Kuyper's Comon Grace #CG1.1 Chapter 20

20 Perfect Integrity

Still remaining on the discussion of “original righteousness” Kuyper uses the metaphor of a mirror:

“In creating man, God makes for himself a mirror in which he wants to see his own image as clearly as the nature of the creaturely makes this possible. In this case it does not depend, as it does for the mirror maker, on glass and mercury that already exist, but he forms that glass and mercury himself as he needs it for this his creation. And this is why this creation would have been unworthy of God and a failure if, as soon as Adam was completed, God had not seen in Adam, as in a mirror, the clear reflection of his own image.” 

He then turns to the question of the creation of humanity. Is it an immediate creation or or an accelerated growth process. He suggests the former. Another issue is Adam’s spiritual existence at the moment of creation.

Kuyper concludes that Adam was created in  the adult state of mental existence as the fruit of immediate, direct creation of God.

“So in Paradise he stood under God, before the face of God, existing only for God, and thus he had dominion over all of creation. Dominion is the Lord’s, and therefore this trait of dominion could not be absent in his image. But dominion in Adam was nothing but a reflection, a shadow, and it served to let God see his image in man.” (190). 

In Paradise was spiritual perfection but not final consummation.