The Pillar Church (Holland, Michigan) Sesquicentennial Lectures, 1997

Robert P. Swierenga and Elton J. Bruins
A.C. Van Raalte Institute, Hope College

To our grandchildren, the future of the church

Jacob, Trent, and Jillanne Groenhout
Sydney Swierenga
baby Breems
James, Katherine, and Thomas Plasman
baby Bruins

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface
Acknowledgements
Preface by Michael De Vries
Introduction
Chapter 1 1834--Afscheiding and Emigration
Chapter 2 1850--The Union of 1850: The Classis of Holland Joins the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church
Chapter 3 1857--Secession Again: Origins of the Christian Reformed Church
Chapter 4 1882--Secession Yet Again: The Masonic Controversy
Bibliographic Essay
Sources of Illustrations
Index

Acknowledgements

The authors contributed severally and jointly to the book. Robert P. Swierenga is primarily responsible for the Introduction, chapters 1 and 3, the index, and illustrations; Elton J. Bruins is primarily responsible for chapters 2 and 4. Chapter 4, here revised, originally appeared in 1983 in Perspectives on the Christian Reformed Church, edited by Peter De Klerk and Richard R. De Ridder, and is used with permission of Baker Book House. The authors acknowledge their indebtedness to Elisabeth Dekker, former colleague at the A.C. Van Raalte Institute, for translations of primary sources; to Richard Harms, director of the Calvin College Archives, for research assistanceand obtaining the photographs; to Larry J. Wagenaar, director of the Joint Archives of Holland, Hope College, for assistance in obtaining the photographs; and to Karen Schakel, administrative assistant at the A.C. Van Raalte Institute, for her careful proofreading and editorial assistance. We also express our gratitude to Peter H. Huizenga, benefactor and founder of the A.C. Van Raalte Institute.

Preface -- the Reverend Michael De Vries, pastor of Pillar Church

As part of its sesquicentennial celebrations, Pillar Christian Reformed Church of Holland, Michigan, sponsored a lecture series in March of 1997 that focused on the religious history of the Dutch Calvinist immigration to West Michigan and the church struggles of the first settlers. One month earlier, on February 9, 1997, Pillar Church celebrated Dominie Albertus Van Raalte's founding of the town and church by holding a "Unity Service" with its long-estranged daughter congregation, First Reformed Church. I preached on the theme of "The Beauty of Unity," based on Psalm 133, and presented to the Reverend Daniel N. Gillett, pastor of First Reformed Church, a complete copy of the consistory minutes for the years 1850-1882, which include the years prior to the painful separation in 1882.

Despite an ardent desire for reconciliation in the Reformed community, this lecture series deals as much with divisions and strife as with unity. Every one of the pioneer pastors of the Holland colony--Albertus Van Raalte, Cornelius Van der Meulen, Marten Ypma, Seine Bolks, and Hendrik Klijn--were seceders from the Nederlands Hervormde Kerk (Reformed Church), the national church. If these leaders had not separated in 1834, there would have been no Holland colony to celebrate. Moreover, as I observed at the Unity service, while God does not condone divisions in the church God has blessed the local congregations and their respective denominations. One must also know that the founders, even when they disagreed, did so in the conviction that they were being obedient to God's Word.

We are pleased to give these fine lectures a wider audience. Becoming knowledgeable about these early struggles within the colony will help us understand the past and, hopefully, encourage us to go forward in faith and hope. We all live by grace!

-- Rev. Michael De Vries

Introduction

In Dutch Reformed circles certain dates resonate with meaning. Mention the year 1834 and the Afscheiding or ">Secession" from the Nederlands Hervormde Kerkimmediately comes to mind. This reformation movement, which harked back to the even more weighty years 1618-1619 (the Synod of Dort), gave birth to the Christian Seceded Church (Christelijk Afgescheiden Kerk) with its fervent spirit and stern orthodoxy. Seceder pastors and congregations led the immigration to North America in the 1840s and placed their stamp of pietism and reverence for Dortian polity on the immigrant churches of the Midwest.

The year 1857 similarly carries great emotional freight. It is the year of the second secession, when some 10 percent of the members of Classis Holland in western Michigan rejected the Union of 1850 with the Reformed Church in America (RCA) and founded the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC). The 1857 seceders were convinced that they were remaining true to the principles of 1834, whereas the 1850 unionists placed a higher value on the oneness of the visible body of Christ.

The seeds of 1857 were sown in 1834. Factions formed in the Christian Seceder Church between the Brummelkamp-Van Raalte party in the south and the De Cock-Van Velzen party in the north. The ecumenical spirit of the south conflicted with the sterner Calvinism of the north. Both mind-sets were carried in the religious and cultural baggage of the immigrants. Consequently, as the Reformed Church in America moved toward the American evangelical mainstream, the sterner Dortians withdrew and formed the Christian Reformed Church to maintain their revered religious heritage.

The third secession, in 1882, centered on this very issue of Americanization. Freemasonry, the quintessential American upper-class social movement, had made inroads among the leaders of the Reformed Church in the East, to the consternation of the midwestern immigrant churches. They had learned in the Netherlands to abhor freemasonry for its "pagan ceremonies" and beliefs grounded in the Enlightenment, although American Masonic lodges blended rather easily with mainstream Christianity. A majority of Van Raalte's own congregation, First Reformed of Holland, seceded only six years after his death and affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, which is now known as the Pillar Church. The appeal of the junior denomination was its "Dutchness," upheld by the motto, "In isolation is our strength." This ideal guided it for several generations, until the influence of Abraham Kuyper's Doleantie movement gained a place among the leaders while the 1834 spirit waned among the laity.

