An Appreciative Review

by Dr. Robert M .Woods Headmaster, Veritas Christian Academy Instructor, Kepler Education

There are some books that reveal not only a different time and place but even shed light onto our own moment. Occasionally there are books that do both of these wonderful things and even more stand as a model for parallel studies. In the span of publishing history, there are only a handful of history books that have seen as many editions in as many different languages as Huizinga’s masterpiece.

Since its original publication in Dutch, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen has seen numerous translations across various languages and cultures. In this review, three will be considered for their enjoyment and benefit for Classical Christian education. The three English translations this review takes into consideration are:1

• The Waning of the Middle Ages Translated by Frederik Jan Hopman.

• The Autumn of the Middle Ages Translated by Rodney J. Payton & Ulrich Mammitzsch.

• Autumntide of the Middle Ages Translated by Diane Webb.

This appreciative review is not as much a scholarly consideration of the quality of the three translations as this would require a polyglot of significant magnitude knowing Dutch, Latin, French, English, and German. This essay is reflecting on the three separate volumes as translated works and their inherent value as intellectual artifacts approximating, in translation, a modern masterpiece of cultural history.

Johan Huizinga, author of several volumes of cultural history including a fine biography on Erasmus and a fascinating study, informed by anthropological insights, on the play element in human culture titled Homo Ludens, is also the author of two collections of essays on contemporary American life and mass culture. This includes a powerful essay on writing cultural history that would serve the budding cultural historian. Huizinga is actually recognized by many modern

1 Respectively, from the earlier to the most recently published, The Waning of the Middle Ages , Johan Huizinga, London: Edward Arnold & Company, 1924; The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga, Translated Rodney J. Payton, Ulrich Mammitzsch. University of Chicago Press, 1997; Autumntide of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life and Thought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Low Countries ed. Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem, trans. Diane Webb. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020.

Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages writers as the founder of the discipline that came to be called cultural history.

Each of these volumes considered has its own distinct value. While the earliest translation in English has significant limitations in terms of illustrations and scholarly apparatus, it is the edition included in the Great Books of the Western World. 2 The fact that it was included in this august set also means that it is included in the Author to Author Index, and the Author to Idea Index. 3

In addition to being a sound reading, with the above referenced indices, this edition is also a tool for research. This translation within the Great Books collection affords the opportunity to engage in the Great Conversation with authors and writings including The Holy Bible, Euripides, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Dante, Erasmus, Goethe, Herodotus, Homer, William James, Nietzsche, Plato, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Virgil because of the way the Great Books index is structured. Using the unique research tool called the Syntopicon, students of Huizinga’s work also interact with some or all of the following Great Ideas: Art, Being, Custom and Convention, Emotion, Experience, Family, Habit, History, Honor, Justice, Knowledge, Language, Law, Life and Death, Math, Nature, Poetry, Religion, Science, Sign and Symbol, State, Time, Truth, and Wealth.

The translators of later English editions graciously suggest that earlier translations, while bringing to English this masterpiece, lacked some of the original text and textual apparatus to aid the scholar. Despite the fact that the original

2 Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.: 1991), 82, 93.

3 Ibid.

English 1924 translation occurred under Huizinga’s involvement and consent there were elements missing from the earliest English edition. Huizinga’s direct influence as editor was not recognized in later translations in other languages.

Huizinga noted earlier that his original intention was to examine the art of the van Eyck brothers by placing this within the context of everyday life in Burgundy. As his research expanded, Huizinga widened his scholarly lens to include the end of the Middle Ages in both France and the Netherlands. This resulted in a move from a generally practiced chronological approach to a thematic study. Each chapter, within the various translations, offers what could be interpreted as a “framing” proposition about medieval life at that moment and in that place. Huizinga frequently offers insight into an anecdote or literary text that sheds light on the customs, conventions, mores, convictions, and practices. Huizinga’s constant references to the form of an idea or beliefs embodied in practices is most engaging. In addition to several key references to everyday life, Huizinga significantly interacts and interprets numerous literary sources. His commentary on these texts provides helpful guidance. Even when Huizinga takes a dissenting interpretive position from what was common in that day or even the consensus of the traditional view, he provides rationale.

