PERSPECTIVES ON THE CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH, Studies in its History, Theology, and Ecumenicity, Peter De Klerk and Richard R. De Ridder, editors. 1983, Baker, Grand Rapids, MI, 404 pp. hardcover.
DUTCH CALVINISM IN MODERN AMERICA, A History of a Conservative Subculture, by James D. Bratt. 1984, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 329 pp. paper
THE REFORMATION OF 1834, Essays in commemoration of the Act of Secession and Return, by the faculty of Mid–America Reformed Seminary, Peter Y. De Jong and Nelson D. Kloosterman, editors, 1984 Orange City, Iowa, 85 pp. paper.
In a time when it has become more popular than formerly to try to trace one’s roots, these books all focus attention on some areas of the history of the (Dutch) Reformed churches. And they all furnish worthwhile information about that history.
Family
The first book is a commemorative collection of essays in honor of Dr. John H. Kromminga at his retirement after over a quarter of a century of service as president of Calvin Theological Seminary. A biographical sketch by his brother, Professor Carl, highlights the problems of living and working in the “dilemma of orthodoxy versus relevance” in our changing times. In some suprisingly frank concluding comments the writer observes that the seminary, in order “to retain and in some instances regain the church ‘s confidence,” “had to assume a larger part of the traditional role (of guiding the church membership) which over the years it had somewhat relinquished in favor of speaking to the broader areas of theological scholarship” (p. 17).
The Krommingas belong to the numerically small , but disproportionately influential, German minority in a denomination that was mostly of Dutch origin. Many of the German immigrants settled in central Iowa to form a “Classis Ostfrisland,” a name which they carried with them from their ancestoral homeland. Herbert J. Brinks provides a brief, but colorful sketch of their early history entitled “Ostfrisians in Two Worlds.” His and a later, more detailed, essay by Henry Zwaanstra (pp. 109–150) recall the effort of the German immigrants to establish their own program for higher education at Grundy College (1916–1934) and seminary. Among the factors contributing to the painful failure of that school (especially during the depression years) was the hostility of the Dutch and their denominational institution at Grand Rapids, Michigan. (We can see a similar institutional jealousy in a current effort to increase Calvin Theological Seminary’s monopoly control of access to the denomination’s ministry.) After Grundy’s demise it provided Calvin with some of its most influential professors.
Donald J. Bruggink, whose specialized interest is appropriate church architecture, observes that the colonists were preoccupied with the Word and worship of God to the point of being virtually uninterested in the symbolism of the buildings (p. 43). Elton J . Bruins focus es attention on the masonic controversy in Holland, Michigan before and after 1880. The fact that the older (Americanized) Reformed Church tolerated the membership of Masons while the seceders (Christian Reformed) did not, led the Dutch churches to favor the secession here and to channel their emigrating members toward the CRC, thereby contributing to the rapid growth of the new denomination . Editor Peter De Klerk charts the abortive attempts to establish immigrant settlements at Rilland and Crook in Colorado in 1893 and the competitive efforts of Reformed and Christian Reformed to extend help. Lubbertus Oostendorp writes a colorful account of “The Americanization of Hendrik Pieter Scholte,” the independent and erratic leader of the Pella colony.
Diedrich Hinrich Kromminga, father of Professors John and Carl, was a pastor who for some years taught at both Grundy and Calvin, where he was an extraordinarily fascinating teacher of church history. Although he personally held a certain premillennial view of eschatology, because of his awareness that this was in a measure in conflict with the form of subscription to the churches’ creed, he scrupulously avoided promoting it either in his teachings or writings. It is ironic that Dr. Harry R. Boer, who has publicly attacked that form of subscription, writes a generally competent analysis and criticism of D. Kromminga’s premillennial views.
Richard R. De Ridder deals with “The Lifetime Tenure of Ministers in Reformed Church Policy.” As the church especially since 1973 is tending to emphasize adjustments to historical circumstances rather than recognizing any fixed Biblical order, there is evidence of a trend away from lifetime tenure.
Covenant
Anthony A. Hoekema surveys discussions in the denomination about the “Covenant of Grace,” aptly tracing the way in which various leaders, Vos, Bosma, Heyns, Van Lonkhuyzen, Hulst, Ten Hoor, Berkhof, Hylkema and Kuyvenhoven dealt with it. Generally they recognized that the Bible speaks of the covenant in a narrower sense as including only the elect and also in a wider sense as including believers and their children, some stressing one, others the other use of the word. Attention is directed to the important bearing of the doctrine on the Christian home and the education of its children. I believe that this informative article might have been made even more comprehensive and illuminating if it had noted the demoralizing effects of the presumptive regeneration idea in the Dutch Reformed Churches and if it had referred also to the Protestant Reformed exclusive emphasis on one aspect of the covenant 2nd the opposite emphasis of the followers of Professor Schilder and the “Liberated” churches, which eventually split the Protestant Reformed churches.
