Journal articles: 'First Reformed Dutch Church' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

The Dutch Reformed Church, church order and education. From the first church order of the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1962, it has formulated stipulations for the church and education. In this regard the Dutch Reformed Church is unique among reformed churches. The wording of this article has changed over the years, but the main content has remained the same. The Dutch Reformed Church supports Christian education as a church, but also recognizes the competence of education authorities to finalise education standards and programmes. In 1962 the order of the Dutch Reformed Church on education also stated that the church would work on the Protestant character of the Afrikaner people. From 1990 onwards these words were omitted. The church nevertheless feels that education will allways be imbricated in a certain culture. In synodical resolutions in recent times the Dutch Reformed Church has recognized the calling of the South African state to subsidize all education enterprises that meet certain purely educational standards. Vanaf sy eerste kerkorde in 1962 koester die Algemene Sinode van die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk die ideaal van nie-kerklike Christelike onderwys. Met sy kerkordelike bepalings oor die kerk en onderwys, is die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk uniek onder gereformeerde kerke. Die bewoording van hierdie artikels het deur die jare verander, maar die hoofsaak het dieselfde gebly. Die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk steun Christelike onderwys vanuit sy kerklike hoek, maar erken die interne bevoegdheid van onderwysinstellings om onderwysinhoude en standaarde te finaliseer. In 1962 het sy kerkorde bepaal dat die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk hom beywer vir die Protestants-Christelike karakter van “ons volk”, die Afrikanervolk. Die uitsondering van “ons volk” is sedert 1990 egter weggelaat ten gunste die erkenning van alle kulture in die onderwys. In sinodebesluite van die afgelope tyd ondersteun die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk die standpunt dat die Suid-Afrikaanse staatsowerheid onderwys alle lewensbeskoulik gerigte instansies subsidieer.

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The Dutch Reformed Church and the Reformed tradition: expression and challenges In this article a brief analysis is presented of the manner in which the Reformed tradition finds expression in die Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. Such an analysis presupposes answers to the questions why such an attempt is necessary and what the identity of the Reformed tradition is. These answers are suggested in the first two sections of the article. The third section contains the envisaged outline of the manner in which the Dutch Reformed Church represents the Reformed tradition. This leads to the conclusion that the contribution which this church could strive to make to the church scene in South Africa is to promote the combination of the faith dimensions of knowledge, experience and obedience which is characteristic of the Reformed tradition.

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AbstractFrom the very first, the Dutch Reformed Church addressed the issue of education. If the people were to be confessionalized in a Reformed direction, then the place to start was with the young. Its greatest concern was to ensure elementary education for boys and girls in the vernacular. The Reformed primary schools were expected to impart reading and writing skills, and, above all, to instill the Reformed faith by means of school catechization. The Reformed Church continually urged the government to banish all "papist" schools and to appoint only Reformed teachers. This essay discusses two major opportunities (namely, the Synod of Dort and the Treaty of Munster) to strengthen the positions of the Reformed schools and of the Reformed Church in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. For several reasons the Reformed "public" Church never became the church of all. School catechization was in all probability not the hoped-for popularizer of the Reformed faith.

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This article investigates the theoretical and practical effectiveness of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa’s (URCSA) ministerial formation of the Northern Synod. The URCSA is part of the Reformed Movement (Calvinism) that was established by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) of South Africa that mainly came from the Netherlands to establish itself in South Africa and later established ethnic churches called daughter churches into existence in terms of a racially designed formula. After many years of the Dutch Reformed Church missionary dominance, the URCSA constituted its first synod in 1994 after the demise of apartheid. It was only after this synod that the URCSA through its ministerial formation tried to shake off the legacy of colonial paternalism and repositioned itself to serve its members; however, it fell victim to new ideological trappings. This article is based on a study that traces some basic Reformed practices and how the URCSA Theological Seminary of the Northern Synod dealt or failed to deal with them in its quest for the ideal theological ministerial formation.

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The Dutch Reformed Church acquired its modern past fairly recently, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, during the first years of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands. From 1819 to 1827 the four volumes of Ypeij and Dermout’s History of the Dutch Reformed Church appeared, some two and a half thousand pages all together. The work has not fared well. Its garrulous verbosity, weak composition, and old-fashioned liberalism have been rightly denounced. Only the four accompanying volume with notes, more than a thousand dense pages full of facts and quotations, have been admired for their scholarship. Protestant academic ecclesiastical history prefers to trace its origin to the founding in 1829 of its scholarly journal, the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, by the two first occupants of the newly founded chairs for Church history at the universities of Leiden and Utrecht.