The reader should not approach Huizinga’s work on the Middle Ages with a conventional chronological model in mind. In this unique work, he divides his material by subject. Within each chapter, each keenly titled, he moves around in both time and location. At times this can seem arbitrary. Huizinga has imaginatively entered into the era he explores and often has a sympathy for the medievalists he considers. It is clear that he understands and at times shares affinities with

Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages what he refers to as “the medieval mind.” While some would criticize him for this, it is actually grounds for commendation. Among the many important contributions of Huizinga’s scholarship is, similar to historian Christopher Dawson, an acknowledgment of religious reality. Divine truths and other worldly priorities are given prominence. Religious faith and practice informed and shaped every area of life. This was a fully, religiously enchanted era. This was a world where the Christian faith shaped and was shaped by transcendent reality. As a matter of truth, the students of contemporary secularized society could learn a great deal simply in terms of contrast. Everyday habits, gestures, widespread customs and conventions were infused with the reality of supernatural truths.

Both the Payton and Mammitzsch and the Webb translations attempt to capture a good bit of the lyricism of Huizinga’s original Dutch. Additionally, these two translations attempt to retain in English many of the neologisms. Finally, these two volumes retain much of the scholarly foundation with copious notes and an apparatus (Webb’s version). While the Payton and Mammitzsch edition has approximately forty-five black and white images, the Webb edition has a plethora of stunning examples of art—historical sites and structures and various artifacts that wonderfully serve to illustrate the written text. In addition to providing a rich education of its own right, this volume could easily serve as a template for cultural and historical studies. For an older student, a Rhetoric school level course in a Classical Christian school, or even a graduate course in Medieval studies, much could be gained from this work in any of the translated versions, but more so in the Payton and Mammitzsch and the Webb translations.

Dr. Robert Woods has long enjoyed the Great Books and the education found within them. He has been an educator and Headmaster within Classical Christian institutions for more than 20 years and has degrees in religious studies (B.A.), religion (M.A.), and Humanities (Ph.D.). Dr. Woods lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.

Review of Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation

by Dr. Christy Anne Vaughan, Ed.D.

In this article about Battle for the American Mind , the reviewer will address how it compares with other types of literature and how successful the authors have been in accomplishing the purpose they set out to achieve. This book is co-written by authors David Goodwin (a Classical Christian administrator and current President of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools) and Pete Hegseth (an investigative television news reporter and military veteran). In tone, it feels more like a fireside chat than a news documentary. Much of that can be attributed to Hegseth, who alternates between narrating from Goodwin’s point of view and his own as a parent demanding to know how we arrived at our current state. This editorial team-up seems to make the book at once pedagogical, historical, and yet accessible to all readers in a kind of Joe The Plumber sort of way. It is more than a documentary or a political action treatise, this book is directed at parents and grandparents as not only a call to action but also a call to repentance.

