Dr Paul Allen

We are living in an age of profound cultural shift. Up until the early twenty-first century, Western history was dominated by a form of Christianity that was legally established and culturally honoured. While not everyone was a Christian, being a Christian was respectable, and Christianity was generally recognized as the dominant cultural and moral outlook in society. That has dramatically changed in the last ten years, signaling the end of that cultural establishment. Many Christians feel disoriented. What is this new world, and how should we relate to it? These are questions that we find ourselves rather ill-prepared to address because up until recently, we could assume things that can no longer be assumed regarding how people think and how they react to Christianity. Amid these changes, I have found considerable help in thinking through these issues in the life and work of Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper (1837–1920), a Dutchman, lived in a place and time when the issues we face today were al...

One of the issues we as Christians are constantly being confronted with today is, “How can you claim to know the only truth, how can you claim to serve the only God and still survive in a pluralistic society? Aren’t you necessarily, Christians, theocrats? Don’t you necessarily want to persecute everybody who disagrees with you?” I think the brilliance of Kuyper is to say, “Here is a way forward where we do not compromise our commitments to truth, but we find a way to develop a pluralistic society where we can live with one another without violating one another’s conscience, without violating one another’s abilities to live according to truth.”  I think if we were more Kuyperian in our thinking, we would be safe from some of our problems. He thought the world was wonderful, but in his analysis, he said, “The polar opposite today in Western society,” meaning the late 19th century, “is this tendency to the authoritative, tyrannical state on the one hand or utterly radical...