Saturday, January 12, 2008

Lecture 1B: Reformation Roots

Dutch / Reformed Church / in America

We began as the Dutch Reformed Church and we are now the Reformed Church in America. What has changed is the movement from "Dutch" to "in America," and what is constant is the "Reformed Church."

At the very beginning we were "Dutch" and not "in America." For a great part of our history, we were both "Dutch" and "in America." Now we are effectively not "Dutch" at all, and fully "in America." (It’s frequently been more accurate to say "North America.") In this slow transition from "Dutch" to "in America," how has the "Reformed Church" evolved?

Dutch

When modern North Americans think of "Dutch," their images are mostly quaint, narrow, and rural. This is an historical mistake. The Netherlands of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries was the most modern, urbanized, and diverse part of Europe.

In 1500, except for a few of its cities, it was just a collection of poor and backward provinces within the Holy Roman Empire. By 1628, it was an independent nation that was in its Golden Age. Its navies ruled the seas, its merchants ran the world economy, and the riches of the planet passed through its harbors, and yet it was a tiny nation, without nobility, and with no natural resources. It was a Republic, the first Protestant Republic. Its culture was open, innovative, embracing, and relatively fair and just.

Its studios drew artists from everywhere. Its universities drew students from all of Europe. There were more Hungarian students at the University of Utrecht than at any school in Hungary! The University of Franeker in Friesland was the Athens of the English Puritans and Rotterdam was their Rome. The University of Leiden was considered the top school in the world.

Almost everyone could read, its rate of literacy was the highest in the world, anyone who went to school knew Latin at some level, and the pastors of its churches were the best educated in Europe.

Its cities drew entrepreneurs and refugees from everywhere. There were so many Norwegians, Danes, Germans, and English in Amsterdam and so many Scots in Rotterdam that those cities sponsored churches for each of them. There were French ("Walloon") Reformed Churches in every city as well. Leiden was the sanctuary for the Pilgrims of England, and Amsterdam was the sanctuary for the Jews of Europe. The Netherlands was the first Christian nation to give the Jews full civil rights and full freedom of worship. Many pastors read Hebrew with their rabbi neighbors.

The Netherlands was the collective publishing house of Europe. Since everyone could read, books would sell. There was full freedom of the press. If a book was banned by one nation’s authorities, it was printed in the Netherlands, including many Roman Catholic books. More Hungarian-language books were printed in the Netherlands than in Hungary. Most English Puritan books were printed in the Netherlands, about which Kings James and Charles loudly complained. Travel books, books of maps and exploration, books on botany and medicine, and of course theology. Lots and lots of theology.

The whole culture was multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Certainly Dutch ethnicity and the Dutch language predominated, but the ordinary citizen could often speak three languages, and had an immigrant in-law. The facts of Dutch geography had made it a transfer point. It lay in the middle of three larger and more unified cultures: French, German, and English. All things French and German traveled down the rivers, and all things English sailed across the narrow sea. What brought on the Golden Age was that the Netherlands, originally the victim of its geography, learned how to exploit it. The Reformation was not the only cause of this, but it was the dominant one.

Reformed Church

The Reformation came to the Netherlands, as fits its geography, in three versions: German, French, and English. It began as German, then was dominated by the French, was nurtured in England, sought refuge in Germany, and there was influenced again, and then developed its own blend. But the Reformation came late to the Netherlands.

As early as 1521, three Lutherans were burned at the stake in Amsterdam. The Anabaptists had an early following, flowering, crisis, and disaster, and it took Menno Simons to settle them down and organize them as responsible congregations. These were the early German influences. But neither the Lutherans nor the Mennonites captured the spiritual imagination of the Netherlands.

Hageman describes why there was less need for the Reformation. (I am reminded of Mike Huckabee’s great line: "You won’t know the Lord Jesus is all you need until you discover he’s all you’ve got!") There was less abuse in the Roman church. The hierarchy was weak, and the Brethren of the Common Life had developed a popular and practical way of being Christian, with an excellent emphasis on education and charity. Life was good in the Netherlands, and always getting better, especially for the common folk.

