beset, too overburdened for it.”

I think he’s right.  And if he was concerned about distraction back in 1907, imagine what he would say today.  CNN tells me that the average teen sends 3000 texts a month!  And then there are ear buds and Netflix and Facebook and a hundred other media waiting with open arms.  Does the average teen-ager have space in his day “to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with . . .the One from whom it all comes”? 

Is it possible that the masses can be so entranced by their distractions that they cease to struggle with questions of God, existence, the universe?  I don’t know but I think so.  “Oh brave new World.”


My church (CRC) has devoted a lot of time in recent years to the question of spiritual formation, and I’m sure it has struggled with the concern that Kuyper raises here.  But I’m not sure how they or anyone answers it.

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