"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.
There is an interview by Bruce Wearne with two Japanese professors: Professors Eiichi Yamamote and Michiya Murata on the All of Life redeemed website. It gives a fascinating insight on Christianity in Japan.
A brief biography of Herman Dooyeweerd 7th October 1894 Dooyeweerd loved art and music and was an accomplished pianist, he enjoyed detective stories and was a supporter of
He has been described as one of the foremost philosophers of the
G.E. Langemeijer, attorney general of the
Giorgio Delvecchio, an Italian neo-Kantian philosopher, viewed Dooyeweerd as ‘the most profound, innovative, and penetrating philosopher since Kant’. [3]
More recently philosopher Alvin Plantinga stated that “Dooyeweerd's work was comprehensive, insightful, profound, courageous, and quite properly influential.” [4]
Dooyeweerd was born on
Dooyeweerd’s father was greatly influenced by Abraham Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, who became a Christian at a young age, was immersed in kuyperian thought and neo-calvinism. He would have heard Kuyper’s newspaper articles read aloud at home and he attended a Christian school whose headmaster Dr J. Woltjer was an associate of Kuyper.
In 1912 he attended the Free University (Vrije Univeriteit, VU) in
He then took up the post of an assistant tax collector in
During this time, he studied independently legal philosophy. He found that there was much conflict between the different approaches to legal philosophy and this made him convinced that there was a need for a ‘genuinely Christian and biblically based insight and foundation’. [5]
Dooyeweerd began to correspond with his brother in law D. H. Th Vollenhoven – Vollenhoven, also a graduate of the VU, had married Dooyeweerd’s sister in 1918. In these correspondences Dooyeweerd expressed a desire to ‘work out the philosophical foundations of science and of developing a theistic position, along Calvinist lines’. [6]
In May 1921 Vollenhoven became a pastor in
In October 1922 the newly founded research institute of the Ant-Revolutionary Party, a party associated with Kuyper, appointed the 27-year-old Dooyeweerd the first director. This gave Dooyeweerd the time and opportunity to develop his philosophical ideas. [7] He married on Jantiena Wilhelmina Fernhout on 19th September1924.
It was during this time that he developed the idea of the religious root of theoretical thought – the idea that all the sciences are dependent on pre-theoretical presuppositions.
He worked for the ‘Kuyper Institute’, as it was known, for four years. He then accepted an offer to become professor of law at the VU, a position he held for 40 years until his retirement in 1965 at 70.
His brief at the VU was to teach ‘Introduction to the Science of Law’, the ‘History of traditional Dutch law’ and ‘Jurisprudence’. He replaced the ‘Introduction’ with an ‘Encyclopaedia of Legal Science’.
It was at the VU that Dooyeweerd completed his De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (Amsterdam: 1935-36). This was translated into English in 1953 as The New Critique of Theoretical Thought. This translation contained extensive revisions and additions. His next planned project was Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy [8] and then the Encyclopaedia of Legal Science. [9] He was not able to complete these fully during his lifetime.
He founded and was editor in chief (1936-1976) of the journal Philosophia Reformata.
After the Second World War he travelled extensively to
During 1945 to 1948He wrote a series of articles in the weekly Nieuw Nederland these formed the basis for his book Roots of Western Culture (1979).
In 1948 he was inducted into the
Dooyeweerd was a prolific author and wrote around 200 articles and books. The last article he wrote was for Philosophia Reformata in 1975.
Dooyeweerd’s son had this to say of him:
Dooyeweerd was a gifted man but in ways of a very down-to-earth person with his feet on the ground. We in the family loved him dearly and are, we think justifiably, proud of him. We remember him as someone who was humble before his God and always strove to be in his service. In the days just before his death I personally witnessed how he struggled greatly with the fact that in his own eyes he had not done all that he seemingly felt God had called him to do.
Footnotes
1. President of the `Humanist League' in The Netherlands and professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Delft. Cited in Witte Jr.