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Murray (1828-1917) was an emissary of God. In the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, where he served as a full time minister for fifty eight years, he was elected Moderator six times. His influence, however, was not limited to the Dutch Reformed Church. Of the two hundred and fifty books (more than 20 000 pages) he wrote, some were translated into more than twenty languages. In spite of his intention not to write theological works, Murray was granted a doctorate degree in Theology by the University of Aberdeen in 1898. He was a man of prayer who published approximately thirty books about prayer. Murray, a mystic and peifectionist, was reared in an extremely legalistic home. As a student he joined the Secor Dabar association which was an offspring of the legalistic Reveil movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the age of roundabout 65, Murray was impressed by the writings of William Law (1686-1761), which fitted his mindset like a glove. But who was Andrew Murray actually? Other similar questions concerning his influence in the Dutch Reformed Church are equally important. First and foremost however: Who was this man? Was he possibly a "tossed salad" theologian? Still today we find traces of Murrayism in the Dutch Reformed Church. Fortunately his full-time service of fifty eight years has left behind a positive heritage of Scottish Calvinism.

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Abstract With a view to the theme of Church renewal, this article explores the role of a wellknown and popular phrase in the Reformed tradition within Protestantism, i.e. ecclesia reformata semper reformanda (‘the reformed Church should always be reformed’). Is this a helpful slogan when considering the pros and cons, the possibilities and the limitations of Church renewal? First, the historical background of this phrase is described: it is rooted in the Dutch Reformed tradition, and only in the twentieth century was it widely recognized in Reformed circles. Against this background the hermeneutical problem, linked with the principle of sola Scriptura, is presented, and put into an ecumenical perspective: the Church as grounded in the gospel. Finally, the article focuses on Church polity as an important field of renewal, taking into account Karl Barth’s interpretation of this phrase. From this perspective, a balanced and ecumenical approach of Church renewal is possible.

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Imminent retirement: Pastors’ experience of their congregation, personal well-being and financesThe provisions of pastors to congregations is of great importance to the Dutch Reformed Church and its congregation. To retire is a complex process of transition affecting various aspects – among others psychological, spiritual and financial aspects. According to current estimates, more than half of the full-time pastors in the Dutch Reformed Church could retire within the next fifteen years. A quantitative online survey was conducted amongst pastors who will retire in the near future, their experience of their congregation, personal well-being and financial prospects before and during retirement was taken into account. For the first time research provides insight into what will happen in churches when a pastor retires. The information should provide valid conclusions and recommendations can be made regarding the demand for pastors (and students?) in order to plan for effective ministry within churches.

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South Africa in the year 2000: What moral guidance can the Dutch Reformed Church provide? An attempt is made in the article to answer the question: What moral guidance can the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) provide in the present South African society? Attention is given, first of all, to the room left for the DRC to provide such guidance in the new South Africa. The suitable nature and range of this moral guidance are discussed. Recommendations are also made about the style of the moral guidance and a suitable strategy for motivating the members of the DRC to fulfil their moral responsibility in society.

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AbstractThe aim of this essay is to develop a critical assessment of the history of the family of Dutch Reformed churches in Piketberg. The purpose of this is to determine a more adequate theological framework for the deconstruction of the traditional ecclesiological and socio-cultural anthropologies as a first step in the process of establishing sound ecclesiological and socio-cultural relations in the ongoing process of being church. Within this ecclesiological exploration, the focus will be on the schism within the once one Reformed congregation of Piketberg into three separate congregations and specifically on the unique understandings of the reasons for the divide along racial lines. The emphasis for this study is on the theological accountability of the church and all her members, with a specific emphasis on theological identity within the Reformed church in South Africa. The case study will thus focus on the stories of one particular place in the hope of raising more general ecclesiological questions of identity, culture and race.

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According to historiographical convention, the experience of exile by Protestants from the Habsburg Netherlands between the 1550s and the early 1570s played a critical role in promoting confessional Calvinism in the early Dutch Republic. But there are too many problems in the evidentiary basis to sustain this conclusion. This essay traces the historiography on the Dutch Reformation in order to isolate where and why this idea emerged. It demonstrates that no specific role for religious refugees in the development of Dutch Calvinism can be found in historical writing from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Only in the late nineteenth century, during a debate about the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, did the experiences of religious refugees come to take on a specific role in explaining the development of Dutch Calvinism. The idea first emerged among Neo-Calvinists who critiqued state supervision of their church. By the twentieth century, it came to be used by orthodox and moderate Reformed Protestants, as well as liberal and secular academic historians. This paper thus demonstrates that this key interpretive framework for understanding the Dutch Reformation was the product not of developments in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands, but of religious politics in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century.

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AbstractContrary to most of the German Lands of the Empire, Lutherans in the Low Countries were a religious minority. In order to establish a congregation in the nascent Dutch republic the Amsterdam Lutherans had to manoeuver between a non-Lutheran authority, the public Reformed Church with the most rights and the highest visibility and other religious minorities. This article describes the influencing factors that helped the Lutherans in this ongoing dynamic and vulnerable process of negotiation. It shows how experiences made by the first generations of Dutch Lutherans in Antwerp were important for the choice to start as a house church. It further explores the international connections of the Amsterdam Lutherans, especially with Scandinavia, that eventually made it possible for them to own two big, publicly visible churches, while still being a religious minority.

