I'm starting with a Van Schouwen story written 15 years ago for a chapter on "The Sixties." First two installments are old material, but relevant to what I'm coming to see. This day's post, as well as tomorrow's, reveals something of my relationship in the Sixties with Van Schouwen.
In a history of the Christian Reformed Church (1998), Our Family Album: the Unfinished Story of the CRC, I wrote this story from my college years to begin to explain what happened back then, during those years I grew up.
Here's the story I wrote:
I’m not sure if the founders of Dordt College studied demographics before they broke ground for a new Reformed college in northwest Iowa, but my guess is that they did. After all, a CRC group in south-suburban Chicago bought an old golf course and turned it into Trinity Christian College at the very same time. What both parties likely saw in the postwar years was what everyone else who looked at the North American populace couldn’t miss–a swarm of sheer numbers who would tax everything from infrastructures to educational institutions. Once World War II ended, the U.S. and Canada had reason to celebrate. Their booming economies verified what the war itself had already proven–we were numero uno. It was time to settle back, have families, and live the good life of peace and prosperity.
If part of the motivation for new CRC colleges was the swarm of young people soon to be applying, then the Dordt College planners didn’t read the numbers as accurately as they should have. Even more students came to the new college than its planners had envisioned. But then, no one really guessed at the effects this huge "boomer" generation would create.
Soon enough the new Iowa college was short of room. The story of the sixties I want to tell takes place in a room no one assumed would ever be a classroom, a basement room of a thirteen-year-old college. It was the lunch room when the college opened in 1955. A decade later, it still seemed more fit for a cafeteria. Its ceiling hung very low, given its size–big enough for fifty or sixty student desks–and foundational pillars arose everywhere, often blocking views.
I’m not sure if the founders of Dordt College studied demographics before they broke ground for a new Reformed college in northwest Iowa, but my guess is that they did. After all, a CRC group in south-suburban Chicago bought an old golf course and turned it into Trinity Christian College at the very same time. What both parties likely saw in the postwar years was what everyone else who looked at the North American populace couldn’t miss–a swarm of sheer numbers who would tax everything from infrastructures to educational institutions. Once World War II ended, the U.S. and Canada had reason to celebrate. Their booming economies verified what the war itself had already proven–we were numero uno. It was time to settle back, have families, and live the good life of peace and prosperity.
If part of the motivation for new CRC colleges was the swarm of young people soon to be applying, then the Dordt College planners didn’t read the numbers as accurately as they should have. Even more students came to the new college than its planners had envisioned. But then, no one really guessed at the effects this huge "boomer" generation would create.
Soon enough the new Iowa college was short of room. The story of the sixties I want to tell takes place in a room no one assumed would ever be a classroom, a basement room of a thirteen-year-old college. It was the lunch room when the college opened in 1955. A decade later, it still seemed more fit for a cafeteria. Its ceiling hung very low, given its size–big enough for fifty or sixty student desks–and foundational pillars arose everywhere, often blocking views.
Professor Cornelius Van Schouwen was teaching a class in Reformed doctrine in that basement room–a class that likely doesn’t even exist in the catalogs of any of the five CRC-related colleges today. Van Schouwen’s class was, to be truthful, less than mesmerizing; but it’s helpful to remember that back then no one assumed education had to be fun. The great attraction of the curriculum, Reformed people thought, was teachers who were soundly biblical, not charming or charismatic. It helped if they were good teachers, but we were far more “confessional" ourselves in the fifties and early sixties; what really mattered was our perception of biblical truth. That someone was teaching Reformed doctrine was more important, perhaps, than that it was done engagingly.
Students understood that arrangement of priorities. Pedagogy was not all that important at the beginning of the television age. While most students would have preferred a more challenging presentation of the material, no one complained–it wasn’t our place to, after all. We didn’t matter as much as the material we were learning did. It was a privilege to go to college, after all. For many of us, higher education was less the fulfillment of our own aspirations than it was the realization of the dreams of our parents.
Students understood that arrangement of priorities. Pedagogy was not all that important at the beginning of the television age. While most students would have preferred a more challenging presentation of the material, no one complained–it wasn’t our place to, after all. We didn’t matter as much as the material we were learning did. It was a privilege to go to college, after all. For many of us, higher education was less the fulfillment of our own aspirations than it was the realization of the dreams of our parents.
We were legion, and we were pampered. The Depression was a memorable incubator, as was the war our parents had fought. Children of my generation were raised in a different world than the one our parents were raised in, a world in which the greatest glories, the greatest joys, the greatest sorrows and tragedies took place not on battlefields but in high school gymnasiums. We marked the epochs of our lives by proms and banquets, by the summer we broke up with Angie or Fred or Tami. We’d suffered no dust bowls. We were raised by our parents, but we weren’t like them.
