In the first volume of his trilogy on the kingship of Christ, Abraham Kuyper devotes a chapter to the relationship between the kingdom and science. Following the Belgic Confession, which states that creation is a beautiful book by means of which God reveals Himself to man, Kuyper underscores the importance, authority, and necessity of knowledge drawn from nature:
“Nowhere does Scripture suggest that all of our knowledge about nature and the world should be derived from Scripture. It posits that there are things that we can only come to know from nature, from the world, and from the course of the world; and that there are other things, about which nature tells us nothing, that can only be known from revelation. Rather than pulling down the knowledge of nature, Scripture instead expresses that God’s great power and divinity can from the very outset be understood and comprehended from creation. It is the height of folly if you imagine that, with Scripture in front of you, you should be able to know from Scripture about nature, the life of the world, and its history without ever actually investigating nature or the life and composition of the world.
You can only know the body by studying the body. You only gain knowledge of the earth’s crust by digging in it. The plant world must be known from the plant world, the animal world from the animals; and similarly the history of the human world must be known from the past. Scripture does lead the way, of course; but aside from it we have, as sources for our knowledge, the entire kingdom of nature, the entire course of history, and the entire course of the development of capacities in human life. God is honored not by those who close the second book of nature to ponder Scripture alone, but by those who in quiet obedience zealously study the two books of Scripture and nature. Nature and human life in this world supply us with a storehouse of givens that God himself lays bare for us, and it would be a sin of omission to delight in Scripture while closing the other book of nature and human life and pushing it aside.”
—Abraham Kuyper, Pro Rege: Living under Christ’s Kingship: Volume 1, pp. 201-202