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This article considers responses to Habsburg persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s. Focusing on the Reformed church, it will first assess how long-established contacts with Reformed co-religionists in northwestern Europe came to provide support for Hungarians in the face of violent state repression. This will concentrate in particular on the trial and imprisonment of Protestant clergy after 1674 and on the liberation of one group of ministers in 1676, thanks to Dutch intervention. It will then consider the diverse ways in which Habsburg persecution of Hungarian Protestants was represented in the Dutch Republic, England, France, and in Hungary, and what this reveals about the international Reformed community toward the end of the confessional age. It will then assess the role of persistent but shifting memories of this era of martyrs and liberators in the later development of Hungarian Reformed identity.

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In August 1958, Meeuwis Drost (1923-86) was the first missionary for the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (Vrijgemaakt), or Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated) to start proselytising among the Papuans of the Upper-Digul area in Netherlands New Guinea. He later recalled how that day: “I simply started with Genesis one. And they listened!” Drost finished teaching the entire Old Testament within one year. To start at the beginning seems logical and is in fact the approach used by most missionaries of the Liberated churches. Transfer of religious and cultural knowledge was seen as an important aspect of their work, especially with an illiterate audience. The Protestant religious landscape in the Netherlands had fragmented heavily during the nineteenth century. Two secessions from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1834 and 1886 led to the formation of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands in 1892. Its tendency to depose those who refused to adhere to its theological views resulted in the Vrijmaking (Liberation) in 1944. Although the Liberated churches were one of many Protestant branches, they were very secure in their own theological views. Consisting of exclusive political, religious, educational and even recreational organisations they formed a mini-pillar in Dutch society.

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Abstract This article tries to find an answer to the central question whether the Dutch Reformed pastor and professor Petrus Hofstede de Groot (1802-1886) was a dominocrat. Hofstede de Groot was pastor in Ulrum and professor at the university in Groningen. My contribution is an elaboration of the oral book review I held in 2017 at the presentation of Jasper Vree’s book Kerk, huis, school en staat: Leven, werk en vriendenkring van P. Hofstede de Groot (1844-1886). In my article I explain the meaning of ‘dominocrat’ and also ‘Dominocrat’ and explore the synodical acts of the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) between 1830 (Hofstede de Groot’s first appearance in the general synod as professor) and 1886 (his death), and Hofstede de Groot’s role in synodical meetings. He was indeed a dominocrat. He favored the leadership of the pastors. At the same time, he was a Dominocrat. In his life and in his work, he was focussed on the Dominus, Jesus Christ, for the church (kerk), at home (huis), school and state (staat).

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Theology at the state universities in the Netherlands since 1876: State disciplines and church disciplines In three contributions the organisation of (protestant) theology in the Netherlands since 1876 has been described. In this first part the Dutch law on higher education (1876) is dealt with, its background (especially separation of state and church and equal treatment of religious traditions). This law has established a dual system (“duplex ordo”): “state professors” and “church professors”, all paid by the government. Various evaluations of this arrangement are discussed and its recent modification and the motifs thereof are given. In practice, the theological faculties at the state universities have been mostly reformed faculties.

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In 2017 the 500th anniversary of the Reformation will be commemorated worldwide through various conferences, church and cultural events, and publications, also in Southern Africa. How should we commemorate the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in 2017 in Reformed circles in Southern Africa? Against the backdrop of this question, this article argues for the need of a self-critical reflection on the possible abuses associated with commemorations as such, as well as by a heightened historical consciousness of the way in which past commemorations of the Reformation functioned in processes of identity construction and ‘othering’. With this in mind, the article proceeds in two parts. In the first part the aspect of commemoration is problematised by referring to the critique of the possible abuses of memory associated with commemorations, as highlighted in the work of Tzvetan Todorov, also with reference to his distinction between commemoration and rememoration. The second part of the article then turns to some historical documents that give us a glimpse into the 400th anniversary of the Reformation in 1917 in Reformed circles in South Africa, and specifically within the Dutch Reformed Church. This is followed by some concluding remarks.

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The twelve-year Truce in the Dutch Revolt occasioned the clash between a liberal Reformed faction, known as Remonstrants, and the orthodox, known as Counter-Remonstrants. After the Synod of Dordt sealed the orthodox victory, the polemic between the two sides on doctrine and the limits of tolerance, first conducted in a pamphlet war, found its culmination in three major church histories: the Remonstrant Uytenbogaert produced the first vernacular church history which anchored the Remonstrant position firmly in the past; he was refuted almost page-by-page by the orthodox Trigland; and finally Brandt published his irenic four-volume History of the Reformation. This study analyzes this marshalling of Clio1 for their cause by the Remonstrants, and the counterarguments used by the orthodox.

