What Kuyper Said

What Abraham Kuyper said about religion can be said about the gospel. Here’s Kuyper:

Of course, religion, as such, produces also a blessing for man, but it does not exist for the sake of man. It is not God who exists for the sake of His creation; — the creation exists for the sake of God (Lectures on Calvinism, 45).

Now let me adapt Kuyper’s words to show that our proposal about the gospel, in The King Jesus Gospel, by making christology first and soteriology second, is doing the very same thing Kuyper thinks Calvinism is doing when it comes to the point of religion.

Of course, the gospel, as such produces also a blessing for all humans, but the gospel does not exist for the sake of humans. It is not God who exists for the sake of His creation; — the creation exists for the sake of God.

That is, the point of the gospel is to tell us something about God — more pointedly, about God in Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ is the Lord, the Messiah/King, the one who saves — and not first about us. This is why what I call the soterian gospel needs to be seen for what it is: the conversion of something about Christ into the benefits Christ brings. “Of course, the gospel, as such, produces also a blessing (salvation), but it does not exist for the sake of the blessing but the blessing for the sake of the King himself.

No, this is not an either-or but a first-second, and those who don’t think first-second doesn’t matter when it comes to gospel could perhaps consider that Kuyper was making the very same point: first God, then the blessing.