Statesmen, theologian and Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), understood that a radically God-centered theology provides the only solid basis for Christian life and work. He wrote in Calvinism: Six Stone Foundation Lectures:
The starting-point of every motive in religion is God and not Man. Man is the instrument and means, God alone is here the goal, the point of depature and the point of arrival, the fountain, from which the waters flow, and at the same time, the ocean into which they finally return… to covet no other existence than the sake of God, to long for nothing but for the will of God, and to be wholly absorbed in the glory of the name of the Lord, such is the pith and the kernel of all true religion, (pg. 24, 46).