The Anti-REvolutionary

Roel Kuyper's book on the Life and Works of Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876)

This life might seem rather obtuse, and I suspect I will have a few readers who simply have never heard of him. Yet, I think it is no exaggeration to say that anyone interested in the current debates about Christianity and Education should have heard of him, because his ideas and his responses to events shaped the world of Abraham Kuyper and many of the Dutch settlers in the United States. Over the years, I have published a variety of articles about the Scottish Church, the establishment principle and the response of men like Dr Begg, Dr Candlish, Dr Guthrie and David Stow to the educational question in Scotland. Yet, repeatedly, I come up against those who have taken a different approach inspired by the Dutch ‘Reformed’ tradition, who refer to arguments that have sprung out of the answers created by Kuyper and before him, Groen van Prinsterer. Even if this debate holds little interest, I defy anyone from a Reformed Protestant background, who has a historical bone in their body, not to have some interest in the development of Christianity in the Netherlands and to want to improve their understanding of how and where our Dutch brethren have formed and split. In reality, I know of very few good books that have been translated into English that enable us to gain this type of clear understanding, and I am very grateful for this book in opening up a key part of Dutch history, let alone Church history, for me.

Before I begin any form of review, let me cover some background that could easily be assumed. In terms of the name, Groen van Prinsterer is his surname – his full name is Willem Groen van Prinsterer, and the ‘van Prinsterer’ was an addition to the surname that was adopted by his father, who had become very wealthy as a result of various investments, as they entered Dutch high society. Throughout the book, the author often calls him simply Willem (or Guillaume) Groen (Green in English). This type of addition to the surname is seen in a close friend of Groen, who I suspect is a name that you might know better as a result of his magisterial History of the Reformation, Merle D’Aubigne. Here again, the informed English reader might easily conclude that the person’s first name is Merle and his surname is D’Aubigne. In reality, Jean-Henri Merle (with the addition of D’Aubigne as a fashionable trend in the late 1700s and early 1800s) was a close friend and a member of the worldwide reveil movement.

A second piece of background that I feel is necessary at the start is a resume of the history of the state. In 1581, several northern Protestant Dutch provinces declared their independence from Spanish Catholic rule. This marked the start of the Eighty Years' War, which ended with the Peace of Munster (1648), officially separating the Netherlands from the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic Spain. Under Spanish rule (and previously under the Duke of Burgundy), those rulers had appointed Stadtholders or governors in each of the provinces. Before 1568, these stadtholders were essentially royal administrators who maintained order and commanded the local military. After 1581, they were kept as an office and were in effect the commander-in-chief of the army and the navy. While during this period any nobleman could be made the Stadtholder and each of the Dutch provinces could choose their own, they almost always chose a member of the House of Orange-Nassau. Gradually, this consistency meant that the stadtholder became a hereditary position. In 1747, the office was made officially hereditary across all the provinces, so the House of Orange, while Stadtholder, looked like a King in all but name. In 1789, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and lasts for about 10 years. From 1792-1794, there is the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror. From 1795-1799, France is ruled by a five man committee called the Directory and all this ends in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte takes charge and names himself as ‘First Consul’. In the midst of this, France was the Netherlands as a key strategic asset and invaded (1794). This invasion was helped by an unusually cold winter meaning that the French troops could literally capture the country by walking in over the ice. William V (of the House of Orange) fled to England and the Netherlands are made into a vassal state of Republican France (called the Batavian Republic), this didn’t last long and in 1806, Napoleon abolished the Batavian Republic and formed the Kingdom of Holland with his younger brother Louis, as the King of the Netherlands (1806). This state of affairs was short lived as Louis Bonaparte angered his brother and was forced to abdicate in 1810, and the Netherlands was annexed into the French empire.

After Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig (the largest battle in European History until WW1), he retreated behind the Rhine and saw the collapse of his German empire and was pursued back to Paris. In April 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and was exiled to the island of Elba. During the fall of Napoleon, the Dutch nobles invited William (the son of the last Dutch Stadtholder) back from exile in England and in 1813, they proclaimed him as ‘Sovereign Prince’. A year later, at the Congress of Vienna, the ‘Great Powers’ of Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria met to draw out the map of Europe and merged the northern Dutch Republic with the Austrian Netherlands and Luxembourg. This ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands’ had William I as its King, and it was hoped that it would act as a barrier to future French expansionism. The position of the King in Dutch politics would change during the course of Willem Groen’s life.

