Quotes from Abraham Kuyper

We believe that our salvation depends solely upon God's work in us, and not upon our testimony; and the little child with stammering lips, but wrought upon by the Holy Spirit, will precede vain scribes into the Kingdom of Heaven.

God creates history, while people create an epic or a drama, drawn either from God's history or from unreality and pure fiction.

But "To Be Near Unto God" in the midst of busy avocations yields its sweetest blessedness when it is cultivated in the face of sin and the world, as an oasis in the desert of life.

For, indeed, without sin there would have been neither magistrate nor state-order; but political life, in its entirety, would have evolved itself, after a patriarchal fashion, from the life of the family.

Modern science is dominated by distrust when it comes to our own deepest sense of life, and that distrust is nothing but unbelief.

all authority of governments on earth originates from the Sovereignty of God alone.

it may never be said that like the state and the church, science arose because of sin and thus from an intervening grace.

Kuyper notes that the scholar is distinct in setting the scope of his stewardship on the mind itself. "Not merely to live," he writes, "but to know that you live and how you live, and how things around you live, and how all that hangs together and lives out of the one efficient cause that proceeds from God's power and wisdom.

When God says to me, "obey," then I humbly bow my head, without compromising in the least my personal dignity, as a man.

Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.

Much less may believers retreat to their ecclesiastical corner and, satisfied with simply having faith, abandon the building of the temple of science to unbelievers, as though science does not concern them.

Finally Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.

Conversely, our duty is that we who confess Jesus Christ take hold of science as an instrument for propagating our faith-conviction.

Het modernisme rust niet voordat het van de vrouw een man en van de man een vrouw heeft gemaakt, en, alle onderscheid nivellerend, het leven doodt door het onder de ban van de eenvormigheid te leggen.

De mens is geroepen in zijn doen zijn eigen wezen af te spiegelen. Hij zelf is een wereld in het klein, maar het ganse heelal vindt hij in zijn boezem terug. Niet het grote, het onbegrensde, het onbereikbare is daarom zijn taak, maar het lokale, het afgeperkte, het kleine, doch dat binnen zijn bepaalde afmetingen toch altijd het grote weerkaatst.

Nevertheless, in whatever form idolatrous religion appeared, precisely because it was derived from the external, and increasingly lost the factor of spiritual revelation, it could develop in no other way than in visible forms.

For whatever sets in motion societal activity originates in the intimate communal living of families in the same village or hamlet, in the same region or country.

This picture of a God who continues to love the creation and who expedites the means to restrain and preserve in the midst of human fallenness—this is the picture that Abraham Kuyper fleshes out in this wonderful treatise.

There is thus no objection to the use of the term 'faith' for that function of the soul by which it attains certainty immediately or directly, without the aid of discursive demonstration. This places faith over against demonstration, but not over against knowing.

What is it to be rich toward God? To understand this, imagine for a moment everything you call yours in the world as taken from you. Picture yourself abandoned and forgotten of all, in utter isolation alone with your own heart. And then ask yourself: What have I now? What do I now possess?

The question is not if the candidate's heart is favorable to Christianity, but if he has Christ as his starting point even for politics, and will speak out His name!

Sin lives solely by plagiarising the ideas of God

God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.

We cannot be passive and silent towards those who reject God's Word and our holy faith.