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This article aims to assess whether Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837‐1920) and his adaptation of Calvinism into a systematic theological, political and social ideology, known as ‘neo-Calvinism’, can be rightfully associated with ‘fundamentalism’. First, the article outlines the constitutive elements of neo-Calvinism: the concepts of antithesis, presumptive regeneration, sphere sovereignty, common grace, ecclesial multiformity, and organic Scriptural inspiration, the differentiation between the church as organism and as institute, the erasure of a theocratic fragment in the Belgic Confession, and the idea that Calvinism is the ‘core element’ of the Dutch national character. Second, it applies recent literature on fundamentalism to neo-Calvinism and the development of the neo-Calvinist movement. Although, as this article concludes, the neo-Calvinist movement did have some ‘fundamentalist’ features, neo-Calvinism in itself did not inevitably lead to what Jan Buskes has called ‘the triumph of fundamentalism’ at the synod of the Reformed Churches in Assen in 1926.

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The main subject of inquiry here is the interrelationship between war, mission and exile in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church at the turn of the twentieth century. The first setting of note is the Anglo—Boer War (1899–1902) when a group of Boer soldiers decided to form the Commando's Dank Zending Vereniging (Commando's Thanksgiving Mission Society) after visiting a Swiss missionary station in the northern Transvaal. Next follows Boer experiences of exile on the islands of St Helena, Ceylon and elsewhere as prisoners of war. A number of these POWs were evangelised and recruited for mission through revivalist sermons preached by their chaplains. After their return, a substantial number of ex-POWs signed up for the DRC's missionary enterprise into wider Africa, most prominently Nyasaland. The missionary experience itself often lasted for several decades. These missionaries did not refer to their life contexts as pilgrimages as such, but they often described the mission field as a place of danger and adventure populated by wild and dangerous people and animals. This article therefore suggests that the missionary careers of the Anglo—Boer War recruits approximate voluntary sacred exile, which in having originated from their forced exile as POWs acquires a pilgrimage-like character.

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Critical remarks on Religious Education in the Dutch Reformed Church A few statistics are mentioned in this article, and conclusions are drawn from them. Then faith-instruction in the Old and New Testaments is discussed. Religious education is first and foremost, the task of the parents, but officially also the task of the congregation. The congregation must learn to make religious education their own responsibility. In the congregation you learn to believe, and faith is stimulated. The author closes with ten critical statements in an attempt to show a way for religious education in the DRC.

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This article analyses the theological development of the eighteenth-century Church of England priest Augustus Montague Toplady through two manuscript collections. The first of these is a copy of John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament that Toplady heavily annotated during his time as a university student in 1758. This book is held in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre at the John Rylands Library. Toplady’s handwritten notes total approximately 6,000 words and provide additional information regarding the development of his views of John Wesley and Methodism, ones which he would not put into print until 1769. Toplady’s notes demonstrate how he was significantly influenced by the works of certain Dutch, German and Swiss Reformed theologians. The second is a collection of Toplady’s papers held by Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Together, these sources enable Toplady’s own theology and his controversies with Methodists to be viewed from a new perspective. Moreover, these sources provide new insights into Toplady’s conceptualisation of ‘Calvinism’ and changes in the broader Anglican Reformed tradition during the eighteenth century.

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Why did states in the US North abolish slavery? This question remains unanswered, despite nearly 150 years of historical work on the subject. To explore this question I offer two "firsts": the use of social movement theory to frame the research, and a quantitative analysis of an original data set to test the theory. I contribute to movement scholarship by examining a number of themes neglected in work on the political outcomes of activism: movement-countermovement dynamics; the link between religious beliefs and religious activism; the outcomes of religious movements; and the economic interests of social actors. Results show that emancipation was affected by Quaker-led antibondage protests; the countermovement of the Dutch Reformed church; this-worldly and otherworldly religions; economic incentives; and political opportunities. Black protest had no impact on abolition, challenging the thesis of black resistance as a major factor in emancipation.

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The geometric pattern of Amsterdam's canals was iconic of its nineteenth-century social order. The spider's web of canals fanned out along the Amstel river in concentric rings, its barge traffic linking the city to its hinterland, the province of Holland, and to the wider Netherlands of which it is the nominal capital. These canals divided the “Venice of the North” into ninety islands linked by more than a thousand bridges. Imposing aristocratic and merchant houses stretched along the innermost canal ring, the Golden Curve of the Gentleman's Canal. At the center of the web lay de Dam, the 200 m long market square built on the first medieval dike protecting the city from the encroaching sea. The three pillars of the Dutch state framed the market square: the Royal Palace of the Merchant King, the Dutch Reformed New Church, and in the nineteenth century, the Amsterdam stock market, the world's oldest exchange.