The book is not a classical text because it lacks the literary depth of a great text. It is not a weighty historical text, although it contains a great deal of history outlining our country’s godly heritage and Christian founding as well as the dawn of the Progressive era of educational thinking from the authors’ point of view. It is a type of popular literature best resembling a call to social change. More specifically, it is a call to action for Christian parents who perceive, as the authors suggest, that America is poised to fall into the pit of anti-God materialistic, secular humanist if not Marxist, idolatrous destruction. The authors spend some time describing the current state of affairs in American public schools and society in general in the first two of the three parts of the book which take up roughly half of the book’s text. War and battle rhetoric flow throughout underscoring the authors’ assessment of dire situations and consequences requiring swift and often self-sacrificial actions. They are not used simply due to Hegseth’s military background but are well chosen to illustrate the authors’ premises. The metaphors often are explained in the text from Hegseth’s battle expertise. The second section of the book titled “The Unauthorized History of American Education” describes changes in public policy regarding the form and end goals of education including the writings of Lawrence Cremin and John Dewey with references to historians, theologians, and philosophers from both the Progressive and traditional/conservative points of view such as Jacques Barzun, David V. Hicks, Francis Schaeffer, James K. A. Smith, Werner Jaeger, and Howard Zinn. Political strategists are included in the mix as well. While engaging, the brief, thirty-nine-page section attempts to explain a major shift in American enculturation away from character formation, or what the authors call the Christian Paideia, in favor of job skills training. What is more surprising than the brevity of this overview are the citations that are left out. There was at least one well-known C. S. Lewis quote left unattributed as well as some more contemporary works. Dorothy Sayers appeared in the index, but her work was not cited in the notes. Perhaps the book was only lightly cited for ease of use or to get it into publication more speedily, but in any case, it does not stand up to academic rigor or formatting and so cannot be placed into those categories on proper library shelves. Most surprising in its absence in the book is John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching (1886). Gregory’s work was later edited and promoted by anti-Progressivist William Chandler Bagley, a contemporary of William Heard Kilpatrick, Dewey’s colleague and successor who is mentioned in the book. Hegseth and Goodwin’s book may have excluded mentions of Essentialist movement educational philosophers and practitioners (who pushed back against the Progressive movement in the early 1900s) as a matter of convenience, but in academic fairness, it is a historical oversight. With these several criticisms gently set aside, let us consider what this book is. It is opinionated. It is political. It calls for parents to remove their children from public school in favor of private or at-home Christian education. It is timely, with references to the American military in Afghanistan and the aftermath of our country’s reaction to Covid-19. Most importantly, it is Biblical. The authors are careful to point out that their published and promoted view of education comes from a Biblical worldview taken from the Holy Bible and writings of early church fathers. Early on (page 49 of 251) in the second and longest of the book’s three parts, the authors state that “for most of the past two thousand years” church and state played related but separate roles in human civili- zation because the eternal king, Jesus, superseded earthly governments. It is only in recent memory that the separation of church and state has been seen as removing the church from public view and not as it was originally construed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The authors then zoom in and point to what they perceive as the real problem: modern political activist Marxists have infiltrated teacher training colleges and departments of education and slowly, during the past century, removed America’s firm foundation in the Scriptures. Into that vacuum the post-modern Progressivists took over with a religion of democracy over the republic, state over self, and materialistic pseudoscience over transcendent knowledge.

The balance of the book outlines what has happened in a sort of postmortem of Western Christian Paideia, or WCP, as coined by the authors. The WCP, the authors assert, has been replaced by a Progressive—and more recently an openly Marxist—paideia. The book’s conclusion is that while this is the current state of affairs, a crack in the status quo wall is present. Christians are no longer the majority point of view, but a minority that needs new tactics. They say we can retake our cultural high ground advantage. The authors call for an “educational insurgency” using Afghanistan and pop cultural Star Wars metaphors in illustration. Classical Christian education in all its forms (home school, home/school cooperative, private religious school) is offered as a model for such a return to America’s Biblical worldview foundations. Hegseth likens our “battle for the American mind” to a firefight where believing that we can vote our way out of this situation is like bringing a Nerf gun to a machine gun battle.

So what are readers who agree with Hegseth and Goodwin to do? On pages 249–250, while acknowledging that clas- sical Christian schools will have imperfections or “warts” as well, the authors call for parents to make a move in faith to strengthen the cultivation of wisdom and virtue in children by removing them from the government educational system. Hegseth and Goodwin speak directly to readers to make personal, sacrificial lifestyle changes: “Get your kids in church. Get them off social media. Get them into ‘training and instruction of the Lord’ every day in school.”

On page 251, the authors close with this final exhortation and request: “Join the insurgency! And then spread the word.”

How well did the authors do in effecting change through a paper-and-ink book as a catalyst? As with other call to action books, only time will tell.

Great minds like C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot suggest that the best way to recover our former standing is to return to our beginnings. In Scripture, Jesus tells the Church in Ephesus to remember, repent, and return to their former works (Revelation 2:5). If readers heed the authors’ call and are motivated to act after reading this book, it would seem that the authors succeeded in their purpose.

