What Are We Fighting For?

As I Was Saying is a forum for a variety of perspectives to foster faith-related conversations among our readers with the goal of mutual learning, even in disagreement. Apart from articles written by editorial staff, these perspectives do not necessarily reflect the views of The Banner.

“Was there nothing to fight for?”

Alan Paton’s question, on the lips of Emanuel Nene in Paton’s final novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, haunts me. Paton combined historical events with composite characters to tell six stories from differing vantage points during the complex social powerplays of South African Apartheid.

In one, Robert Mansfield, a handsome and popular cricket star, had become a respected high school principal. Though “non-political” in his own self-assessment, Mansfield sensed the inappropriateness of the rules of Apartheid that were being sent down from Pretoria. He was arrested when he refused to allow some of them to shape his school. Separated from family and friends as he waited to stand trial, only Emanuel Nene came and went, bringing papers to sign and legal instructions from the court.

“Why did you do it?” Emanuel Nene asked Robert Mansfield one day, even though conversations between the two were forbidden by the authorities. When Mansfield shrugged his shoulders, Nene told him, “I think I know. Some day you and I will both leave this life and go to the other side. There we will be welcomed home by the One who greets us, ‘Well done, good and faithful servants!’

“We will bow and praise him, and we will wonder, amazed at the lingering scars on his hands and feet. Then he will look at us and say, ‘Now show me your scars.’

“His question will catch us by surprise. ‘Lord!’ we will say, ‘were not your scars sufficient?!’

“After a moment of thoughtfulness, he will smile and nod. Then a tear will slowly seep down his cheek, and he will reply, ‘Yes, surely … but was there nothing to fight for?’”

Fighting … But Who?

Recent years in our Christian Reformed denomination have brought the fights. Yet not all fights are good conflicts. Yes, we have different communities of affinity in our CRCNA. That is a natural human sociological experience, and it is also a part of our historical development. Henry Zwaanstra, Ph.D., our Calvin Theological Seminary professor of church history for many years, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the competing urges of pietistic isolation, doctrinalist purity, and Kuyperian social transformationalism in our Dutch and immigrant roots. Zwaanstra called them the “pies,” the “docs,” and the “kuyps.”

Our denomination emerged out of the pietism of the Swiss Reveil, which resulted in the 1834 Afscheiding separation in the Netherlands; the doctrinalist concerns of Dutch neo-Calvinists in the mid-1800s that created the Kampen Theological School (1854) and the rewriting of Reformed liturgical forms; and the Kuyperian social transformationalism that welded together significant portions of the other two groups in a new denomination emerging from the Doleantie of 1886. Precisely during these stressful times, many Dutch and German families were migrating to North America, bringing their passions and perspectives with them.

At the same time, their shared recent history of European ecclesiastical persecution and separation made them uneasy about mixing quickly with others who were already established in North America. So some of the “Seceders” split from what eventually became the “Reformed Church in America” and formed the “True Dutch Protestant Reformed Church,” which became the CRCNA. Meanwhile, there had been also a single Classis of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Jersey (Classis Hackensack) that felt its distance from the gentrified establishment of the Dutch Reformed Church of New England. In 1822, under doctrinalist leaders, it separated itself from the Dutch Reformed Church in the United States to become the True Dutch Reformed Church. With the arrival of these new “seceder” immigrants, this classis, with its English-language monthly publication titled The Banner of Truth, joined the emerging CRCNA denomination in 1890.

Similarly, the mid-19th century Dutch pietist and doctrinalist migrants who followed Hendrick Scholte to establish Pella, Iowa, remained suspicious of all other Christian groups, including those in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. They would not begin to affiliate with other immigrant Reformed denominations until 1886!

Synergism, Not Sameness

This is how the CRCNA began, with its family of three related identities: the pietists (focused on separation from the world and holy living), the doctrinalists (focused on correct theology and properly run church matters, as guided by the Belgic Confession), and the Kuyperians (believing that the Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty necessarily required the church to engage in cultural transformation). While these three communities intertwined collectively, to their mutual benefit, each has always also established unique corporate entities within the CRCNA:

