All Sermons

Experimental Roots of Dutch Calvinism By C Pronk

The title of my speech may puzzle some of you, as indeed it did me when it was first suggested to me by the organizers of this conference. Does this title not assume too much, namely that there is only one kind of Calvinistic preaching in the Netherlands, and that that preaching is experimental? If anyone here should think that, let me say at the outset that this is not the case, alas. Dutch Calvinistic preaching is as varied as Scottish Calvinistic preaching and also American Calvinistic preaching, and most of it cannot be called experimental in the sense in which we here understand that term. Broadly speaking, Dutch Calvinism may be divided into two categories. First there are the old-school or traditional Calvinists,
which do stand for experimental preaching. This branch of Calvinism is found in several
small denominations in the Netherlands, such as the Christian Reformed churches, not to be
confused with the Christian Reformed church of North America, though they both have their roots
in the secession movement of the 1830s in the Netherlands. And then there are the Reformed
congregations, and also a sizable conservative group within the Dutch state church, the
Netherlands Reformed church, and that group is called the Reformed Alliance, a group that has
been greatly blessed by the Lord in the last decade or even longer. And then there are also,
of course, the Neo-Calvinists, and they are found in the much larger Reformed churches of the
Netherlands associated with Dr. Abraham Kuyper and the Free University, and also to a certain
extent in the liberated or Article 31 churches, better known perhaps as the Followers or the
Disciples of Dr. Klaus Filder. Now the latter would strongly object to my identifying him and
his denomination with the churches of Kuyper, and justly so, because there are serious differences
between them. Yet in spite of all their differences, they do stand together against the
old Calvinists, and they exhibit a marked aversion to experimental religion. Yet even though
experimental preaching has almost disappeared from these Neo-Calvinist churches, it is not all
that long ago that a mild form of such preaching could still be heard from many of their pulpits,
especially in rural areas in the Netherlands. There continue to be people who preferred the
older type of preaching, which searches the heart and which explains how a sinner is saved,
the way in which the Holy Spirit brings sinners to conviction of sin,
and a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. As late as 1945, Dr. S. J. Potma observed that there were
still pietistically colored congregations whose members lacked joyful assurance of faith,
because, as he said, they try to obtain that assurance by grasping at certain marks within
themselves. A decade earlier, the Reformed community had been considerably agitated by a
prolonged controversy between those advocating, quote, exemplary preaching, and those insisting
on a more historical, or rather a redemptive historical approach. The spokesmen for the latter
included Dr. Skilder, who may be called the originator of the redemptive historical school,
also Halverda, Wienhof, Van Dyck, and Speer. Now these men complained about the method
most ministers were using in preaching historical texts.
Their main objection was that those using this method tended to hold up historical characters
as examples to be followed, hence the term exemplary preaching. They charged that
thus no justice could be done to the meaning of the text. The point at issue, said Van Dyck,
is not primarily whether the truths proclaimed are biblical, but whether these truths are actually
revealed in the preaching text. Ministry of the word is to proclaim to the congregation
that message which God gives in the text. Hence, when one studies the text, he must try to discover
its special content. That specific content must be preached, not notions, however beautiful,
which could equally well be tacked on to other texts. Defenders of the exemplary method were
quick to point out that their opponents, with their redemptive historical approach,
reduced sermons to dry lectures on Bible history, with no relevant application for their hearers.
Now it is not my intention this afternoon to go into the details of this controversy,
enlightening as it might be, and also profitable, for it has to be admitted that the proponents of
the historical method have a lot to say about the proper exegesis of the scriptures, although
in my opinion they went much too far in their rejection of the exemplary approach. But as my
topic deals with something quite different, I will say no more about the controversy as such.
The reason why I mentioned it at all is that this controversy has an indirect bearing upon my
subject. It is not without significance that almost all the representatives of the redemptive
historical school were members of the Association for Calvinistic Philosophy.
This association was formed in 1935, shortly after the publication of D'Oyverd's Philosophy of the
Law idea. What characterized and characterized us, the D'Oyverdians, is an almost excessive
concern with culture and the externals of religion. The same men who were critical of
the exemplary method of preaching also objected to what they regarded as latent
Pietism, with its three daughters, subjectivism, individualism, and mysticism.