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During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period of history when the DRC in South Africa had begun to regressively disengage from ecumenical entanglements in order to focus on its developing discourse of Afrikaner Christian nationalism, this venture in ecumenism by one of its foreign missions was a remarkable anomaly. Yet, as this article illustrates, the ecumenical project as finalized at a conference in 1924 was characterized by controversy and nearly became derailed as a result of the intransigence of white DRC missionaries on the subject of eating together with black colleagues at a communal table. Negotiations proceeded and somehow ended in church unity despite the DRC’s missionaries’ objection to communal eating. After the merger of the synods of Blantyre, Nkhoma and Livingstonia into the unified CCAP, distinct regional differences remained, long after the colonial missionaries departed. In terms of its theological predisposition, especially on the hierarchy of social relations, the Nkhoma synod remains much more conservative than both of its neighboring synods in the CCAP to the south and north. Race is no longer a matter of division. More recently, it has been gender, and especially the issue of women’s ordination to ministry, which has been affirmed by both Blantyre and Livingstonia, but resisted by the Nkhoma synod. Back in South Africa, these events similarly had an impact on church history and theological debate, but in a completely different direction. As the theology of Afrikaner Christian nationalism and eventually apartheid came into positions of power in the 1940s, the DRC’s Nkhoma mission in Malawi found itself in a position of vulnerability and suspicion. The very fact of its participation in an ecumenical project involving ‘liberal’ Scots in the formation of an indigenous black church was an intolerable digression from the normative separatism that was the hallmark of the DRC under apartheid. Hence, this article focuses on the variegated entanglements of Reformed Church history, mission history, theology and politics in two different 20th-century African contexts, Malawi and South Africa.

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This article studies the appropriation of Anglican choral evensong, and more specifically, dress at choral evensong, in the Netherlands outside the context of the Anglican Church to gain more insight into religiosity in the Netherlands. The authors explore the dress worn at choral evensong in the Netherlands and the meanings participants attribute to it. The concepts of denotational and connotational meanings are used as an analytical tool. In analysing their interviews, the authors came across three categories of meaning and function participants attribute to dress at choral evensong. The first category was the reference to ‘England as a model’. By wearing Anglican dress, choirs indicate they belong to the high-quality sound group of English cathedral choirs. At the same time, by changing the Anglican ‘dress code’, choirs emphasise their unicity and individuality, independent of church traditions. The second category was the marking of identity: choirs copy the dress from the English tradition, but add some elements to mark their own identity. Besides this marking of identity, aspects of unicity, uniformity, group identity, and gender-marking also play a part. The third category was metamorphosis and transcendence. Choir members refer to unarticulated transcendental experiences by wearing ritual liturgical dress. On the one hand the authors noted a ‘cathedralisation’ or ‘ceremonialisation’ of the singers’ dress, and on the other a de-institutionalisation, for example, in the dress of the minister, if present. The article’s main conclusion is that the fieldwork data reveal that dress at choral evensong in the Netherlands points to changing religiosity at two different levels. First, the authors observe a transformation in the way religion is expressed or ritualised in Reformed Protestant churches in the Netherlands. The popularity of evensong suggests a longing for other forms of worship, with a focus on ceremonies and Anglican-like vesture for the singers. Second, they observe a mix of concert practices and Anglican-like rituals, which the interviewees in our research refer to as a new form of religiosity. In both practices the traditional dress of the Anglican Church is used, whether copied exactly or adapted. A new phenomenon may be observed: choirs wear Anglican-like vesture decoupled from the Anglican Church as they are longing for transcendental experiences which they find in the musical-ritual form and high musical quality of choral evensong.

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The funeral epigraphic material of Elbląg and the surrounding area, relating to the period preceding the XVIth century, remains, first of all thanks to the researches of Polish epigraphists, relatively more explored and introduced into the scientific circulation array. At the same time the Renaissance-Baroque gravestone monument of the XVIth–XVIIth centuries, which is extremely important for the comprehensive study of the reformed Circum-Baltic, often continues to need a detailed research commentary. To the epitaph of the burgomaster of Elbing (Elbląg) Johann Jungschultz (1583–1630), as well as to the Latin text of the funeral Eulogy, associated with this epitaph, composed by the Bohemian humanist Venceslav Klemens, is expected to address in this article. The epitaph of Johann Jungschultz was established in 1630–1640. From the compositional point of view closest to the epitaph of Johann Jungschultz, and almost prototypical for it, is the epitaph of Edward Blemke (1591), in the St. Mary’s church of Gdansk. It allows to speak about the author of the epitaph of Johann Jungschultz as oriented to samples of the Dutch monumental tombstones of the end of the XVIth century, or even as belonging to the circle of Willem van den Blocke (circa 1550–1628), which was the principal mediator of the influence of the Dutch art in the South-Eastern Baltic in the end of XVIth – the first quarter of the XVIIth century. The compositional and decorative solution of the epitaph also has close matches in the works of Johann Pfister (1573 – circa 1642/1645 or 1648).