• Publications: The Banner of Truth, begun by the pietists of Classis Hackensack, was bought by the CRCNA to become The Banner of the young denomination, and was then transformed significantly by Henry Beets, Ph.D., into a voice of the Kuyperian Reformed identity. This prompted an alternative pietist voice published as the Dutch-language De Wachter; decades later its perspectives would be mirrored in the English language as The Torch and Trumpet (1951), renamed in 1971 as The Outlook of the Reformed Fellowship. In response, the doctrinalist and Kuyperian elements among us established the Reformed Journal (wrestling with cultural and philosophical issues), and the Calvinist Contact (now Christian Courier).
• Missions: our doctrinalist inspired “Jewish Mission” in Chicago evolved into our pietist Navajo/Zuni Mission, and then later inaugurated our “Home Missions” agency out of the influence of both these groups. Meanwhile, our Kuyperian dimensions broadened these missional efforts into what became our “World Missions” agency, and later augmented the “Word” emphasis of evangelism with a focus on “Deed” ministries through our “Christian Reformed World Relief Committee” (now “World Renew”). Similarly, our pietist communities out of Chicago created The Back to God Hour radio ministry, which was then redeveloped by our Kuyperian communities into a global media ministry, and more recently rescaled, primarily by our doctrinalist communities, into a voice of Reformed apologetics.
• Education: our emphasis on Christian day schools that were distinct from the “Public School” system in North America began immediately within the Dutch immigrant communities, but for three distinct reasons—our pietists wanted to separate our children from the world; our doctrinalists wanted to ensure that home, church, and school were teaching the same Reformed theology; and our Kuyperians maintained that all education needed to be presented from a consistent redemptive worldview. In a similar manner, we started our Theological Hochschool (seminary) under pietist auspices, but quickly grew it into a doctrinal powerhouse that twinned into Calvin Theological Seminary and Calvin College. When our pietist minds perceived this intellectual growth and broadening as an abandonment of our initial missionary zeal, we created the “Reformed Bible Institute” in order to get back to the training of evangelists and teachers. This school later became “Reformed Bible College,” and now continues with us as “Kuyper College.” Meanwhile, the Kuyperian and doctrinalist communities among us urged the development of a more fully articulated Reformed presence in advanced academics, and brought into being the “Institute for Christian Studies” graduate school in Toronto. The greatest synthesis of our three dominant strands, though, emerged in the late 20th century with the establishment of our paired network of independent (but deeply CRCNA formed and associated) Christian liberal arts colleges (Dordt, Trinity, Redeemer, The King’s University College) and the development of our wildly successful integrated church school program. Life Curriculum brought together the strength of Heidelberg Catechism training and solid biblical instruction, joining the best of our pietist, doctrinalist, and Kuyperian threads in an amazing faith-nurturing system of discipleship and transformation that became the standard of many Reformed and Presbyterian denominations around the world.

Christ and Culture

In his perceptive study, Christ and Culture (Harper &Row, 1975), H. Richard Niebuhr identified five prominent ways in which Christians have navigated the truths and ideals of their faith in relation to the tragedies and fallenness of the societies in which they live:

• Christ against Culture: Human societies are corrupted by sin, and antagonistic to Christianity and Jesus’ redemption. We must live in isolation from culture.
• Christ of Culture: While much in human society has been corrupted by sin, the redemptive light of Jesus, as creator and redeemer, is shining through, and we must celebrate and enhance these glimmerings as the long divine redemptive process.
• Christ over Culture: In losing its connection with our Creator, human society has become degraded and sordid. But Christ has come, and working with him we can reassert divine hope in “Christianized” communities, or “Christendom”.
• Christ and Culture in Paradox: The world deals with secular things in manipulations of power, while the church provides expressions of grace through worship and care. Humans live in both worlds and must learn to be the best they can in each.
• Christ, the Transformer of Culture: Our world has been corrupted by sin, but God has begun a redemptive mission—first through Israel, then in Jesus Christ—that is restoring people and cultures to the fullness of God’s Kingdom intentions. While we long and pray for the complete transformation that will only come when Jesus returns, we work under the leadership of Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to bring the beginnings of that renewal now.

In our CRCNA heritage, our pietists have tended to emphasize “Christ against Culture,” our doctrinalists have focused often on “Christ over Culture,” and our Kuyperians have touted “Christ, the Transformer of Culture.” Recently some among us have begun to use the term “Confessionalists” to describe themselves; this tends to be an expression of “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” using power and dominance as primary techniques for asserting identity in both society and the church.

Unraveling?

It was on two sociological matters (the role of women and the place of homosexual people within the church) that we began to splinter into isolationist camps in the late 20th century. Suddenly we seemed no longer to be able to talk meaningfully or to work together synergistically. Although standing together on the shoulders of our mixed Reformed forebears, we seem to have forgotten a few things:

• Kuyper was a pietist who wrote more devotional meditations than theology books and who adored Bavinck the doctrinalist, recruiting him to shape the transformationalist Reformed movement in the Netherlands.
• Bavinck was a pietist who had an enormous capacity to see and communicate the nuances of doctrine, but that his greatest work was the resoundingly Kuyperian The Philosophy of Revelation.
• The early pietist and doctrinalist Christian Reformed Church, existing almost exclusively in three small “colonies,” became a significant denomination and influential missional agent only when the Kuyperian influence of later Dutch immigration broadened its insights and capacities. We are stronger together than any of our seminal groups are independently.

“Was there nothing to fight for?” Indeed, there was and there continues to be. But the scars we carry into eternity should not be those we inflict upon our closest sisters and brothers in the family of Jesus.