Paul claims that all are under sin (Romans 3:9) and uses a number of biblical quotations to show the unrighteousness and irreverence of man (Romans 3:10a, 18), giving further explanation of his sinfulness and examples of his sin (Romans 3:10b–17). Addressing the Jews in particular (cf. Romans 2:17, “if you call yourself a Jew”), Paul clarifies that they are the audience of the Law and identifies its purpose (Romans 3:19–20). 

Romans 3:9–20 concludes Paul’s discussion of man’s unrighteousness in Romans 1:18–3:20.
Paul clearly asserts that both “all, Jews and Greeks [Gentiles], are under sin,” that is, under its power, made obvious man’s many sins (Romans 3:9; cf. 3:13–17). “As it is written” then introduces a number of biblical quotations to show the universal sinfulness of man (Romans 3:10).
Romans 3:10–12 quotes much of Psalm 14:1–3 (almost identical to Psalm 53:1–3). Paul claims as David did that “none is righteous” before God (Romans 3:10; notice Paul’s modification from Psalm 14:1, “There is none who does good”). One could literally translate this phrase, “There is no righteous one,” just as Romans 3:18 could translate, “There is no fear of God.” These two instances of “there is” act as bookends for Romans 3:10–18. Romans 3:19–20 then closes all of Romans 1:18–3:20.
As evidence of man’s unrighteousness claimed in Romans 3:10, the quote from Psalm 14 stack the negatives against mankind—no one understands, seeks for God, or does good but rather turns aside and becomes worthless (Romans 3:10–12; cf. Psalm 14:1–3).
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Some people attend the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest for curiosity, but stay for its message. Corcea thinks that Reformed churches have an advantage over Eastern Orthodox because both the liturgy and the Scriptures are intelligible. Besides, the congregation can sit down, while in Eastern Orthodox churches they stand the whole time. At the same time, Reformed worship is reverent and based on historical formulas and creeds which people can recognize.

No course of study or pastoral training prepared Rev. Mihai Corcea for the loneliness he experienced on the mission field of Romania‚ even though it’s his native land. It’s not a lack of companionship (he has a lovely wife and a young, energetic son). Rather, Corcea described his loneliness as “being overwhelmed by the opposition around me,” and not having other pastors nearby that share the same experience.
The Making of a Pastor
Corcea is pastor of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest, a mission of the United Reformed Church in North America (URCNA). He was born into a nominal Eastern Orthodox family and attended the local Orthodox church with his grandparents. When he was a teenager, Corcea’s parents began attending an Evangelical church and brought him along to worship. He soon became interested in reading the Bible and some Christian books. He later became convinced of the soundness of the Reformed confessions in 2006, while spending some time in Holland with a Reformed family.
After earning a degree in business management and marrying his wife Lidia, he settled in Bucharest where they attended a mainline Lutheran church. Slowly, he met other people who were interested in the teachings of the Reformation. Together, they started a mid-week Bible study.
Soon, it was clear that Romania needed a Reformed church. Corcea contacted several churches in Europe for support and advice, and received an answer from Rev. Andrea Ferrari, pastor of the Reformed Church Filadelfia in Milan, Italy (also a URCNA mission). Mihai and Lidia became members of that church and attended as often as they could, given the distance of over 1000 miles.
The consistories of both Milan and Santee, CA (the overseeing church) agreed that Corcea was called to be a pastor. With their encouragement, in 2013 he began his studies at Westminster Seminary California (WSC) in Escondido, graduating in 2016. After his ordination as URCNA minister, Corcea returned to his country. On August 7, 2016, the first service of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest took place in an office building.
“I soon learned that the place and format of the worship service matters much in Romania,” Corcea said. The visitors were few, and rarely returned. Things changed when he moved into an actual church building which he shares with a Lutheran congregation. “The cross on the roof makes a difference,” he explained.
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In surveying their eschatological vision of culture and the resulting imperative for Christians to be diligent in the cultural labors out of a sense of calling in light of God’s future work of recreation, Kuyper and Schilder impel Christians towards similar ends. Further, their respective differences, owing to divergences in their understanding of God’s purposes in creation, can help strengthen the others’ view by adding a counter-stress against where they each descend into problematic conclusions.

Abstract
Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture is gaining interest in the English-speaking world, especially among those outside the Dutch Reformed tradition. Historic debates in the Dutch Reformed tradition over Kuyper’s hallmark doctrine of common grace often seem parochial or irrelevant to contemporary engagement with his thought. Revisiting one figure in those debates, this essay argues that Klaas Schilder, one of Kuyper’s most vocal critics, offers an important counterbalance to problematic features of Kuyper’s theology. While the divide between Kuyper and Schilder has historically been severe, consideration of their similarities regarding their eschatological vision of Christian cultural creation offers a way to harmonize their differences.

