Going Dutch in the Modern Age

John Halsey Wood, Jr. Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham
Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands.
New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, x + 235pp. $74.00

In 1848, the Dutch constitution
separated the church from the state. In 1886, a disillusioned but determined
Abraham Kuyper, armed with theology, locksmiths and lawyers, was suspended from
the ministry of the Netherlands Reformed Church and led a secession out of it.
In 1892, the secessionists’ churches joined the Christian Reformed Church in
the Netherlands, which had seceded in 1834. Within less than a decade of the
union, Kuyper, founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, would become Prime
Minister of the Netherlands. Against the ecclesiastical background of his life
and times, John Halsey Wood has written a volume examining Abraham Kuyper’s
ecclesiology, a key concern which lay behind and drove his thought as a whole.

Wood describes dilemmas, tensions
and evolution in Kuyper’s ecclesiology over the years. As a young pastor, with
little time, initially, for the institutional church, he came to appreciate the
institution. As he matured and changed, so did his ecclesiology, running its
incarnational and sacramental course to its conclusion in a form of believers’
church. What had to be adjusted and readjusted as he and his circumstances
developed was the connection between the church as organism and the church as
institution. Here, Kuyper began to strike out in a fresh ecclesiological
direction and came to conceive of the church as a visible organism, a concept
which integrated the organic and the institutional. This novelty found
published expression in the 1883 Tract on
the Reformation of the Churches. If the essence of the church is its
organic reality, it is not invisible: a gathering ‘possesses the essence of the
church’ and the gathering of believers ‘is a manifestation of the essence of
the church…This visible gathering of the essence of the church is the same as
the visible organism’ (p. 88). Institution does not belong to essence, but the
church nevertheless requires an institutional dimension, so the institution is
‘necessary but contingent’ or ‘necessary but not essential to the church’ (p.
89). That is not the end of the theological story. The move from a sacramental
to a believers’ church ecclesiology and departure from the national (albeit
disestablished) church forced Kuyper to think through the question of the church
as a voluntary organization and this involved rethinking the nature of baptism.
Eventually, Kuyper, as a Reformed paedobapist, concluded in favour of the
presumptive regeneration of infants.

After showing the connection
between these theological moves and his particular changing circumstances, Wood
proceeds to widen out the account and track the relation of ecclesiological
development to Kuyper the revolutionary and Kuyper the public theologian. If
anyone seemed set against the French Revolution, it was brother Abraham, yet
there were those who accused him of separating church and nation, ascribing ecclesiastical
and social power to the people in a way that conceded dangerous ground to the
philosophy of R/revolution. In particular, Kuyper was breaking with Calvinism
in theologically permitting a plurality of churches. However, Kuyper knew that
the times were new and was convinced that he was consistently applying the
Calvinist principles pertaining to freedom of conscience and church-state
relationships to the dramatically changed social and political circumstances of
his own day. This requires not the least compromise on the principle of the
universal lordship of Jesus Christ or public-theological concern of the
churches over the whole area of human endeavour; it just means that the claims
of Christ must be heard and heeded without either state or church assuming
social power over all the spheres of life.

This is a good, scholarly,
instructive volume, equally a pleasure and an edification to read. Kuyper’s
thought is plausibly described; the relative attention given to the various
contexts of his work – immediate (national); deep (Dutch-historical) and broad
(nineteenth-century European) – is proportionate to the author’s concerns. The
secondary literature is admirably treated, whether in account, agreement or
demurral. The concluding chapter not only shows very clearly how ecclesiology
and the public theology for which Kuyper is so well-known outside the
Netherlands are integrated, but also rightly states that his thinking about ‘common
grace’ and ‘antithesis’ was integrated. ‘The purpose of common grace was not to
moderate the antithesis. The antithesis and common grace depended on each
other. Kuyper would not have needed a theology of common grace if he had not
had a theology of the antithesis’ (p. 163). This chapter is a satisfying conclusion
to a satisfying volume whose occasional repetitiveness scarcely detracts from
the quality of the whole.

Aside from the question of
whether Wood accurately depicts the development of Kuyper’s thought against its
historical background – and he argues his case well – it seems to me that the
principal question which arises is whether Wood too readily assumes that
tensions in ecclesiology which arose on account of historical circumstance and
in Kuyper’s own thinking are theologically intrinsic in ecclesiology. Take the
question of baptism as the author sets it up at the beginning of the fifth
chapter (pp. 114-17). Supposing I hold that infants are members of the covenant
community of the church and that baptism is the mode of initiation into that
community; ergo, infants are the proper subjects of baptism. I raise them to
love and follow the Lord their God in their increasingly independent lives.
Then I shall detect not even prima facie
conflict between paedobaptism and ‘active personal spirituality’ or necessary
connection between paedobaptism and national solidarity. Indeed, I shall see no
difficulty in thinking of the church as a voluntary gathering in an appropriate
sense when pitted against an objective institutional, national church. It is
true that infants are not voluntarily inside the church, but they are not
voluntarily outside it either – infants are not voluntarily anything. So when
Wood talks of Kuyper’s ‘socio-theological dilemma’ in this connection, we
should either say that the dilemma is more social than theological or we should
say that it is theological within Kuyper’s terms of reference but not
‘intrinsically’ theological. I should apply this consideration to the way in
which theological tensions in ecclesiology are viewed throughout this volume,
at least since the introduction of Troeltsch in the first chapter.

In fact, is it the excessive
influence of Troeltsch’s ‘church-sect’ distinction that is responsible for  the way Wood sets things up? Wood is careful
in his handling of Troeltsch and particularly careful not to endorse the
typology as Troeltsch advances it. Nevertheless, he contends that it is
fruitful for exploring Kuyper. In principle, that is fair enough. However, I
wonder if Troeltsch exerts too much influence – or the wrong kind of influence
– in practice. Troeltsch’s position is described like this: the objective
institutional character of the church, which is its essence, means that ‘[o]ne
is born and baptized into the church apart from any voluntary decision, and in
that respect is has a compulsory character and requires relatively little by
way of inward commitment or holiness’ (p. 31). Our first thought should be to
reject completely the theological, whatever may be said about the historical, connection
between the non-voluntary nature of infant membership of the church and the
paucity of spiritual requirement. Actually, in the second volume of The Social Teaching of the Christian
Churches, Troeltsch himself admitted that historical Calvinism broke down
the church-sect distinction with the attendant polarities which he had
described. It seems to me that, had Wood given more attention to this and
pressed the question of whether Troeltsch credits Calvinism with sufficient
coherence on this point, he might have re-described the theological dimension
of the ecclesiological tensions which Kuyper experienced. I raise this as a
question; the author may have a ready answer.

Finally, one must register
disappointment at the editorial standards of the Oxford University Press. We
have ‘aid’ for ‘aide’, ‘shear’ for ‘sheer’, ‘principle’ for ‘principal’,
‘Apostle’s’ for ‘Apostles’ ‘ along with ‘minutia’, ‘indispensible’ and
‘plurformity’. Troeltsch appears far more often in the text than he does in the
index; less significant, but still significant, figures like Bonhoeffer and
Stephen Sykes do not even make it into the index. In light of the preceding
sentences, I presume that the first sentence of the second paragraph on p. 70
should read: ‘Christians’ relationship to Christ was dependent on their
relationship to the church, according to Kuyper’, although perhaps what the
sentence needs is clarification rather than reformulation. Overall, this is a
pity; this book and this author deserve better.

Stephen N Williams is Professor of Systematic Theology and church
history at Union Theological College in Belfast.