The events of the years 1850, 1857, and 1882 made clear the divergent paths of the Dutch Reformed denominations in America. While the Reformed Church took its place in the American Protestant mainstream, the Christian Reformed Church resisted Americanization and tried to cling to its religious roots in the Netherlands. This allowed it to gather in the waves of immigrants from 1880 until World War I and again after World War II. This immigration has now ceased, and the Christian Reformed Church is rapidly adapting to the multiethnic American culture and the ecumenical spirit of American Protestantism.

This adaptation, which is inevitable and even necessary, together with the accelerated pace of secularization in all western societies since the 1960s, explains in part the turmoil and secessions that again plague the Christian Reformed Church. Since 1990 more than 30,000 people, about 10 percent of the membership, has withdrawn, transferred out, or seceded to form new associations and alliances. This loss rate is the same proportion that initially seceded from Classis Holland of the Reformed Church in 1857 to form the Christian Reformed Church.

This fledgling body struggled for a decade or more before a flood of new immigrants secured its survival after the Civil War ended. The key to enfolding most of the newcomers in its congregations was the condemnation by the mother church in the Netherlands of the Reformed Church in America because of its acquiescence to Freemasonry. This emotional issue has its counterpart today in the decision of the Christian Reformed Church to ordain women as elders and pastors. A potentially more devastating issue, that of accepting practicing homosexuals as members in good standing in the churches, which has been considered in several classical assemblies, would greatly accelerate the loss rate and hasten the formation of seceder denominations. In a real way, the Dutch Reformed communities today are reliving the struggles of the pioneer generation 150 years ago to maintain a pure church.

No one has yet studied the religious mentality of the 30,000 departed Christian Reformed members of the 1990s. Their reasons for leaving are varied and complex. A few left, in fact, because the pace of modernization was too slow! But judging from numerous writings by seceder leaders in the periodical press, letters by lay people to editors of church papers, and comments of elders and pastors at church assemblies, those separating from the CRC share the mindset of the 1834 and 1857 seceders. These dissenters actually included at least two camps, the individualistic pietists (who worshiped in lay conventicles) and the stern Calvinists of the northern Netherlands who valued the Dortian church order and the three historic Reformed creeds.

The Christian Seceded Church of 1834 managed to hold these diverse factions together through compromise and accommodation. The Christian Reformed Church in North America had done the same for more than 100 years. But the consensus has broken down. Today, the pietists in the CRC are gravitating to the experiential American denominations--Wesleyan Methodists, Assemblies of God, Peoples Churches, Baptists, and nondenominational megachurches. The sterner Calvinists, on the other hand, are seceding to form orthodox congregations modeled after the "original" Christian Reformed churches of the pre-World War II era, complete with the 1934 or 1959 Psalter Hymnals, weekly catechetical preaching, regular family visits, and care for discipline. The pietists stand in the tradition of the Brummelkamp-Van Raalte wing of the Afscheiding, and the orthodox hark back to the De Cock-Van Velzen wing. The Kuyperians in the CRC have generally stood firm and are the backbone of the denomination today.

It is the authors hope and prayer that this book will remind the Dutch-born Reformed churches of their rich religious heritage that our ancestors defended against bitter assault and preserved with blood. It was a history of factiousness and strife, but also of deep piety, love for Christ's church, defense of truth, and bold action to work out the faith in "world and life."

Chapter One: 1834--Afscheiding and Emigration (by Robert P. Swierenga)

Importance of the Afscheiding Emigration to America

The founding pastors of the Holland colony--Van Raalte, Van der Meulen, Ypma, Bolks, and Klijn--were seceders from the Hervormde Kerk. If there had been no Afscheiding in 1834, life among the Dutch immigrants in America would have been markedly different. First, without the religious motive fewer families would have left the homeland. The Dutch never caught America fever like the Irish or Germans. They loved their gezelligheid and believed in the adage: "Oost, West, T'huis Best." The Netherlands ranked only tenth among European nations in the extent of emigration. Had there been no religious turmoil and persecution, the overall Dutch emigration might have been reduced up to 25 percent--75,000 people.

Some 13,000 Seceders emigrated between 1845 and 1880, mostly in the first wave of the 1840s. The earlier an emigration tradition began in a particular Dutch village, the more emigrants left from that village over the decades. The fact that the Seceders left in such large numbers in the first years thus had a multiplier effect on the total emigration. Many Hervormde Kerk members and even Catholics decided to follow the example of the Seceders, who first made migration a normal response to the diminished future at home. Emigration became the thing to do among the distressed kleine luyden.

Second, and most important, the Seceder dominies organized and led the initial exodus, in order to establish colonies where the believers could live together and not be scattered and likely lost to the faith. Eight Calvinist colonies were founded before 1860, and more than 100 by 1900. The colonies acted as magnets, attracting members of the Hervormde Kerk and other splinter groups as well. Herbert Brinks estimates that between 1846 and 1900 three-quarters of all Dutch emigrants settled in Reformed enclaves.[1] These people, of course, experienced a much slower and less intense Americanization process than the non-enclaved emigrants. The ethnic cohesion in the colonies and their continuing ties to the mother churches preserved the Dutch Reformed identity for many generations. In 1920 there were more than 500 Christian Reformed and Reformed congregations in the United States, many still worshiping in the Dutch language.

