Abraham Kuyper Founds the Free University of Amsterdam

Four years after the Alliance of Reformed Churches formed in London in 1875, and fifty four years before the Confessing Church adopted the Barmen Declaration in 1934, both already recorded here, Dutch Calvinism built an institution meant to carry its doctrine into every field of learning. Abraham Kuyper, a Reformed minister, journalist and leader of the Anti Revolutionary Party, had argued for years that Reformed Christianity needed a university free of both the Dutch state and the increasingly liberal Dutch Reformed Church, funded instead by ordinary Reformed families through a national association. On 20 October 1880 he convened the founding assembly of the Vrije Universiteit, the Free University, at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the first Dutch university independent of church and state, and served as its first rector. Kuyper went on to found a Reformed newspaper and political party and to serve as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, but it was the university, teaching that Christ's authority extended over every sphere of life including scholarship itself, that carried his neo Calvinist theology into the twentieth century Reformed institutions already recorded on this timeline.