My Grandpa Dirkse carried his Christian faith in a manner that I've come to believe was, in practice, substantially different from his wife and my Schaap grandparents, yet not unique to him. Doctrinal differences may lie somewhere beneath their individual expressions of faith, but the differences between them had little to do with catechism and more to do, perhaps, with personality.
All of them embraced the standard orthodoxy, that since our first parents' crashing defeat and their post-haste exile from God's garden, we have all been dragged into the wake of that Fall. Held down by our sin, we are walled out of God's flowering grace. On our own, our cause is hopeless. We can be brought back to the garden of God's love only by way of God himself carrying us back, the way a parent carries a child to the curb of a busy street. That's precisely what God has done in Christ Jesus.
The story my family believed--and still does--is the gospel's basic plot line: our sin and God's grace; we messed up but Christ's blood cleans up after; we dropped the ball but God picks it up and us with it and carries us all the way across the goal.
The gospel most familiar to Dutch Reformed congregations in the Netherlands in the early 1800s, a gospel heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, took a bit of different tack. The message was “onward and upward.” The University of Groningen trained young preachers in a theology of human potential. Instead of discussing slimy old sin and human filth, instead of remedying our sad state with grace so brilliant as to be blinding, the lesson taught was one of human dignity—"I'm okay, you're okay. Think positively. Pull your life together and dream dreams, see visions. You can do it.” Human potential.
Such doctrines satisfied and even energized many of those whose self-image generally slummed around in darkness. Lots of human beings--Christians and non-Christians alike--needed to raise their chins. But when such moral lessons teach that getting on top of the blues is a matter of self-will alone, a matter of looking into the mirror and simply determining to see something good and nice and lovely, then the gospel truth of our sin and Christ's redemption, my people believed, was vividly short-circuited.
To Enlightenment minds, Christ wasn't necessarily outside the process; he might even have played a role. Look what Jesus did, after all--he was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows. Yet he took upon himself the burden of our sin and achieved a victory that marked him with greatness throughout the centuries. Enlightenment preachers liked to make the point that Christ is a model. A Savior? Well, after a fashion. But we find real joy when we learn to love ourselves.
By the late 1820s this brand of Christianity, built on confidence in the resilient human spirit, had affected parishes across the Dutch countryside. The old confessions and their piety were absent from seminary curriculums and not to be heard from pulpits. Preachers stirred their congregations with eloquent calls to be decent, to be nice; they used the Bible as a sourcebook for morals, a godly Aesop’s fables. Virtue was the end, really, of religion. In form and style, worship was largely unchanged--the same liturgy chugged along as if what it carried didn't differ substantially from the old cargo. What had been dropped along the way, however, was the message of the reality of sin and, therefore, because the reality of sin is a prerequisite to forgiveness, the full-bodied message of grace.
But in the shadows of those Dutch churches where dominies held forth on the dignity of the human character, lesser folks--people of lower social standing--were gathering in farmhouses for worship of a whole different species. In those homes and barns, Christians recovered the dynamic emotional warmth of the gospel, something they felt missing entirely from their churches. House churches (or "conventicles," as they are known), furnished with the old doctrines from Heidelberg and Synod of Dort, sheltered a piety that was a stranger to what many of them called the “Groninger preaching" of the Enlightenment.
The gospel most familiar to Dutch Reformed congregations in the Netherlands in the early 1800s, a gospel heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, took a bit of different tack. The message was “onward and upward.” The University of Groningen trained young preachers in a theology of human potential. Instead of discussing slimy old sin and human filth, instead of remedying our sad state with grace so brilliant as to be blinding, the lesson taught was one of human dignity—"I'm okay, you're okay. Think positively. Pull your life together and dream dreams, see visions. You can do it.” Human potential.
Such doctrines satisfied and even energized many of those whose self-image generally slummed around in darkness. Lots of human beings--Christians and non-Christians alike--needed to raise their chins. But when such moral lessons teach that getting on top of the blues is a matter of self-will alone, a matter of looking into the mirror and simply determining to see something good and nice and lovely, then the gospel truth of our sin and Christ's redemption, my people believed, was vividly short-circuited.
To Enlightenment minds, Christ wasn't necessarily outside the process; he might even have played a role. Look what Jesus did, after all--he was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows. Yet he took upon himself the burden of our sin and achieved a victory that marked him with greatness throughout the centuries. Enlightenment preachers liked to make the point that Christ is a model. A Savior? Well, after a fashion. But we find real joy when we learn to love ourselves.
By the late 1820s this brand of Christianity, built on confidence in the resilient human spirit, had affected parishes across the Dutch countryside. The old confessions and their piety were absent from seminary curriculums and not to be heard from pulpits. Preachers stirred their congregations with eloquent calls to be decent, to be nice; they used the Bible as a sourcebook for morals, a godly Aesop’s fables. Virtue was the end, really, of religion. In form and style, worship was largely unchanged--the same liturgy chugged along as if what it carried didn't differ substantially from the old cargo. What had been dropped along the way, however, was the message of the reality of sin and, therefore, because the reality of sin is a prerequisite to forgiveness, the full-bodied message of grace.
But in the shadows of those Dutch churches where dominies held forth on the dignity of the human character, lesser folks--people of lower social standing--were gathering in farmhouses for worship of a whole different species. In those homes and barns, Christians recovered the dynamic emotional warmth of the gospel, something they felt missing entirely from their churches. House churches (or "conventicles," as they are known), furnished with the old doctrines from Heidelberg and Synod of Dort, sheltered a piety that was a stranger to what many of them called the “Groninger preaching" of the Enlightenment.
Grandpa Dirkse died one night of a heart attack, when I was a boy, just ten years old. I remember the night because I'd stopped at his house and was shooed away because, I discovered later, my uncle didn't want me around. His father was dying. I can't help but believe that Grandpa Dirkse practiced a kind of Christian faith that often emerged from the hothouse of the conventicle tradition.
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More on the conventicle tradition tomorrow.
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