Abraham Kuyper was born on Sunday, October 29, 1837, in the parsonage of the Reformed Church at Maassluis, in the Netherlands province of South Holland. Little “Bram” was the third child, and first son, of Dominie Jan Frederik Kuyper and his wife, Henriëtte Huber. In keeping with custom, he was named after his paternal grandfather, an Amsterdam shopkeeper. His earliest biographers, looking for portents of his remarkable life to come, rehearsed bits of family lore about his birth. Supposedly, an old neighbor woman prophesied greatness at seeing the caul that clung to the newborn’s head, and a visiting “wonderdokter” (a “quack,” perhaps a phrenologist) expressed astonishment at the sight of the lad’s prodigiously large head. Others saw in his big dreamy eyes the token of a Romantic visionary.
Kuyper’s head was big by any measure. Far too big, according to his enemies. Capacious enough, his supporters noted, to produce in the hundreds of titles he wrote a body of commentary on the entire religious, political, and cultural landscape of his times, as well as the blueprints, rationale, and operating instructions for a network of institutions that put his proposals into practice. Various of these labors were, perhaps, foreshadowed at his birth. The cries that echoed through the parsonage that Sunday morning, keeping the older Kuyper from his pulpit duties, were faint anticipations of the uproar that his son would raise in the Dutch Reformed Church — that would, in fact, cause its largest rupture in 250 years. That turmoil the younger Kuyper intended as a new reformation in the line of John Calvin; his father registered his infant son at the Maassluis town hall on October 31, the 320th anniversary of Martin Luther’s manifesto at Wittenberg. Kuyper’s hometown stood near the mouth of the Maas (Meuse) River, downstream from Rotterdam and right next to the Waal (Rhine), thus athwart the arteries of continental trade that would make Rotterdam the great port of Europe in the twentieth century. For now the drowsy pace of trade gave only faint echoes of Holland’s seventeenth-century “golden age” at the head of global commerce. Kuyper would argue that the Calvinist Reformation had something to do with that prosperity, and that his own crusade would help renew Holland’s glory. It could hardly do worse: in his birth-year the Netherlands stood near the bottom of a long century of decline.
Kuyper’s vision also had an international scope that was mirrored in his remarkably cosmopolitan set of ancestors. Six, perhaps seven, of his eight great-grandparents were born outside the Netherlands. The source of his patronym, Dirk Kuyper, came to Holland from Latvia via the Baltic trade in grain and lumber that provided the foundations of Dutch golden-age commerce. In 1739 Dirk married the widow Anna van Duyn van Dort and duly enrolled as a burgher of the city of Amsterdam, employed with his new father-in-law as a carpenter, at the other end of the lumber business. Of Dirk and Anna’s ten children, Abraham the grandfather was eighth born, in 1750. Like his mother he married twice, the second time at fifty years of age to Anna Bauer, a native of Neukirchen bei Kassel, probably in Switzerland though possibly in Germany.* This Abraham ran a brush-making shop between two of Amsterdam’s canal rings. On that modest base and amid economic hard times, he and Anna had seven children, beginning with Jan Frederik in 1801.
On his mother’s side Abraham the grandson could trace his lineage back four generations to the 1680s in the Winterthur district of Switzerland, north of Zurich. With an occasional officer post in the local watch or Swiss Guard adorning their history, the Hubers held a little higher status than the Kuypers. Like Anna Bauer, Kuyper’s grandfather Jean Jacques Huber arrived fairly late in Amsterdam, marrying there as a twenty-eight-year-old in 1790, but he seems to have brought along enough capital to open his own business. His bride, Christina Andressen, was of half-Dutch, half-Hessian ancestry, with links, according to family tradition, to Liege in Wallonia. The dry-goods store that Jean Jacques, now Jan Jacob, operated on Leidsestraat suffered along with grandfather Abraham’s shop and much other Dutch trade and industry during the French occupation of the Netherlands (1795-1813), especially when Napoleon’s Continental System shut down sea-borne commerce. That the Hubers’s only son was conscripted into the Grand Army that Napoleon led into Russia in 1812 redoubled the family’s animosity toward French rule. Young Samuel deserted — and survived.
