Abraham Kuyper Was a Heretic Too

Over the last few years I’ve been saddened to see a number of teachers and preachers of the Word of God, along with friends in the pews, begin a dubious doctrinal decline, wandering into either questionable teaching or even outright heresy. And believe me, I don’t use the term heresy lightly. The narratives are diverse, and the motivations multifarious, but in all, their tragic departure brings me distress for their spiritual lives and for the churches they serve.

What should we do in these cases? What should we think when someone we know departs from the truth of the faith “once for all delivered” and veers into what we believe to be serious, dangerous error? While I don’t have an exhaustive answer, we should at least rule out completely writing them off as lost and beyond hope.

Heretic to Hero

 

G. C. Berkouwer tells this story of theological giant Abraham Kuyper:

When Kuyper referred to Modernism as “bewitchingly beautiful,” he doubtlessly recalled the fascination which the modernism of Scholten had exerted on him as a student. He acknowledges in 1871 that he too had once dreamed the dream of Modernism. And when at the age of eighty he addressed the students of the Free University, he harked back to the “unspiritual presumption” which had caused him to slip. “At Leiden I joined, with great enthusiasm, in the applause given Professor Rauwenhoff when he, in his public lectures, broke with all belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.” “Now when I look back,” he writes, “my soul still shudders at times over the opprobrium I then loaded on my Savior.” (The Person of Christ, 9-10)   Continue at Derek Rishmawy