Dr. Christy Vaughan holds an Ed.D. from Liberty University in Educational Leadership and serves as Secretary for Classical Christian Education International, Inc. (www.2CEI.ORG) and Head of Curriculum and Instruction at Brown County Christian Academy in Ohio. She has more than 10 years of experience in public and private education in both online and brick-and-mortar classrooms, and she currently offers courses in preparation for a career in Christian education through Kepler Education.

Book Review of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature

by Dr. Gregory Soderberg

This book seeks to fill a hole in the current revival of classical Christian education. It endeavors to show the relevance of the classics for all students—not just students of a particular ethnic, or economic, background. This is important because of recent attacks on the classical tradition, from leftist intellectuals like Johanna Hanink and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Hanink penned the now infamous “If Classics Doesn’t Change, Let It Burn” in 2021, claiming that “The field is a product and accomplice of white supremacy; scholars are fighting to change that.”1

This is what Dr. Anika Prather, co-author of The Black Intellectual Tradition, used to think as well. Her parents started a classical Christian school and asked her to teach there. At first, she refused because she believed that “classical ed- ucation was rooted in racism” (137). However, through her reading of Frederick Douglas and W. E. B. Du Bois, she discovered their indebtedness to the classical tradition: “Both men were avid readers of the canon and those classical texts helped to shape their work in abolition and civil rights” (139). Through further study, Prather realized that many African American heroes were also shaped and formed by classical education, and that this was an important, if neglected, part of Black history.

1 Johanna Hanink, “If Classics Doesn’t Change, Let It Burn,” Real Clear Books&Culture , Feb. 16, 2021, https://www.realclearbooks.com/2021/02/16/if_classics_doesnt_change_let_it_burn_660567.html, accessed Oct. 27, 2022.

Just as classical education shaped black leaders in the past, Prather and Parham hope that it will shape future leaders for the black community, and for every community. Because classical education is about what is best, it can appeal to our shared humanity, no matter our skin color: “[W]hile each of these [black] writers helps us to enter into the pain they experienced, they never leave us there. Having acknowledged the reality of injustice, they press on toward a firm hope rooted in a time-tested faith” (68–69). Parham states the “core argument” of the book: “any education that is committed to truth, goodness, and beauty will achieve only a pale vision of this commitment if it fails to engage the writings of Black intellectuals in a serious and substantial way” (2). This book presents a series of portraits of black authors who were influenced, to varying degrees, by the tradition of classical education. These authors are presented as exemplars to follow, as they refused to stay stuck in their oppression, but moved forward through the liberating effects of classical education and—in most cases—their Christian faith. The book contends that these authors should be included in classical curricula, especially in schools with diverse populations:

“Who better than exceptional Black writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas, and Toni Morrison to address the question of what it means to be human? These writers, who were thought of as inhuman or not fully human, wrote back against this negative judgment, calling Western writers to live up to their own standards” (2). There is much that is salutary in this approach, and this book is an important contribution to a discussion that we need to have in the world of classical Christian education. How can we bring the wealth and treasures of the classical Christian educational philosophy to those who need it most—rather than confining it to those of a certain ethnic or socio-economic standing? I have some first-hand knowledge and experience with schools and ministries that are trying to do this, and I know how challenging it can be. But, while this book is an important step forward, I believe there is more work to be done.

For instance, Dr. Prather writes: “This book is an invitation to rethink the works of the canon by revealing how they have intersected with the story of Black people. Join us in stepping away from the traditional perspective of ‘preserving the West,’ and see the Great Books as a sort of portal into understanding the very soul of humanity. We invite you to see it as the canon of human civilization” (4). While this sounds admirable in principle, where are the brakes on this train? The authors do not speak much about classical Christian education. If we are pursuing classical Christian education, then we must privilege the texts of the West. This is not to deny the existence or importance of non-Western texts—it is just to recognize that in God’s providence, the Gospel took root most deeply in Western culture. Therefore, the texts of clas- sical Christian/Western civilization should retain a place of prominence in our curricula. 2

I would argue that the “canon” of classical education is solidly-fluid. It’s like a glacier. It’s massive, well-defined, but still moving. So, authors can enter and leave the canon somewhat capriciously. J. S. Bach was ignored and forgotten for a time, only to be resurrected by Mendelssohn, to now reign supreme in the canon of Western music. Similarly, certain classic authors might be preferred over others in different ages. But the canon is not open to all, just because we want to make the canon more diverse. There must be some credentials, some street-cred, before letting the latest popular author into the canon-club. I believe the authors would agree in principle, but this is where further discussion needs to happen. 3 In a world of “so many books, so little time!” we must consider which authors deserve our attention. In some ways, this might depend on the cultural context of the school, and its students.

