Whose Hospitality? Whose Kingdom? Women's Place in Abraham Kuyper's Theology

The following paper by Professor Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (reprinted by BlueChristian with her kind permission) explores Christian philosopher, politician/statesman, and theologian Abraham Kuyper's contributions to today's gender debate. This blog's author, a teacher in the "Project 12" school run by Jesus People USA, finds the below essay interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that I am vitally interested in the current sharply defined gender "war" taking place among evangelical (and even -- sigh -- some "post-evangelical") Christians. Second, as just as vital to me, is how the in many ways compelling ideas of Reformed theology interact with (for good and ill) the issue of gender.

Whose Hospitality? Whose Kingdom?
The Stob Lectureship at Calvin College & Seminary
November 4, 2003
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

The text for my lectureship title comes from the 1987 edition of Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church, from two hymns penned by poet Marie Post (1919 – 1990). The first is the hymn “In Our Households, Heavenly Father,”[1] the third verse of which reads as follows:

Help us make our homes a haven,
Quick with hospitality.
Move us, Lord, to serve each other,
With true love and charity.

The second is a wedding hymn, “Lord, Today Bless This New Marriage,”[2] in which Post writes:

May the home they are preparing
Be a place of faith and prayer
Fruitful for this life, and fruitful
For the kingdom, which they share.

These verses clearly allude to ideals for family life that are as old as the church itself. The first exhorts Christian homes to be not just a place of mutual service for their immediate members, but also a magnet of hospitality to others.[3] Developing both these themes in more detail, Abraham Kuyper wrote as follows over a century ago:

A family-life, that seeks to develop a rich social life within its own bosom, is indispensable for the formation of heart and character … [But] this flourishing of happiness in one’s own home must not degenerate into incapacity for general fellowship, into cold indifference to what goes on outside …Where such becomes the case, the spirit of narrow-heartedness creeps in, which over-estimates everything that belongs to one’s own home and hearth, which with disgust and envy spies out what others do and not do, and surliness that repels rather than generosity that invites and attracts is made the rule of life.[4]

He was also quick to add that hospitality is not to be rendered in a calculating, tit-for-tat fashion, or to be limited only to the household of faith. Appealing both to the doctrine of the church and to the wider doctrine of all humanity’s creation in God’s image, Kuyper wrote that “Hospitality must be shown, not because the company of the stranger gives you pleasure, nor because presently in turn he will receive you, but because man (sic), created after God’s image, is not to be left to himself, and the brother in Christ must not be neglected.”[5]

Sphere Sovereignty in the Family and Beyond:
Kuyper often noted that in all domestic activities – the raising of children, the sharing of responsibility for material welfare, the practice of hospitality to others like and unlike ourselves -- homes are the settings where we learn (or don’t learn) with an intensity rarely duplicated elsewhere what it means to practice the fruits of the Spirit at the interpersonal level. But, as Marie Post intimates in the second hymn I quoted, Kuyper and his descendants also believe their Christian world view calls them to be ‘fruitful for the kingdom.’ That is to say, all their behavior is to be guided by an eschatological vision of the new heaven and the new earth whose ‘first fruits’ Christians are to cultivate, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in the here and now.

On this account, Christians are to be agents of light and salt in every arena of human life, bringing biblical principles to bear on activities within, but also beyond, the domestic and ecclesiastical. As Kuyper put it in an oft-quoted 1880 monograph, “There is not one part of our world of thought that can be hermetically separated from the other parts, and there is not an inch in the entire area of our human life of which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry ‘Mine’!”[6] Furthermore, each of many God-ordained human activities has its own unique set of rights and responsibilities before God, according to Kuyper’s theory of ‘sphere sovereignty.’[7] That is why he and his descendents in various times and places have formed -- sometimes with, but more often without public financial support -- Christian schools, universities, trade unions, political parties, hospitals, adoption agencies, farmers’ federations, art galleries, newspapers, public policy think tanks and other organizations. Sphere sovereignty calls for each of these associations to be free from both state and church control, and to be ‘fruitful for the kingdom’ as it works out the implications of a biblical world view for a given kind of human activity.[8]

