cultural-mandate

In every moment of time beats the pulse of eternity; every point in space is filled with the omnipresence of God; the finite is supported by the infinite, all becoming is rooted in being.

But unity, true unity, a unity which does not destroy differentiation, but rather includes and enfolds it, may come, and can come, only when the entire world is conceived as the product of the wisdom and power which reve…

Without revelation religion sinks back into a pernicious superstition.

The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation, the secret of all that exists in all its forms. The deeper science pushes its investigations, the more clearly will it discover that…

Revelation, while having its centre in the Person of Christ in its periphery extends to the uttermost ends of creation. It does not stand isolated in nature and history, does not resemble an island in the ocean, nor a dr…

The resurrection is the fundamental restoration of all culture. Christ himself took again the body in which he bore on the cross the sin of the world; he has received all power in heaven and earth, and is exalted by God…

They firmly believed that the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; and they considered themselves the new humanity, in which Jew and Greek found their unity and destination.

the desire has reasserted itself in modern theology and philosophy to do justice to this central fact of universal history, and to trace on all sides the lines of connection established by God himself between revelation…

This, after all, is what man seeks in religion,--strength, life, a personal power, that can pardon sin, receive us into favor, and cause us to triumph joyfully over a world of sin and death.

a rejuvenation is still in store for us; but if so, that rejuvenation can come only through the old and yet ever new Gospel which, at the beginning of our era, and again at the time of the Reformation, has saved the thre…

But this light did not arise through evolution; it shone from the Cross of Calvary.

Calvinism did not stop at a church-order, but expanded in a life system, and did not exhaust its energy in a dogmatical construction, but created a life- and world-view, and such a one as was, and still is, able to fit i…

I keep my eyes fixed upon the Beautiful and the Sublime in its eternal significance, and upon art as one of the richest gifts of God to mankind.

Thus you recognize that the cosmos, instead of being a heap of stones, loosely thrown together, on the contrary presents to our mind a monumental building erected in a severely consistent style.

To receive as the highest reward a University of the Sciences in a moment, when, in a fearful struggle, the course of the history of the world was turned by your heroism is only conceivable among a people in whose very l…

There is found hidden in Calvinism an impulse, an inclination, an incentive, to scientific investigation.

Yea, even as a grain of wheat from the sarcophagi of the Pharaohs, when again committed to the soil, bears fruit a hundredfold, so Calvinism still carries in itself a wondrous power for the future of the nations.

Calvinism has yet a blessing to bring and a bright hope to unveil for the future.

Consequently, it is impossible for a Calvinist to confine religion to a single group, or to some circles among men. Religion concerns the whole of our human race.

notwithstanding all this the chief aim of all human effort remains what it was by virtue of our creation and before the fall, -namely dominion over nature.

And for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover th…

Call to mind that this turn in the history of the world could not have been brought about except by the implanting of another principle in the human heart, and by the disclosing of another world of thought to the human m…

So Calvinism was bound to find its utterance in the democratic interpretation of life; to proclaim the liberty of nations; and not to rest until both politically and socially every man, simply because he is man, should b…

Calvinism, as the only decisive, lawful, and consistent defence for Protestant nations against encroaching, and overwhelming Modernism,—this of itself was bound to be my theme.

When thus taken, I found and confessed, and I still hold, that this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism. In Calvinism my heart has found rest.

Two life systems are wrestling with one another, in mortal combat. Modernism is bound to build a world of its own from the data of the natural man, and to construct man himself from the data of nature; while, on the othe…

It is a symptom of spiritual poverty if the church of Christ is afraid to address the burning problems of the day'every burning problem, after all, and above all the social problem of the working classes, arises from dir…

Much less may believers retreat to their ecclesiastical corner and, satisfied with simply having faith, abandon the building of the temple of science to unbelievers, as though science does not concern them.

What is it to be rich toward God? To understand this, imagine for a moment everything you call yours in the world as taken from you. Picture yourself abandoned and forgotten of all, in utter isolation alone with your own…

Alas, (and now I come to the second part of my address) we have disrupted this beautiful order. By our guilt the earthly fatherland is no longer oriented toward the heavenly but stands constantly in opposition to it. And…

And so God's children will receive more than paradise, because all division and separation of the peoples will come to an end in that better fatherland. What existed before the flood, what the sinners intended by buildin…

Het modernisme rust niet voordat het van de vrouw een man en van de man een vrouw heeft gemaakt, en, alle onderscheid nivellerend, het leven doodt door het onder de ban van de eenvormigheid te leggen.

Islam isolates God from the Creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.

If Christianity is to be presented as the hope of the future, then it must be presented to men as a total life and world view.

If the believer's God is at work in this world, then in this world the believer's hand must take hold of the plow, and the name of the Lord must be glorified in that activity as well.

This 'regeneration'breaks humanity in two, and repeals the unity of the human consciousness' [The result is] an abyss in the universal human consciousness across which no bridge can be built.

Sin, indeed, is an absolute darkening power, and were not its effect temporarily checked, nothing but absolute darkness would have remained in and about man; but common grace has restrained its workings to a very conside…

Now then even the unbeliever can be of service to us as in Christ we re-undertake the original mandate given to Adam. We see now that history is a coherent process with the Cross as its center, a process in which every n…

Faith gives highest assurance, where in our own consciousness it rests immediately on the testimony of God; but without this support, everything that announces itself as faith is merely a weaker form of opinion based on…

Conversely, our duty is that we who confess Jesus Christ take hold of science as an instrument for propagating our faith-conviction.

A person endowed with faith gradually will accept Scripture; if not so endowed he will never accept it, though he should be flooded with apologetics. Surely it is our duty to assist seeking souls, to explain or remove di…

The Christian Religion and Paganism do not stand related to each other as the higher and lower forms of development of the same thing; but the Christian religion is the highest form of development natural theology was ca…

The purest confession of truth finds ultimately its starting-point in the seed of religion, which, thanks to common grace, is still present in the fallen sinner; and, on the other hand, there is no form of idolatry so lo…

Sin unbridled would have resulted forthwith in the total degeneracy of human life. But God arrested sin in its course in order to prevent the complete annihilation of his handiwork, which naturally would have followed. B…

If special revelation assumes that in consequence of sin the normal activity of the natural principium is disturbed, this implies of itself that the natural principium has lost its competency to judge' Being as he is, he…

One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. And sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of…

At no single point of the way is there place, therefore, for a support derived from demonstration or reasoning' What God Himself does not bear witness to in your soul personally (not mystically-absolutely, but through th…

Against all such efforts the words of the Psalmist are ever in force: In Thy light shall we see light, and also the words of Christ: Neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomever the Son willeth to re…

Indeed, man is incapable of doing any good. Are all unbelievers then wicked and repulsive men? Not at all. In our experience we find that the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to…

It is, indeed, by means of the cognitio specialis that the cognitio naturalis becomes useful. Only in the light of Scripture is the sinner enabled to account for the semen religionis in his heart and of the glory which i…