Prof. K. Runia. Trowel & Sword. August 1966
Preamble: “One of the problems of our time is that so many people have so little interest in history”. So wrote Klaas Runia in this first of two articles in 1966 (Paragraph 3). He went on to explain why this was regrettable 60 years ago, and by extension, still is today. At this point you, the reader, could agree that you have little interest in history, switch off, and read no further. OR, your curiosity could get the better of you and you could read on to see what he actually had to say. Read through to the end and you will see how he begins to tie it in with the situation here in Australia – why revival has not been a major factor in the history of evangelism in this country.
Lessons From The Nineteenth Century (I)
In recent weeks I have been reading two books, both dealing with the nineteenth century. I believe that we people of the middle of the twentieth century often have the feeling that we are far removed from the nineteenth century; so far that it almost seems to be a strange age. In a way this is true. Much has happened in these last sixty years and much has changed. Two world wars have left their deep scars on our world. In many ways our world has become and is increasingly becoming ‘smaller’. Technically we have gone through various revolutions and we have become so used to them that we hardly realise that they are still going on before our eyes. There is much dissatisfaction with old traditional patterns and our generation is all the time seeking for new forms (see what is going on in art, music, literature, etc.). In other words, our century can be characterised by the word ‘dynamical’. Compared with this the nineteenth century seems to have been a sleeping’ century. Was it not the age of Victorianism, that is, of respectable traditionalism and traditional respectability?
Yet we should not make the mistake of losing sight of the proper historical perspective. Really, the nineteenth century was not as static as we – and especially the young people among us – may sometimes feel inclined to think. The great church historian K.S. Latourette has called it ‘The Great Century’ in the history of the Christian Church. But great periods in the history of the church never come on their own. They are always paralleled by greatness and activity in the secular world (cf. the Reformation period). This is also true of the nineteenth century. On the cover of one of the books I read: “Expansion was the order of the day in all human activity – industry, exploration, invention and trade. In these ever-widening horizons the Church of Christ shared until the Good News had spread, in the familiar words of the hymn, ‘from pole to pole'”.
One of the problems of our time is that so many people have so little interest in history. This is regrettable for several reasons. For one thing, we cannot really understand our own day, if we do not know how our present situation has come about. For another thing, we forget to learn the lessons of the past and are in danger of making mistakes, which could easily have been avoided. The nineteenth century in particular is very instructive for us as members of the Church. For however much may have changed, many ecclesiastical problems of today are exactly the same as those of last century. This is the reason why I draw your attention to these books.
“The Miracle Of The Nineteenth Century”
Under this title Mr. H. Algra (historian, editor of a Christian daily newspaper, senator) has written a most interesting book on the history of the church in the Netherlands. (Het wonder der negentiende eeuw, I. Wever, 350pp., with many pictures, f.19.50). The subtitle explains the word ‘miracle’ in the main title: “Of Free Churches and Small People’ (‘kleine luden’). Mr. Algra is a born narrator (he was my own history teacher in high school) and by his style and the many unknown details and anecdotes he captivates the attention of the reader from the beginning to the end.
In the first chapter he briefly describes the background: the French Revolution.
The spirit of this Revolution also worked in the church and manifested itself particularly in opposition to the confessions, especially the Canons of Dort. When in 1818 the Rev. N. Schotsman wrote a booklet in praise of the Synod of Dort, he was simply ridiculed by the leaders of the church. In those days (especially after the imposition of a new form of church government by King William I in 1816) modernist theologians were dominating both the courts of the church and the theological faculties of the universities. The situation was really pitch-dark. Humanly speaking there was no future for the Gospel in the church.To be sure, there were still many simple people who wholeheartedly accepted the Bible and lived by this Bible. Their spiritual food they received largely from the ‘old writers’ of the 17th and 18th centuries, who themselves were strongly influenced by Puritanism (Mr. Algra has a very appreciative chapter on the Puritans!), but gradually these people drifted away from the official church and met in small groups. Furthermore, there were no leaders capable of taking up the battle against the modern trends. Indeed, humanly speaking there was no future for the church.
