A friend once commented to me, echoing Wolterstorff, that there are three currents in the Reformed river. First, there are the pietists, to whom personal conversion and resultant personal devotion is everything. And then there are the doctrinalists, to whom precise doctrinal conformity to the Canons of Whatsitburg are everything. The third group is the Kuyperian, which believes that every aspect of life needs to be brought under the functional authority of the lordship of Jesus Christ.
But a problem has been caused by Abraham Kuyper’s success and subsequent influence, in that Kuyperian is now generally taken as a term of praise in Reformed circles, and not a term of abuse. As a term of praise, this means that everybody wants it, and this has resulted in a number of pietists and doctrinalists who think they are Kuyperian but who are not at all. Wouldn’t it be nice to be Kuyperian is not the same thing as actually engaging the world at every point.
True Kuyperian practice is not to go out into the world and do pretty much what everybody else is doing, only with a Jesus label attached. This is not the lordship of Christ — rather it is Christians getting into the manufacture of knock-offs. If something gets popular in the world, the Christians are right there with a competing model made with cheap labor in a Third World factory and using a lot more plastic.
In order for the Kuyperian spheres to be rightly related to one another, it is necessary for all of them to be rightly related to worship, a worship of God that is at the center. In the first place, this means worship on the Lord’s Day, and in the second place, worship in other settings — like chapel at seminary.
So here is the invitation for those choosing between seminaries, but with an illustration first. One of the things you can do if you are dubious about a restaurant is to simply walk in and take a look at one of their restrooms. Depending on the conditions there, you can go on to look at other things — the menu, the prices, the service, etc. But an appalling restroom ought to be a deal-breaker. Using a similar approach, take a grand tour of all the Reformed seminaries in the United States. Do not sit in on classes, or visit the bookstore, or examine the curriculum, at least not first. Just make sure you hit the chapel service. Sit there and ask yourself if you want this to be the future of the Reformed world. Are they singing “Jesus is my boyfriend” music? Is the worship inane? Is the message God-honoring? Is the overall demeanor breezy and casual, with shorts and flip-flops abounding? Is this what “reverence and godly awe” mean to them?
And the chances are, if you get in a conversation with someone about this, and you raise the point, the defense will be to retreat to their true justification for carrying the Reformed mantle, and it will either be a tight doctrinal defense (“the Heidelberg doesn’t say we can’t worship this way”), or it will be a love and good works defense (“our students volunteer in evangelistic outreach and numerous crisis pregnancy centers”). And this is nothing against doctrinal precision or active evangelism and social engagement. The Kuyperian approach includes these, and does so robustly. But the Kuyperian approach never justifies a glaring lack in one place by pointing out another place where the lack is not so evident. You can’t defend yourself against a charge of stealing something by pointing out all the things in town you didn’t steal.
One other thing. I am not saying that all Reformed seminaries have atrocious chapel services, any more than I am saying that every restaurant in town has a filthy restroom. I am just saying that what they are doing in their chapel service matters, and tells you a whole lot more than anything else you might look at there.