Abraham Kuyper Quotes
... we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation.... On the other hand ... by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger which lurks for our personal liberty in the power of the state.
Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1931, p. 80.
See also Gerald R. Ford for a later similar expression.
His reference was to his experience as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, which he and associates views as a liberal organization, while others viewed it as a conservative bastion of the establishment.
The "administrative state" was the term used for a government had had powers and used them to regulate things and areas of society without each specific regulation being voted upon by the legislature. In America sicne the New Deal there have been so many areas that have regulations that a single agency like the Environmental Protection Agency might issue in a year more regulations than the entire Congress considers in all areas put together. All these regulatory powers are delegated by Congress passing legislation authorizing it, and Congress can legislate any change in any regulation it wants, but the modern state is so complesx and areas so specialzied that Congress has preferred to delegate. There are a few who legal scholars and politicians who believe that it is unconstitutional for the legislature to delegate powers to the executive branch and no regulations have validity unless specifically passed by Comgress. There are some others who have not taken a position on this point but who believe that of an administrative state can regulate phases of citizens lives it is bound to circumscribe personal freedom as all legislation does to some extent. This quotation was used by opponents of Judge Gorsuch in arguing that he was unfit for the Supreme Court as he was out of touch with the Administrative State which America gradually became and rapidly in the New Deal and in the 80 years thereafter a very extensive administrative state. Gorsuch's views were based on classic political pholosophy but there were some ultra conservatives who did not want any regulation of business by Congress or Administrative Agencies and therefore supported Gorsuch and the few others with this view as if Agencies were not able to issue regulations there was no practical way that Congress could issue as many and regulation would be reduced which is what they desired.
Abraham Kuyper, was Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905, an influential neo-Calvinist theologian and also a journalist. He established the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, which upon its foundation became the second largest Reformed denomination in the country behind the state-supported Dutch Reformed Church.
