Born in Dronrijp, Klapwijk started to study Philosophy and Theology in 1952 at the Vrije Universiteit (VU University), where he received his MA in 1961.
His doctoral dissertation was written on Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), the German theologian and later philosopher of history in Hegel’s Chair in Berlin, who was widely celebrated for his defense of radical historicism and who gave us the sociological distinction between Church, Sect and Mysticism.
He then pretends that we have to accept the radical historicity of human beings including pluralism of norms and values without ignoring the undeniable intimations of ultimate, universal core principles that rule our daily life.
His inaugural lecture was published as Dialektiek der verlichting: Een verkenning in het neomarxisme van de Frankfurter Schule (1976, English 2010).
He focussed on Vollenhoven's early vision of an integral Scriptural philosophy that is not accommodated to ancient Greek paganism or modern secular humanism, undiluted by what Vollenhoven and his colleague at the VU, Herman Dooyeweerd, had called "synthesis philosophy", i.e. a mix of biblical motifs with sophisticated conceptions of a non-Christian origin.
For Vollenhoven, this synthesis quality compromised the Middle Ages and even the entirety of Patristic philosophical theology, contrary to Alfred North Whitehead's appraisal of the same era.
But Klapwijk emphasized how in later years Vollenhoven acknowledged that an antithetical attitude, so characteristic for Reformational thinkers, does not exclude affinities and structural similarities between secular theories and Christian philosophy.
One of Klapwijk's first attempts to articulate this critical stance for his philosophical community occurred in a widely-read volume edited by Hendrik Hart, Johan van der Hoeven, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, reviewed in Theology Today by Eugene Osterhaven: "An excellent chapter on 'Rationality in the Dutch Neo-Calvinist Tradition' by Jacob Klapwijk ... treats Abraham Kuyper's doctrines of common grace, and the antithesis, and his failure to harmonize the two, especially when he dealt with human reason.
Kuyper's attempts to give the antithesis organizational form is shown to "lead to a dangerous identification of the Christian (or, if you will, Reformed) cause with God's cause."
It is athletic enough to keep pace with the broader philosophical world, putting the theories of the day to a critical test and using what is valuable in such a way that it can become subservient to a Christian perspective on reality in the realms of theoretical thought.
[8] In recent years Klapwijk has applied his view of Christian philosophy in terms of transformation to the field of living nature and evolutionary theory.
"[9] Klapwijk's theory of emergent evolution (TEE) indicates how at crucial moments in earthly history, when basic conditions of solidity and complexity were suitable, physical things reorganized themselves in such a way that new forms of existence were disclosed.
In short, it is the modal hierarchy of physical laws, biotic rules, vegetative patterns, sensitive standards, mental and moral principles that in due time has given rise to phenomena of emergent or "transcendental novelty" (G. Ledyard Stebbins).
Klapwijk’s TEE can be described as a non-reductive evolutionary theory attuned to the different modal spheres that characterize our earthly existence.
The Big Bang, the early inceptions of cosmic time and space, the primeval expressions of unicellular life, the rise of the multicellular systems of plants and animals and, last but not least, the intimacies of human consciousness are difficult to unite in a great chain of being, for scientists to comprehend in an ontology, an overall view of reality.