In Lectures on Calvinism Kupyer begins by introducing his Calvinistic Weltanschauung (world and life view) and then turns to apply it to several areas of life and thought: Religion, Politics, Science, Art, and the Future. In the seminal chapter on Calvinism, Kuyper briefly discusses various uses of the term from four acute angles: historical, confessional, scientific, and denominational. In short, he describes the comprehensive nature of Calvinism as follows:
“…[Calvinism] was developed first as a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for a political and social life, for the interpretation of the moral world-order, for the relation between nature and grace, between Christianity and the world, between church and state, and finally for art and science; and all these life-utterances it remained always the self-same Calvinism…Calvinism made its appearance, not merely to create a different Church-form, but an entirely different form for human life, to furnish human society with a different method of existence, and to populate the world of the human heart with different ideals and conceptions [italics added].”