The Hubers, and the Kuypers too, thus entered the nineteenth century seared by some epochal events of history. Though their particular trial might appear to modern eyes to have arisen from political and economic forces, they along with thousands of their countrymen understood it in religious terms. More broadly, the nineteenth century in Europe was the age of history, in which personal, national, even metaphysical destiny was defined by an understanding of the past. We need to review some of the main lines of Dutch historical development, then, to identify the furnishings of Kuyper’s mind — its heroes and villains, its lessons and warnings — the better to understand which items he would keep, which ones he would discard, and which ones he would rearrange over the course of his long career.
Golden Age and Trying Times
It was common in Kuyper’s circles to blame Holland’s early nineteenth-century malaise on the French occupation and French ideas. In fact it was rooted much earlier, in some grand, home-grown aspirations. Dutch hegemony in European commerce arose in the 1590s in the wake of the successful revolt against Spanish rule, and it crested in the mid-seventeenth century under the leadership of Johan de Witt and the Amsterdam commercial regency. But the French invasion in 1672, besides triggering De Witt’s assassination by a Dutch mob, put the Netherlands at the forefront of a long campaign led by William of Orange to repel the aggressions of Louis XIV. To Dutch Protestants this was as much a religious as a strategic or economic cause; their land was to be the bulwark for the true faith against Catholic (“papist”) tyranny. In the process William, along with his wife, Mary Stuart, eventually took the crown of England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, cementing an Anglo-Dutch alliance that launched a virtual twenty-five-year war against France. In these campaigns (1689-97 and 1702-13) the Netherlands supplied the bulk of the land forces and the British focused on their navy. The resulting burden on Dutch finances and manpower left them with a substantial and growing debt, while Britain gained lasting supremacy at sea. Dutch trade held its own until 1740 (the year after Dirk Kuyper settled in Amsterdam) but then entered a long decline that hit its trough just about the time Kuyper was born.
The nation hardly became impoverished overnight, since its seventeenth-century boom set marks — in levels of urbanization, the scale of its manufacturing sector, and per capita standard of living — that England would not match until the 1820s. Thus even in the decades of decline the Netherlands continued to attract immigrants of modest means, especially from Germany — people like Kuyper’s grandmother Bauer and his Hessian great-grandfather Nicolaas Andressen, who showed up on the Delft city register in the lowly status of lamplighter, gravedigger, and night-watchman. Yet, as contemporary critics sensed and later historians have confirmed, the expansive commerce and spirit of the Dutch seventeenth century, its unsurpassed art and architecture, its world-class science and universities, and its shipbuilding and finishing industries, gave way in the eighteenth to the imitative, decorative, and depressed. Income inequality widened well before the “French time,” as regressive tax policies transferred wealth from the poorer, rural, and eastern provinces to the regents in the big maritime cities. These became less merchants than rentiers, living off the interest on their government bonds and shares in the East India Company, targeting new investments abroad rather than at home.
These economic developments were mirrored in politics. The Dutch Republic ran under multiple, discrete, yet overlapping shares of sovereignty parceled out among the States-General, the States (parliaments) of particular provinces, the cities and towns, and the stadtholder (the prince of Orange). These assorted “spheres” of authority loomed large in the political thinking of the time as they would later, transformed, in Kuyper’s own thought. Within this complexity, however, a persistent political division prevailed over the Republic’s two-hundred-year existence. On the one side were the urban regents, centered in the States of Holland. Not nobles in the traditional sense, they were nonetheless patricians of the purest water, claiming the right to rule by virtue of their wealth, education, and public spirit — not to mention the importance of their commercial and industrial interests to the general prosperity. Their political philosophy, inscribed by Hugo Grotius, glorified republics, placed sovereignty in the provinces, and elevated civil power over the ecclesiastical. That is, it gave town and provincial councils the right to control religious policy on the understanding that the church existed for the purposes of social morality and order as much as for ends eternal.