Thus for Kuyper families had their own unique calling in terms of mutual troth and hospitality. Indeed, he regarded the family as the foundation of civilization, the only social sphere explicitly ordained by God prior to the fall of humankind. It was for him a microcosm of society since it “contained every type of relationship found in society and taught all the skills and duties needed there.”[9] But for this very reason homes were also to be launching pads for Christianly-grounded service in every other sphere of life: the marketplace, the academy, the political forum, the laboratory, the art gallery, the concert hall, in addition to the church. In contrast with the pietist tendency to separate and rank-order these spheres according to a sacred/secular dichotomy (with church and devotional life at the top of the value scale) Kuyper’s understanding of the cosmic drama of creation, fall, redemption and future hope led him – though not always consistently, as we shall see -- to postulate both autonomy and interdependence, both created goodness and sinful distortion, both functional continuity and a recurring need for reform in all spheres of life.

World Views and Scholarship:
In resisting the separation of so-called sacred from so-called secular arenas of life, and having a robust doctrine of creation, Christians in the Kuyperian tradition have been particularly strong supporters of scholarship. They regard the life of the mind as one of many activities by which humans, as God’s accountable stewards, fulfill the cultural mandate of Gen 1:26-28 to ‘subdue the earth.’ At the same time, Calvinists in general have resisted the modern intellectual separation (dating at least back to Kant and arguably even to Descartes) between facts and values – the idea that human reason, rightly applied, is capable of complete objectivity and ideological neutrality. On the Kuyperian account, all human thought patterns – in all spheres of life and in all academic disciplines – are guided by a world view that reflects either allegiance to the one true God or else (inevitably) to some substitute idol. On this account, all of life – including the life of the mind -- is religiously motivated, and when humans do not yield to the true Author of the cosmic drama, they will certainly succumb to worship of one or more aspects of creation, such as science, politics, art, or personal pleasure – things which are God’s good gifts in their rightful place, but when substituted for God get turned into idols. “It is simple make an idol,” Reformed theologian Lewis Smedes once memorably observed. “Just slice one piece of created reality off from the whole and expect miracles from it.”[10]

This mix of appreciation for creation and the human calling to explore it on the one hand, and a zeal for exposing the foundational faith-assumptions behind so-called objective inquiry on the other, has led to much creative scholarship by Kuyperian-leaning Calvinists in the past few decades – from Nick Wolterstorff’s philosophical inquiry into Reason Within the Bounds of Religion[11] to Stephen Bouma-Prediger’s book on environmental stewardship, For the Beauty of the Earth,[12] from George Marsden’s historical work on The Soul of the American University[13] to James Skillen’s political analysis of the state as God’s servant, called to maintain the rights and responsibilities not just of individuals, but of all creationally-ordained spheres of life.[14] For a Christian academic like myself, this tradition of scholarship and activism has been both an intellectual and spiritual blessing. It affirms that one need not put one’s mind into cold storage as a Christian, and provides a well-explicated world view -- embracing the entire biblical drama – as a basis for cooperation with, but also critique of, mainstream scholarship and its applications. Indeed, I consider it part of my mission, now that I teach at a university with American Baptist roots, to turn at least some Baptists into Kuyperians who embrace the concepts of sphere sovereignty, common grace, and the importance of world views in all human thought and action.

Kuyper’s Mixed Pronouncements on Gender Relations:
However – and here is where the family quarrel begins -- the Kuyperian tradition is somewhat less helpful when it comes to explicating the questions implied by the title of tonight’s lecture: "Whose Hospitality? Whose Kingdom? " So let me now explain my choice of that title. On the one hand, Kuyper’s theory of sphere sovereignty holds that family life is no more, but also no less important than life in the academy, the marketplace, the political forum, the artist’s studio or the church. In keeping with this conviction, Kuyper wrote regular meditations, as well as essays, on family relations many of which were collected in books such as When Thou Sittest in Thine House,[15] Keep Thy Solemn Feasts[16] and The Practice of Godliness.[17] On the other hand, listen to historian James Bratt’s summary of Abraham Kuyper’s own daily and yearly schedule towards the peak of his career in the 1880s:

Breakfast alone at 8:30. Writing and reading, absolutely undisturbed, in his study from 9:00 till 12:30. A quick processing of visitors until 1:00 then off to the Free University to lecture and consult. Dinner and devotions with the family (their only slot) from 5:30 to 6:30. Then [came Kuyper’s] famous walks, covering the same route and the same two hours every evening, during which he rehearsed editorials and articles for the next day. Back home, some conversation and to bed. As to the annual cycle, a short winter vacation … for the first few days of the new year. In midsummer, a longer holiday at the baths … with no family, friends or work along. Absolute rest was required for absolute work. [Kuyper’s] labor-breakdown-recovery cycle had been ritualized into every day and every year.[18]

