Session Two

Colony, Conflict, and Constitution

Dear students, my lecture is much shorter this session. That’s because you’ve got an especially big chunk of reading to do. You are reading a wonderful book, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies, by Gerald F. De Jong.

This is a remarkable book and a great read, with first class scholarship and original research. The late Professor De Jong was a deeply spiritual man, who felt like your favorite grandpa, but he was also a distinguished and exacting scholar at the University of South Dakota. This is the best book in the RCA Historical Series, and because you won’t get the chance again for a while, you might as well read it now.

The period we are looking at can be summarized by four themes:
1. The slow and steady expansion of our churches as indigenous to North America.
2. The evolution of our distinct identity, as neither Dutch nor English but North American.
3. The Coetus - Conferentie conflict.
4. The conflict’s resolution in our Constitution, the landmark of our indigenous identity.

1. The slow and steady expansion of our churches as indigenous to North America.

When the English took over in 1664, the dozen or so Dutch Reformed congregations faced the threat of being immediately turned into Anglican parishes, under the Episcopal government of the Church of England. They won the right to continue to exist, although the church in New York had to yield its building and its property and endowments to the Anglicans (which is why Trinity Church - Wall Street is one of the riches churches in the world today).

The other threat to the church was the effective end of immigration from the Netherlands. In spite of these two threats, the Dutch Reformed culture of North America, though only forty years old, proved itself vital and substantial.

Those earliest congregations not only hung on, but began to expand and multiply, even against the hostility of English colonial government, at worst, and its indifference, at best. The Dutch American families multiplied "like rabbits," as one observer wrote, and those large families were apparently able to keep the faith throughout their generations.

At the same time, when other immigrants arrived, under English auspices, some of them Americanized, not as English, but as Dutch! The most famous examples are the French and Germans whose churches became Dutch Reformed. From the beginning, therefore, in the Netherlands, the Dutch Reformed Church in North America was able to integrate a remarkable degree of ethnic diversity. This also meant that it practiced a less strict version of Calvinism than in neighboring New England, which was more homogenous.

2. The evolution of our distinct identity, as neither Dutch nor English but North American.

Looking back, we assume that the language change from Dutch to English was inevitable, and that those who opposed it must have been obstinate enemies of progress. Not necessarily. There were plenty of examples to the contrary!

Think of Quebec, where French has maintained itself until today, or think of South Africa. In Great Britain itself, both Scotland and Wales, though under even closer English domination, maintained their native languages with vigor until the Nineteenth Century, and even longer so in Ireland.

Americans were less monolingual than they are now. It was by no means atypical for ordinary peasants to be bilingual, even if they were illiterate in both! If the relative proportion of the Dutch Americans to the English had been, say, just a little larger, New York and New Jersey might have become a Dutch Quebec. Or if the Dutch Reformed church had been more different from the Church of England, which was, at least, officially Reformed, and the Church of Scotland, which was effectively Reformed.

A bilingual Dutch American who visited an Anglican or Presbyterian church in Manhattan would have been able to worship God without idolatry. So I suspect that because the Dutch were Reformed, the language change was bound to happen.

But it’s because they were Reformed that they held on to their language as long as they did. As you know from your Church History, the Reformation emphasized religion in the vernacular. The Reformation empowered the vernacular languages and cultures which Latin Catholicism had ignored. Because they were Reformed, the Dutch Americans could read their Dutch Bibles, and love them. Because they were Reformed, they could read from the rich library of Dutch devotional and popular theological books that we know they had. They held onto their Dutch as long as they did because it was the medium of so much richness, both familial and spiritual.

A further thing. For all of us modern Americans and Canadians, who come to the RCA as predominantly an English-speaking denomination, we have little idea and no experience of Psalm-singing, which was the primary spiritual expression and the heart and soul of primitive Dutch Reformed religion. Metrical Psalm-singing. The Genevan Psalter. The primary medium of both prayer and hermeneutic.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, and it’s not just a matter of nostalgia. The center of Dutch Reformed liturgy on Sundays and the focus of Dutch Reformed devotion at home was the same: Psalm-singing. And this was bound up in the Dutch language, and it was not available in English. To switch to English was to lose it. (Which is exactly what happened.)

And finally, the use of Dutch was the defense of being American. This may strike you as backwards, but it is true. To be a Dutch speaker, in New York and New Jersey at least, was to be more American.

First, English was a johnny-come-lately, and the Iroquois, for example, spoke Dutch (and French) more than English. Second, Dutch was the badge of only hesitant submission and superficial loyalty to that British crown. Notice, for example, that as soon as the Thirteen Colonies won their independence, the language change was swift. The shield against the British was no longer necessary.

