Report on the prefatory remarks to a debate held at the annual general meeting (June 30, 1892 in Groningen) of the Association for Higher Education on Reformed Principles. The debate focused on the question whether scholarly formation for missionaries to the Jews, Muslims, and heathen should be considered as part of mandate of the Vrije Universiteit and, if so, what the university’s faculties might contribute to missionary training.

In the prefatory remarks a brief account is given of missions in the nineteenth century, which generally tended to be conducted according to pietistic principles. If this remains the case, then university study can do nothing for missions. Kuyper argues, however, that the manner according to which missions have been conducted up to now must be rejected in principle. Insofar as missions should be directed not by missionary societies but by the church, they also should have an ecclesiastical character (see 1890.05). On that basis, the faculty of letters could give courses on, for example, Islam and Hinduism, the faculty of law could provide lectures on Islamic law, and the faculty of theology could offer better and broader treatments of the subject de plantatione ecclessia [on the establishment of the church] in its courses on church order.