Ironically, as Brinks noted, by colonizing, the Seceders "who had been marginalized in their native villages became dominant in their transplanted settlements," where they "assumed a cultural authority that was much like that of the national church they had spurned in 1834." They wanted to preserve old values and practices and to remain "more Dutch than the Dutch."[2]

The Seceders were the most focused of all Dutch emigrants. They left in the largest proportions and almost all settled in colonies. In 1849 Seceders numbered a little more than 1 percent of the Dutch population, yet they contributed 65 percent of all emigrants from the Netherlands in the peak years of Seceder emigration--1846 through 1849. In 1847, when the colonies of Holland and Zeeland (Michigan), Pella (Iowa), South Holland (Illinois), and Sheboygan (Wisconsin) were founded, Seceders made up 79 percent of all emigrants (see table). In the years 1846-1849, 80 of every 1000 Seceders in the Netherlands emigrated, compared to only 4 per 1000 among Hervormde Kerk adherents. Fully 60 percent of all Seceder emigrants to America in the entire period 1835-1880 left between 1847 and 1857. The intense and focused migration of this religious minority, therefore, gave it a presence in the Midwest that far exceeded its numbers.

Emigrants from the Hervormde Kerk outnumbered Seceders in every year except 1845, 1846, and 1847. Hervormden made up 58 percent of all Dutch emigrants in the period 1835-1880, compared to the Seceders 20 percent. Many Hervormden joined the Seceder colonies but others scattered far and wide, often choosing the cities, where they quickly assimilated; some 10 percent even settled in the Dutch East Indies and other parts of the world. So the Hervormde Kerk immigrants must not be ignored--they outnumbered Seceders two to one--but Seceders deserve the top billing when we think about the founding of the Dutch Calvinist colonies in America.

Table: Emigration by Year, Hervormde Kerk and Afscheiding Kerk Members, 1835-1857

Hervormde Kerk+ Afscheiding Kerk* Total

Year___________ N______ %_________ ____N_______%_____N_

1835-44 152 61 99 39 251

1845 210 49 216 51 426

1846 349 27 957 73 1306

1847 835 21 3223 79 4058

1848 837 52 779 48 1616

1849 1006 59 691 41 1697

1850 333 81 77 19 410

1851 565 83 118 17 683

1852 764 93 60 7 824

1853 801 84 152 16 953

1854 2457 86 402 14 2859

1855 1376 80 342 20 1718

1856 1300 81 311 19 1611

1857 1191 89 142 11 1333

Totals 12176 62 7569 38 19745

+ Includes 285 Nederduits Hervormd, 3 Presbyterian Hervormd, 13 Waals Hervormd, and 4 English Hervormd.

* Includes 4,526 Christelijk Afgescheiden, 2,580 Gereformeerde, 452 Hervormde Afgescheiden, 6 Christelijk Gereformeerd, Hervormd, 4 Waals Gereformeerd, and 1 English Gereformeerd.

 

Source: Robert P. Swierenga, comp., Dutch Emigrants to the United States, South Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, 1835-1880: An Alphabetical Listing by Household Heads and Independent Persons (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983); augmented for the years 1831-1847 with data from report of the Department of Binnenlandsche Zaken, "Staat van landverhuizers 1831-1847," Nederlandsche Staatscourant, 5 September 1848, 2.

Antecedents to the Afscheiding--Rational Religion

The golden age of the Dutch national church was the century following the Synod of Dort (1618-1619), the historic assembly which

[photos of Synod of Dort and title page of Acts here]

consolidated the gains of the Protestant Reformation in the Netherlands by promulgating a new creed--the Canons of Dort, and a new church order--the Articles of Dort, both of which the orthodox viewed as divinely inspired and the final word on all issues. The Dutch Calvinists came to consider themselves as the new Israel, a chosen people under God, country, and the house of Orange. But the desire to continue reforming doctrine and life soon waned, and church leaders began to accept rationalist thinking, which viewed the Bible and the three Reformed forms of unity as man-made creeds. This declension prompted conservative teachers, later revered as the "Old Writers," to publish doctrinal compendiums of the way of faith that stressed experiential knowledge rather than mere head knowledge. They also wrote practical handbooks for religious life, describing how to be Reformed in everyday life as fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers, or housewives. But it was a losing cause, because the national church was too weak ecclesiastically to discipline leaders with heterodox beliefs. Indeed, 200 years passed before the church convened another synod.[3]

By the early nineteenth century the spirit of toleration of Enlightenment thought had gained the upper hand theologically, and the government interfered more and more in church polity. The signs that the spiritual leaders "had fallen asleep" were everywhere.[4] Few protested when Napoleon's revolutionary army came into the Netherlands in 1795 and purged traditional Calvinism from public life. Almost the first act of the secular "Patriotten," the Orange-Democrats, as the liberal democrats were called, was to disestablish the national church and place all religions on an equal footing at law. Under the banner of nonsectarianism, public funds were cut off to pay pastor's salaries and the teaching of Reformed doctrine in the public schools was replaced with deistic religion. Furthermore, the Education Law of 1806 took from private Reformed schools the right to use doctrinal criteria in hiring new teachers.[5]

 

National Synod of 1816

The crowning blow came after the restoration of the House of Orange, when the monarch became the highest authority in the church. In 1815 King Willem I convened a national synod, the [photo of King Willem I here] first since 1618, and rather than allow the normal procedure of election by provincial assemblies, he hand-picked delegates who reflected the modern temper.[6] With little debate, the synod made a number of momentous changes that threatened completely to undo the Hervormde Kerk. Most importantly, the synod altered the Form of Subscription ever so slightly and thus made its meaning ambiguous. The new oath allowed candidates to accept the doctrines of the three official creeds "in so far as" (rather than "because") they agreed with Scripture. This subjective clause allowed pastors and professors the liberty to interpret official doctrines as they saw fit, which emasculated the creedal foundation of the church and protected those who denied the Trinity and other vital teachings.[7] The synod also dropped the requirement of weekly catechism preaching.

Most importantly, the synod changed church polity by creating a standing executive committee to run the church and by making delegates to all classes and synods royal appointees. Instead of the revered Dortian polity, the national church now became virtually an administrative arm of the state.