So the Dutch Reformed church in the American colonies was the expression and nursery of an indigenous North American culture, neither English nor really Dutch anymore, but something of its own. The Dutch they spoke developed into an independent dialect, "De Taal," that is, "the language," sort of like Afrikaans or Québécois, with Indian, French, and English words thrown in. Ironically, as their dialect diverged from European Dutch, they found English preaching easier to understand than the preaching of Dutchmen from the Netherlands.

Their churches developed divergent styles and habits from the churches in the Netherlands. And their pastors noticed this. Some of them thought this was great, and some of them thought this was bad, and that brings us to our next theme. Because, as you will learn when you are pastors, whenever you see growth, yes, you will also get conflict. Count on it.

3. The Coetus - Conferentie conflict.

To the victor belongs the spoils, and history is written by the winners. When we tell the history of the American Revolution, we call the rebels "patriots." If Britain had won, we’d call the Tories "patriots,’ and we’d call the rebels, guess what, "rebels." Notice what we call the folks who lost the Civil War!

In the case of the Coetus - Conferentie conflict, our bias, looking back, is generally with the Coetus. (Pronunciation: seetus, konferensee.) And, effectively, the Coetus won. Therefore it’s important to give the Conferentie a fair shake and a fair hearing.

There were saints and sinners on both sides. We need to understand their motivations. But more, we need to interpret what the issues were. Since we are children of the Coetus, we have to give the Conferentie the benefit of the doubt, and offer them both more sympathy and more imagination.

Give them a second hearing, get past their sins and offenses, look hard to imagine what they represent. You might disagree with them, and what they most feared might be what you love, but if you also want to love your enemies, you need to honor their point of view. More than that, you to understand the Conferentie if you want really to understand the Coetus, and by implication, yourself as well.

Let me emphasize that, from our vantage point, we underestimate the Anglican threat. We need to remember that in England at that time, you could be executed for being a Catholic. You couldn’t go to university if you were a Presbyterian or Congregationalist. Even in New York, the Presbyterian Church was technically illegal, and could not incorporate or hold title to its property. (Its church building had to be the private property of one of its members.) No non-Episcopal church could ever feel completely secure under the English colonial government, and only a couple of the Dutch ones had Royal Charters to fall back on.

You can hardly blame the Conferentie for regarding a very tight connection with the Classis of Amsterdam as purely a matter of survival. It’s not that they were afraid of the future; they were afraid of the present! And as the decades went on, the interest of the Crown in its colonies did not wane, and most of its policies were going the opposite of liberalization. That’s why we had a War of Independence. The very fact that we felt ourselves forced to fight (and die) in a Revolution should give you some sympathy for the Conferentie’s fears.

When I taught this class traditionally, I divided the students into three groups, the Coetus, the Conferentie, and the Classis of Amsterdam. The two sides presented their cases. The Classis questioned them. The two sides debated, and then the Classis issued a decision. (One year the group who were the Conferentie showed up with towels on their heads for powdered wigs!)
Is it possible for us to have a Distance Learning Debate of Coetus - Conferentie? How do we do this? How do we assign who gets to be whom? We’ll get back to you.

The Coetus - Conferentie conflict is so important because it captures so many of the issues that have defined us from the beginning and are still defining us today. I mentioned some of these in the previous session, and you should be able to discuss them in terms of this session too:

What kind of Calvinists should we be: how strict, how loose, how Lutheran, how Puritan?

How American should we let ourselves be?

What kind of education should we demand of our pastors?

What should be our relationship to other denominations?

Does it honor God to keep our denominational independence?

How shall we fit within a generally Arminian and Pelagian environment?

How do we deal with our relative smallness among the denominations?

What are effective strategies for Domestic Missions and Church Extension?


4. The conflict’s resolution in our Constitution, the landmark of our indigenous identity.

John Henry Livingston was our combination George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. If Domines Megapolensis and Selyns were our Abraham and Isaac, Doctor Livingston was our Moses. He forged the resolution of the Coetus - Conferentie dispute, and his synthesis revitalized all sides. He was the great man (called by God) who brought us together, brought us around the corner, and got us moving again.

Livingston is also the single person most responsible for the character of the Reformed Church in the next two centuries: orthodox but not judgmental, traditional but also ecumenical, calmly Calvinist, and committed to education and Missions. As recently as my childhood, I knew that the RCA had an outsized reputation for Missions and education. No matter how much the East might differ from the Midwest, we united on Missions and education. (That Missions and education no longer define us is the least appreciated but most significant change in the RCA.)