Our story was only in its opening chapters. In that basement theology room, a young woman who sat beside me wrote daily letters to her boyfriend in Vietnam. She told me the class was a snap; she’d graduated from a Christian high school, she said, where she’d already heard most of Van Schouwen’s lectures. I was a public high school graduate, and the class wasn’t that easy for me. To be honest, it wasn’t that interesting either. What did I care, after all, about Reformed doctrine? I was more interested in my girlfriend–and sports.
But what happened in that class one day has stayed in my memory longer than any other classroom discussion from my college years. It was 1968, and the young woman next to me wasn’t the only girl with a boyfriend in 'Nam. There were few, if any, African Americans at Dordt that year, but unless your head was poked deeply into the sand, you couldn’t help but notice smoke rising from rioting inner cities all over the country. “The times, they were a’changin’," even in a place as remote as Sioux Center, Iowa.
Van Schouwen was lecturing on sphere sovereignty, a principle he lifted directly from Kuyperian theology. I wouldn’t have known that then, and I wouldn't have cared either. Today, the whole business is fascinating to me.
He said that the place, the "sphere," of the preacher was the pulpit–and only the pulpit. I wish I could quote him, but I can’t, and now he's gone. A preacher had a place in his sphere, in the pulpit, but nowhere else, that’s what he insisted in that sometimes garbled and tinny voice of his. He said it was wrong for preachers to take to the streets, to lead marches for civil rights or protests against the war in Vietnam. He said the preacher was called to open the Word of the Lord in the visible church, to hold forth with the gospel, to practice humility and love and administer the sacraments. He said preachers who moved out of their sphere were violating something ordained by God. He said preachers who marched in Selma or Washington or on college campuses throughout: America, those who protested government policies concerning the war in Vietnam. were preachers who’d abandoned thee role and, quite flatly, done wrong in leaving their "sphere," the place the Lord intended them to operate.
I don’t remember what the girl beside me did at that point, whether she put down her pen or even looked up; I wasn't really concerned about what the others did, but what Professor Van Schouwen said struck a very tender nerve. In fact, the word that came to mind at that point can't be written in this book, even though it refers to a substance that filled cattle yards in every direction around that classroom. I was hardly militant, but I’d already seen enough of life to know that that outrageous idea being sold to dutiful young Reformed students copiously noting every word seemed flat wrong. To me, what motivated the professor’s saying it was not God’s Word but plain old cultural politics. The man was using God to cover his own political views. Besides that, he was wrong.
But what happened in that class one day has stayed in my memory longer than any other classroom discussion from my college years. It was 1968, and the young woman next to me wasn’t the only girl with a boyfriend in 'Nam. There were few, if any, African Americans at Dordt that year, but unless your head was poked deeply into the sand, you couldn’t help but notice smoke rising from rioting inner cities all over the country. “The times, they were a’changin’," even in a place as remote as Sioux Center, Iowa.
Van Schouwen was lecturing on sphere sovereignty, a principle he lifted directly from Kuyperian theology. I wouldn’t have known that then, and I wouldn't have cared either. Today, the whole business is fascinating to me.
He said that the place, the "sphere," of the preacher was the pulpit–and only the pulpit. I wish I could quote him, but I can’t, and now he's gone. A preacher had a place in his sphere, in the pulpit, but nowhere else, that’s what he insisted in that sometimes garbled and tinny voice of his. He said it was wrong for preachers to take to the streets, to lead marches for civil rights or protests against the war in Vietnam. He said the preacher was called to open the Word of the Lord in the visible church, to hold forth with the gospel, to practice humility and love and administer the sacraments. He said preachers who moved out of their sphere were violating something ordained by God. He said preachers who marched in Selma or Washington or on college campuses throughout: America, those who protested government policies concerning the war in Vietnam. were preachers who’d abandoned thee role and, quite flatly, done wrong in leaving their "sphere," the place the Lord intended them to operate.
I don’t remember what the girl beside me did at that point, whether she put down her pen or even looked up; I wasn't really concerned about what the others did, but what Professor Van Schouwen said struck a very tender nerve. In fact, the word that came to mind at that point can't be written in this book, even though it refers to a substance that filled cattle yards in every direction around that classroom. I was hardly militant, but I’d already seen enough of life to know that that outrageous idea being sold to dutiful young Reformed students copiously noting every word seemed flat wrong. To me, what motivated the professor’s saying it was not God’s Word but plain old cultural politics. The man was using God to cover his own political views. Besides that, he was wrong.
_____________________
Tomorrow: Speaking up.
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