These, they said, were the historical roots of the Dutch Calvinistic churches, and they saw
themselves as the men who could change the direction of the churches. They were the men
of the new direction, apostles of the new direction. Over against the alleged
subjectivism of the exemplary-minded preachers, they advocated not objectivism, as one might
expect, but rather what they termed the normative character of preaching. As Speer, the popularizer
of D'Oyverdianism, puts it, the word of God is neither objective nor subjective. The Gospel is
the power of God unto salvation. It is the dominating norm for our lives. And see, Vainov
adds, scripture is charisma, address, and appeal. In it, God lays hold on us, and scripture may
therefore never be divorced from the speaking God. It is his word. Christ is present in the word.
He stands behind it as a divine logos. The word is never without his spirit.
Word and spirit always go together. Now, this is an extremely important statement.
And as such, of course, we can have no quarrel with it. But what they did with this notion,
with this truth, that of course was not quite so good, as we will see later.
In this way, the men of the New Direction sought to overcome the age-old subjective-objective
dilemma. How successful they have been in this attempt? Well, listen to the following evaluation
of Schilder's preaching, first by an opponent of Schilder, and then by an admirer. His opponent
said this, Schilder's sermons were not much different from his lectures. They were
intellectualistic in character and preponderantly objective. And the application merely consisted of
he who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches.
If this sounds somewhat exaggerated, here is what a close friend of Schilder's
pulpit work said. His sermons were always dominated by stringent objectivity. He was
adverse to all subjectivism and mysticism. He also disliked applications because he
realized their worklessness. The second characteristic of Pietism,
as defined by Schilder and his associates, is individualism. Now, this disease they tried
to cure with a renewed emphasis on the Covenant. And the reason why this was thought to be such
an effective weapon against individualism is clear from the following statement of S.G. De Graaf,
who says in his recently translated work Promise and Deliverance – some of you may have seen it
or have bought it – he says, in the Covenant God always draws near to his people as a whole,
never just to individuals. Because of the Covenant, the entire people rests secure
in God's faithfulness and every individual member of the Covenant shares in that rest as a member
of the community. The third characteristic of Pietism, according to the men of the New
Direction, was mysticism. Now, this word mysticism became a kind of catch-all for
everything that was considered bad in religion. Mysticism was responsible for anthropocentrism,
the nature-grace dichotomy, introversion or excessive self-examination,
lack of assurance, etc., etc. Schilder accused those given to mystical tendencies of turning
the attention away from the world outside and closing the eye to, quote,
what God has wrought and will work on the broad highways of redemptive and
revelational history. End of quote. All that remains, he concluded, is God and the soul
embracing each other. He felt that the only way to rid the church of these mystical tendencies
was to stress once again the great Reformation theme of sola scriptura and to proclaim the
relevance of God's Word for all areas of life. Now, what I've said so far could easily be seen as,
or you could easily conclude from that, that the Reformed churches in the thirties
were full of subjectivists, individualists and mystics, and that the criticism of Schilder and
others was really called for. But the question that we should ask is this. Were these evils
really so widespread in these churches of which Schilder was still a member at that time?
I'm afraid that the answer has to be no. Oh sure, there were indeed some far-out groups
within the Calvinistic camp whose piety was sickly and mystical in the wrong sense of that word.
But this was not the case in the major Reformed denominations.
And therefore what the men of the New Direction were objecting to was not the excesses of a wrong
kind of experimental preaching, but in my opinion they were objecting rather to the remnants of a
healthy biblical experiential preaching which at one time had characterized all of the Calvinistic
churches in the Netherlands. J. H. Bathing, not the same as Hermann Bathing, one of the leaders
of the exemplary school, diagnosed the real nature of his opponent's attack when he wrote,
the new spirit is averse to the soul, to religious experiences and the inner marks of the Christian.
As might be expected, this new school was also opposed to discriminating preaching,
because such preaching assumes that the visible church is made up of converted and unconverted
people. While recognizing the possibility that there may be some hypocrites within the
congregation, the redemptive historical men objected vigorously to any preaching which
addressed itself to different types of hearers in the church. Here's what Van Dyck said,
the preacher who has accepted a confessional church which excommunicates all those who
demonstrate in their lives that they do not belong to the Lord's congregation does not have the right
to sift the people once more when addressing them. The preacher who does this commits three
wrongs. He insults the Church of Christ by addressing it as a mixed law. He harms the
Church of Christ because believers may begin to doubt and hypocrites tend to close their
ears at the familiar refrain. And finally he retards the upbuilding of the church
because his view of the hearers is bound to distort the goal and content of his sermons.