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we have to consider that Livingston was the mover
and shaker of our Constitution, and it was the Constitution that propelled us from being a collection of Dutch congregations in some British colonies into being a unified denomination that was native to a new nation.

We were relatively small, but we were at home, and we were well known. It was Livingston who received the oath of office from George Washington at his Inauguration. We were, let’s say, the Delaware of denominations.

Livingston had lots of help. There were pastors and elders who first directed him, welcomed him, encouraged him, supported him, and then labored with him. They saw him as their future leader and when he was ready they let him lead Some of their names you will run across in your reading. But if you know the story of Livington, you know a lot about the RCA.

He was able to bring together the wounded and wary congregations, hold them together through the Revolutionary War, and then lead them to work together to reconstitute themselves for a new day. The landmark was our Constitution, the basic shape of which is still in force today.

As I argue in my book, Meeting Each Other, Livingston had to forge a synthesis that was both conservative and progressive. He had to show that the Constitution was essentially the same as what the denomination had been based on since 1619. At the same time, he had to apply it to a context that was brand new in the world, the separation of church and state. We had to become on paper what we had learned to be in practice: a "free church." Fortunately, as I pointed out in the first session, the basic order of the Reformed Church was forged among the free and exiled "churches under the cross" from the 1550s to the 1580s.

By this time we were known, most often, as the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in North America (RPDCNA.) Still quite Dutch, at least in background, language and history, but not so much in ethnicity. John Henry Livingston himself was not ethnically Dutch. His ancestors were Scots who fled to the Netherlands for religious reasons and thence to the Hudson Valley.

When he went to college, he went to Yale, and he reports that he considered returning to the Presbyterianism of his ancestors (as some of his relatives had done), or even to Anglicanism. But he chose the Dutch Reformed church, conflicted and facing decline, and he gave it his life (sort of like Howard Hageman)

In an apparent combination of foresight and desire, he went to the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study for his doctorate. While he was there, he either drafted himself or collaborated on the Plan of Union to heal the struggling church in North America.

Of course, some people didn’t like him. Some people found him distant and pompous and arrogant. He wasn’t the best of our preachers, and maybe not our best theologian, even in his own day, though for years he had the only earned doctorate.

But good grief, he was all at once a full-time pastor in Manhattan, a professor of theology in Flatbush, and the only denominational officer we had at the time. It was all on him, so we can forgive him if he was a little stiff. But he certainly knew his stuff. He understood Covenant Theology, and his sermon on the "Everlasting Gospel" had a national reputation for the cause of Foreign Missions.

So that’s where we end up. From colony through conflict to Constitution. Don’t rush our getting there. Give your full attention to the century in between.

Study Questions for DeJong.

(Pay attention to Chapters VII & VIII. They’re wonderful.)

1. What is a krankenbezoeker?
2. What happened in 1628? Where?
3. Describe the general layout of colonial Dutch Reformed (DRC) church buildings.
4. What is a "collegiate" church?
5. What is the foundational reason for the existence of the DRC in NA?
6. What tensions were between the West India Company and the New Amsterdam consistory?
7. How did the DRC’s status change in 1664? What did the DRC have to sort out thereupon?
8. What caused the continued expansion of the DRC in NA after 1664? Whereto? Compare to Quebec and South Africa.
9. Why should a Dutch pastor come to North America? What could he expect? Who paid them? Before 1664? After 1664?
10. What was the pastor’s job? Were there other workers in the church?
11. From 1680-1720, what were the typical problems faced by pastors? Congregations?
12. Compare Selyns and Bertholf, the "founders" of the church in NYC and NJ respectively.
13. Describe a typical Sunday worship service.
14. What was the import of the royal charter in 1696? What did it resolve?
15. How was the DRC like the Church of England? Like the Presbyterians?
16. Did Black people come to church?
17. Why were some congregations reluctant to baptize slave children?
18. Why was the mission to the Indians unsuccessful?
19. What is pietism?
20. What were the complaints against Frelinghuysen? Style, doctrine, discipline?
21. What happened in 1738, 1747, 1754, 1755, 1771?
22. On the Coetus/Conferentie schism,
A. Who are the real Calvinists?
B. Why could each side call itself "conservative"?
C. How educated should a Reformed pastor have to be?
1. Knowing what? Why?
2. Skilled in what? Why?
D. What are the roots of the schism?
E. What were the apparent issues? Were they the real issues? Anything deeper?
23. What was the Van Driesen case and what did it represent? The DeWint case?
24. How did the royal charter hinder the use of English in the NYC church?
25. In 1763, bringing in English preaching entailed implied bringing in what else?
26. What were the strengths and weaknesses of the DRC?
27. What tensions are built into the RCA, judging from its early history?