Ref Doc --1968 (continued)

 

(continued from yesterday)  

“Wait a minute," I said. “You’re saying that it’s wrong for preachers of the gospel to be part of political rallies–it’s wrong for Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead marches because he’s a preacher?"

It will come as a shock to many born after the sixties, but to much of perfectly white evangelical America at the time, Martin Luther King, Jr, wasn’t so much a Christian as he was a communist. I don’t doubt that Van Schouwen shared in that view.

But he didn’t bite back at my question. In his typical way, he merely repeated what he’d said, as if my not hearing it in the first place was due to some circuit breakdown in my brain. He put his finger down on his notes to help him remember where he was and then simply repeated what he’d said before as if that should be enough to satisfy my complaints. I was supposed to say, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." He likely translated my silence as the end of the conversation.

He was dead wrong about that too. I didn’t buy what he said–not for a minute. Still don’t. But unlike college students all over the U.S. at the time, I didn’t push him. I let it be. The class was humming along just fine, even if some seemed uninterested. I wasn’t going to make a scene. But to me, already affected by the counter-culture around me, Van Schouwen was simply convincing evidence of the fact that the CRC was a dinosaur. Van Schouwen was out to lunch.

Not only that, his views were typical of a mentality I'd seen too much of in 1968 at Dordt College, a mentality that had staged a demonstration in Sioux Center's Central Park, a demonstration meant to counter the prevailing counterculture. It was a rally where politically conservative kids and professors, while they didn't exactly support the war, held it up in prayer. Such a holy undertaking must have made parents proud. (Please excuse my rather typical late Sixties sarcasm). 

But there was no middle ground in 1968, and if you didn’t oppose the war, if you only prayed for its participants, you were, in effect, supporting the bloodshed nearly five hundred young Americans per week. For whatever to me, already deeply affected by the counterculture around me, Van Schouwen was simply convincing evidence of the fact that the CRC itself was a dinosaur. Van Schouwen was out to lunch.

Not only that, his views were typical of a mentality I’d seen too much of in 1968 at Dordt College, a mentality that had staged a demonstration in Sioux Center’s Central Park, a demonstration meant to counter the prevailing counterculture. It was a rally where politically conservative kids and professors, while they didn’t exactly support the war, held it up in prayer. Such a holy undertaking must have made parents proud. (Please excuse my rather characteristic late-sixties sarcasm.)

But there was no middle ground in 1968, and if you didn’t oppose the war, if you only prayed for its participants, you were, in effect, supporting the bloodshed, nearly five hundred young Americans per week. For whatever reasons--some of them good, some of them evil--I had been as embarrassed by the rally as I was by Van Schouwen's condemnation of Martin Luther King.

It’s unlikely that anyone else in that class remembers my single comment because what I’d said wasn’t marked by bitterness or anger. I didn’t scream out obscenities, or throw down the book and stomp out of the room. I didn’t try to lead the students in open rebellion with a raised fist. But something happened in my head that day that was likely far worse: I learned, sincerely, to doubt–not only Van Schouwen, but the whole hierarchal system he personified. What had begun, perhaps, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was continued by freedom marches throughout Mississippi and the rural South, was heightened by antiwar sentiment growing exponentially with the rising number of body bags. What all of this taught some of us was that there was something rotten at the heart of American society, something obviously missing from our fragrant and compelling American dreams. Van Schouwen’s response simply didn’t wash with me and what I’d learned in the streets

Many men and women from my generation can tell a similar story. Maybe theirs isn’t something that happened in a classroom or even on a college campus. It may have happened in an apartment, Janis Joplin belting out a song on the stereo or Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing a tribute to those massacred at Kent State. It may have struck them in a rice paddy. However and wherever it occurred, many of the kids of World War II veterans began to doubt the very tradition their fathers fought to preserve. The glorious way of patriotism and nationalism began to seem more like the way of lies.

It’s unlikely that anyone else in that class remembers my single comment because what I’d said wasn’t marked by bitterness or anger. I didn’t scream out obscenities, or throw down the book and stomp out of the room. I didn’t try to lead the students in open rebellion with a raised fist. But something happened in my head that day that was likely far worse: I learned, sincerely, to doubt–not only Van Schouwen, but the whole hierarchal system he personified. What had begun, perhaps, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was continued by freedom marches throughout Mississippi and the rural South, was heightened by antiwar sentiment growing exponentially with the rising number of body bags. What all of this taught some of us was that there was something rotten at the heart of American society, something obviously missing from our fragrant and compelling American dreams. Van Schouwen’s response simply didn’t wash with me and what I’d learned in the streets.

Many men and women from my generation can tell a similar story Maybe theirs isn’t something that happened in a classroom or even on a college campus. It may have happenal in an apartment, Janis Joplin belting out a song on the stereo or Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing a tribute to those massacred at Kent State. It may have struck them in a rice paddy. However and wherever it occurred, many of the kids of World War II veterans began to doubt the very tradition their fathers fought to preserve. The glorious way of patriotism and nationalism began to seem more like the way of lies.

Every institution of culture was suspect. When Professor Van Schouwen insisted that preachers stay off the streets, he lugged his generation, his patriotism, his way of life, all of Dordt College, and even his faith into question in my mind and soul. The whole business seemed a house of cards. I was confident that the whole thing–the “system," the “establishment"–would come Humpty-Dumptying down. The lie about Vietnam, about race relations, about Watergate extended even into the CRC, which I began to think of as similarly reactionary and NeanderthaI, totally out of touch with reality–not to mention, as I’ve said, flat wrong.

I tell that story not because I’m trying to explain myself but because it is emblematic, I think, of the time. In that basement classroom, the whole regimen of my parents’ faith not only came under scrutiny but was nearly undone. If I was learning something that far from the truth in a class titled “Reformed doctrine," then I couldn’t help but believe that Reformed doctrine itself was not only seriously flawed but completely outworn, dead in the water.

I was at a Christian college my parents hoped would not only preserve my faith but strengthen it with an education grounded in the truth of Scripture. What I heard created exactly the opposite effect; it made me distrust everything. Professor Van Schouwen and I couldn’t have been farther apart. It wasn’t a liberal professor who made me doubt; it was a conservative.

Thirty years have passed, time enough for history to do its work and reveal something of the theological and cultural forces that created the chasm separating the two of us that morning. I know now that Van Schouwen was as much a man of his generation as I was of mine. He'd been shaped and honed by his experience in the war. One of dozens of CRC pastors called to be "chaplains," Van Schouwen was a legitimate war hero.

~   *   ~   *   ~   *    ~

The story of Ref Doc, 1968, of Prof. Van Schouwen's use of a fundamental principle in Kuyperian theology to criticize MLK, as I read that story now, almost 20 years after writing it, is a story I haven't forgotten because that single classroom confrontation remains fundamental to understanding not just me, but the whole Boomer generation.

Now, eighty years after Van Schouwen left the military at the end of World War II, the man who wrote that story about him 27 years ago in a history of the church Van Schouwen loved, has been reading his diaries, his often day-by-day portrait of a man the soldiers called Chaplain Van, that man at war. 

I still think he was wrong about sphere sovereignty--and something of a racist with respect to Dr. King, whose death happened that year. I can't help thinking today, so many years later, that in my youthful rebellion, I was doing the right thing--opposing the Vietnam war and supporting MLK.

But I've been reading the stories of a man I once thought far, far out of touch. That man is someone I'd like to bring up to the front of this blog's classroom, not to hear him lecture but to hear him tell his own unforgettable stories.  

Had I known them, I might better have known him.

I'm not repenting, but I am,  in a way, trying to even the score.