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The reviewer identifies three disparate texts, Koos Malgas Sculptor of the Owl House (Julia Malgas and Jeni Couzyn, 2008), The Black Countess (R. E. van der Ross, 2008) and Die verhaal van Elandskloof (“The Story of Elandskloof”, Tobie Wiese assisted by Ricky Goedeman, 2009) as counter-discursive texts writtten against specific hegemonic practices. The first text presents a reevaluation of the contribution of Koos Malgas to the famous Outsider Art place, The Owl House in Nieu Bethesda; the second is a short biography on the black countess, Martha Grey and the third is a lay history of a Dutch Reformed Church mission station, Elandskloof. The writer discusses the obvious similarities between these texts such as the co-operation between authors, the margin as a site of resistance, the fragmented documentation of marginalised lives, the formation and re-formation of identities and the tensions around expressions of ‘truth’.

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Abstract In May 1945, shortly after the Liberation of the Netherlands, Dutch Reformed minister Willem Banning (1888-1971) published a sketch of a ‘personalistic socialism’. Shortly thereafter, he became one of the founding fathers of the renewed Dutch Labor Party. At the first convention of the new party he proposed that the process of renewal of socialism had to be informed by ‘spiritual values’. In Dutch historiography, the role of Banning as one of the founders of the Dutch Labor Party was never really been understood as religiously or even ideologically motivated. The so-called ‘Breakthrough-movement’ ‐ which sought a new synthesis between political action and religious or ideological inspiration ‐ has been generally interpreted in terms of opportunism: in order to persuade Catholic and Protestant workers to vote for the Labor Party, some spiritually and morally loaded vocabulary was added and the harsh anti-religious affiliation of classic socialist politics was (temporarily) toned down. In this article, I propose a new analysis of the breakthrough-movement, inspired by new studies on public debate in the Netherlands and in Europe between 1918 and 1960 and by an in-depth analysis of the intellectual development of Banning. This leads to the conclusion that the spiritual and religious sources of inspiration of the breakthrough movement should be seen as a turning point in the Dutch debate on the essence of humankind and his/her role in society, church and politics in a period still problematically labelled by the metaphor of ‘pillarization’.

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In the summer of 2011, Dutch teacher Duran Renkema was dismissed from the orthodox Reformed school in Oegstgeest because he had left his wife and family, and decided to openly live together with his boyfriend. In the court case that followed, the judge ruled that the publicly funded denominational school did not have the right to dismiss a teacher who otherwise functioned well, merely because of his sexual identity. In collecting funds so it could take the case to the Equal Treatment Commission, the Dutch gay rights organization Coc emphasized that this was the first time that a teacher at a religious school publicly dared to contest his dismissal.Although the teacher himself also initially threatened to put the issue before the Equal Treatment Commission (ETC), he later withdrew the case, stating, “my family, partner and I need rest to come to terms with what happened.” He indicated that he hoped that “the discussion and dialogue in the Reformed churches will not come to a halt here, but that they will take this opportunity to show the gay community in the Netherlands that the message in the Bible is one of love.

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AbstractBooth's Translation of an Irenical Perkins-Book In 1604 the Utrecht minister Everard Booth (1577-1610) published a translation of William Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike'. Because of this translation, biographical dictionaries and other literature say that he must have agreed more or less with the predestinarian views of Franciscus Gomarus. In the conflict between Franciscus Gomarus and Jacobus Arminius, Perkins played an important part. He owes this to Arminius, who wrote a book against him and utterly disliked his ideas on predestination, the certainty of faith and final perseverance. The problem is that Booth attended the Conventus Praeparatorius (1607), a meeting meant for the preparation of a national synod. Here he agreed with Arminius on the question of whether the Belgic confession ought to be revised or not. In 1610, the year of his death, Booth's position raises even less doubt. He proved himself to be an Arminian. So his translation of Perkins might point to a change in his outlook or to a moderate stand. However, there is a better solution to the riddle of how a potential Arminian could like Perkins. Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike' (1597) is an item in the syllabus of irenical writings, released by the French diplomat Jean Hotman in 1607 and extended later on. Utrecht was a former cathedral city which still had a high percentage of Roman Catholic inhabitants. Presumably Booth's attention was drawn to 'A Reformed Catholike' because of its irenical character. He may have considered the book as a means to bring his Catholic fellow citizens to other thoughts. In the same year, 1604, a second Dutchman, Vincent Meusevoet, translated 'A Reformed Catholike' too. He published it together with a translation of a highly polemical book written by Perkins, 'A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times'. Booth did not do things in this way. Incidentally, he took a Latin edition of Perkins' book as his source, not the original English work, as Meusevoet did. 'A Reformed Catholike' is, indeed an irenical treatise. Perkins started his chapters with a discourse on the issues agreed on among Catholics and Protestants. Especially illustrative is the sixteenth chapter dealing with the faith. In the first part of this chapter, devoted to the common elements, he discussed his favourite theme for bruised consciences, namely that a small portion of faith, a faith as a grain of mustard seed, is sufficient in the eyes of God for salvation. So Roman Catholics who desired to believe could assume that they would be children of God, according to Perkins. As a matter of course, nobody was entitled to be satisfied with a small sparkle of faith: man had to aim at an increasing faith. Yet the 'infolded faith' really had a great importance according to Perkins. He showed himself open to the Roman Catholics on a central point in his theological thinking. Booth must have felt attracted to thoughts like those mentioned in 'A Reformed Catholike'. He was an irenical theologian. In the Dutch predestinarian conflict, the irenicists often turned out to be Arminians later on. Notwithstanding his English example Booth's irenical feelings placed him alongside the Arminians with their less unquestioning ideas. One indication of Booth's gifts as an irenicist is what became of the Utrecht Reformed community after his arrival (1602). For many years it had been in a state of turmoil. There were many people who steadfastly refused to go to church in Utrecht. They blamed the Consistory because it danced to the piping of the magistrate. After his arrival the situation improved. During his ministry (1602-1610) the Utrecht church enjoyed a period of peace. This may be mainly due to his influence. Booth was a pupil of the Leiden professor Franciscus Junius, the author of the 'Eirenicum de Pace Ecclesiae Catholicae'. Junius tried to mediate between the religious parties in Utrecht from 1593 onwards. Everard Booth followed in his footsteps.