By now it should become clear that one cannot simply speak of Dutch Calvinistic preaching.
and its experimental roots. We must clearly distinguish between the traditional old-school
Calvinism and the men of the new direction, neo-Calvinism.
These two schools, to be sure, have their roots, the common roots, in the Protestant Reformation.
Yet these two schools and the 17th century and 18th century
represent a decline of Calvinism, a decline of that pure Calvinism of Geneva.
I will have something to say about that later. It cannot be denied that Dutch Calvinism,
as it was found in the Reformed churches prior to Kuyper's ascendancy and in several
denominations even today, has been heavily influenced by Puritanism. And I say thank God.
Insofar as these churches had and have their roots in these movements,
I should have mentioned also Puritanism and Pietism, insofar as they have their roots
in these movements, they may indeed be called experimental roots.
Experimental religion did not, of course, begin with the Puritans.
As Ernest Stufler says in his The Rise of Evangelical Pietism,
from the days of the apostles we find running through the history of the church
what we might call an experiential tradition.
Stufler sees this tradition surfacing in the Middle Ages in the protest movements calling for
reformation, also in the monasteries, in the ascetic and mystical piety of the monks.
But he sees it also exerting itself in the Protestant Reformation and states that neither
Luther nor Calvin were free from its grip and that also the Strasbourg reformers were
strongly motivated by its influence. But Stufler says it was especially during the 17th century
that this experiential line asserted itself through Protestantism in the Pietistic movement.
Now I think that Stufler makes a big mistake in lumping together Puritanism and Pietism.
These two movements have a lot in common indeed, but there are also differences.
And one of the differences between Puritanism and Pietism is that Pietism was primarily concerned
with the conversion and the sanctification of the individual believer, whereas Puritanism,
at least in its earlier stages, aimed also at the reformation of the church and society,
the whole church, society and state, they were the concern of the Puritan.
What Packer says about the Puritans in England applies equally well to their spiritual brethren
in the Netherlands. He says, inheriting a medieval vision of the solidarity of Christian society,
the so-called Corpus Christianum, the Puritans saw and felt the unity of life to a degree that
moderns find hard to grasp. Their vision of reality was not fragmented. They did not need
to argue the point that Christian concern may not be limited to church order or the welfare of
individuals, but must embrace both together along with the politics, economics and culture
of nations, for they took this as axiomatic. Therefore, they spent their strength trying
to ensure that holiness to the Lord could be written in letters of gold over every part of life
and relationship. So the Puritans, while they were interested in the individual too, of course,
they were equally concerned with the church as a whole and even with all of society.
The Dutch Puritans, even more than their English counterparts, had reason to be proud of what had
happened in the Netherlands. They could look with gratitude to Gaunt for the mighty change that the
Reformation had brought about. The Reformed Church had become the established church
of the Netherlands, and especially after the Great Synod of Dort, the truth was preached from all
its focus. And yet the more discerning among the Dutch clergy realised that purity of doctrine
is not sufficient. They knew that unless a sound profession was adorned by a holy walk,
the Reformation would eventually lose its hold on the nation and on its people. Consequently,
they began to work towards a more thorough-going Reformation. Concerned about the growing number
of nominal Christians in the Dutch Reformed Church, the Puritan-minded preachers began
to separate the precious from the vile. They began to discriminate between those who consider
themselves Christians and those who really are believers. They brought forth from the Scriptures
the marks of a true believer and the marks of a hypocrite, the marks also of an almost Christian.
Now that some of these men went too far on this, that is to be expected. Especially in the later
stage of Puritanism in the Netherlands, there were those who so separated between true and false
that indeed it led to an unhealthy introspection that cannot be denied. But
most of these men, though some of them went astray, were truly God-fearing men,
and they had a real burden for souls. And they wanted to be absolutely sure that those
under their preaching knew where they stood with reference to their eternal state.