At the opposite pole, and high in the esteem of Kuyper’s forebears, stood the prince of Orange, around whom clustered groups that shared little more than a common antagonism to the regents: notables from the interior provinces, artisans and workers from the larger cities, members of town militias, agricultural laborers, and anyone especially devoted to the faith or interests of the national Reformed church. The House of Orange itself sometimes emitted the tones of absolute monarchy, but its supporters more often endorsed the constitutional type. They elevated central over local authority and had a strong sense of “natural” hierarchy, two elements with which Kuyper would sharply disagree. He was one with them, however, in prizing national unity and dignity as much as wealth, and in tying public virtue to the ministrations of the Reformed church. Some Orangists sincerely, others for political reasons, wished to make the church more independent of the state, to shore up orthodoxy within its halls, to augment its controls over public morals and education, and to enforce more uniformly its rights as the only legitimate public religious body.
This last provision meant that, during the Republic, while non-Reformed believers were not punished for their personal convictions, they were also not allowed to advertise their assemblies or educate their children by their own lights. Understandably, religious out-groups — especially Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, and Lutherans (although not Amsterdam’s Jews) — sided with the Holland regents, while Reformed orthodoxy typically went with Orangist politics. These correlations were not without contradictions, however. The regent party could tolerate anything but orthodox intolerance, and for all their talk about the rights of different spheres they would subordinate the church to larger civic purposes. For their part, the orthodox Reformed could support Orange more consistently as a concept than as a person, for two of the most notable stadtholders, Maurice and William II, cut a swath of dissolute womanizing around The Hague that hardly fit Calvinist norms of sexual morality. Populist as well as Calvinist taste had to swallow hard at the lavish style the stadtholders started cultivating in the mid-eighteenth century, particularly since the princes’ pretensions were rising just as their character and abilities were falling. Indeed, in the riots by which they enforced their will in emergencies (as when they dismembered De Witt) but also in their assertiveness vis à vis town councils during ordinary times, Orange populists showed a rebellious streak quite beyond what the regents or the stadtholders would countenance. Kuyper had that rebellious streak in quantity.
The Divided Heart of Dutch Protestantism
The country’s political division ran parallel to a theological divide dating back to the time of the original revolt against Spain. On the one hand, that revolt was inextricably entwined with the rise of Protestantism. It was the explosion of iconoclasm — the wholesale sacking of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries — in the 1560s that sealed Philip II’s decision to suppress Protestantism in the Low Countries by military force. And at every low point in the subsequent war it was Calvinist conviction, organization, and inspiration that proved to be the irreducible nugget of resistance. On the other hand, the iconoclasm of the south (present-day Belgium) was little seen in the north (the future Netherlands), where the Catholic establishment melted away under apathy more than by Protestant zeal. In fact, when Calvinist preachers started filtering up from the south, they discerned an alarming religious vacuum. In the United Provinces that finally did gain their independence, hard-core, positive Protestants amounted to about ten percent of the population. Those numbers were certainly augmented by a flood of Calvinist refugees from the south (the Spanish reconquest of Antwerp, for instance, sent 38,000 — half the city’s population — into exile), but the intense zeal the newcomers brought with them hardly altered the milder convictions of many old families in the north.
