Dr. Harry Van Dyke, emeritus professor of history, is one of the key contributors to a new series of books and digital resources titled Abraham Kuyper: Collected Works in Public Theology, published by Lexham Press.
Kuyper, a Dutch journalist, statesman and Neo-Calvinist theologian, is one of the strongest proponents of a Christian worldview that insists that the Christian faith is both for salvation and for the rest of life. His influence on Christian scholars, including those on Redeemer’s faculty, is almost impossible to overestimate.
Van Dyke is one of those whose life and studies were influenced by Kuyper. “’Kuyper’ was a household word in our family home,” he says, “and his fearsome portrait hung in Grandpa’s parlour room.” From his early teens, through undergraduate and graduate studies, Van Dyke was inspired by Kuyper’s forceful engagement of culture and politics. As part of a sabbatical from Redeemer, Van Dyke read through the nine thousand letters in the Kuyper Archive at the Free University in Amsterdam.
He has also written several articles about Kuyper. “The one I am most pleased with deals with the influential tradition that Kuyper was heir to and carried further with powerful organizations such as the Vrije Universiteit and the Gereformeerde churches. This article became the opening chapter in the book On Kuyper: A Collection of Readings on the Life, Work and Legacy of Abraham Kuyper (Dordt College Press, 2013).”
Through his attendance at the annual Kuyper Conference at Princeton Seminary, Van Dyke was asked to translate and edit Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, the first volume to be made available in the series. And he has been asked to do more for the series: “Currently I am translating pieces for two planned anthologies of writings by Kuyper on education, business and economics. I find him still amazingly relevant today.”
The series is the capstone project of the work of the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society, a loose knit group of Kuyper scholars from across North America and Europe. It came about in 2011 and is funded by a number of donors and foundations. More information about the series can be found on the CRCNA’s news feed.