As Calvin University celebrates 150 years, we must accept — with gratitude — the charge of being a “tiny fundamentalist school,” though it reveals more about the accuser than the accused. “Tiny” often names institutions still capable of coherence; “fundamentalist,” those unapologetic of principles. In a broader culture that prides itself on academic freedom from Christ, Calvin’s offense is not intellectual smallness but institutional fidelity. We proclaim what many fear to whisper: that scholarship answers to something higher than totally depraved human desire. Abraham Kuyper understood that this clarity is not weakness — it is the precondition for serious thought.

“Accordingly, our scholarship will not be ‘free’ in the sense of ‘detached from its principle.’ That would be the freedom of the fish on dry land, of a potted plant uprooted from its soil, or, if you will, a day laborer taken from his hamlet on the moors and suddenly plunked down on Broadway or Times Square. We bind ourselves in our own house strictly and inexorably to a fixed regimen, convinced as we are that a household thrives best under set rules. The most generous academic freedom is found only in the rule that whoever wants to leave should find the door open, plus the rule that no outsider may enter your house to lord it over you; but also, that others are just as free to build on the foundation of their principle, in the style of their method, displaying the results of their own research.”

Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 1880.

— Joe Toly, ‘26