From the start, then, the United Provinces harbored two founding myths: one of true freedom, the other of true religion. The home of the first was the old families and civic elites; of the second, the overlapping sets of refugees, guild-members, small proprietors, and skilled workers that included families like the Kuypers and Hubers. Each side acknowledged the other in a secondary role, though that tolerance tended to get squeezed out under duress. Both dwelt in the Reformed church but had different expectations for its teachings. The party of freedom identified with a native northern spirit of Erasmus and Thomas à Kempis, a Christian humanism of personal religion, an undogmatic Bible, and the ethics of Jesus. The party of true religion favored Calvin’s disciplined system of theological reflection, moral discipline, and church organization. The most famous clash between the two erupted early in the seventeenth century over the teachings of Leiden theologian Jacobus Arminius, whose accommodation of Calvinism to human free will resonated with the heritage of Erasmus. The opposition sided with Franciscus Gomarus, an exile from the south, in his forceful reassertion of divine sovereignty. The dispute was resolved at the Synod of Dort (1618-19), which found against the Arminian “Remonstrant” position. While the Synod represented the last and worthy gathering of the Calvinist International, its edicts coincided with a coup d’etat by Maurice, Prince of Orange, against the regent regime headed by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius. Both of these took the Remonstrant side. Oldenbarnevelt paid with his life, Grotius was smuggled out of town in a trunk, and the alliance of Orange and orthodoxy was sealed for all time.
The underlying antagonism lived on, however. It cropped up in the next generation in a clash between Johannes Cocceius, another Leiden theologian, and Gijsbert Voetius of Utrecht. Aligned with the new critical philosophy of Descartes, Cocceius proposed a more figurative reading of Scripture and a looser authority for the documents that Dort had established as binding standards. The Voetians, who stood fast by Bible, Aristotle, and the confessions, took the battle to the plain of practical conduct via an alliance with the forces of the Netherlands’ “later (also “further”) Reformation.” This was a pietist movement inspired by English Puritanism for the purpose of deepening personal devotion and tightening the moral regulation of everyday life. It frowned on theater, dancing, card playing, and popular festivals like the fabled Sinterklaas day — also upon the use in worship of the equally famous Dutch pipe organs. It tried to get city and provincial councils to enforce Sabbath-observance and moral education, and church councils to suppress Cocceian and Socinian (Unitarian) teachings. No conclusive resolution was forthcoming this time, however. William III established a model of alternating pulpit and university appointments between the two parties, while educational and behavioral matters were left to local option.
Accordingly, robust theological argument gave way to other concerns over the eighteenth century. Humanist circles started attending to the various schools of Enlightenment thought that were coursing over from France and Scotland. In the Dutch case these translated into close empirical studies more than grand theories of human nature or society, while concern for virtue and order made the Dutch Enlightenment more moderate, averse to any shades of atheism or political radicalism. For their part, the orthodox gave up on purifying the Reformed church as a whole and concentrated on cultivating true religion in smaller circles. Sometimes as study and discussion groups and sometimes as well-defined conventicles, sometimes supplementing official church services and occasionally replacing them, the pious gathered to read classics of confessional and devotional orthodoxy by “old writers” (oude schrijvers) like Voetius, Willem à Brakel, and Bernardus Smytegelt. Both sets of Kuyper’s grandparents frequented such meetings. Besides yielding personal edification, these sessions cultivated hopes and prayers that a reformation of public morals, a return to confessional rigor, or simply a more heartfelt repentance on their own part might restore the Reformed church, the Netherlands, the House of Orange — any or all of these — to their former glory.
In vain. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Republic, by now “inherently hollow and precarious,” became a pawn on the chessboard of international politics. The most concerted protest against this devolution came from the Patriot movement of the 1780s, inspired by the American Revolution. Appalled by William V’s toadying before Britain and Prussia and vindicated when he brought Holland to utter humiliation in the fourth and final Anglo-Dutch War (1780-84), the Patriots called for a new republic invigorated by a renewed civic virtue. Alas, their citizen militias melted away before the Prussian invasion of 1787. The restored stadtholders did no better when the armies of revolutionary France invaded eight years later; William fled to England and the Patriots rose up to greet the invader. For the moment the French behaved themselves, especially compared to a British relief force that pillaged the countryside, but their attempt at reform stumbled from one experiment to another until they cleared the board in 1806 and deposited the Republic in the dustbin of history. The regime they put in its place instituted a uniform law code, centralized administration, more equitable taxation, and freedom of religion, along with plans for more robust, state-supervised primary education. These elements remained in place when Napoleon erased the nation itself by absorbing the Netherlands into his empire in 1810. To this the Dutch submitted, one historian puts it, “without resistance and without enthusiasm.” In the collective memory under which Kuyper was reared, the French reforms were all suspect by association and usually condemned in substance. They amounted to a legacy of bad faith and humiliation. Kuyper’s task would be to sort through them, spying out some that lived on, also under the guise of orthodox religion, while trying to redeem others from their revolutionary taint.
