Mission

The Kuyper Centre exists:

to mentor Christian students from every academic discipline for faithful leadership,

to provide a supportive, networking community for Christian students and faculty, and

to engage the university with the best of Christian scholarship.

The Kuyper Centre offers a number of different programming options.

Honourariums for students to encourage critical and constructive academic thinking and research across disciplines.

Resources for students and faculty seeking to integrate Christian faith and academic scholarship.

A variety of social and academic events - both locally and regionally - for students and faculty.

The Kuyper Centre is named after and stands in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper, former Prime Minister, journalist, statesman, and theologian in the Netherlands in the early 20th century. Kuyper worked throughout his life to tirelessly emphasize the presence and role of God in every aspect of daily life. He said, “No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!’” This attitude and conviction gives confidence that one’s faith and one’s scholarship can be constructively related.

In fact, Kuyper is often cited as one of the founding fathers of the neocalvinist tradition. This tradition within the mainstream of Christianity can be summarized in the following way (thanks to the Paideia Centre):

1. Neocalvinism begins with Christ and this focus opens up into a full Trinitarian faith.

2. Christ is rendered to us truly in Scripture, which is fully trustworthy as God’s Word.

3. Christ stands at the centre of the biblical story and the good news he proclaimed is about the kingdom as the goal of history - God restoring his rule over the whole of human life and creation.

4. Since Christ has revealed and accomplished the end of history, the Scriptures have a storied shape and as such tell the true story of the whole world.

5. A central theme of the biblical story is God’s election of a people to embody the kingdom, to be a preview of the goal of history, and thus to bear witness to Christ’s rule over all of life - this constitutes mission.

6. The comprehensive gospel of the kingdom has been narrowed and consigned to a very minor place within the dominant Western humanist worldview, and this calls for a conscious articulation of a biblical worldview in relation to the cultural worldview to enable the church to recover the all-embracing scope of the good news.

7. The good news reveals the restoration of the creation from sin, and thus a neocalvinist worldview insists on a comprehensive and integrated understanding of creation, fall, and restoration.

8. The fundamental backdrop of God’s drama of restoration is creation and thus neocalvinism articulates a rich doctrine of creation including its good and dynamic creation order and humanity’s place within it.

9. History is part of God’s order for creation and neocalvinism affirms the historical development or differentiation of creation.

10. The implication of the fall is that the power of sin and evil now radically twists every part of creation, and while the structures of creation remain good the distorting power of sin means they have been radically misdirected.

11. The Bible tells the story of restoration centred in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the recovery of God’s originally good purposes for the whole of his creation and all of human life.

12. Since God’s restorative power is at work in the creation by the Spirit, and the forces of evil remains at work in the creation, neocalvinism recognizes an ultimate religious conflict in the whole of human life.

13. God is at work leading his creation to its destiny of a new heavens and a new earth, and only then will the kingdom finally come. Until then the church is called to participate in God’s redemptive mission - the missio Dei - as witnesses to his victory, but since we await the final victory there is no room for triumphalism in neocalvinism.

The Kuyper Centre seeks to illuminate this vision for and with students and faculty.