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Towards healing services in the Dutch Reformed Church The position of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa with regard to the world wide recovery of the Church’s healing ministry is discussed. Features of liturgical healing services of other denominational churches are utilised to develop a model for the Dutch Reformed Church in Initiating this kind of public ministry.

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The Dutch Reformed Church and the South African Council of Churches The General Missionary Conference which was founded in 1904 became the Christian Council of South Africa in 1936. In 1940 a founder member, viz. the Transvaal Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church withdrew from the council. In 1968 a change of name to the South African Council of Churches reflected a deeper involvement in social and political matters and it gradually also became more representative of the black Christian point of view. Despite various invitations, the Dutch Reformed Church has not rejoined the Council and relations have been very strained, but at its last synod in 1986 the Dutch Reformed Church decided that informal discussions could be held.

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Soon after the start in 1906 the ‘The Reformed League for the Liberation of the Dutch Reformed Churches,’ experienced a deep crisis. By 1909 the League, however, remade itself under the name ‘The Reformed League for the Promotion and Defence of Truth in the Dutch Reformed Church,’ a change often interpreted as a conscious shift away from the Doleantie and Abraham Kuyper’s ecclesiology. This article argues that in 1909 the Reformed League only renounced the appeal to political power for the liberation of the churches, an appeal that Kuyper was unhappy with. During its formative period the ecclesiology of the Reformed League emphasized the local congregations as the true confessional church, an emphasis that made its position within the Dutch Reformed Church vulnerable

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Challenges for the Dutch Reformed Church in Southern Africa with Malawi and Zambia as illustration areas What will be the challenges for the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa if in the coming decades its isolation from Africa could be ended because of political developments in a post-apartheid era? The Dutch Reformed Church planted indigenous churches in many African Countries like Botswana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Namibia. The role of the church in Africa will be determined by its relations with these younger churches. The challenges in the fields of evangelism, church ministry, the youth and in the socioeconomic and political areas are illustrated specifically in the cases of Malawi and Zambia.

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The publication of Buddhist mission: ‘Christian’ barbarism in Europe, translated by Louis Adriën Bähler (1867­1941), a Christian anarchist and pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, led to the founding of the Reformed League in the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk). The classis censured Bähler, but Synod rehabilitated him and therefore the orthodox Reformed within the church charged that Synod’s actions revealed its powerlessness to maintain doctrinal discipline. Bähler’s Buddhist leanings have drawn much attention. This article places Bähler’s sympathy for pietism and mysticism in the broader context of his theology, one characterized by a spiritualization and moralization of the Gospel.

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The relationship between the ‘powerful’ Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and the many churches that were planted by the mission work of the DRC has always been and still is a very sensitive matter. This paper will take a historical look at the relationship over the last decade (2004-2014) between the Dutch Reformed Church in Botswana (DRCB) and the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, especially the Dutch Reformed Church in the northern Cape (DRCnC). It was during this time that a paradigm shift started developing in the relationship. After some socio-economic changes and ‘new’ missiological reflection from the DRCnC on their own understanding of mission, the DRCnC took a definite decision to move away from a deed of agreement relation with the DRCB and work towards a partnership relation. After requests from the DRCB regarding theological education, the DRCnC decided to broaden its vision to the church in Botswana and not only the DRCB. This paper wants to look at the process of transformation of a power relation which involves learning, unlearning, relearning and new learning of the different contexts, as well as the understandings and realities of mission, ecclesiology, partnership, tradition, interdependence, theological education and leadership.