But then we see the miracle of God’s grace and power: a revival takes place. It is still known by the French word for revival: ‘the Reveil’, Starting with a small Bible study group in Geneva, led by a Scotchman, Robert Haldane, elder in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, several young men are converted (Cesar Malan, Adolphe Monod, Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigne) and through their evangelistic preaching the revival spread throughout Western Europe. In Holland it deeply influenced such men as Groen Van Prinsterer, Da Costa, Capadose, De Clerg, and others. All these men were deeply concerned with the sorry state of the church and openly discussed its problems, in particular also the problem that the church had deviated from its confessions. But they refused to go any further. When the first secession took place in 1836 (the soc. ‘Afscheiding) under the leadership of De Cock, Scholte and others, the men of the Reveil did not join them.
In his description of these well known events Mr. Algra gives many interesting details. Did you know, for example, that the six ministers who were the leaders of the first secession, were all under the age of thirty-five? De Cock was 34, Scholte 30, Meerburg 29, Van Velzen 25, Brummelkamp and Van Raalte both 24! Such facts make you think and you cannot help wondering whether in the present situation we should not expect reformation rather from the younger men than from the older evangelical leaders in the larger denominations. Sometimes it looks as if the older men are so tired, or so used to the policy of compromise, that they no longer have the strength to take the ‘risks’ involved in the reformation of the church.
Mr. Algra then goes on to describe the life of the secession church. He draws interesting parallels with what happened in England and Scotland (see the chapter: The Chapel and Democracy. He also shows how from the secession in the Netherlands new churches came into existence in other countries (the Christian Reformed Church in the U.S.A., the Soc.Dopper-church in South Africa). For due to the persecutions by the government many people of the secession church sought a new liberty of religion and worship in other countries. The story of their emigration is an epos in itself. We also read the story of their many quarrels! The people who joined the secession movement had rather different backgrounds and it took many years before they all had been moulded into one Reformed pattern. Reading this part of the book one cannot help thinking of our own situation here in Australia and New Zealand. In our on churches too we have people of many different backgrounds. Our church members come from different churches in the Netherlands, while gradually more Australians and New Zealanders join our churches too. Among our ministers we have the same situation. At first they came from the Gereformeerde Kerken in the Netherlands. Soon several Christian Reformed ministers came to help us on a five year ‘loan’-basis. Then the first graduates of the College entered into the ministry. In the article of the Rev. K.V. Warren in this same issue we read that 17 of the 21 graduates of our College serve in our churches. Finally we have several ministers from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one from the Christelijk Gereförmeerde Kerk in the Netherlands, one from the Reformed Church of South Africa and two who have come over from the Presbyterian Church. Is it any wonder that at times there are tensions, misunderstandings, different views? We should rather call it amazing that there are not more differences! At the same time we should realise that it may take years before we have overcome them all. Perhaps even this is expecting too much. In a living church there will always be differences of opinion. As long as they are all within the framework of our Reformed faith, there is no cause for anxiety. As long as no single group or party tries to impose its own view upon the others, there will be no harm and we can still be a strong, living church with a clear message for the world of today.
In the second half of the book we see how a new secession is gradually developing under the leadership of Dr. Abraham Kuyper. After the first secession, and in spite of it, modernism had increased in the old church and the modernists became bolder all the time. There were still many evangelical ministers, but most of them were inclined to accept compromise as the only solution of the ecclesiastical problems for the time being. In the meantime there was still a strong undercurrent of truly Calvinistic conviction among many of the ‘small people’ (kleine luyden’). The modernists looked down upon them with contempt. The compromising conservatives did not realise their sorry plight. Dr. Kuyper, however, who personally had rediscovered the glory of the Reformed faith through the influence of one of these ‘small people’ in his first congregation (Pietje Baltus), became their leader. One of the most amazing facts is that he managed to convince these ‘small people’, who hardly knew what a university was and who generally were very suspicious of higher learning (was it not THE cause of all the trouble in the church?), of the need of a university on a Reformed basis. Thus in 1880 the Free University was established in Amsterdam. The struggle within the church was of no avail and so in 1886 a second secession took place, the soc.Doleantie. In the last chapter of his book Mr. Algra tells us how after six years the two secession churches were united into the ‘Gereformeerde Kerken of the Netherlands. This happened in 1892. This in itself was a miracle.There were many differences. What is much worse, there were deep suspicions in some respects. Yet these men had the faith and the courage to get over their differences, to lay aside their suspicions and to become one. Significantly this last chapter is called: ‘More than a feast’!