A third set of background that we need to cover before looking at the life of Willem Groen and his influence and impact on all this politics, is the state of the Dutch Church. During the 1700s, the Dutch Reformed Church was all-pervasive; it wasn’t technically a state church, but you had to be a member of it to hold a political office. However, the Dutch had been famous for promoting religious tolerance, so there were a range of minority groups, including the Roman Catholics, the Mennonites, the Lutherans, the French Huguenots and the Remonstrants, all forming different dissenting groups. In the midst of all of this, you get two distinct movements, the Reveil movement (or the awakening), which rebelled against the supposed rationalism of the Dutch Reformed Church and sought personal piety, and wanted to ‘wake up’ the aristocratic members of the church. This Reveil movement started in the early 1800s and is linked with men, like Willem Groen and Isaac da Costa and pushed for personal piety (‘heart faith’), social justice issues (like the abolition of slavery) and the authority of the Bible. While the Reveil was drawing together the response of the wealthy, educated and aristocratic members of Dutch society, a similar revival was starting among the common people and rural farmers, which led to the Afscheiding. In 1834, Hendrik de Cock in Ulrum signed an ‘Act of Secession’, breaking away from the Dutch Reformed Church to return to a purer form of Calvinism and worship. While the Reveil movement stayed within the state church and sought to bring it back to conservative Calvinism, the Afscheiding broke away and started a new church which faced persecution. The nature of this persecution led to large scale Dutch migration to the United States from the 1840s, with large numbers settling around the Great Lakes, Michigan and Iowa. In Holland, the Afscheiding led to the creation of two main churches the Christian Seceded Congregations (Christelijke Afgescheiden Gemeenten) and the Reformed Church under the Cross (Gereformeerde Kerk onder het Kruis) these two groupings would merge to form the Christian Reformed Church (Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerk) in 1869. There would be a second major split from the state church in 1886, when the Doleantie (led by Abraham Kuyper) left and merged 6 years later (1892) with many of the Afscheiding churches to form the GKN (Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland). The Afscheiding churches that didn’t join this merger in 1892, became the CGK (Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken). In 1907, the Reformed Churches under the Cross group from the Afscheiding joined with another group that had left the state church in 1841 (Ledeboerian) and this merger created the NRC (Netherlands Reformed Congregations) led by GH Kersten. In 2004, the Dutch Reformed Church merged with the GKN to form the Protestant Church of the Netherlands (PKN) and those who believed the PKN was too liberal split to form a group called the HHK (Hersteld Hervormde Kerk).

On the other side of the Atlantic, the seceders joined the existing Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (RCA - formed as a result of previous Dutch emigration in the 1600s), but this wasn’t a good match as doctrinally they were more liberal than the newer seceders, plus the RCA allowed freemasonry and didn’t sing the Dutch psalter. In 1857, the seceders split from the RCA to form the Christian Reformed Church (CRCNA), seeking a return to the true principles of the Afscheiding. The CRCNA has also seen divisions, with the Netherlands Reformed Congregations (NRC) formed in 1907 with the links to Kersten in Holland, which use the 1611 Dutch State Bible, and the Free Reformed Churches of North America (FRC), which maintain close links with the CGK (those that didn’t merge with the Kuypers group) in Holland. The Heritage Reformed Congregations (HRC) emerged in 1993 from the NRC and has been led by Dr Beeke.

My fourth and final aspect of background information is Dutch politics. This book is called the Anti-Revolutionary, and this is because Willem Groen was instrumental in the formation of an Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) as the first modern organised party in Dutch politics, but now no longer exists. The ARP would become a powerhouse under Abraham Kuyper, who organised the little people (Kleine luyden) into a powerful political bloc vote. From 1901 to 1905, Kuyper would become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands as a result of a coalition with the Catholics in opposition to secular control over education. Kuyper pushed the idea of sphere sovereignty (soevereiniteit in eigen kring), which argued that the family, the church, business and science get their place and authority from God, rather than the state. This led to a system of pillarization (verzuiling) where different groups of Christians, Roman Catholics and even Socialists would have their own schools (but also newspapers, hospitals and even trade unions). The ARP merged in 1980, with two other parties, the KVP (which was mainly Roman Catholic) and the CHU, to form the CDA (Christian Democratic Appeal). The CDA remain a significant player in Dutch politics, although the D66 liberal progressive party won the most recent election, followed by the PVV anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders. The modern CDA party aims to emphasise broad family values. The original ARP political movement of Groen and Kuyper has really split into three groupings:

1.        the CDA (the technical heirs of the original ARP)

2.        The CU (ChristenUnie) which was formed in 2000 from a union of the GPV (liberated reformed churches) and the RPF (the orthodox wing of the Dutch Reformed Church and broader evangelicals)

3.        The SGP (Reformed Political Party) who are now the oldest political party in the Netherlands, and who gain much of its support from the traditional churches like the NRC, CGK and HHK. This traditional conservative party, due to proportional representation, often wins around 2 or 3 seats in every Dutch election (out of the 150 seats available).