Clearly, Kuyper did not spend much time with his wife and their eight children, and probably practiced hospitality rarely to visitors other than those connected with his work. Indeed, his activities as a pastor, a journalist, a theologian and a politician (including a four-year stint as prime minister of the Netherlands) were so all-consuming that they led, as Bratt notes, to periodic nervous breakdowns, each necessitating months to years of recovery.[19] And Kuyper’s lifestyle leads to the main question of tonight’s lecture, namely: In the 21st century, how are women and men to ‘serve each other with true love and charity?’ What does it mean that husbands and wives are to be ‘fruitful for the kingdom, which they share? Do they share kingdom tasks as generic humans, made in the image of God, with little if any distinction in roles or status, as Evangelical feminists have claimed?[20] Or, at the other extreme, are women and men endowed by nature and God with some kind of unchanging essence of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ that dictates – or at least recommends -- behaviorally-distinct ways of serving each other? And if so, is this division of labor set within an unchanging gender hierarchy in family and/or church, and/or all other spheres of life, as variously defended by writers such as C.S. Lewis, Elisabeth Elliot, the founders of the present-day Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and, indeed, various Synods of the Christian Reformed Church in the years between 1970 and 2000?[21]

Or is the truth, as John Calvin believed, somewhere in between? On Calvin’s account, women and men are equal both in creation and in redemption, with no natural or moral superiority accruing to either. If, as Calvin believed, men were mandated by God to be in authority over women in family, church and other spheres of society, this was simply for the sake of maintaining social order. Consequently, commenting on Paul’s injunctions about women speaking in church (1 Cor 14:34), Calvin urged “the discerning reader” to “come to the decision that the things which Paul is dealing with here are indifferent, i.e., neither good nor bad; and than none of them is forbidden unless it works against decorum and edification.” Clearly, however, Calvin did not see such a move as being conducive to decorous and edifying church activity in his lifetime.[22]

Kuyper, writing at the turn of the 20th century, falls somewhere between Calvin and the strict gender essentialists/gender hierarchicalists on this issue. Following Calvin, he views women as equal to men both in creation and redemption. In church life, Kuyper supported women’s right to vote and do certain kinds of diaconal work. In public life he recognized that there was much injustice in the treatment of women, and he worked as a politician to counteract it, crafting labor laws that protected women from overwork and making certain that workmen’s insurance included coverage for their widows. In brief, Kuyper was an advocate of what he himself called social feminism: “We support feminism,” he wrote in 1914 in a series of articles on The Woman’s Position of Honor, “insofar as it wants to free woman’s position according to civil law …[as it applies to] business, industry, labor and much more.” He even envisioned that “[j]ust as there are now Chambers of Commerce, so it also is conceivable that Chambers of Women’s Rights ought also to be established” to promote justice for women in civil law, business, and labor relations.[23]

However, what Kuyper seems to give with one hand he takes away with the other, for his much stronger theme in The Woman’s Position of Honor is exemplified in the following quotation:

There are two kinds of life. A life in the family, with the relatives, with the children, which has a more private character, and almost completely outside of that, a different life in Councils and States, in the navy and in the army, which has a more public character. These two kinds of life require clearly distinguished gifts and talents; and now it is the lesson of history and the empirical given of today, that those two kinds of gifts, at least as a rule, seem to fall along the lines of the natural distinction between man and woman. The private and public life form two separate spheres, each with their own way of existing, with their own task … And it is on the basis of this state of affairs, which has not been invented by us, but which God himself has imposed on us, that in public life the woman does not stand equally with the man. Nor more that it can be said of the man that he has been called to achieve in the family that which is achieved by the woman.[24]