But when life started getting bad, and the hierarchy onerous, and the government positively nasty, then neither Lutheranism nor Anabaptism had the right stuff. It was Calvinism, the French influence, i.e., L’Église Reformé (the Reformed Church), that had the theology, practice, and organization to both strengthen the people under persecution and organize them for liberation.

You have already studied the Reformation. You have already studied Calvin and Calvinism. So please understand that what follows is just one take on it, for our own purposes. Think of Calvinism as an attempt to solve some problems that the Reformation had raised.

At the end of his life, Martin Luther despaired at the condition of the Protestant churches of Germany, and he questioned whether the whole thing had been worth it. Hageman describes how the Reformation, after its early success, had hit a wall, and that it was losing and on the defense. He points out how John Calvin, the second-generation Reformer, was the one who brought new life to the Reformation, and a whole new influence, which changed the face of the world.

His influence is not just the Reformed Church, but democracy as we know it, and modern learning, and modern economic organization. Indeed, though secular historians don’t like to admit it, and though he constantly gets unfair treatment in the popular mind, he’s probably the most important single figure in world history since the Middle Ages. He was hardly perfect, and we are living down some of his mistakes, but you need to be proud of your connection to him.

Calvin was a great organizer and a great teacher. (Of course he was also a brilliant philosopher and theologian.) He balanced the best of Lutheranism and Anabaptism. Lutheranism is all about grace, grace, grace; it’s about liberty, freedom, and justification by faith alone apart from works. It preaches the gospel, not law. Anabaptism is all about discipline, sanctification, good works, and obedience. The movements saw themselves as opposites. Calvin forged the synthesis.

Lutheranism kept the old Catholic idea of Christendom. They kept much of the medieval liturgy and they kept the parish churches, to which everyone in their neighborhoods belonged. The princes should be Lutheran, and so should the universities. The princes should endow and protect the universities and the churches, and the princes should use the sword to defend the Gospel. In a Lutheran parish church, the Gospel was preached every Sunday, and what was required was a penitential faith and the (antinomian) ethic of overflowing love.

Anabaptism completely rejected Christendom. A church is not a parish but a self-conscious congregation, separated from the world. They met in barns and houses, not church buildings. Their worship tried to imitate the New Testament. They had no interest in universities and they had no truck with any government, and they were strict pacifists and they would not bear the sword. In an Anabaptist congregation, the law of Christ was preached every Sunday and on weekdays too, and what was required was discipline and rejection of the world.

For Lutherans, sola scriptura (solely by scripture) was opposed to the judgements of the Pope and the councils of the church. It did not at all rule out tradition, or the use of other books in the church. It grammatical terms, it is an ablative, not a nominative, it doesn't mean "scripture alone," but "only by scripture." And yet, for Anabaptists, sola scriptura was opposed to all other learning in general, and the Bible should be the only book in the church.

You can see the differences summarized in the chart I have provided you in the syllabus. The Lutherans emphasized justification by faith, and they preached what God has done for us. Sola gratia, sola fide. The Anabaptists emphasized sanctification and discipline, and they preached what we must do for God. The Lutheran hermeneutic of scripture was always to distinguish Law and Gospel (both are found in every book of the Bible), and all of scripture points us to the cross of Christ. The Anabaptists found in scripture the patterns and rules to obey and imitate.

Lutheran ecclesiology is focused on the local parish, the church is for everyone in the neighborhood, and there is no discipline. Anabaptist ecclesiology is focused on the congregation, gathered, separate from the world, and disciplined. If you fell into sin, you were banned and shunned.

On politics, the Lutherans taught "two realms," and they were generally conservative. The prince is an officer of God, so do not disobey the government. The Anabaptists were so radical as to never get involved. Don’t ever fight the government, just leave.

Calvinism was the synthesis. It was able to synthesize the demands of justification and sanctification in the sovereignty of God: God is sovereign in our salvation and God is sovereign in our lives. God’s sovereignty in salvation is expressed in predestination (and you had better understand predestination if you want to be happy in the RCA), and predestination’s security made for a tough kind of faith: "fearing God, they feared no man."

Calvinism synthesized the Biblical hermeneutic. Scripture was understand in terms of covenant, which opened up the Old Testament. As the Book of the Covenant, scripture was the rich and only Rule to measure and benefit all other knowledge, both judging and transforming all of life and culture. For Calvinism, sola scriptura was much closer to Lutheranism than to Anabaptism, but where the Lutherans confined the judgement of scripture to the church, the Calvinists applied to all of knowledge and culture.

