Abraham Kuyper offers one non-liberal route for the state to organize itself in a way that is supportive of the basic truths of the divinely ordained natural law within a system that is more tolerant of diversity than the Constantinian settlement.

Abraham Kuyper, the Invisible Church, and Religious Establishments

Early Protestant politics, according to Abraham Kuyper in his famous lecture “Calvinism and Politics,” was in many ways a product of the Middle Ages, exemplified “in an article of our old Calvinistic Confession of Faith [which] entrusts to the State the task ‘of defending against and of extirpating every form of idolatry and false religion and to protect the sacred service of the Church.’…[and] in the unanimous and uniform advice of Calvin and his epigones, who demanded intervention of the government in the matter of religion.”1. It was indeed a relatively straightforward carrying over of the basic Constantinian settlement which brought “differences in religious matters under the criminal jurisdiction of the government” based on the conviction that there “was only one Church of Christ on earth, and it was the task of the Magistrate to protect that Church from schisms, heresies and sects.”2 Calvin’s view on this is stated succinctly in the Institutes:

[T]o the [civil magistrate] it is assigned, so long as we live among men, to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the Church…³

In this system, the state has a responsibility to protect and enforce the whole system of the true religion against all competitors. In such a scheme religious liberty is impossible. It would not even have been comprehensible, much less desired, even if it had it been an option at the time.

Religious liberty, however, is seen as one of the chief blessings of the modern world, at least in those nations that are heirs of traditions stretching back to the Enlightenment. Christians since that time, however, have argued for a variety of positions on religious liberty, many of which are not founded on explicitly Enlightenment foundations. Most such arguments are based primarily on a conviction about the dangers to the church when the state has power to regulate the church’s internal affairs and doctrine, rather than a fear about illegitimate influence from the church on the state. Such arguments—in distinction from ones derived primarily from the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment—make an argument from Scripture, whether it is the correct one or not. This is how it should be: if religious liberty is worth preserving, it is worth preserving on explicitly Christian grounds.

This is where Kuyper’s argument is particularly interesting. He, too, makes an argument for (limited) religious liberty on explicitly theological grounds. He argues on the basis of a central point of Reformed theology, even as he attempts to show that the essentially Constantinian vision of the Reformation regarding the state was partially mistaken. In so doing he argues for a form of religious liberty different from that offered by many Christians today. It may very well be a position that retains some of the beneficial aspects of classic Protestant political thought, while at the same time providing a more realistic vision of religious liberty for the modern world than a straightforward application of the earliest Reformed theology would allow. At the very least it could serve as a springboard for further discussion in this area.

It is the doctrine of the invisible church that Kuyper understands as necessitating a reformulation of the medieval relationship of church and state. If one accepts, as even the earliest Reformed theologians did, “that the Church of Christ can reveal itself in many forms, in different countries; nay, even in the same country, in a multiplicity of institutions” then “immediately everything which was deduced from this unity of the visible church drops out of sight.”⁴ That is to say, there is not necessarily only one institutional manifestation of the church in a given nation. A core conviction of the Reformed churches is that the visible church is always more or less pure, and that not everyone in it is chosen for salvation in God’s eternal counsel. Therefore, there is an “invisible church” within the visible.⁵

Kuyper insists, then, that since

in Calvinistic countries a rich variety of all manner of church-formations revealed itself…it follows that we must not seek the true Calvinistic characteristic in what, for a time, it has retained of the old [medieval] system, but rather in that, which, new and fresh, has sprung up from its own root…With Rome the system of persecution issued from the identification of the visible with the invisible Church, and from this dangerous line Calvin departed.”⁶

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