On the Church

What is the relationship between the church and the state?

Dutch politician and Christian activist Abraham Kuyper was deeply invested in debates over the influence Christianity should have on his nation. As a pastor and theologian, he was just as concerned about the ailing Dutch church. In On the Church, the Acton Institute and the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society have partnered with Lexham Press to publish seven brand-new translations of Kuyper's most influential essays and speeches on the relationship between Christianity and the world.

Kuyper believed that Christians must neither hide from the world behind the walls of physical church buildings nor engage the world solely through earthly institutions. The introductory essay by Ad de Bruijne discusses how Kuyper's incisive view of the church still can--and must--apply today, just as it did at the turn of the 20th century.

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a leading Dutch figure in education, politics, and theology. He was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, was appointed to Parliament, and served as prime minister. Kuyper also founded the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, a political party, and a denomination, in addition to writing on a dizzying array of subjects.

Ad de Bruijne (Ph.D., Leiden University) is full professor of Christian ethics and spirituality at the Theological University Kampen, the Netherlands. His main field of research concerns public theology, where he tries to bring the neo-Calvinist tradition into dialogue with contemporary debates and proposals concerning the public calling of church and Christians in a post-Christendom context.

Andrew M. McGinnis (Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is a research fellow at the Junius Institute. He is the author of The Son of God Beyond the Flesh: A Historical and Theological Study of the extra Calvinisticum (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014) and the editor of Franciscus Junius' The Mosaic Polity (CLP Academic, 2015). He has written various articles and reviews and has assisted in the compilation of several academic bibliographies.

John Halsey Wood Jr. (Ph.D., Saint Louis University) is an independent scholar from Birmingham, Alabama. His book Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham Kuyper's Struggle for a Free Church (Oxford, 2013) examines the development of Abraham Kuyper's free church ecclesiology.