You can see how this book has led me through this interesting background exploration of Dutch politics, history and the church movements, which helped me to understand some of the content.

Roel Kuyper, the author, is a professor at the Theological University of Utrecht and it is very helpful to have this type of life available in English. Willem Groen was born in 1801, which you will see from my historical background, was in a very turbulent period in Dutch history. His mother was a cousin to two bankers who had played a prominent role in the Batavian Republic. His father was a medical man, who was drawn into government and politics and served on various medical boards. He was also the Doctor for RJ Schimmelpenninck (the CEO of the republic) and later for King Louis Napoleon. His parents were clearly adept at changing with the movements in the social order, at one point, the Prussian commander von Bulow and the Cossack general, Marklay, were quartered in their Amsterdam house (with the young Willem enjoying playing chess with the Cossack general). At university, Groen would study Plato for his dissertation. The quality of his work attracted much attention, and he was awarded magna cum laude. In the 1820s, there weren’t many job opportunities for young graduate lawyers in either the judiciary or the civil service. Yet, he was admitted to the Bar in the Hague and completed his legal practice, but then joined the faculty of law at Leyden. He then had a bit of a career break in 1826, as his father encouraged him to respond to an invitation from the King (Willem of Orange) to write a history of the Netherlands. As a result of his entry to this national competition, he was offered a role as a clerk in the King’s cabinet.

At roughly the same period, he married Betsy. In his new role, he worked closely with the Royal Cabinet and would move from The Hague to Brussels. In Brussels, he was drawn into the Reveil movement (see my explanation above) and in the local Walloon church became lifelong friends with Rev JH Merle (D’Aubigne). Over the next few years, there would be real political turbulence in the young Dutch state, as it sought to bring together the Protestant Northern states with the Catholic southern ones. By 1832, he had moved back to The Hague, begun his own family and established a government newspaper to counter some of the pro-Belgian press.

In 1830, fifteen years after the establishment of the new state, the Belgian’s revolted and William of Orange was unable to regain control. Groen was concerned the King wasn’t doing enough and tendered his resignation. A year later, the King would persuade him to take up a new role looking after the Royal Family Archives.

In 1832, Holland was struck by a cholera epidemic. His mother became ill and died, then Groen himself became very ill and there were periods when his wife Betsy, writing to De Clerqs and others feels that he might die. After his illness broke, he had a renewed sense of his need for a Christ centred faith and the need to be a witness for Christ. He briefly returned to the Cabinet and then began writing a sequence of books on the law, as well as returning to his role as the Royal Archivist.

In 1834, he saw the Afscheiding movement with sympathy and was scandalised by the strong response of the state who took reprisals against the ministers who joined it. While the reveil movement felt a little betrayed by the Afscheiding movement, the treatment of these fellow Christians left Groen feeling ‘terribly depressed’. The authorities broke up these secession services and damaged their property. They felt that the constitution required them to protect  ‘existing’ denominations and saw the seceders as fanatics who opposed progress. Groen wrote legal memos on his approach, arguing that the constitution sought to provide equality of religions. He questioned the legitimacy of a change to the form of subscription that allowed ministers to agree to the confession insofar as they conformed to Scripture (rather than because they did). He said that the Seceders were good Reformed people, members in good standing who should be dealt with sympathetically. He argued against billeting in their homes, as they posed no threat to public order and that, as they were of a Reformed persuasion, he felt they might be protected under the constitution. At the same time, he saw the secession as part of a broader revival movement and argued for the restoration of the church rather than dogmatic hair-splitting and petty bickering.

In 1836, he was appointed as an extraordinary member of the Council of State, which clearly reflects his strong personal relationship with King Willem I.   He became interested in public education and had a lot of contact with Victor Cousin, who was the French minister of education. They would visit Paris (including attending the church of F. Monod) and Geneva (where the Merles were now placed – indeed, he was a godparent to their son).

In 1837, his father died and they moved into his large house on the Korte Vijverberg, as well as buying a country house at Oud-Wassenaer (his father’s country house Vreugd en Rust had become the country estate of his sister). Clearly, his father left Willem and his two sisters very well provided for, as a result of investments in steamships and railroads, leaving over 2 million guilders.