And they granted themselves no rest until their Hearers understood what is true faith
and what is that which comes very close, but which stops short of saving faith.
Characteristic of Dutch Puritan preaching is that it was objective-subjective.
They would have agreed wholeheartedly with Archibald Alexander when he writes in his
preface to his thoughts on religious experience,
there are two kinds of religious knowledge which, although intimately connected as cause and effect,
may nevertheless be distinguished. These are the knowledge of the truth as it is revealed
in the Holy Scriptures and the impression which that truth makes on the human mind
when rightly apprehended. Now this is a very Calvinistic statement,
and the Calvinists of the old school believed and still believe that this is true,
and that therefore biblical preaching ought to be explication and application of God's Word,
as we already heard last night. And by application these men did not just mean that preaching has to
be relevant, so that when we preach we try to apply our sermons to everyday life, that too is
necessary. But by application these men meant rather the subjective appropriation on the part
of the Hearers of that which they heard from the pulpit, against the objection of the
neo-Calvinists that such application is the work of the Holy Spirit, and that therefore we should
leave it all to Him. They said indeed the Holy Spirit has to apply the Word,
but we preachers have to so divide the Word that we give the Holy Spirit something to apply.
I would like to quote from a book written by reverend
Isaac Kivit, a minister of the Reformed Alliance in the Netherlands Reformed Church,
who died about 20 years ago, so a very recent exponent of old Calvinism. And his book is called
Objective-Subjective Preaching, Demand of Holy Scripture. After explaining the philosophical
distinction between objective and subjective, he goes on to say this about objective preaching,
Objective preaching speaks about faith, conversion, repentance, God, salvation, and Christ.
It deals with the truth, but it is without life and without experience. There is no heartbeat
in such preaching. The preacher delivers an essay or a discourse, but it is dead and spiritless.
Such preaching petrifies and leads to pride, for historical faith is considered to be saving faith.
In fact, objective preaching is not administration of the Word, for it does not explain how Christ
becomes the possession of the sinner. Of course, the preacher will say that it is by faith,
but how that faith is wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit, and how that faith is exercised,
is not explained. And then he gives this advice, which I think we could all take home with us.
The preacher must not only point to Christ and speak of the promises that are given,
but he must also speak about the exercises of the heart in regard to the appropriation of the
promises and their fulfillment in our life. The preacher must not only explain who Christ is,
and for whom he came into the world, but he must also point out the way that leads to Christ.
He must not only point out the necessity of Christ, but also how Christ and the lost sinner
are joined by the Holy Spirit, and how this faith relationship is laid, and how Christ makes room
in the heart of his sinner for himself. Many of these elements, Kivitz says, are missing in
sermons today, and therefore the people receive stones for bread and they look for food elsewhere.
Of course, he says, the objective element comes first. We can and may only draw the fullness
of the objective truth from scripture, but the subjective experiences and the exercises of the
heart may not be forgotten. These things also belong to the body of the sermon, and if they
are missing, the sermon cannot be called scriptural. These excerpts show where this
Reverend Kivitz stood in what theological tradition, namely the Puritan Reformed tradition.
That tradition did not start in the 17th century after the Synod of Dort, as some say.
It started rather with Kald and the Reformation.
Reverend Kivitz has many quotations in his book, but very few of them are from the men of the Second
Reformation, and almost all of them are from John Calvin, and he did that, of course, for a certain
reason. For instance, he quotes the Great Reformer as saying this about the purpose of preaching,
The end of the whole gospel ministry is that God, the fountain of all felicity, communicate Christ to us,
to us who are separated from God by sin and hence ruined, that we may from him enjoy eternal life,
that in a word all heavenly treasures be so applied to us that they be no less
ours than Christ himself. That's Calvin's definition of preaching.
I'd like to read it again. The end of the whole gospel ministry is that God,
the fountain of all felicity, communicate Christ to us who are separated from God by sin and hence
ruined, that we may from him enjoy eternal life, that in a word all heavenly treasures be so applied
to us that they be no less ours than Christ himself. I think that's a beautiful definition.
Calvin believed that in the preaching of the word there are not one but two preachers at work,
the external minister who holds forth the vocal word which is received by the ears,
and the internal minister, the Holy Spirit, who, quote, by his secret virtue
effects in the hearts of whosoever he will their union with Christ through faith.