Calvinism synthesized the geographical parish and the self-conscious congregation by teaching the parish to act like a congregation! He effectively invented the consistory, and the consistory organized the parish into being a sufficiently disciplined congregation. He also revived the three-fold office of pastor, elder, and deacon.

Calvin based his liturgy on what he understood to be the pattern and practice of the early church fathers, neither the New Testament itself nor the medieval church. Indeed, the Reformed Church was not modeled on either the medieval church nor the New Testament church but on the patristic church of the first and second centuries after Christ, which implies that it can accept tradition but always reform it according to the Word.

And finally, Calvinism, with its Old Testament and covenantal sensibility, applied the sovereignty of God to politics. Calvinism sought to transform the world for Christ and for justice and righteousness, and it allowed Christians to fight if they had to for justice and freedom. Even more, Calvinist church order gave a powerful example for political organization, and the structure of the church became the model for the structure of the republic.

And so it was Calvinism that had the right stuff for the Netherlands. In the time of crisis, the Reformed Church was the church that served the congregations in times of both persecution and empowerment. A single church order proved relevant for both the refugee congregations under the cross and the established parish churches at the center of the city.

In America

Hageman nicely tells the story, from 1550 to 1619, of how the Reformed Church developed from a few small congregations to become the established church of the Netherlands. In 1619 was the Great Synod of Dort, which finally consolidated the doctrine and organization of the Dutch Reformed Church, though other confessions and religions were given remarkable toleration.

You know, this story recapitulates the story of the early Christian church, how the few small congregations of the apostles developed, often under persecution, into the established church of Emperor Constantine.

But there’s a remarkable difference, of course. The Netherlands was a Republic, and at the vanguard of the development of democracy in the world. It was called the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and it was not a centralized monarchy. The Dutch Reformed Church was not a state church in the same way that the Lutheran or Anglican churches were, although it was certainly an "established" church.

There was no monarch to be the Supreme Head of the Church, as in England and Scotland. The Reformed Church was established separately in each of the Dutch provinces, and each province had its own Provincial or Particular (we now say Regional) Synod. Each provincial government was the patron and protector of its provincial Reformed Church. The General or National Synod met only infrequently, and, for a number of reasons, after the Great Synod of Dort in 1619, it did not meet again for two hundred years! The Dutch Reformed Church had no hierarchy and no centralized administration.

The Netherlands itself was so decentralized. It was a very peculiar nation, and the royalty of Europe considered it a nursery of dangerous ideas. How strange, being so decentralized and so jealous for freedom and equality, that it in just a few decades it should have build an empire to rival the power of Spain.

As I have written in one of my books, "It was an empire without an emperor, and it was ruled by committees. It was directed by a number of mercantile companies that were chartered by a group of provinces. Its glory was its profitability, and its imperium was the concentration of commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

"Wherever in this peculiar empire the Dutch companies established permanent trading posts, they also sponsored religious services, having accepted the responsibility (Belgic Confession 36) ‘to maintain the holy worship of the church’ and ‘to see that the Word of the Gospel is preached everywhere.’ Thus, in such places as Indonesia, Ceylon, South Africa, Surinam, and the West Indies, Dutch Reformed churches were established that endure to this day.

These colonial churches were supervised and supplied, for the most part, by the Classis of Amsterdam. The Classis’ Committee of Deputies for External Affairs acted as a foreign mission board for the whole Dutch Church, executing all the duties, that, for example, the Church of England had assigned to the Bishop of London.

"By 1621 the Dutch West India Company established the colony of New Netherland in North America, comprising the modern states of New York and New Jersey and parts of Delaware and Connecticut. The Company had been furnishing its colonies with spiritual ministry in the form of official "Comforters of the Sick," and the first such Comforter to arrive in New Netherland, early in 1624, was Bastian Krol."

"Four years later the first regular pastor was sent to serve the growing village of New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan Island. Domine Jonas Michaelius immediately organized a congregation according to the Church Order of Dort, formed a consistory, and celebrated a service of Holy Communion." (Meeter, Bless the Lord, O My Soul, Lanham, MD and London, 1989, pp. 27-28.)