2. October 6, 1964. On the occasion of Dooyeweerd’s 70th birthday. Cited in Witte Jr.
3. Cited in Witte Jr.
4. In ‘Christian philosophy at the end of the twentieth century’.
5. Dooyeweerd Jr p. 107.
6. Henderson p. 27.
7. According to Witte Jr: “His work in these four years culminated in five major articles, including a fifteen-part tract ‘In the Struggle for a Christian Politics’ [Herman Dooyeweerd, "In den strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde. Proeve van een fundeering der Calvinistische levens- en wereldbeschouwing in hare Wetsidee," I Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde (henceforth A.R.S.) 7-25 62- 79, 104-118, 161-173, 189-200, 228-244, 309-324, 433-460, 489-504, 528- 542 581-598, 617-634, (1924-5); 2 A.R.S. 244-65, 425-445 (1926). A.R.S. was the monthly journal of the Dr. Abraham Kuyper Foundation, which Dooyeweerd edited for several years. This work will appear as volume B5 of the Collected Works of Dooyeweerd.] and an important monograph ‘Calvinism and Natural Law’ (contained in volume B1 of the Collected Works of Dooyeweerd).”
8. The three volume work has now recently been published by Edwin Mellen Press as A5, A6 and A7 of the Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd series.
9. The first volume of this has now been published (translated by Robert D. Knudsen) by Edwin Mellen as A8. A9-11 will appear shortly.
Bibliography
Witte Jr., John, ‘Introduction’ in A Christian Theory of Social Institutions, by Herman Dooyeweerd, trans. Magnus Verbrugge. (Paideia Press: Ontario, 1986)
Herman Dooyeweerd Jr, ‘Herman Dooyeweerd – a biographical sketch’ in Herman Dooyeweerd Christian Philosophy and the Meaning of History (Edwin Mellen Press: Lewsiton,1996).
R. D. Henderson Illuminating Law: The Construction of Herman Dooyeweerd’s Philosophy 1918-1928 (Vrije Uiversitet:
Herman Dooyeweerd ‘The Last Interview of Dooyeweerd’ in J.M. van Dunné, P. Boeles and A.J. Heerma van Voss (eds): Acht civilisten in burger (Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1977). (Translated for study purposes by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen)
H. Evan Runner Dooyeweerd’s passing and appreciation The Banner 1977
Paul Otto 'In the twilight of Dooyeweerd's corpus: the publishing history of In the Twilight of Western Thought and the future of Dooyeweerd studies' Philosophia Reformata 70 (2005) 23-40.Also, Gregory Baus has made available here two audio lectures by Henk Geertsema, he discusses some of the issues that arise out of the first two chapters of Twilight
Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a new director of the Vatican Observatory, replacing the Rev. George Coyne, a long-serving Jesuit astronomer and a vocal opponent of "intelligent design" theory.
It was unclear if the replacement of Coyne, the observatory's director since 1978, reflected a sense of disapproval within the Vatican over his opposition to intelligent design -- the idea that the world is too complex to have been created by natural events alone.
Before I answer the questions (see below), I’ll offer the disclaimer that the Bible fits almost every category (and I’m not a pietist!): it changed my life; I’ve read it more than once (or I’m trying to); I’d want it on a desert island (but I like to pose the question, what five books of the Bible would you pick if you had to?); it makes me laugh; it makes me cry; while I can’t wish it had been written, I often wish it included more; sometimes I wish it hadn’t been written because of the demands it places on me (ignorance is bliss, they say); I’m currently reading it (currently in the Psalms); and, yes, I’ve read and am reading the Bible, but I so often find myself ignorant of much of the wisdom, mystery, and knowledge of the Scriptures that I share the sentiment that we sometimes have about books we’ve been meaning to read.
I have now added the Thomas McIntire pages to the All of Life Redemeed website.
After a little subtle encouragement Rudi Hayward - a philosophy teacher - is now blogging at Intermezzo. Rudi is another prerson who has come to the reformational movement via Richard Russell’s Christian Studies Unit.
Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.'Why can't America believe in evolution?' New Scientist 19 August 2006.
In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism - the idea God created us within the past 10,000 years - to any other explanation of how we got here. Another 19% favoured the theory of intelligent design - that some features of living things are due to a supernatural being such as God. This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin - evolution theory rang true for only 56%.
People have different explanations about life on earth and how it came about. Which of these statements best describes your view?
The 'evolution theory' - Humans developed over milliosn of years from less advanced forms of life. God has no part in this process (56%)
The 'creationist theory' - God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. (12%)
The 'intelligent design theory' - Some features of living things are best explained by the intervention of a supernatural being, e.g. God. (19%)
Don't know/ other (13%)
The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it's springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.
It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of "Mrs Widgery's Lodger" and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell.
And it is never danced properly.
Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the world turtle.
And even there, only in one place have they got it right. It's a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations.
There, the men dance on the first day of spring, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. People come and watch. There's an ox roast afterwards, and it's generally considered a nice day out for all the family.
But that isn't the secret.
The secret is the other dance.
And that won't happen for a while yet.