The king by royal decree on January 7, 1816, promulgated the Church Order of 1816 as the ecclesiastical law of the land. With this act, the Hervormde Kerk was reestablished as the only state-supported religious body and public monies again flowed to support it, but it was no longer Presbyterian in form, with authority flowing upward from the local congregations. Rather, power flowed from the top down, and the church shared with the government the task of nurturing loyal subjects. Given the ever closer bond between church and state, this change meant that any future church conflict would inevitably become a threat to the political order. In one stroke the king undermined the historic national church and, in the opinion of reformers, further weakened the church and the nation.[8]

 

Conventicles

The king's arbitrary actions aroused very little public dissent. Most clergy were happy to get paid regularly again and their parishioners welcomed the restoration of the national church, even if it was subject to closer government control. Opposition against the new regime came only from a few orthodox local congregations and a small group of intellectuals.

In the countryside, passive resistance arose when the first national synod to meet under the revised structure mandated pastors in each worship service to select one or more hymns from the new hymnal, called De Evangelische Gezangen, which included 192 gospel songs to augment the traditional Genevan psalms. The [front piece of 1777 official Psalter used in the Hervormde Kerk] synod had adopted this hymnal in 1807 and recommended it to the churches but did not make its use obligatory. When that changed in 1816, some "stijf kops" refused to sing the "man-made songs," which they thought smacked of Arminianism. They stood silently, or put on their caps, or even marched out of the church until the singing was over. A few sympathetic ministers defied the ruling and selected only the psalms, but they were subject to discipline.[9]

In the next years pious members of the national church simply walked away from it and turned to the traditional conventicles (gezelschappen), extra-church assemblies of the devout that had arisen at the first signs of apostasy in the national church in the decades after Dort. Here people practiced the community of the saints, testified to the inner workings of the Holy Spirit, and warned against false teachers. The nineteenth century conventicles evolved into full-fledged worship services held in homes and barns where elders read sermons of the Old Writers. Recognized local groups were the Zwijndrecht Newlights of Stoffel M|ller (1816), the followers of the prophet Jan Mazereeuw of West Friesland (1824), and the Restored Church of Christ of Johan Vijgeboom in Zeeland (1823).[10]

 

Riveil

Opposition also formed among a few ministers and intellectuals in the major universities, including Leiden, which was the major Reformed academy and theological school. At Leiden, the Reverend Nicolaas Schotsman (1754-1822), a minister of the Hervormde Kerk, first raised a lone voice of protest. He was influenced by the religious revival (or Riveil) that began in Geneva, Switzerland, around 1810. When Schotsman in 1819 memorialized the Synod of Dort in two published sermons, liberal clerics counterattacked viciously. This, in turn, aroused Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1832), a noted lawyer and the founding teacher of a private theological school at Leiden, to rise to the defense of Schotsman as one truly warring for Jesus Christ.

[photo of Willem Bilderdijk here]

Bilderdijk's teaching and pamphlet war against unbelief earned him the title of the father of the Dutch Riveil. His major disciples, the political leader Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) and the Portuguese Jewish converts Isaac Da Costa (1798-1860) and Abraham Capadose (1795-1874), also engaged in the

[photos of Groen van Prinsterer, Da Costa, and Capadose here]

battle for truth. These men defended the Bible and the Reformed creeds and brought the spiritual awakening at Geneva to the Netherlands.[11] The Riveil sparked a spirit of renewal and piety in Reformed circles and made resistance to rationalistic thinking and doctrinal heterodoxy intellectually respectable.

In addition to Bilderdijk's defense of traditional Reformed teachings, he also espoused the new millennial beliefs that the end of the world was near and that the House of Orange and the Hervormde Kerk would play a crucial role as history reached its climax. In a similar vein, he and Capadose, a medical doctor, opposed the government-mandated smallpox vaccinations for school children. Virtually all the Seceder clerics later adopted this same antivaccination position, which caused their children to be barred from school.[12]

 

Secession in 1834--Links to Riveil

The Riveil men did not break with the Hervormde Kerk, but their stress on a religion of the heart and their radical escatological expectations strongly influenced the Seceder leaders Hendrik de Cock (1801-1842), Hendrik P. Scholte (1806-1868), and Albertus C. van Raalte (1811-1876).

The links between the Riveil and the Secession of 1834 were forged in the theological schools at two universities, Groningen 23and Leiden. At Groningen Professor Petrus Hofstede de Groot (1802-1886) and two colleagues rejected the popular rationalistic

[photo of Hofstede de Groot here]

theology and emphasized the importance of the heart in Christian belief. This became known as the Groninger theology. In an unusual gesture, the Groninger professors opened their lectures to local pastors and thus spread widely their warm and experiential Christianity.

 

Hendrik de Cock of Ulrum: Father of the Afscheiding

Hofstede de Groot's best friend at the university was his fellow theology student Hendrik de Cock. When Hofstede de Groot [photo of Hendrik de Cock here] took a professorship at Groningen in 1829 and gave up his pastorate of the Hervormde Kerk at Ulrum, De Cock replaced him in the pulpit, and his friend preached the sermon at the installation. Soon, De Cock's devout parishioners pushed him to reexamine historic Calvinism and he read Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion for the first time. In amazement, De Cock came to understand that salvation was entirely a gift of God's grace and that a person, even with a keen mind and university education, could do nothing to earn it.[13]

[photos of Nederlands Hervormde Kerk at Ulrum, exterior an interior]

When the Belgian revolt against Dutch rule began in 1830, De Cock preached that God was punishing the nation for departing from Gods ways. He also published his views in a popular pamphlet. He would be a watchman to "blow the trumpet to warn the people" of the wrath to come. The public response was overwhelming. De Cock had touched a nerve, and people flocked to Ulrum by the thousands to hear him. But his erstwhile friend Hofstede de Groot condemned his new views as too radical. Read the Bible and John Calvin, De Cock thundered in reply. The friendship was doomed.