Kingdom
Fred H. Klooster provides an illuminating article on “The Kingdom of God in the History of the Christian Reformed Church.” He divides the past 90 years of that history into three thirty-year periods . In the first period, in which Abraham Kuyper’s concern about the rule of Christ everywhere was especially influential, there was keen interest but also intense debate about the subject. In the second, between the wars, interest waned and organizations earlier set up to implement these Christian convictions in various areas of society collapsed. The third period has been confused and Klooster sees little beside the activities of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod initiating an authentic Kingdom perspective. The last part of the essay highlights the valuable writings of Gerhardus Vos on the subject, a little known but important 1913 lecture of Louis Berkhof on “The Church and Social Problems,” and Samuel Volbeda’s moving but never published, forgotten lectures about covenant, church and kingdom. Reflection on the illuminating but distressing historical survey recalls the Lord’s words, “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say” (Luke 6:46)? Unmistakably contributing to the collapse of a great deal of conviction and some idealistic enterprises for “God’s Kingdom” has been the current compromise with Biblical criticism which makes everything the Lord said subject to debate. (And that fatal compromise is especially apparent in the current disintegration of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod.) When the church loses its conviction of any clear Biblical authority it is soon lost amid conflicting opinions.
Harvey A. Smit considers the relative lack of missionary zeal in the first sixty years of the denomination’s history up to 1917, attributing it especially to a general emphasis on self-maintenance that was far greater than any stress on its responsibility to bring a gospel testimony to unbelievers.
Antithesis
Henry Stob, for many years a most influential seminary professor, contributes a brief but highly significant article on “the Antithesis,” a term which Abraham Kuyper used to refer to the cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, the church and the world. Although God said to the serpent, (Gen. 3:15) “I will put enmity between you and the woman,” the professor maintains that the origin of this opposition was the devil and God’s work was really the removal of it. “The antithesis, in short, is what the gospel is out to destroy” (p. 245). Following the carefully reasoned discussion helps the reader to understand the enthusiasm which Dr. Stob often aroused in his students and also the tendency they often showed to move away from such doctrines as God’s sovereign predestination and toward Liberal compromises in the name of common grace.
Ecumenism
The concluding part of the book is devoted to ecumenical relations. John H. Bratt deals with the Christian Reformed Church and its part in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. John Hesselink, Jr. provides an article on “The Future of a Distinctive Dutch American Theology” in his Reformed church and the CRC, which we might describe as blandly ecumenical. Doede Nauta traces the history of the relations between the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the CRC. Observing that the American organization is really older than the Dutch, he characterized the attitude of the Dutch church toward the U.S. denomination as at first rather apathetic, and traced later developments since the second world war to the present arguments and rifts. Klaas Runia, another representative of the same Dutch denomination, writes about the relations of the CRC to the World Council, toward which he considers the denomination “too negative” (p. 342). Paul Schrotenboer, long–time secretary of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, reviews the CRC relations with that body. Especially in recent years the Liberal movement of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands, in particular their identification wi.th the World Council, has brought the RES under increasing strains as a number of smaller conservative Presbyterian bodies have been abadoning it and the CRC delegates have, by a compromise policy, vainly tried to hold the disintegrating venture together. In the book’s concluding article William van’t Spijker traces the history of relations between the Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands (which had never joined with the larger Reformed Churches, the GKN) and the CRC in North America. Each pursues a somewhat independent course.
Dutch or Calvinist?
James Bratt’s book on Dutch Calvinism in Modern America clearly reveals an impressive amount of research—Consider the effort involved in collecting 80 pages of footnotes and working through 17 pages of bibliography. And the author is frank and free with his opinions and judgments as he writes in an entertaining style.
His concern, the title states, is with Dutch Calvinism in modern America, and his doctoral work was done under Sidney Ahlstrom, whose massive Religious History of the American People also shows a special interest in ethnic perspectives. Unfortunately the Dutch side of the title gets much more careful treatment than the Calvinism, for whose real character the author, despite his study, shows little or no appreciation. Henry Stob has divided (CRC) Calvinists into three different “minds” as though one could pick his style of Christianity according to personal preference. N. Wolterstorff has done the same , speaking of “pietism,” “doctrinalism,” and “Kuyperianism” and applying them to the entire history of the CRC. Fred Klooster in the previously mentioned volume points out how misleading this kind of categorizing really is when he observes that “Authentic Kuyperianism displays a rich kingdom vision coupled both with doctrinal sensitivity and genuine piety” (p . 211). This kind of categorizing Bratt pursues with a vengeance. Just how misleading his hasty labeling can be is perhaps best exemplified in his caricature of Louis Berkhof as one who virtually “made doctrine the whole of religion,” and whose work was “utterly devoid of imagination and feeling” (p. 135) and lacking any “social corporate emphasis.” One has only to tum to Fred Klooster’s 4-page summary of Berkhof’s lecture on “The Church and Social Problems” in the volume just reviewed (pp. 216–219), a booklet which Zwaanstra called “the most significant work to appear in the CRC on the task of the church in society” to see how grossly Bratt misrepresents him.
