Reformed Dogmatika

Lectures on Calvinism

Abraham Kuyper (1837 to 1920)
Abraham Kuyper (1837 to 1920). Public domain.

Reading Edition · The Stone Lectures

Lectures on Calvinism

Abraham Kuyper · Princeton, 1898


“In Calvinism my heart has found rest.”

Abraham Kuyper, Lecture I

In the autumn of 1898 Abraham Kuyper, churchman, journalist, and soon prime minister of the Netherlands, crossed the Atlantic to deliver the L. P. Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. In six addresses he argued that Calvinism is not merely a set of doctrines or a form of church order, but a complete view of life that touches religion, politics, science, art, and the shape of the future. More than a century later it remains the most influential single statement of the Reformed world-and-life view.

This Reformed Dogmatika edition presents all six lectures in full. Kuyper’s text is public domain and reproduced verbatim; we’ve corrected the scanning errors of the digital source, broken his long paragraphs into shorter ones for easier reading, and kept his footnote markers in place. Each lecture opens with a short Editor’s Introduction. One caution belongs here: Kuyper wrote in 1898, and the lectures carry the racial and cultural assumptions of his age. We present them as a historical document of lasting theological worth, without endorsing those assumptions.

The Six Lectures


FURTHER STUDY

For the systematic theology behind Kuyper’s vision, see the Herman Bavinck: A Reformed Reader’s Guide. For where the tradition stands now, see The Future of Calvinism.

Read the Bavinck Guide →The Future of Calvinism →The Catholicity of the Church →

About this edition. The text is collated from the digital edition at reformed.org and corrected against documented scanning errors; pagination follows the standard 1931 Eerdmans reprint, in which the lectures begin at pages 9, 41, 78, 110, 142, and 171. Kuyper’s own footnotes are reproduced; explanatory glosses from the digital source are flagged for replacement with Reformed Dogmatika’s own annotations. The work is in the public domain.

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