[photo of De Cocks pulpit at Ulrum]

De Cock preached boldly from his pulpit in Ulrum, and many parents, who believed their own preachers were unconverted, beseeched him to baptize their children. Scholte, pastor of the Hervormde Kerk at Doeveren in Noord Brabant, counseled him not to violate Reformed principles and baptize children of nonmembers, but De Cock did so anyway. This sparked official action; the Classis of Middelstum instituted formal proceedings against him.

De Cock then lambasted two clerical critics by name in a pamphlet (entitled Defense of True Reformed Doctrine and of the True Reformed Believers). He charged that his colleagues were "two wolves in the sheep-fold who can preach much better about eating and drinking, nice weather and long days, about gardening and farming, about newspapers and war, than about the Kingdom of Heaven, as they lead the way for their congregations to the markets and horse races, drinking and singing until early dawn, or attending meetings for the so-called [society for the] common good."[14] De Cock also wrote a pamphlet attacking hymns as "contrary to the word of God" and "a concoction of siren lovesongs fit to draw the Reformed believers away from the saving doctrine."[15] He certainly had a way with words!

[De Cocks parsonage at Ulrum]

Despite an immediate suspension and the start of proceedings to depose him, De Cock was determined to remain in the national church and reform it from within. But events soon forced him to withdraw. In October 1834 Scholte traveled to Ulrum in a show of support. When the news spread of Scholte's coming, thousands of people gathered to hear him preach. At a Friday evening service at Ulrum, Scholte castigated unfaithful ministers as "idolaters and prophets of deceit" and fervently proclaimed the Reformed faith. Classis Middelstum was not pleased. When Scholte asked to preach again at the Sunday afternoon service, the classis ordered its supervisor not to allow it. The supervisor delivered the decision at the church door before a large crowd, at which some men roughed him up and the police closed the church to avoid a riot. That night Scholte preached in an outdoor service and then left Ulrum immediately.

The following Monday, October 13, 1834, De Cock presented to his consistory a document, the "Act of Secession and Return," which he and the entire consistory signed. He explained: "Everything now fitted together for me as if it were an indication of the Lord what I had to do and which way I had to go." The state church appeared to him to be apostate, showing few marks of the true church. The next evening the congregation met, and 137 members also signed the document. The Ulrum church had sparked the secession of 1834. Thereafter De Cock became a "home missionary," planting numerous churches throughout the provinces of Groningen and Drenthe. Within a year 16 churches had been organized in the north. Scholte was suspended from his pulpit two weeks after De Cock's secession, and 287 members of his congregations at Doeveren and Genderen withdrew with him.[16] The reformation of the Dutch Calvinist church was now underway.

[Grave monument of Hendrik De Cock in church cemetery at Groningen]

The Scholte Club at the University of Leiden

The second seat of secession developed around the Riveil group at Leiden University in the 1820s. In 1829, Scholte enrolled there as a student in the theological school and soon became friends of Bilderdijk and Da Costa and joined the movement. After his two mentors died in 1831, Scholte gathered around him a group of five younger orthodox students of theology to form the so-called Scholte Club, which included Anthony Brummelkamp (1811-1888), Simon van Velzen (1809-1896), Albertus van Raalte (these three later married De Moen sisters and became brothers-in-law), Louis Bdhler (1766-1838), and George Gezelle Meerburg (1806-1855).

[photos of the young Scholte, Brummelkamp, Van Velzen, and Meerburg here]

It is remarkable that the oldest university of Holland should train all the leading Seceder dominies except De Cock. The youthfulness of these "soldiers of the cross" is also noteworthy. The average age in 1834 was twenty-six years; Scholte was oldest at twenty-nine and Van Raalte and Brummelkamp were youngest at only twenty-three.

The professors at Leiden were not happy with the Scholte Club. The rebel students often skipped the faculty lectures and rather repaired to the living room of a pious old grain merchant named Johannes Le Fiburi, who taught them the Bible and the Reformed faith.[17] This made Scholte and his followers marked men, but all except Van Raalte were able to graduate in the years 1832-1834 and enter the pulpit before church authorities could marshall their forces. Van Raalte had the misfortune to graduate last, in 1835, and his road was blocked by professors and church officials who refused to recommend him for candidacy. So Van Raalte alone joined the dissenting church without first being deposed or resigning his pulpit in the Hervormde Kerk. This rejection was the more hurtful because Van Raalte had a strong desire to remain in the church in which his father had been a pastor.

Thus, the protest movement came to a head in 1834-1835 and gained a name, the Afscheiding, under the leadership of De Cock in Groningen, Scholte in Utrecht and Noord Brabant, Brummelkamp in Gelderland, Van Raalte in Overijssel, Van Velzen in Friesland, and Gezelle Meerburg in Noord Brabant. Later associates were Huibert J. Budding(h) (1810-1870) and Cornelius van der Meulen (1800-1876) in Zeeland, Lambertus G. Ledeboer (1806-1863) in Zuid Holland, and H. Jvffers (1808-1874) in Groningen, among others.[18] In 1836 Scholte took the initiative and called the leaders to convene at Amsterdam for the first synod. The body of five ministers and eleven elders examined Van Raalte and admitted him to the ministry and petitioned the king for religious liberty, but differences of opinion on church order questions hampered the synod. At the 1837 meeting, the body adopted a new church order written by Scholte, but the churches in the south rejected it. They formed their own denomination in 1844, the Reformed Church Under the Cross (Gereformeerde Kerk onder het kruis), and reaffirmed their commitment to the Dort church order. It was 1869 before the two factions joined together again.