Kuyperian Inconsistencies:
What’s going on here? Why does Kuyper speak with such mixed voices about gender roles? In light of his various writings on this subject, I conclude that Kuyper regarded public justice for women in industry, law and commerce rather like the compromises of Just War theory. The theologians who developed Just War theory – including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin – agreed that war was not part of God’s creational intentions. However, they recognized that in a fallen world ruling authorities must sometimes choose the lesser of two evils. Just War theory was meant to delineate the criteria under which war – if it really is the lesser of two evils in a given situation – should be declared and then fought.[25] In parallel fashion, Kuyper did not think it was God’s intention for women to be active in the academy, the marketplace, or the political forum (not even as voters), let alone the preaching and ruling levels of the church.[26] But, confronted with late-19th century challenges of industrialization and urbanization, and with young men’s growing tendency to delay marriage while pursuing pleasure and material prosperity, Kuyper saw the need for legislation to protect women’s interests in various public settings -- at least as potentially-exploited workers -- even though he was adamant that both God and nature had designed them to specialize in domesticity as wives and mothers. Thus, he concluded that

the women’s position of honor is most effectively maintained if she can sparkle in private life, and in the public domain, for which man is the appointed worker, she will never be able to fulfill anything but a subordinate role, in which her inferiority would soon come to light anyway. The woman who, in order to cover this up, wants to imitate the man, does not elevate herself, but descends on the social ladder … and whoever has man take his place at the cradle and woman at the lectern makes life unnatural.[27]

To be fair, we should note that there is a kind of symmetry to Kuyper’s gender essentialism: for him, women and men are in a sense ‘separate but equal.’ To Kuyper, men were more gifted by God and nature for work in the public sphere, and were God-ordained leaders of churches and families. But women’s unique talents for domesticity were supposed to give them a distinct advantage as well, one which he and many of his 19th century male colleagues regularly idealized. Indeed, his view of gender relations was much more influenced by the class and cultural forces of his era than he himself recognized. I say this because in the process of justifying this gendered division of labor Kuyper fell short of his own neo-Calvinist world view in at least three ways.

First of all, Kuyper never attempted to exegete Gen 1:26-28 – the passage Reformed theologians have referred to as the ‘cultural mandate’ -- in terms of its significance for gender relations. In that passage God addresses both members of the primal pair and gives them this blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion … over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” It is not that Eve is charged to be fruitful and Adam to subdue the earth: both mandates – to be fruitful, to have dominion -- are addressed to both sexes. But Kuyper, ignoring the implications of this passage, effectively dichotomizes the cultural mandate by sex: women, he insists, are meant to be fruitful and nurturant while men are meant to subdue the earth, and for the most part these callings should not overlap.

In making such assertions, Kuyper appeals instead to a combination of divine command and a mystical sense of gender essentialism that may be rooted in the same streak of pagan mythology that later affected C.S. Lewis’ views of gender.[28] On the one hand, male headship in marriage for Kuyper is based neither on uniquely male virtues nor uniquely female limitations. As it was for Calvin, husbandly leadership for Kuyper is based purely and simply on God’s divine pleasure, so much so that

[i]f God had wanted to say to the man: “Your will shall be under submission to the woman!” then the woman would have to operate as queen in the home with the scepter in hand, even if the man was ten times stronger and smarter. But because it so pleased God to say just the reverse to the woman … it is now settled once and forever that … in the name of God, headship of the home belongs to [the man].29

On the other hand women’s domesticity for Kuyper seems to be built into their nature, though he offers no clear biblical theology to justify such a conclusion. He simply asserts that

in the public arena … the All-disposing Creator and Master of our life did not give the special gifts to women. Undoubtedly within the feminine nature and feminine life is hidden delicate, tender, moral and religious strength which are of the highest significance for State and Society, but.. it is not at the voting booth that the woman shall best and most abundantly feed the religious element into public life, but only if she remains a woman, and a housewife in the fullest sense of the word, and if she causes the deep tone of God’s glorification to resound in her husband and son.[30]

Secondly, Kuyper’s concept of sphere sovereignty reflects his concern that God-ordained institutions (such as church, family, business, education, science, politics and art) develop as creationally intended without being overwhelmed by the state, ignored in the pursuit of individual liberty, or reduced to one another among themselves. Spheres thus refer to activities, not groups of people. Thus there is little indication in Kuyper’s work that racial groups (and the activities that make up their common stereotypes) constitute creationally-separate ‘spheres’ as he used that term,[31] although this is just what the Afrikaaner Apartheid theorists – many of them trained in Kuyper’s thought at the Free University of Amsterdam – claimed through much of the 20th century. Likewise, there is no reason intrinsic to the notion of sphere sovereignty that the sexes (and the activities and traits stereotypically ascribed to them) must be assigned to permanent, largely non-overlapping spheres of activity, resulting a kind of ‘gender Apartheid.’ Yet this is what Kuyper is arguing for and apparently how he organized his own family life.

