In an age of comfort & ease it is all too tempting to think that afflictions are an inconvenience to our happiness. But the Word reveals to us that all our pains, whether inflicted by our own foolishness, or due to the sorrows that still fill this world, are means which the Lord brings about our true happiness. May the Lord forgive us as a nation for hating the stern rebukes of God’s Word through the faithful preaching of righteousness. May God grant us in His church tender hearts to feel in the sting of conviction and see in the bruises of our chastisement God’s lovingkindness, His purging holiness, His great mercy towards us.

In a recent reading through Proverbs around our dinner table, I was struck by a proverb that takes a bit of pondering to make sense of:
“The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly (Pro. 20:30).”
To rephrase this verse, the black & blue of a bruise is the visible proof that the body is remedying some wound which struck the body. God not only designed your body to repair itself from being wounded, but also made that healing visible.
We’re naturally averse to suffering and pain. We try to avoid afflictions. But God’s kindness refuses to let the evil abide in us, and sends us hand-selected chastisements to purge our hearts. A stubborn child, a lawless criminal, a backsliding saint will all need to meet with the various, but stern, correcting strokes of justice. The parents must apply the rod. The judge must give punitive measures. The elders must withhold the Supper.
But the pain of discipline, the sting of rebuke, the sharpness of affliction aren’t ends in and of themselves.
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Scientists in Darwin’s time and through most of the 20th century could only work out the branches of the evolutionary tree of life by looking at the structure and appearance of animals and plants. Life forms were grouped according to similarities thought to have evolved together.

If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fall outs you might have even hoped it was a sign that you were adopted.
As our new research shows, appearances can be deceptive when it comes to family. New DNA technology is shaking up the family trees of many plants and animals.
The primates, to which humans belong, were once thought to be close relatives of bats because of some similarities in our skeletons and brains. However, DNA data now places us in a group that includes rodents (rats and mice) and rabbits. Astonishingly, bats turn out to be more closely related to cows, horses, and even rhinoceroses than they are to us.
Scientists in Darwin’s time and through most of the 20th century could only work out the branches of the evolutionary tree of life by looking at the structure and appearance of animals and plants. Life forms were grouped according to similarities thought to have evolved together.
About three decades ago, scientists started using DNA data to build “molecular trees”. Many of the first trees based on DNA data were at odds with the classical ones.
Sloths and anteaters, armadillos, pangolins (scaly anteaters), and aardvarks were once thought to belong together in a group called edentates (“no teeth”), since they share aspects of their anatomy.
Molecular trees showed that these traits evolved independently in different branches of the mammal tree. It turns out that aardvarks are more closely related to elephants while pangolins are more closely related to cats and dogs.
Coming Together
There is another important line of evidence that was familiar to Darwin and his contemporaries. Darwin noted that animals and plants that appeared to share the closest common ancestry were often found close together geographically. The location of species is another strong indicator they are related: species that live near each other are more likely to share a family tree.
For the first time, our recent paper cross-referenced location, DNA data, and appearance for a range of animals and plants. We looked at evolutionary trees based on appearance or on molecules for 48 groups of animals and plants, including bats, dogs, monkeys, lizards, and pine trees.
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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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