 

Official Persecution

The king responded to the Seceders' request for recognition by condemning the unauthorized meetings and demanding that they dissolve their organization, obey the law, and submit to the "established and recognized church." The argument was that the separatists were harming the church by arousing suspicion against pastors and causing a steep drop in attendance and contributions for the church and deacons' funds. On July 5, 1836, the king issued a royal decree denouncing the Seceders as schismatics, fomenters of unrest, and secret agitators [scheurmakers, onruststokers en geheime opruijers].

However, the king also opened the door a crack, allowing individual congregations to assemble, provided their gatherings did not have the "signs, the form, and the appearance" of regular worship services; i.e., no sacraments, no ministerial title, and no black coat with tails. A policeman would stand at the door to ensure compliance. Most Seceders were not of a mind to accept this humiliating offer. Van Raalte, who was pastoring the church at Genemuiden, declared at the city hall that he would never comply with these rules or give up his title as a servant of God, and then he left in a "big huff, swinging his three corner hat."[19]

The decision of the king and his officials to suppress the free church movement was not only ill-advised but unconstitutional. Scholte, in a letter to the king, appealed to the Constitution of 1814, which specifically granted freedom of religion and the equal right of all religious faiths to carry on their worship in public. But the liberal church leaders did not want religious freedom for the orthodox separatists and they prevailed on the king not to honor the freedom of conscience clause in the fundamental document.[20]

Government officials moved to quell the separatist movement by expelling the rebel clerics and imposing heavy fines and even jail terms for their civil disobedience.[21] Scholte and De Cock were given eighteen-month jail sentences in 1834 for the ruckus at Ulrum, but both were released on bond after several days. Van Raalte spent twelve days in jail in 1837. By misusing an old Napoleonic statute that forbade regular public assemblies of more than twenty persons for religious, political, or literary purposes without official permission, the government levied fines of f100 ($40) on clerics every time they conducted an unauthorized worship service.[22] In four years of preaching throughout the islands of Walcheren and Zuid-Beveland, Budding was fined more than f40,000 ($16,000). Counting it a joy to suffer for Christ, he refused to pay the fines and spent seven months in jail before the king pardoned him. Van Raalte's fines also totaled about f40,000 for his preaching throughout the province of Overijssel.[23]

[photo of the Rev. Budding here]

Consistory members were fined f50 ($20) each per service, and owners of a house or barn used for worship had to pay f100. Jannes van de Luyster (1789-1862), the founder of Zeeland and an elder in the Seceder church in Borssele, was fined repeatedly as an elder and for allowing the use of his barn.[24] Despite fines totaling in the hundreds of thousands of guilders and the deployment of thousands of troops to break up the illegal worship services, which the government defined as "riots," the Seceder clerics and elders carried on, preaching to as many as 1,000 spiritually thirsty people at a time in open air worship services.

All of the preachers served numerous congregations in their provinces as itinerants, until more men could be apprenticed in parsonages and trained in Seceder theological schools to fill the pulpits. The Seceder preachers tried to avoid the police by assembling in groups of twenty or less, or they fled the jurisdiction immediately after the service, keeping one step ahead of the law. They would obey God rather than misguided government officials. No wonder that in America Van Raalte cherished freedom of religion as such a precious right!

The official persecution was relatively short-lived, as one would expect in the generally tolerant Netherlands, and the intensity varied from province to province and even city to city. The government also learned that it was not only very costly but also impossible to stifle the devout believers, who declared that the government would have to ban them from the Fatherland or behead them to stop them. Quartering of soldiers in homes of dissidents was stopped in 1837, no Seceders were jailed after 1839, and soldiers did not break up Seceder meetings after 1840. But fines continued to be levied in scattered places until 1846, particularly in the province of Utrecht.

Beginning in 1838, the "illegal" Seceder congregations began applying for legal status, which the government first allowed in 1836 under certain conditions: They must submit a petition for freedom of assembly, which admits to their former illegal behavior (thus making them admit to being a false church); renounce their place in the national church (when they really desired to reform it from within); agree to take care of their own poor and be entirely self-supporting; formulate a new church order other that of Dort; and promise to submit to the government.

Scholte in 1838 was the first to accept the stringent terms and write a freedom petition for his Utrecht congregation. The civil government approved, and he adopted the name "Christian Seceded Church," since the law forbade the use of the title Reformed. Scholte's unilateral action broke the Seceders' "united front" against the government and prompted several other churches to petition for recognition, including congregations Van Raalte had planted at Genemuiden, Ommen, and Den Ham (1839).[25] Most Seceder congregations refused on principle to "sell out" to the government and thereby deny their holy calling to reform the national church. They remained subject to prosecution.

After Willem I abdicated the throne in 1840, King Willem II further softened the religious oppression, and the new constitution of 1848 guaranteed complete religious freedom. It was 1870, however, before the government officially recognized the Christian Seceded Church and allowed them to use the name Reformed (Gereformeerd).

By 1849, 40,000 people (1.3 percent of the population) belonged to the Christian Seceded Church, and the Hervormde Kerk had lost 5 percent of its members. There were many more sympathizers still in the national church who could not face the family fights and public ridicule hurled at the dissenters. Seceders continued to suffer social ostracism, economic boycotts, and job blacklists long after the official suppression stopped. Nevertheless, over the next twenty years, the Seceded denomination grew until, by 1869, it boasted 100,000 souls and 328 churches served by 232 ministers.[26]

 

Divisions among Seceders

The seminal years 1834 to 1839, when the Seceder churches grew by leaps and bounds under persecution, were years of relative harmony, but the differing personalities and outlooks of the major leaders made cooperation difficult. Scholte, the leader in the center and south of the country, tried at first to cooperate with De Cock, the leader in the north. This was the "Reformed period" in Scholte's theological life, says his biographer, Lubbertus Oostendorp, before he became enamored with the dispensationalist premillennial views of Bilderdijk and the Englishman, John N. Darby, the founded of the Plymouth Brethren.[27] But already in the first Seceder synod of 1836, fissures were apparent. These came to a head in the 1840s, and the immigrants carried them in their religious baggage to the United States.