“Kuyperians were pluralists before pluralism was cool,” writes James K. A. Smith.1 Indeed, neo-Calvinists in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) display a marked fondness for stressing the possibility and imperative of shared cultural labor between Christians and non-Christians in society.2 Christians can work alongside non-Christians to create God-glorifying artifacts of culture, such as art or music, as well as less tangible elements of culture, such as share values, language, philosophic systems, or social and political institutions. While Smith certainly appreciates such contributions of the Kuyperian tradition, his critique aims at correcting what he perceives to be far too great an interest in the commonness which Christians share with the rest of society, at the expense of neglecting their distinctiveness. Neo-Calvinists have lost a sense of Christianity’s prophetic cultural witness, he argues. Or, to put it in more Kuyperian terms: neo-Calvinists have neglected the ecclesial contours of the antithesis between Christ’s work of redemption and humanity’s rebellion in sin. More specifically, they have failed to live out the active ministry of the institutional church of shaping communities in the distinctiveness of Christian liturgical life, which in turn is to serve as a leavening force in society for civic virtue.3
To rekindle the force of the Kuyperian antithesis, Smith has shown interest in the lesser known influence of Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder (1890–1952). Schilder, a strident critic of Kuyper and his legacy, provides what Smith sees as an element lacking in many contemporary neo-Calvinist theologies of social and cultural life. This is namely a “dispositional deflection” away from public life steeped in non-Christian principles, while at the same time providing a call to remain faithfully present within society, for its good and for Christ’s glory.4 Smith is not alone in recognizing the value of the greater emphasis Schilder puts on what neo-Calvinists call the antithesis, the epistemic and existential divide between regenerate Christians and the unregenerate, especially concerning social and cultural cooperation. A growing group of Kuyperians have begun to look to Schilder in an effort to strengthen their Kuyperian heritage.5
This willingness of those sympathetic to Kuyper’s theology of culture and common life to reach across what has been a bitter divide in the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition represents a promising new chapter in the conversation. Schilder rejected Kuyper’s foundational doctrine of common grace with great skepticism, and any effort to harmonize their thoughts must begin elsewhere. This essay proposes to put Kuyper and Schilder in conversation yet again, seeking to find some constructive unity in their varied understandings of culture, the antithesis, and common life shared between Christians and non-Christians. Whereas much of this discussion has historically focused on areas of disagreement, little serious effort has been given to those areas where Schilder and Kuyper’s theology bear similarities and can in fact work well together. The way to do this, this study proposes, is to begin where these similarities are the strongest.
For various reasons, Kuyper and Schilder disagree about much regarding creation, divine providence, and doctrines which serve to construct a “protology,” that is, a doctrine of the axiomatic beginning of all things. However, their eschatological vision for culture and human life does possess some crucial harmony. This study will therefore begin at the end, so to speak, examining both Kuyper and Schilder’s eschatological visions of culture, in order to discern how Christians in the present ought to understand their cultural task in light of the future. To frame this proposal, this study will survey the nature of the divide between Kuyper and Schilder on culture and common grace, before turning to their respective eschatological visions for culture to begin to work of synthesizing their views.
The Nature of the Divide
Beginning with the end of all things is a fitting endeavor in the study of Schilder’s theology of culture. “All threads of life and revelation,” he says, “lead in the end to heaven.”6 Though his thoughts on the cultural life of the eschaton certainly diverge from Kuyper’s, they do find significant common ground here as well. Schilder’s main conflict with Kuyper concerns instead the beginning of history. Kuyper is famous for his expansion of the doctrine of common grace in Reformed thought as the basis for his theology of cultural life. For Kuyper, God’s design for his creation is for humanity, his vice-regents, to develop the hidden potential sown into the created order as seeds awaiting germination.7 Cultural life, that is, the fruit of human labor as they interact together with God’s created order, is but one element of this latency.8 Humanity is charged with the task of creation’s development in Genesis 1:26–28 as part of God’s command to both fill the earth and to subdue it. The fall and the entrance of sin into the life of humanity, however, raises the question of how such a task and humanity’s capacity to fulfill it is affected by so deep a rift in God’s design for things. For Kuyper, God’s common grace accounts for the existential reality that humanity has indeed been able to develop creation’s latent potentials, sometimes for better though often for worse. Common grace, therefore, serves as Kuyper’s account for how cultural life remains possible, and reveals that God’s design for his creation has not been aborted, but continues to unfold and advance in this life prior to its consummation in the eschaton.9
Schilder, writing a generation after Kuyper, rejected Kuyper’s accounting for human cultural life in common grace, partly because of what he saw as problems inherent in Kuyper’s doctrine of divine providence. While both Kuyper and Schilder adamantly embraced a supralapsarian vision of God’s eternal decrees, the nature of Schilder’s critique highlights the supralapsarian tendency to frame the situation in more absolute terms.10 For Schilder, it cannot be the case that what allows both sinful humanity and the redeemed to both seemingly develop culture can be called grace.11 In reality, what Kuyper calls “grace” is simply the prolonging of judgment that will ultimately result in grace for the elect but condemnation for the reprobate, justified by reprobate humanity’s sinfulness manifest and magnified by their cultural labors.12 What accounts for present cultural life is a common “tempering” of God’s judgment against sin, so that his equal plans of both grace and wrath might come to completion in history.13
Despite such a dire prognosis, Schilder does retain a fundamentally positive view towards human cultural life, going so far as to call cultural abstention on the part of Christians a sin against God’s creational calling.14 For Schilder, cultural life is one area of responsibility for humanity under God’s covenant of works, which God entered into with the whole human race via Adam in paradise. This covenant bears actual expectations for faithfulness, namely to live out the fullness of the imago dei for which God created humanity and to the development of creation’s latencies in cultural life—covenant expectations which remain in force for all humanity even today.15
One Culture or Two?
One can begin to see in the above outline of Schilder’s thought the emergence of his emphasis on the antithesis. For Schilder, to properly speak of culture in its present reality is to speak only in connection with its ultimate telos. The problem of the fall is that it detaches human cultural striving from its proper integration with right orientation of cultural life, which hinges on right worship of God.16 The hope of the work of Christ is that regeneration restores the possibility of properly integrated cultural labor, that is work which sees “every part in its proper place in the whole”—even if this is only provisionally possible this side of the eschaton.17 The recognition this brings is that according to Schilder’s thought the vast majority of cultural development throughout history is debilitated by sin, even if cultural life as such remains inherently good according to God’s designs.
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