From this little seed, transplanted from Europe, has grown the plant that is the RCA. From this Communion service we date our founding, as the oldest Protestant denomination in North America with a continuing ministry.

We should note a number of things. First, the RCA was planted only nine years after the Synod of Dort, and before the synod’s officers had published its documents. It could be argued that the RCAmerica is almost as much the younger sister of the Netherlands Reformed Church as its daughter. Indeed, our separate development started so early as to give us very different characteristics from the start.

At the same time, we were like our mother in that our first Communion service was bilingual, and Domine Michaelius read the Liturgy in both Dutch and French. (At the time of the American Revolution, we were worshiping in four languages in New York: Dutch, English, French, and German.) We should also note that this first little congregation was also a parish, because it served everyone in the colony. And the colony was already a melting pot, with as many inhabitants not Dutch as Dutch.

"For another thirty-five years, in spite of neglect and mismanagement by the West India Company, the colony of New Netherland quietly grew. Land was cleared around the forts and along the rivers. A few small villages were settled by farmers and new congregations were organized. Eventually little churches could be found at Fort Orange (Albany), Brooklyn, Flatbush, Flatlands, Harlem, Kingston, Bergen (Jersey City), and Staten Island. By the time of the English conquest in 1664, there were about a dozen congregations served by six pastors." (Meeter, 29).

These congregations were all established by the civil authority of the West India Company. Peter Stuyvesant, for example, established the triple collegiate church of Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Flatlands. All the inhabitants were taxed to pay for the buildings and the pastor’s salaries. All the inhabitants, including the slaves but excepting the Indians, were expected to attend. (Some people refused to pay and refused to attend!) All the inhabitants were under the spiritual care of the elders, and all the inhabitants could go to the deacons for "welfare" assistance.

The deacons of Brooklyn, for example, had a small herd of four cows, the "Cows of the Deaconry," which they lent out to the poor of the village. If you were lent the cow, you could sell your left-over milk, and half your profits you had to give back to the Deacons.

Also in Brooklyn, when both the parents of one particular farm family died, the Deacons put the orphaned children up at the homes of different families in the parish. They also took possession of the farm, made an inventory of its goods, sold them off at auction, and put the proceeds in a trust fund for the orphans. (I admit that I am very proud of the deacons of my congregation.)

The Dutch capitulation to the English in 1664 threatened the religious settlement of the population, the status of their churches, and their connection with the Classis of Amsterdam. "Could its members, especially the ministers, be subject to the British government, but owe ecclesiastical obedience to a religious body in Holland? Would the Dutch Reformed people of New York and New Jersey be expected to contribute to the financial support of of an established English Church? Who would pay the salaries of the ministers formerly paid by the West India Company and by taxation? These and other problems troubled the Church for many years after 1664." (De Jong, Church in Colonies, 48.)

The greatest problem, perhaps, was how to translate an "established church" into a free church of self-supporting congregations. But of course, that just put us back to our earliest beginnings as "churches under the cross" in London and Germany, when we were more or less free-standing, self-supporting congregations.

"The terms of surrender in the Articles of Capitulation were actually quite generous. Article Eight guaranteed that ‘the Dutch residents here shall retain and enjoy liberty of conscience in Religion and Church Discipline,’ and the churches were allowed to keep their property and buildings.

In fact, the Reformed Church grew steadily after the English conquest, largely due to a very high birthrate, resulting in ‘the astonishing multiplication of the old Netherland families into a very numerous posterity,’ as the Classis of Amsterdam put it. The Dutch Americans were able to maintain their language and culture under the English regime for another century, and with such strength that the French and German immigrants who later settled the Hudson Valley adopted Dutch as their new language rather than English." (Meeter, 30.)

But the die was cast. If the Dutch population had been relatively larger, like Quebec, or if the colony had been more isolated, like South Africa, they might have been able, even under English government, to preserve their own non-English culture. It was not to be. For the next century, from 1664 to 1776, our denomination was the Dutch Reformed Church in North America. But that century also saw the evolution of thirteen British North American colonies into something new called "America." And what that also meant was the necessary evolution of the Reformed Church away from "Dutch" and toward "in America." And that’s the topic of our next lecture.

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