 

Purpose and Goals

Religious reformation is difficult to channel into constructive rather than destructive ways. The Seceder leaders proclaimed independence from the national church, but what did they want to take its place? Some, like De Cock and Van Velzen, wanted to restore the Dortian traditions of historic Dutch Calvinism. Others, like Scholte, wanted to restore an experiential gospel ("primitive Christianity") and congregational independence. Yet a third way, that of Van Raalte and Brummelkamp, was to adapt the old church rules to modern times by defending liberty of conscience and building a church independent from the state. Strong personalities in the center and extremists and bigots at the fringes plagued the Seceders, as they do every popular movement.[28]

The Seceders also had their "crisis of youth."[29] A minor matter such as Scholte's discarding of the old-fashioned clerical cloak caused Budding to disassociate from him completely. To this Van Velzen asked Budding, "Are you crazy? Or do you want to be the Pope completely?" Scholte had to depose an entire consistory at Stellendam for following a young girl who saw visions. Every provincial assembly suspended elders and deacons for being spiritually unfit or holding unorthodox views.[30]

Baptism

The differences among the various Seceders gradually crystallized around the major issue of the role of the church in society. Was it to establish the religion of the realm (Corpus Christianum) Body of the Christened or to be the religion of true believers (Corpus Christi) Body of Christ. The Netherlands Reformed Church clearly was a "realm-religion," but most Seceders were wary of the heavy hand of the state and leaned toward a "free religion."[31]

The issue, of course, affected views of the sacraments and the church order as well. De Cock followed the standard practice in the national church of baptizing children of baptized but not confessing members, in the belief that God's promises apply to all who attend. This was public christening rather than covenant baptism. Scholte, Brummelkamp, Meerburg, and Budding rejected this "half-way covenant" and insisted that only confessing believers could present their children for the sacrament, since they alone were members of the church of Christ. Van Velzen allowed an elder or other confessing member to present children of baptized members.

Van Raalte originally stood with the Scholte majority on baptism but then wavered, and he eventually followed De Cock's practice. Van Raalte desired the church to be a community church, a volkskerk. "Children do not become members of the Congregation by confession of faith, but are members by virtue of the Covenant of Grace.... [Thus] the children of the children of the Congregation must be baptized."[32] He accepted the traditional close ties between the Hervormde Kerk and the Dutch government, including payment of ministers salaries from the public treasury. Scholte's antithetical view, that of a church free of government funding and control, won out in the synod of 1836, and his position became the policy of the Gereformeerde Kerk in the Netherlands and the Christian Reformed Church in North America. Most Seceders, however, followed De Cock, whose position was adopted at the synod of 1846.[33]

Church Order and Lay Preachers (Oefenaars)

Issues of church governance also threatened to destroy the young Seceder movement. Scholte feared synodical dictates and generally wanted the locus of power to be held in the individual congregation rather than in major assemblies. He proposed a shorter church order, which provincial assemblies adopted in Noord-Brabant, Zuid-Holland, Utrecht, and Lower Gelderland. But Van Velzen, Van Raalte, and De Cock rejected the wholesale revision of the historic Dortian synodical system and would allow only minor changes. Assemblies in the northern provinces followed Dort. The most debated issue dealt with the status of lay preachers (oefenaars), which were allowed by Dort. Scholte wanted them banned, but De Cock believed that the Secession had flourished primarily because of them.[34]

The National Synod of 1837 at Utrecht, under Van Velzen's firm hand, hammered out a compromise to try to force unity, which included a ban on lay preachers. The churches of Zeeland agreed, as did Van Raalte in Overijssel, but his Zwolle congregation raised such a storm of protest that Van Raalte "wearied of his life." Zwolle already objected to Van Raalte's giving up the minister's coat, and now he rejected lay preachers. Several of Van Raalte's congregations, including Zwolle, Zalk, and Mastenbroek, joined the Reformed Churches under the Cross, which met in the conventicle style with elders reading sermons of the "old writers." A leader in the breakaway group against Van Raalte was the Rev. Douwe J. van der Werp (1811-1876), a student of De Cock who after 1864 became a leader in the Christian Reformed Church in America. Van Velzen blamed his old school friend Scholte for the new secession, and the church order debate became a personal quarrel. Van Raalte defended Scholte at first but not for long.[35]

 

Scholte deposed--1840

The quarrel between Van Velzen and Scholte escalated into a splintering among the Seceders that led to Scholte's deposition [photos of Scholte and Van Velzen later in life] from office in 1840. Amsterdam was the battleground. The break began in 1839 when the Amsterdam congregation, which Scholte had formed in 1835, in a close vote called Van Velzen over Scholte to be its pastor. Van Velzen accepted the call but strangely did not leave his post in Friesland to take up the work in Amsterdam. In the face of this irregular "acceptance," Scholte began holding separate services in Amsterdam. Scholte's Utrecht consistory then charged that Van Velzen's preaching overemphasized divine election and was coldly formal. He "preached a conglomeration of theoretical truths without the living Christ, without a regenerating Spirit, and without the living and active faith." To this, Van Velzen cried "Slander!"[36]