Part I is entitled “Black Writers as Guides to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.” Chapter 1 deals with “In Pursuit of the Truth: Grappling with Our Difficult and Controversial Past,” which treats the lives of Olaudah Equiano, Phil- lis Wheatley, and Frederick Douglas, who were all born into slavery but managed to attain freedom, education, and a Christian faith. Chapter 2 is “Seeking the Good: Learning from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Anna Julia Cooper.” Anna Julia Cooper is really the star of this book, with all of Part 2 devoted to her life and legacy. She was a remarkable black Christian scholar, and should be an inspiration for all educators, and especially for those working with diverse students. Born a slave, she pursued a classical education—against all odds—and eventually attained a doctorate from the Sorbonne, in France. She worked tirelessly for the cause of classical Christian education, especially for the black community. The Appendices contain three short writings by Cooper and are a helpful introduction to her work. However, it is ironic that, in a chapter focused on “seeking the good,” the authors make no mention of the moral failings of Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not bring this up to discredit King or the importance of his life and work. On the contrary, reading the Great Books should enable and equip us to sift through the good, the bad, and the ugly, in both texts and in people. It seems well established that King was a serial adulterer.4 This does not automatically discredit his life or work, but it should be acknowledged and lamented. This is particularly important when many want to discredit the work of the American Founding Fathers because they owned slaves, or perhaps even had illegitimate children with them. If there’s one thing that studying the classics should teach us, it is that people are a glorious mess of contradictions. None of the great writers or thinkers was an angel. That should be admitted on all sides. But their moral failings should not be covered up. Rousseau’s moral life was a wreck—that should give us pause when we read his writings. (On the questionable private lives of Rousseau and others famous artists and writers, see Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals). I am not qualified to pass judgment on King’s corpus, simply because I have not read enough of it. However, we should keep his moral failings in mind. Our words and ideas are not separated from our actions in airtight boxes. Classical education demands honesty with a text—and with the authors who write the texts we study.

2 This is also not to downplay the contributions of Africans to the Western tradition. Thomas Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Recovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2007) has demonstrated the profound debt that the Western Christian tradition owes to African theologians and thinkers.

3 Dr. Parham writes: “If a mere increase in the diversity of authors were the aim of this book, I too would be wary of such a goal. I have too often seen the disappointing results of unreflective and superficial mixing in of ‘diverse’ authors, which results in a kind of box checking for diversity. But this is nothing like what we are proposing. We are after something much deeper: hearing and learning from the voices of great writers who are already part of what Robert Hutchins called the ‘Great Conversation’ but who, despite nimbly and powerfully addressing major themes of this conversation, have not been well-represented in classical education,” The Black Intellectual Tradition , 1–2.

I was also not sure about the overall goal of the authors’ treatment of King and its relationship to classical education. They write: “King’s education and his close reading of classic and canonical texts is a model for students in classical Christian schools” (91). That point did not seem substantiated by the evidence presented. The chapter demonstrated King’s interaction with Thoreau, Marx, Niebuhr, and Ghandi. If anything, this shows King’s engagement with modern thought— not classical, or “canonical” texts. They also stressed King’s “dialectical” reading, which they claim was the process whereby he “scoured classic and canonical texts, using both his reason and the lens of faith to determine which insights to take from them and which to reject” (78). No source was provided to explain this use of the term “dialectical” reading, and I know just enough about King to know that he was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, which has dialecticism at its core. I’m not a philosopher, but I’ve also read enough to give me some serious misgivings about Hegel, and Co.

(Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Tillich, etc.). For the process of taking the good in texts, and leaving the bad, a much better model is St. Augustine’s metaphor of “plunder - ing the Egyptians” (see On Christian Doctrine, Book II.XL). We don’t need Hegel to teach us how to sift through texts.

Chapter 3—“Contemplating Beauty: Entering Toni

Morrison’s Poetic Imagination” was an interesting and informative close reading of Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon . It uncovered many layers of symbolism and showed areas where Morrison draws on both traditional African cultures, as well as the classical tradition. However, the claims about Morrison and the classical tradition seemed a little tenuous (the main point being that Morrison echoes The Odyssey in her novel). The chapter functioned more effectively as exemplifying an approach to reading and understanding diverse authors. For educators who are working within non-white contexts and are seeking to bring in literature from diverse authors, this chapter will be very helpful. Here, classical education, as used by the authors, broadens to focus more on “methodology” rather than on concept of “canon.” Perhaps Toni Morrison will eventually be included in the canon of classic literature, but I’m not sure we’re in the best place to judge that yet. This relates to one of the main questions I have about this entire book, which reflects the “diversity” of the twentieth-century revival of classical education. Is classical education more about the “canon” of texts that withstood the test of time, or primarily a methodology suited to stages of child development, or ways of teaching (such as Socratic dialogue), or is it simply finding the “true, good, and beautiful” in a variety of texts? Or perhaps a combination of all of these?

At times, the authors use “classical education” in ways that are vague and seems motivated more by their desire to make the classics relevant to diverse students than faithfulness to how the tradition has been defined and practiced throughout the centuries.

For example, Prather writes that classical educators “value that which is good, virtuous, and beautiful, and inherent in the classical education philosophy is a belief that all minds, hearts, and voices are important” (196). It’s not clear to me how it is “inherent” in the classical education philosophy to value all voices. In fact, this seems to contradict one of the central tenets of the classical tradition—that there are works of literature, art, history, philosophy, and theology that are inherently better than others, and that these should be the focus of our studies and our life-long pursuit of wisdom. The authors focus on the ability of the “classics” to engage our common humanity, which seems to be a helpful way to view the matter. This approach would be especially helpful to those who have to justify studying the classics in an increasingly hostile context. As Dr. Prather writes:

Children from diverse communities may not speak our language or understand our culture. There will be a veil even if you are of the same race. This is why classical education is so critical: through it we are giving our students the language and literacy of the country and one with which most of humanity has intersected. In addition, the thoughts and narratives shared in the works of the canon contain themes universal to all of humanity. Classical education provides a common ground so that teachers and students can connect (184).

Although this book raises many questions, it is an important contribution to the growth and maturity of the classical Christian education revival. I hope it will prompt many more charitable and informed discussions on these topics.

Dr. Gregory Soderberg (Ph.D. VU-Amsterdam) is a Lead Teacher for Logos Online School, a Teaching Fellow at the BibleMesh Institute, and a Mentor-Professor for Redemption Seminary. He is the author of As Often As You Eat This Bread: Communion Frequency in English, Scottish, and Early American Churches (V&R), and has contributed chapters to three other books. He has written for Intellectual Takeout and blogs at The SoderBlog.

Book Review of On Education by Abraham

Kuyper

by Scott Postma

Well-known for the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty,” Abraham Kuyper once famously declared: “no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”1 Kuyper is also notable for delivering the 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton’s Theological Seminary in which he offered a profound and lasting treatment of Calvinism which remains relevant to us who are living in the postmodern era. But it is his significant work of educational reform in the Netherlands spanning nearly fifty years (1869–1917) that features in On Education .

On Education is a substantive anthology of Kuyper’s thoughts on Christian education, published as part of a twelve volume series of Kuyper’s works, produced by the Abraham

1 Stated in a public address delivered at the inauguration of the Free University on October 20, 1880. “Sphere Sovereignty,” Dr. Abraham Kuyper. Translated by George Kamps, 28 pgs.

Kuyper Translation Society, the Acton Institute, and Kuyper College. And it is precisely because of Kuyper’s “unique gifts, experiences, and writings” on Christianity and education that On Education is more than just a helpful resource; it is a uniquely prescient guide for everyone concerned with the education crisis plaguing twenty-first-century North America (vii).