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The ministry of compassion of the Dutch Reformed Church in Natal - dependent and exclusive?This study highlights two major concerns in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church of Natal’s ministry of compassion. The church’s work became financially too dependent on government subsidies. The work originally started off with church finances, but was later financed by government. In principle there is nothing wrong with such a partnership, but the present financial dependency will have to make room for an independent ministry of compassion. The church’s ministry of compassion was also mainly focussed on the Afrikaner nation. In this the church supported the apartheid system of the day and started the perception that services of compassion are for the White community while missionary work is focussed on the Black communities. What history teaches us in this field of compassion and caring can help to rectify the ministry of compassion of the Dutch Reformed Church in KwaZulu/Natal and help the church to avoid the same mistakes in future

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This article attends to the relationship between minor and major assemblies as prescribed by the foundational principles of Reformed church polity proposed by Mary-Anne Plaatjies-Van Huffel. It reviews the limited autonomy of local congregations and the authority of broader assemblies in the Church Order of Dordrecht (1618/19), the touchstone of Dutch Reformed church polity. It considers the challenge to historic Reformed church polity posed by the ecclesiology of the Doleantie, a secession from the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (NHK) in 1886 under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper. Finally, it evaluates a contemporary church order (of the United Reformed Churches in North America), that explicitly codifies Doleantie ecclesiology. The church order fails to embody the principles of Reformed church polity set forth by Plaatjies-Van Huffel. This article concludes that it cannot be considered a Reformed church order.

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Many Dutch Calvinist churches house a Ten Commandments panel, installed in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century as part of the Reformed adaptation of the medieval Catholic church interior. In this article, the characteristic design of Ten Commandments panels is analyzed as a form of Calvinist visual culture. It suggests that these panels were primarilymade to be viewed rather than thoroughly read. The remarkably figurative Moses imagery on panels points at a divergence between the rigid Reformed theological image prohibition and the practice of the adaptation of the church interior. The placement of Ten Commandments panels in the Reformed church interior highlights their symbolic value: It signified the need for self-examination of the participants in the Lord’s Supper. The original spatial setting of Ten Commandments panels also shows how the newly Reformed furnishing and use of church space was rooted in its late medieval Catholic past.

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Abstract The French Reformed church of Maastricht, founded in 1632 following the Dutch takeover of the city, was a geographically isolated institution within the Dutch Republic. This isolation was reinforced by the city’s unique status, which allowed the public exercise of Catholicism. Within this context, and situated next to the hostile Principality of Liège, the French church had to develop survival strategies and establish relations not only with the States-General and the Walloon synod, but also with the urban authorities and the Dutch Reformed church, in order to withstand the influence of Catholicism. Yet even though Maastricht was on the confessional and military front line—a place of passage for merchants, refugees, and Catholic clergymen—the French Protestant community survived the French occupation of 1673–1678 and managed to absorb the massive influx of Huguenot refugees from 1686 onwards.

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This article is the edited version of the presentation held at the University of Pretoria’s “Theological Day” on January 31, 2008. It seeks to answer the question: “Can the Dutch Reformed Church still make a difference in South Africa today?” This article places this question within the wider world and African contexts, then focuses on the South African situation. It describes the South African context as one of spiritual uncertainties and confusion, political tension, economic inequalities and social unravelling, which each in the their own way and together put particular challenges before the church. This paper answers the question the affirmative, provided that the Dutch Reformed Church meets its own direct challenges, the most important of which is the challenge toward reunification within the Dutch Reformed family of churches.

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<strong> Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape and the Great Trek: an evaluation.</strong> <br /> The reaction of the Cape Synod of 1837 of the Dutch Reformed Church and the presbytery of Graaff-Reinet of 1838 and 1840 marked the official stance of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) on the Trek. Both were negative about the Trek because they saw it as a revolt against the British Government. These two assemblies were, however, influenced by the negative approach of the Trek in public opinion and willingness on their side to follow and bow to the government in this regard. The Trek after all, was an emigration. Since 1843 the approach of the DRC on the matter changed and the members of the DRC on the Trek were regarded as full church members who are not in a process of discipline because of their emigration.

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One of the important issues in the formation of Javanese Reformed-Christian (JRC) church was the usage of the Javanese language. The formation of the church did not only involve transplanting theological and ritual teachings of the Dutch Reformed Churches (GKN), but also the usage and the choice of registers of the hierarchical Javanese language for Javanese congregation. This article intends to examine the importance of Javanese in the formation of Javanese Reformed-Christian church in Yogyakarta. Archival sources, particularly of the GKN, were used to examine the importance of Javanese in the establishment of this JRC church in Yogyakarta. The author concluded that the usage of Javanese terms for “church” and “pastor”, and the choice of the highest level of the language, Krama, in church ritual was intended to preserve Javanese language and convey social equality between the Javanese and the Dutch.

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Church Reformers we should not forget. On thefifth of November 1980, the Reformed Day Witness was published in Die Kerkbode by eight theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Witness, as it became known, soon had storm clouds gathering in the church, because of it's content. It was a wakeup call to the church about it's prophetic call, it's guidance to government and it's role in reconciliation. Many ministers and members of the church supported The Witness while church leadership was mainly against it. In the end The Witness was silenced but the seed were sown. Many ministers and church members now knew that the Dutch Reformed Church had to take a new approach with regard to it's prophetic call and it's role in society. When we look back over what happened in the past seventeen years, history tells us that these men were prophets of their time, men that we must not forget.