‘The Light Of The Nations’
This is the title of the second book I have referred to and it has been written by Dr. J. Edwin Orr. Again the sub-title explains the main title: ‘Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century’. (Pub. by The Paternoster Press, 302pp. $A 4.25). This book is of a somewhat different nature from the other. The author is a chronicler rather than a narrator. At times it becomes a rather tedious enumeration of facts and names. And yet this book too makes wonderful reading. Again we see that the nineteenth century is ‘The Great Century in the history of the church. We see the Spirit of God moving mightily over the face of the whole earth.
Again the beginning of the century is pictured in dark colours.The title of the second chapter reads: “Dark before the dawn’. Both in Britain and the United States Deism and Scepticism were the leading forces. Of the United States Dr. Orr writes: “Dark days clouded the end of the eighteenth century. Its middle fifty years had been a jubilee of expansion of the Church throughout American territory, but the final twenty-five years were as distressing as the first twenty-five”. In Northern Ireland there was an upsurge of Arianism among Irish Presbyterians. Before the end of the eighteenth century the religious life of Scotland showed a marked decline. Not only Arianism and Deism wrought a deadening work, but even greater havoc was wrought by lay-patronage, in which a patron without spiritual insight was free to inflict an unspiritual minister upon a church. In England itself it was all Deism and Scepticism, especially among the educated people. “It was said that infidelity, like hair-powder for wigs, could be worn only by the aristocracy. The middle classes were actively or passively orthodox, the lower classes largely ignorant”.
At the close of this chapter Dr. Orr writes: “Evangelical Christians knew that they faced defeat. They began to pray the prayers of desperate men”. And God is still a God who hears and answers prayers. Great things began to happen. Often they started in a very small way. To mention one example. “In Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (USA), a few students, without one professing Christian among them, attempted to conduct a prayer meeting, of which one of the novices reported: ‘We tried to pray, but such prayer I never heard the like of. We tried to sing, but it was in the most suppressed manner, for we feared the other students’. The ungodly students created a disturbance, and the President of the College came to investigate. He rebuked the rowdies and invited the intercessors to his study for prayer. Within a short space of time, more than half the number of students professed conversion in a movement which stirred the local churches too”.
This is only one simple example of what happened in one college. But similar things happened everywhere and soon new activities broke out on all sides. The most striking thing in the first quarter of the nineteenth century is the fact that almost simultaneously all over the world new missionary societies are being established Numerous young men and women, afire for the Lord, go out into the world to preach the glorious Gospel of Christ. Most unexpectedly the nineteenth century becomes the great century of missions. Hence the title of the book: ‘The Light of the Nations’.
But there is much more.This century also becomes the century of the Second Great Awakening. Again and again, and in all different parts of the world, revivals take place: In America, in Ireland, in Scotland, in Wales, in England, but also in Europe: In the Scandinavian countries, in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in the Netherlands.
One of the striking exceptions to this general pattern was – Australia! Dr. Orr writes: “A most significant factor in the evangelising of Australia was the comparative absence of the revival tradition. There are few records of any spiritual awakenings among the inhabitants”. He further mentions two reasons. The first was that the convicts, who had often been sent to the colony for trifling offences, were embittered and resented any compulsory religion instituted by the authorities. The second was the fact that in the Anglican ministry the evangelicals were evenly matched by the high church ministers and that the Presbyterians were in discord because of what happened in Scotland in the Disruption. Personally I cannot find these reasons very convincing. I wonder whether we should not seek the cause in the fact that in Australia there was not enough fervour and prayer. This, to me, seems to be more in accordance with the pattern of the revivals.
Unfortunately I have to break off at this point. We intend to continue this article in the next issue.
K. RUNIA
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