The volume is divided into four parts, tracing Kuyper’s involvement with the Netherlands’ seventy-year political battle over parents’ rights to choose schools representative of their religious convictions. Part One introduces the beginnings of the struggle: in 1868, the Society for the Common Good issued a manifesto stating what it perceived was a need to protect its gains of having achieved “the religious neutrality of the public school;” Kuyper responded that his party was not attempting to take back the Society’s perceived gains but, instead, to “make it possible for more children to receive the religious education desired by their parents” (9). This section further treats Kuyper’s grave concern about Dutch public schools “teaching the immortality of the soul,” something he contends is not “safe in the hands of the state school teachers” (22).

Part Two consists of four chapters dedicated to Kuyper’s anti-revolutionary vision of sphere sovereignty which, when properly applied, would protect Christian schools from the revolutionary spirit of “false mingling,” whereby the state “sought to mix together precisely what God had separated” (53). Kuyper argued that it is only by properly distinguishing between the boundaries and bonds ordained by God that Christians can keep their schools from falling prey to the state and resist those secularists who would use the public trough to take away their freedom to preach Christ.

Book Review of On Education by Abraham

Kuyper

Part Three consists of six chapters of parliamentary addresses, journalistic articles, public speeches, and theological writings that address Kuyper’s pluralistic program for national education. At the time, the Netherlands was a nation that consisted in near equal measure of Rationalists, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics. In short, it was Kuyper’s position that, “The state may not use its supremacy to favor one part of the nation over another. All spiritual compulsion by the state is an affront to the honor of the spiritual life and, as an offense to civil liberty, is hateful and abominable” (xi).

Finally, Part Four consists of five chapters that treat Kuyper’s appeal to the public conscience, his concern for the injustice done to the poor of the nation, the political struggle, and ultimate victory—albeit a compromised victory. Kuyper sought a political policy of “principled structural pluralism”(xlii). And his Anti-Revolutionary Party “worked diligently to establish the right of all parents to provide their children with a quality education in accordance with their deepest convictions and values” (xii). Directed by his motto, “Free schools the norm, state schools a supplement,” (361) and by the foundational Christian principles of “freedom of conscience, equal treatment of religion under the law, and the place of schools within civil society” (365), Kuyper fought for a national system of free schools for the entirety of his public life. He firmly believed that free schools were the best way to serve all parents, not just Christian parents because “it was best for all children to experience a unity of world view and values between school and home” (361).

In 1917, his Anti-Revolutionary Party won a great victory. “As a culmination of these efforts, the Dutch constitution was amended to guarantee this right, and in 1920, the year Kuyper died, a new education bill was passed which put that amendment into practice” (xii). Although Kuyper made three substantial, albeit pragmatic, compromises to his ideal, he believed they were ultimately successful since compromise is always necessary when working in an imperfect political system. Nevertheless, while their own struggle culminated in a victory for free schools, Kuyper also recognized that the “struggle of the spirits” behind the struggle of the schools was far from over. In his speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Christian Teachers Association, Kuyper exhorted the teachers saying:

Brother and sisters, our struggle for the principle of Christian education has come to an end, and God grant that it never return. But that does not mean that the struggle of the spirits is over. On the contrary, the contest between the two forces that contend for the soul of the nation has only intensified. The waves of unbelief are pounding our shores with increasing force and threaten to flood the entire nation. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, nor against specific people. We face a struggle, rather, that arises from the spiritual world and penetrates life in the very heart of the nation…What spirit will control the heart of our nation: the Spirit poured out on Pentecost, or the spirit from the abyss? (359).