Thirdly, Reformed scholars have often noted that Calvin did not believe stations in life to be immutable. In contrast to Luther, who believed that God had ordained a fixed social hierarchy and that sin was only to be understood an individual misbehavior in one’s station, Calvin recognized that social structures, as well as individual behavior, could be the result of human sin, and thus might be in need of change.[32] And it seems that Kuyper was a thoroughgoing Calvinist in applying the principle of semper reformanda to the public sphere. Business, government, education, science, art, and certainly the church were all to be continually scrutinized with a view to rooting out structural distortions and bringing them more in line with God’s intentions. With regard to the domestic sphere, however, he was evidently more Lutheran than Calvinist: women -- and, it turns out, servants and even grown-up children still living at home -- cannot negotiate or question their divinely assigned domestic roles. Neither does it matter if women’s gifts (as Kuyper admits is sometimes the case) might equally suit them for service to their neighbor in other spheres instead or as well. The ‘separate but equal’ pattern of gender relations, within an overall pattern of male headship, is in principle not open to development, and any exceptions are more to be compared to wartime emergencies than seen as biblically-warranted reforms, or as the responsible stewardship of talents.[33]

The 19th Century Doctrine of Separate Spheres:
In short, one could hardly find a more thoroughgoing endorsement of what has variously been called the doctrine of separate spheres, the cult of true womanhood, or the cult of domesticity. This was, among other things, a 19th century attempt to deal with the industrial revolution in Europe and America by turning middle-class women into ‘angels of the home’ and their husbands into ‘captains of industry,’ as well as of the academy, the marketplace, and the political forum.[34] Thus Kuyper appeals (selectively) to nature, to God, and to local Dutch behavioral patterns in an attempt to build a timeless case for what was in fact a historically limited and class-specific construction of gender. For if there is such a thing as the ‘traditional family,’ then historically and statistically it has been the one in which workplace, dwelling space, and child rearing space have overlapped almost completely for both sexes. Think of your recent ancestors who had family farms, or family businesses with living quarters above or behind the shop.[35]

Moreover, up through the beginning of the 19th century in America, households, though centered around a nuclear family, could and often did include single relatives, apprentices, indentured servants, borders (including what we would now call mental patients and paroled prisoners) and others as well. The basic social unit was thus not the biological family but the highly- hospitable – though still patriarchal -- household. In addition, as family law historian Joan Williams notes: “The view that the biological family needed its privacy and that minor children needed large amounts of parental attention were far in the future: these beliefs became prevalent only when the family was reconceptualized as primarily an emotional rather than an economic unit. This reconceptualization was a central element of the cult of domesticity.”[36]

Moreover, although in pre-industrial times men and women generally did have different work roles (inevitably in an era when men’s upper-body strength was needed to do heavy tasks, and women were vulnerable to many pregnancies), women frequently did work traditionally associated with men – everything from blacksmithing, wheelwrighting and shipbuilding to butchering, tinsmithing and shoemaking. Joan Williams notes that

[w]omen doing “men’s work” did not jar contemporary sensibilities because men and women were not primarily defined by their separate spheres. Women were defined, instead, by their inferiority … A father’s authority over his family, servants, and apprentices was simply one link in what early commentators called the ‘Great Chain of Being,’ the line of authority descending from God: humans above animals, the higher classes above the lower, God above the king, men above women … Not only was religious, political and familial power concentrated in men: men were also associated with [greater amounts of] all good character traits. Women were the weaker vessel … Sexually voracious and intellectually and morally inferior to men, women needed firm family governance.37

In contrast to all this, the doctrine of separate spheres, as a response to the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, made it normative for men to leave home on a daily basis to earn (at least in theory) a ‘family wage,’ while allocating to women the tasks of nurturing husbands and children and maintaining the home. Men were to become what later sociologists labelled the ‘instrumental’ specialists: rational, individualistic, oriented toward public achievement, and tied to their families and to their own sense of masculinity mainly through their wage-earning role. Women, by contrast, were to be the ‘expressive’ specialists: emotional, relational, and concerned mainly with ties to family, church, and neighborhood – or as Freud memorably to it, to kinder, kuche und kirche.[38] To put it another w