There’s always a danger in receiving medical treatment, however, that critical care measures will not morph into long term rhythms of health and wellness. The therapies of the ICU are not the same as the mature rhythms of human wellness, diet, and exercise. While an IV may be necessary for a season to provide nutrition, fluids, and medicine to combat a virus or to help one recover from the trauma of surgery, eventually the body needs to gain those things apart from such an invasive measure. This kind of challenge can face us theologically as well. There’s always the danger that our enthusiasm for a crisis intervention can hinder us from finding longer term balance.

When I was recovering from a surgery involving my digestive track, I was provided soft foods that wouldn’t give my intestines a run for their money. In that season, the intake of foods that wouldn’t provide any resistance outweighed any desire for a balanced diet with all the varied nutrients. Thankfully, that diet contributed to a healthy recovery. Even more thankfully, that diet was able to change in the days and weeks to follow so that I could expand my intake and begin to eat at least a somewhat wider array of foods. Might we also benefit from asking about what a more mature Kuyperianism could involve?

The Dangers of a Kuyperian Approach

How might the Kuyperian infusion of earthy hope hinder us in the long run? It has helped us recover or retain a commitment to certain Christian commitments like the resurrection of the body, but it may sometimes crowd out or distract from the central Christian hope, namely, that we look forward most of all to the eternal presence of God. I think we could call this danger “eschatological naturalism,” that is, the idea that while God graciously gets and gives us eternal blessing, he is not necessary to or defining of that blessing itself. You might say God becomes an instrument who provides our hope, though he himself is not that hope. That hope instead is identified with the renewed environment or the resurrected body, with the advent of world peace and the absence of human sin, with psychological wholeness or relational reconciliation. All good things, but they can be imagined and desired without God.

In fact, I’m not merely speaking hypothetically as if this could happen. In certain strands of the Kuyperian-influenced world, it has happened. Now I don’t think that people have intentionally aimed at excising God from their vision of glory, but that’s just the point. This kind of problem can arise unintentionally precisely because the Kuyperian emphases (which are good correctives) fit so snugly with what we are trained by the wider culture to value. Our world says that your body matters – against the dispensationalists, Kuyperians remind us that God values the body so much as to raise it anew. That the Kuyperian approach overlaps with non-Christian values is no sign of its falsehood, but it ought to be a reminder that we must be vigilant here to not allow it to provide cover for unrestrained or undisciplined desire.

Some Kuyperians paint a picture of the new heavens and new earth, barely bothering to mention God as the central occupant. Some have gone still further and actually chided those who sing of his heavenly presence as if they were “singing lies in church.” Neither view is necessary for a Kuyperian – in fact, Kuyper himself fell into neither of those errors. But we might be naïve if we didn’t observe how snugly Kuyperianism can provide a religious justification for lots of things we are raised to prize otherwise: political progress, environmental justice, psychological health, bodily vigor, and so forth. And we would be in danger if we weren’t wise enough to see that Kuyperianism has not heralded the elements of our hope that run more directly against those of the secular culture, namely, that God is the central or defining element of our future.