Kuyper was well aware that the battle over education is a spiritual battle for the soul of a nation. But as he concluded his public service and entered the twilight of life, it seems he was also forced to come to terms with the “skyrocketing costs of education,” and “a reality which he had only just begun to understand, that of the state as being of benefit to society, not merely by curtailing sin, but also by providing a necessary ‘backbone’ to the social spheres, especially in an era of

Book Review of On Education by

Abraham Kuyper

huge undertakings and expensive tasks” (396). One clear and relevant example of the way modern thinking tended to see the state as providing the necessary backbone for the benefit of an expanding, progressive society is the railroad subsidies in the nineteenth-century United States. Without the backing of the U. S. government, investors were unwilling to put their money behind such a risky and expensive project as the transcontinental railroad, notwithstanding its acknowledged benefit to the public good. As detailed in the National Archives, “In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, which designated the 32nd parallel as the initial transcontinental route, and provided government bonds to fund the project and large grants of lands for rights-of-way.”

2 In other words, the modern age which encompassed Kuyper’s work for education reform in the Netherlands underwent a significant shift in thought, globally, about the role of government. 3 Government, as it had primarily functioned prior to the modern period, was no longer merely responsible for curtailing sin and keeping the peace of the kingdom; in the progressive and expansive modern world, it now represented an agent for securing and underwriting the public good.

2 National Archives and Records Administration. (2022, May 10). Pacific Railway Act (1862). National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 7, 2022, from https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/pacific-railway-act

3 The kind of autonomous democratic thought stemming from the Enlightenment brought about a global spirit of revolution that defined the modern age—from the storming of the Bastille in France (1789) to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and fall of the Soviet Union (1989–1991). The revolutionary spirit co-existed in part with the spirit of the Reformation (roughly 1517–1650), which also advocated for individual liberty but a liberty that was rooted in another source—the gospel of Jesus Christ and the resultant theology of sphere sovereignty. Thus, Kuyper formed and led the Anti-revolutionary Party (ARP) in the Netherlands which advocated for the reformational kind of freedom for all which he argued should be protected and supported by the modern state. The state, however, which itself claimed to advocate for the same kind of democratic freedom, only actually supported that freedom which was characterized as secular.

Given the significant shift in thought about government’s role and the enormity of social needs and circumstances created by the modern progressive state, Kuyper seems to have reluctantly come to terms with the fact that his ideal would likely never be realized. As editor Wendy Naylor notes, Kuyper was forced to make three pragmatic compromises during his lifetime of working for educational reform. In the Afterward, Naylor concisely lays out the nature of the compromises:

Given the powerful opposition to the ARP (Anti-Revolutionary Party) educational program in Parliament, progress, he knew, would be slow, and in the interim free schools needed to be kept alive. If there had been a more democratic system of suffrage, independent of any property qualification, Parliament would have represented the people far more accurately and a system of subvention would have met with success far earlier. But the Netherlands was only slowly emerging from a class-based society with its census democracy, and the ARP had to be patient and accept steps of progress which, when considered out of context, could appear inconsistent. From the beginning, Kuyper proposed short-term measures, stop-gap solutions which would enable free schools to survive until such time as either the suffrage laws were changed or they were able to appeal to their opponents’ sense of justice and fair play, or both. Thus, from 1869 until 1889, Kuyper proposed a system of Restitution; from 1869 until 1910, he argued for Partial Subsidy; and from 1911 until 1920, he put his weight behind a program of Full Subsidy for all schools. 4

4 Wendy Naylor, “Afterword: Faith, Finances, and Freedom,” in On Education , ed. Wendy Naylor et al., Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 2019), 373–374.

Book Review of On Education by

Abraham Kuyper

Notwithstanding his unfortunate but necessary compromises, and notwithstanding the fact that the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dutch educational and political system is obviously much different than that of the twenty-first-century U.S. educational and political system, Kuyper’s application of Christian principles to education in his situation continues to offer valuable principles for modern educators who are facing our own unique situation. For in both situations, we strive from the belief that there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, Who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”

This review originally appeared in Ad Fontes, the journal of The Davenant Institute. It is reprinted here with the full permission of Ad Fontes.

Scott Postma is the President of Kepler Education and has been an educator for nearly 30 years. He has earned degrees in Christian and Classical studies (M.A., Knox Theological Seminary), religion and English literature (B.S., Liberty University), and creative writing (A.A., College of Southern Nevada); and he is completing his Ph.D. in humanities at Faulkner University (est. summer 2023). Scott lives in the panhandle of Idaho with his wife, Tammy.