This provisional publication presents the first half of a series of articles issued by the Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd in the years 1945-1948 in Nieuw Nederland, a Dutch periodical of which the author was editor-in-chief.
We acknowledge that the antithesis cuts right through the Christian life itself. Everywhere, in personal life, in the life of the Christian family, in Christian organizations and political groups, even in the Christian church there has been gratifying evidence of genuine vitality.
Even a first, provisional attempt to delimit the area of sociology of law from other “modal”- branches of sociology, such as sociology of ethics, of “religion”, of language, economics, art, etc., is inescapably confronted with a problem of legal philosophy.
Closer scrutiny teaches us that in the various branches of science there is no such thing as an unambiguous employment of these basic concepts.
In the evolution of Jurisprudence and Political Science in the second half of last century many tenets that used to be taken for unassailable truths, were cast into the melting-pot of criticism.
The commemoration of the jubilee of one hundred and fifty years of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Humanities gives occasion for historical reflection.
In the development of Western thought, anthropological conceptions have been dominated by four religious ground‐motives, which have shaped the entire development of the West.
Nowadays we are confronted, anew and in an insistent way, with demands for justice, by all kinds of political and social organizations, by ecclesiastical institutions and action groups. Where is justice? What is justice? Questions we must answer.
How can we trust our Bibles when there has been so much time between now and when the authors wrote the originals? Hasn’t the text been corrupted over all those years?
The inspired Word is the divine THESIS, the lens by which we can see the world for what it truly is, and the guiding principle by which we ought to order our lives.