Apart from this applicatory work of the Holy Spirit, Calvin says, Christ remains of no value
to us and therefore at a great distance from us. It is the Spirit who brings Christ who is
at that great distance from us into our hearts by a faith which he works in us, by his secret
operation. Thus Calvin clearly distinguished between objective and subjective, and therefore
those who claim that Calvin did not believe in this distinction, they are altogether wrong.
Another characteristic of Dutch Calvinistic preaching is that it is or should be
discriminating. While neo-Calvinists maintain that preachers have no right to separate between their
hearers, the old Calvinists insist on such a separation. Dr. H. Bathing, that is the great
Bathing of the dogmatician, who came out of the old Calvinist school of the secession,
followed Cooper in many things, but not in one thing, or at least not in this thing. He did not
follow him in his doctrine of presumptive regeneration, and Bathing wrote a book called
Calling and Regeneration, and in that book he warns against a type of preaching which assumes
that all professing believers in a given congregation are safe, because such preaching
proceeds from the ideal. It fails to appreciate reality and ignores the lessons of history.
The result is that faith in the confession is confused with the confession of faith,
and a dead orthodoxy which contents itself with an intellectual consent to doctrine is fostered
under such preaching, Bathing warns, there is but little concern about the disposition of the heart
and the purity of life, as Israel rested on its descent from Abraham and on the temple which was
in their midst. So many members of the New Testament church are beginning to build their hopes
for eternity on the external ecclesiastical privileges wherein they share baptism, confession,
Lord's Supper, and thus they fall into a false complacency. Although the church is a gathering
of true believers in Christ as to its essence, they must yet constantly go forth in her midst
the summons to faith and repentance. Herman Bathing was, in the true sense of the word, a purity.
He wrote in an introduction to the works of Erskine, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine,
which were being republished at that time in 1904, these words, here in these works of Ralph
and Ebenezer Erskine, these Scottish divines, he says, here we have an important element which is
largely lacking amongst us. We miss this spiritual soul knowledge. It seems we no longer know what
sin and grace, guilt and forgiveness, regeneration and conversion are. We know them in theory,
but we no longer know them in the awful reality of life and experience. Bathing
gave here his assessment of the situation in his churches in 1904.
These statements of Bathing have their roots not just in Puritanism, which, as we know,
favored a discriminating ministry, but also in the Reformation and in John Calvin. John Calvin
is often quoted, and you may quote Calvin to support almost any theological position,
but I hear him very seldom quoted in support of a discriminating ministry.
Yet one does not have to read very long in Calvin's commentaries, for instance,
to discover that Calvin certainly did not believe that all who professed Christianity
were truly in Christ. For instance, commenting on Acts 11, verse 23,
which tells of Barnabas exhorting believers to cleave unto the Lord with purpose of heart,
Calvin says this, we learn from Barnabas' definition of the way to persevere as continuing
with purpose of heart that faith has put down living roots only when it is grounded in the
heart. Now listen. Accordingly, it is no wonder that hardly one in ten of the number of those
who profess the faith persevere right to the end, since very few know the meaning of good will and
purpose of heart. And on Psalm 119, verse 101, where David says, I have refrained my feet from
every evil way, that I might keep thy word, Calvin says this, though all without exception
to whom God's word is preached are taught, yet scarce one in ten so much as tastes it,
yea, scarce one in a hundred, profits to the extent of being enabled, thereby to proceed
in a right course to the end. And again when the poet of Psalm 143, verse 2, asks the Lord not to
enter into judgment with his servant because he is convinced that in God's holy judgment
no man can stand, then Calvin says this, all human righteousnesses go for nothing when we stand
before God's tribunal. This is a truth which is universally acknowledged in words, but which very
few are seriously impressed with. My friends, there are at least 30 similar statements in
the commentaries of Calvin, and that is only in the commentary, let alone in his other writings.
Statements which clearly show that Calvin, when it came to assessing the number of those who were
truly born again, was not as large as some of our neo-Calvinistic brethren, you may suppose.
Calvin was not afraid to separate. Commenting on Psalm 15, verse 1, where it says,
Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He writes,
David saw the temple crowded with a great multitude of men who all made a profession
of the same religion, and presented themselves before God as to the outward ceremony.
