Prof. John C. VanderStelt

The story goes that when the Hulsts came to Dordt College in the early Sixties, they couldn't help be awed by the tight-corset of pietism then in power, a Sabbatarianism, for instance, drawn so tight that on Saturday nights dorm counselors stuck Scotch tape over the coin slots on the Coke machines. Sounds cartoonish, but it wasn't.

By the time I arrived a few years later, the behavioral codes hadn't loosened a whole lot. I remember getting sent back to the dorm by the Dean for wearing jeans to supper. No TV--no football--on Sunday. Women had a curfew--10:30. Men never did. The powers-that-be determined that herding the mares into the corral would leave the stallions with nothing to do. 

For women, slacks were questionable, too "whatever" for the formality of class--except when the temperature, as announced on college radio(!), was -10 degrees below zero, in which case allowances could be made, all of this in spite of the fact that in the mid-Sixties, short skirts flirting above the knees were all the rage. 

No dancing, of course. Definitely, no firewater. An non-traditional student, coming up on thirty years old, already hairless, was seen by a constituent drinking a glass of wine with his dinner at a steak house a half hour away from campus. That constituent reported the transgression to the Dean, who called the man's parents to report their son's offence. The word was, that student's immigrant father had to be told four or five times what all the hoopla was about. When he put down the phone, he still didn't understand.

To live among the Dutch-Americans in northwest Iowa in the early Sixties was to be herded down rigorous paths of righteousness. To be comfortably Dutch Reformed meant adopting codes that prescribed the means-to-grace in strict detail.

When Rev. John C. Vander Stelt began teach philosophy at Dordt College, he was, to be sure, more Dutch than almost anyone in Siouxland. Born and raised and educated in the Netherlands, he'd come to Canada too late to shake the brogue he'd carry for the rest of his years. His childhood--as others like him--was marked by the desperation the German occupation of the Netherlands created for so families, and a moral framework created by a world that justified armed resistance, even murder. Good Christians in the Resistance often as not prayed before their armed robberies.

What's more, in the Netherlands Prof. John Vander Stelt had absorbed a religious vision that was far wider than the pietist views that undergird Dutch northwest Iowa and Dordt College, then barely ten years old. His was a vision shaped by a preacher who became the Dutch Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper, who believed, as did his contemporary theologian friends, that the Christian life required two "conversions," first a conversion to the Savior, but second--and a like unto it--a return to the world. Prof. Vander Stelt believed Christianity wasn't about keeping the ship from sinking but moving it out and away from harbor.

When I was a boy, "worldliness" was among the vilest of sins. Those faithful who fell away, like the prodigal son, gave their souls over to the pig sty that was the world. Prof. Vander Stelt put a new spin on John 3:16--"that God so loved the world" meant He loved all of life. God almighty wanted to his own to see beauty even when it wasn't in rectitude. 

Prof. Vander Stelt freed me to read John Updike instead of The Sugar Creek Gang, freed me to believe that all of life is religion, that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, that to understand how the world operates, how art glorifies, how vision shapes life, we had to be "in but not of" in a wholly different way than making sure coin slots were taped on the Sabbath. 

That's why Dordt College went to war with itself soon after Prof. Vander Stelt, and others like him, arrived on campus. Two visions of the Christian life walked on to the battle field. Only one view of things would or could prevail. The vision of Prof. Vander Stelt, battered and scarred, somehow prevailed.

In the late Sixties, Prof. Vander Stelt asked tough questions about prejudice when race riots burned through America's cities; the pietists maintained that the Bible commanded to honor those leaders God appoints, like Nixon. When protestors questioned America's role in the Vietnam War, Prof. Vander Stelt dared to ask whether the hippies weren't morally right. Prof. Vander Stelt set us out into a world the pietists denied. Prof. Vander Stelt played a monumental role in my life, as a teacher--a professor--and, later, for so many years as colleague and friend, his fiery passion so readily ample, so divine.

He wouldn't like me saying that, of course--"divine," but John C. Vander Stelt, my friend and colleague, reshaped the course of my faith by pushing me--and so many others--into a world so much bigger and even blessed than that which we meant by "worldliness."

Last Saturday, in the middle of a precious family gathering, my friend John died of a massive heart attack. He went home with his Savior and Lord.

But he has not left us. Not at all.