At its heart, the dispute centered around subtle historic differences regarding the doctrine of election and human responsibility that stirred the Reformed churches since the Synod of Dort. Van Velzen and his supporters stressed human depravity and inability. As Van Velzen thundered in a sermon: "Man can do nothing, yea, may not do anything" to attain salvation, "because this would be one's own work, and that such work is condemned before God." Scholte and the others agreed on the need for divine grace, but they would not so denigrate the human condition. This raised the ghost of Arminius for Van Velzen.[37]

The upshot was that the Synod of 1840, meeting at Amsterdam, did not investigate Van Velzen's theology but demanded that Scholte retract his "slander" of the brother and unconditionally accept the 1619 Dort church order. When Scholte refused, the synod suspended him from the ministry. Thus, as Oostendorp says, did the young Seceder denomination lose one of its "most capable leaders." The major voting block against Scholte was the four brothers-in-law--Van Velzen, Brummelkamp, Van Raalte, and Carel G. de Moen (1811-1879), plus De Cock. The synod also gave up all [photos of Carel G. de Moen and Anthony Brummelkamp here] attempts at revising church polity and adopted almost verbatim the historic church order.[38]

After Scholte's deposition, many churches in Utrecht, Zuid-Holland, and Zeeland continued to recognize him as a brother, and Van Raalte also tried to rehabilitate him. When the next synod assembled in 1843, again in Amsterdam, Scholte actually appeared, and the delegates worshiped together and tried to effect a reconciliation. Van Raalte offered a resolution asking everyone to accept the Dort order as "binding." He and Van Velzen voted "yes," but Scholte and Brummelkamp said "no." Van Raalte and twenty-one other delegates then left the meeting, and the gathering adjourned.[39] After this, Scholte adopted the premillennial ideas of Bilderdijk, Da Costa, and Darby, and all possibility of reconciliation ended.

 

Southern "center" party, Northern "right" party, and Scholte "left" party

Although the Secession of 1834 was a series of locally oriented reformations, rather than a centrally organized movement, the various factions soon coalesced into larger groupings, which can truly be called "brother's quarrels" (broedertwisten), because Van Raalte and Brummelkamp ended up on one side and Van Velzen on the other. In the center of the religious spectrum was an urban and liberal southern party, led by Brummelkamp, Van Raalte, Scholte (in the early years), and Van Der Meulen, which was concentrated in the provinces of Overijssel and Gelderland, with lesser contingents in Noord- and Zuid-Holland, Utrecht, Noord-Brabant, Zeeland, and Ost Friesland. On the right stood the rural and very orthodox northern party led by De Cock and Van Velzen, which was concentrated in the provinces of Groningen, Friesland, and Drenthe, with related groups of conservative Zeelanders led by Budding and many Graafschapers.[40]

Scholte increasingly after 1840 moved to the extreme left, espousing a separatist, pietist, premillennial, nonconfessional Christianity--"no creed but the Bible." He became the lone ranger, going into nontraditional paths that led to "ecclesiastical anarchy"--to use Van Raalte's words--where few other leaders would follow.[41]

The northern party defended the doctrine, liturgy, and polity of Dort as biblically grounded; they were strongly traditional Calvinists who stressed the need for Christian schools and catechetical instruction of the youth, given the "Godless influence" in the public schools. The northern faction had steel in their bones, while the southern party had rubber. The southern party was more broad-minded, inclusive, and even tempered; it stressed experiential piety and evangelism to the point that some charged them with Arminian leanings. They did not glory in the Secession but rather longed to return to the national church, provided that its leaders were willing to seek Bible-based reformation. In 1842 Van Raalte and C.G. de Moen took the remarkable step of publishing an "Appeal" to the General Synod of the Hervormde Kerk on behalf of the Seceded churches in Ommen and Den Ham, which called for "a true linking of all upright reformed people, separated as well as not separated Christians.... We still feel connected to those in the Church who forever love Christ," the brothers-in-law confessed in the document that ended with their personal signatures.[42]

The Afscheiding factions presaged divisions that would occur later in America, which were merely a continuation of old battles, with a new issue thrown in, that of Americanization. As Herbert Brinks explained cogently, "Though the general lines of descent display astounding complexities, it is clear that the Christian Reformed Church and its Protestant Reformed offshoot originated from De Cock's adherents while the Reformed Church in America attracted Van Raalte and his disciples."[43]

Among the Seceders who emigrated in the crucial 1840s when entire congregations left for America, the southern element was stronger than in later years when the northern contingent predominated. For example, 93 percent of all Seceder emigrants from the province of Utrecht between 1844 and 1880 departed before 1857. Comparable figures for other southern provinces in these early years are Gelderland, 71 percent; Zuid-Holland, 80 percent; and Noord-Brabant, 72 percent. In the northern province of Groningen, on the other hand, the rate of Seceder emigration increased over the years, from 20 percent in the early period to 32 percent from 1858 through 1868, and 48 percent from 1869 through 1880. It was the large influx of Groningen farm laborers after the Civil War that spurred the growth of the Christian Reformed Church in those years.

 

Conclusion

The Secession of 1834 was a reformation in the Hervormde Kerk that started small but had a far-reaching impact in the Netherlands and across the seas in North America, South Africa, and elsewhere. The central issue was a return to Dordrecht, to the doctrinal integrity, church governance, and practices of the seventeenth century. The controversy risked tearing the church apart in sectarian struggles and personality conflicts. The descendants of these leaders can be thankful that they overcame the difficulties, saved the reformation, and even planted a renewed church here in a new environment. The Dutch Reformed churches in America are truly daughters of the Secession of 1834. We cannot understand ourselves without knowing our mother, the Christian Seceded Church of the Netherlands.