And therefore, assuming the person of one wandering at the spectacle, he directs his
discourse to God, who in such a confusion and medley of characters could easily distinguish
his own people from strangers. And then Calvin applies it in this way,
as we too often see the Church of God defaced by much impurity to prevent us from stumbling
at what appears so offensive, a distinction is made between those who are permanent citizens
of the Church and strangers who are mingled among them for a time. God's sacred barn floor,
listen brethren, God's sacred barn floor will not be perfectly cleansed before the last day,
when Christ at his coming will cast out the chaff. But he has already begun to do this
by the doctrine of his Gospel, which on this account he terms a fan. Preachers have to use the
fan, and thus they will separate the precious from the vile, not out of
a harsh judgmental spirit. Calvin certainly was not like that, he was a warm-hearted bastard,
but out of a true concern with the eternal destiny of those entrusted to our care.
Neo-Calvinists try to combat individualism with a renewed emphasis on the doctrine of the covenant,
and they often appeal to Calvin, who also, according to them, was very concerned about
this key doctrine of the scripture. And that is true, Calvin was certainly a covenantal theologian,
but unless some of his modern disciples, Calvin did not make membership in the covenant a kind
of eternal life insurance. He taught indeed that as Abraham and his seed were adopted into the
covenant of grace, so New Testament believers and their children were included in the same covenant.
He even called covenant membership a general election, which, however, must be distinguished
from particular election. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is not because I want to stir up
a controversy. I know that different brethren here have different views on the covenant
from myself and others, but the reason why I'm bringing this up is to show that though Calvin
believed that the whole church was in the covenant, that that did not mean that they
were all saved. He says, meanwhile, let us note that there has been a general election
which pertains to all the people, the Jews, which deserves to be highly esteemed. However,
it does not profit unless each one for his own part is participating in it. See here the election
of God, whereby he puts such difference between the lineage of Abraham and all the rest of the
world. Lo, here is an election which pertains in general to all the children of Abraham,
but it was necessary that such a grace was to be ratified by faith, for we see that many of them
were cut off. Now then the election of God, which extended itself to all the people, was not
sufficient, but it was necessary that each one should be a participant of it for himself, and how
by faith. Then he goes on to explain that faith is worked by the Holy Spirit in the way of true
conversion, in the way of becoming a lost sinner before God. Membership in the covenant, or in the
visible Church, is not enough. It is a great blessing, it is a privilege, but it is not enough.
Only the experiential conviction that one is lost by nature and therefore in need of the sovereign
grace of God, as we heard this morning, only if we are shut up to the mercy of God who can save us or
who can damn us, only that is the experience that will lead unto true salvation. These things must
be insisted on in our preaching, for unless it comes to what the Puritans call a closing with
Christ, unless it comes to an embracing of the Savior on the part of the preacher as well as
of the hearers, unless it comes to a casting of ourselves with a rope around our neck as beggars,
guilty before God, casting ourselves upon the mercy of God, revealed in his dear Son,
I say unless it comes to that, then our religion is but a shell, an outward shell.
You may call this mysticism, but God grant us a lot of that mysticism in our time.
Without this experimental, that is individual, personal knowledge of God,
this heart knowledge, the Church is dead and no amount of man-made fireworks
can bring it to life. The old Calvinists knew this, and therefore they preached as they did,
and I'm happy to say there are still some who do preach the same way. In the Netherlands, oh yes,
there are at least, at least 400,000 people who every Lord's Day hear that kind of preaching
in different denominations, and the Lord is doing a great work in the Netherlands
among these old Calvinistic preachers and congregations. Yes, we find it also here,
thank God, the old Calvinism which preaches the experimental truth.
These preachers preach as Calvin did, as Luther did, as Spurgeon and many others.
That preaching has experimental roots because it is rooted not only in Puritanism
or in Pietism or the Reformation, but in the conviction of Christians throughout history
that the essence of true religion is to be found in a personal and in an individual relationship
with God our Creator and our Redeemer in Jesus Christ. And that conviction in turn is rooted
in the scriptures which say the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, that filial fear,
and it is to them and to none else that He shows, reveals His covenant. Thank you.
This recording is brought to you by thechristianlibrary.org.au