Perhaps even more serious than his hasty “pigeonholing” of people into such artificial compartments in which they do not fit, is the fact that he attempts to deal with “Calvinism” while manifesting a complete lack of appreciation for what defined that perspective for Calvin himself, the authority of the Bible as God’s Word. Ralph Janssen, the early promoter of Biblical criticism, is portrayed as a mistreated hero, and the line of thought represented by the Reformed Journal is presented as almost the only Christian Reformed scholarship worth mentioning. Thus we are left at the conclusion of Bratt’s interesting but rather cynical excursion into the story of Dutch Calvinism in America, with the Journal’s rather futile efforts, Robert Schuller’s empire and the Amway Corporation as about the only traces the Dutch Calvinist movement leaves as it is seen merging into “the full measure of freedom and banality that is the promise of American life” (p. 221).
The dreary ending of Bratt’s book is not really surprising. If all that distinguishes Dutch Calvinism is really “Dutchness,” that is, of course, certain to disappear in a generation or two in America. John Calvin himself had no concern for preserving the “Frenchness” of his own teaching. What determined and distinguished his teaching was not his ethnic roots, but the fact that he had received and sought to teach “God’s message . . . not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the Word of God, which also performs its work in the believer” (1 Thess. 2:13). Bratt’s in some ways able work shows no appreciation for that. The larger composite work we have reviewed, giving many glimpses and perspectives on the C.R. Churches, has indications of the same loss of perspective as it reveals a church moving toward an ecumenical Liberal main stream. In that situation, trying to retain a few Dutch traditions, as John Hesselink recommended, is a rather useless business; it is a far from adequate ground for trying to preserve a church. The only thing that distinguishes a real church is its living by the Word of God. When it loses that, it becomes, as our Lord said, “salt that has lost its taste” (Lk . 14:34, 35) and, even if it joins some large majority, is headed for the trash piles of history. Only the church that seeks to live by the Word of Lord will endure (Matt. 7:24–27).
Considering the position of Reformed churches in the present confusion, as these books prompt us to do, suggests that instead of futilely trying to perpetuate Dutch ethnic church traditions, we ought more consciously to merge our efforts with those of the Presbyterian who, sharing the same faith, also seek to live by the Bible as God’s Word.
Secession Roots
It is appropriate that the third, smaller booklet issued by the faculty of a new school that was established to provide Biblically Reformed training of ministers, should commemorate an event that occurred 150 years ago as a product of the same kind of conviction that inspired its founding. A century and a half ago a small but growing group of people, at great cost, broke away from a politically controlled and doctrinally apostate Liberal church to reestablish a church fellowship that would honestly believe God ‘s Word and try to live according to it.
Two essays by Dr. Peter Y. De Jong recall the background and development of that secession. Nelson Kloosterman then analyzes its doctrinal significance. Henry Vander Kam in an exceptionally interesting essay traces the later history of the secession movement on into the 1940s when the “Liberated” Reformed churches again broke away from a fellowship that had largely fallen back into the former apostasy. Timothy M. Monsma focuses attention on the educational ideals of the seceders who emigrated to the U.S. and the way in which they tried to realize them in the schools in their Michigan colony. Mark Vander Hart follows the seceders who especially under the leadership of Hendrik Pieter Scholte, settled west of the Mississippi River.
This is a useful booklet to acquaint the people of our churches with their increasingly unknown religious history. A better acquaintance with the way our predecessors, although under superficially different circumstances, had to “fight the good fight” for the faith, would be far more helpful to us than most modern people realize. Some knowledge of history often helps us, by the grace of God, to recognize, understand and overcome current problems that many people who do not know that history, regard as totally new and baffling. The observation has often been made that it is especially those who will not learn from the past who have to repeat its lessons.
As we, entreating the Lord’s guidance, seek to profit from Biblical and later history, we need to see clearly what needs correction in our churches’ current plight and try to make the correction. Sometimes we must, like our forefathers, begin building anew what has deteriorated beyond repair. When that may seem discouraging, we have to learn, like our predecessors, not to “despise the day of small things” (Zech. 4:10) but to recall what God has done and may do again with efforts begun in faith and obedience to Him.
Somewhat paradoxically, the denomination, as it loses its sense of being directed by the Word of God, is also deliberately fostering ethnic diversity—as though there were, could and should be black and white, red and yellow varieties of Christianities, creeds and church orders!