In 1840, he would be shocked by the abdication of King Willem I to marry a Roman Catholic Belgian countess. All of this background plays into his work on the Dutch educational system. He didn’t like the legal position that spoke of teaching children ‘civic and Christian virtues’ arguing that this was an abstract philosophical form of Christian morality. The fear provoked by the Belgian revolt, meant that he wanted to use the education system to enhance the Protestantism of the North. Yet, this provoked an issue for Roman Catholic children and humanists who wanted a non-sectarian school system. In Nymegen, there were arguments where prayers were said by a Protestant teacher, then the Romanists would remove their children. This resulted in a state commission, where the Romanists argued for their right to establish their own private schools, the Protestant members argued for improving the existing common schools, and Groen sided with the Romanists, arguing for the right of Parents and the Church in the field of education. It is interesting that as a government minister making this argument, he has assumed but not articulated the role of the state. Where in Scotland, in the debates with Begg and others, you have church ministers arguing for a similar tri-party position that involves the state, the family and the church. Yet, some of the modern uses of Groen’s argument (and Kuyper’s thinking) continue to neglect the role of the state (as it wasn’t clearly articulated in their writing, because they were doing it as ministers of state). It is also interesting that Begg was trying to apply a Biblical Establishment principle idea to a practical problem of how to maintain an expensive Free Church school system, whereas Groen (and Kuyper) were interested in how to resolve a practical conflict with Roman Catholics and avoid Protestant Christianity falling into mere ethics.

In 1848, there was another seismic shift in Dutch politics that effectively transformed the country from an absolute monarchy (under the House of Orange) into a modern parliamentary democracy. The French revolution of 1848, had toppled King Louis Philippe, and fearing a similar sequence of events, William II invited Thorbecke (the leader of the liberal opposition) to draft a new constitution. This meant that the King no longer had direct responsibility for government policy and lost his executive powers, there was an elected house of representatives and there were new freedoms around religious assembly, the press and education. This change would lead to the Pillarization model that arose under Abraham Kuyper. The same model that sits at the heart of some of the responses in the modern schooling debate and is undergirding some of the responses from those supporting home-schooling, rather than the establishment principle thinking of the Free Church leaders in Scotland.

Groen wasn’t directly involved in the new constitution. In 1849, the King died and was succeeded by his son, whose wife was a good friend of Groen’s wife (Betsy). Groen became a member of Parliament and founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP). He argued that the 1848 revolution was based on Godless principles and argued against secular public education, instead wanting parents to be able to send their children to either Protestant, Catholic or indeed Humanist schools. In March 1853, the liberal government sought to improve relations with the Papacy. A Papal communication spoke of restoring the bishoprics in Holland (the land of the Calvinistic Heresy). This provoked the rise of anti-popery political movements and increased support for the ARP. Groen, however, didn’t think that Roman Catholic episcopates were unconstitutional, and he defended Dutch Catholics' rights to religious beliefs just as he had defended the Secession. When Protestants came out in Orange parades, Groen stayed at home, and he actively encouraged his ARP supporters to stay independent of the anti-popery movement. In 1856, he would be offered an official role in the government, which he declined, and he vociferously opposed the education bill of 1857, which sought public schools which promoted ‘Christian and Civic virtue’. He had tried and failed to secure a set of subsidies for private Christian schools, and he felt that the public system marginalised the rights of Reformed Christians. His view was that a common Christianity without clear Biblical teaching could never foster the power of true faith. His failure to affect the passage of this bill brought his resignation from Parliament; it led his friends to see him in a different light, and his critics felt he was always against everything and impossible to work with. This ended the influence of the reveil movement in Dutch politics; it ultimately gave more credence to the approach of the Secession movement and meant that the ARP would metamorphose under Kuyper into a mass movement of the common people.

In the mid 1860s he returned to Parliament, but would resign again faced with having to oppose on a conservative cabinet on the education question. By the late 1860s, he would preside over meetings that gave birth to the Christian Nation Primary School Education movement, which played a role in the opening of private ‘Bible Schools’. In 1869, Groen and Kuyper met for the first time. They were soon lobbying through the Christian National School Education movement for a change to the constitution, to achieve equal treatment for private and public schools and the removal of the word ‘Christian’ from the 1857 Education Act. Kuyper said, it was under the fine cloak of this word that the nation was being educated in an unchristian manner.

In 1870, the French declared war on Prussia due to conflict over the Spanish succession. The French army would surrender at Sedan but then refuse the peace terms, leading Bismarck to besiege Paris and impose his peace terms in Versailles. Many Dutch Protestants rejoiced in the German victory, but Groen would argue against Bismarck’s approach and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Groen’s friends struggled to understand him, especially as he had warned so clearly about the French danger. This was followed by a range of disagreements with Kuyper over the direction for the ARP party, which would finally result in his resignation from the party. By the mid-1870s he died, confident that he had defended the truth and was at peace with his Lord.