Toward 1848
Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813 opened the way for a new beginning and laid out the landscape on which Kuyper grew up. The next prince of Orange was installed as “King” (not just stadtholder) William I and ruled over a country that had been doubled in size by amalgamation with present-day Belgium. In exchange William ceded to Britain most remaining Dutch colonies — that is, he traded distant potential for immediate gains. To his credit, he invested much of his personal fortune in economic development projects in both the north and the south. At the same time he exuded absolutist airs that contradicted Dutch sensibilities, not to mention the limited monarchy inscribed in the country’s new constitution. He kept in place the French system of centralized administration. He thus resembled at once a latter-day enlightened despot and the prototype of the nineteenth-century businessman-king. William’s investments helped launch Belgian industrialization, but his attempt to replace parochial education there with secular secondary schools alienated Roman Catholics, who joined a petition drive in 1830 for general civil liberties that netted 350,000 signatures. William took it as an anti-Dutch rebellion and mounted an invasion to suppress it, only to see his army flee before a French counter-assault. For a decade he refused to negotiate terms, embittered that Britain had deserted his cause. He finally abdicated in 1840, also to avoid a crisis over his second marriage, to a Roman Catholic.
The Belgian troubles worsened the north’s economic woes. The French period had not only crippled Dutch commerce but, through revaluations, had cost the financial classes some forty percent of their capital. William I had inherited a colossal national debt from the eighteenth-century wars, redoubled it by assuming the arrears of the bankrupted East India Company, deepened it further through his investments in infrastructure, then lost the Belgian revenue while insisting on maintaining a costly military presence along their contested border. By 1837, the year of Kuyper’s birth, the nation was facing an acute fiscal crisis on top of a deep depression in agriculture, which worsened with extensive crop failures in the 1840s. Thus, if the Netherlands in 1850 might still claim the third highest per capita GDP in Europe, its productivity was falling along with real wages and nutrition. The only curves going up tracked food prices and mortality rates.
The government survived the crisis by three measures: it refinanced its debt, rationalized its accounting procedures, and returned to exploiting the colonies. The “Cultivation System” introduced under William I required the inhabitants of the East Indies to devote twenty percent of their land or labor to growing crops exclusively for export to the Netherlands. This generated huge revenues for the government (some forty percent of the total by 1857, enough to balance the budget already by 1847) and boosted the Dutch carrying trade and domestic manufactures. It created a safe harbor for investment and eventually paid for the infrastructure that would carry future economic development. It even supplied the compensation that owners received when slavery was abolished in the Dutch empire in 1863. All in all, the 1850s marked a turning point in the Dutch economy; old investment and new revenues generated real economic growth that would boom for a quarter century. This was the matrix of Kuyper’s education and early career.
At the same time a new chapter was opening in Dutch political history. Soon after assuming the throne in 1840, King William II agreed to submit biennial budgets (rather than one a decade!) and make his ministers partially responsible to the States General (rather than to himself alone). More radical changes were spurred by the revolutionary upheavals that swept Europe in 1848. Even though these did not wash over into the Netherlands, they prompted an anxious William II to commission the leading Liberal politician of the time, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, to draft an entirely new constitution. A Leiden historian of German ancestry and English sympathies, Thorbecke crafted a pick-and-choose document from different models without any fixed ideology. Nonetheless, it was made for classic Liberal constituencies: the well-educated, well-heeled professional and business classes who personified the mantra of “careers open to talent and merit” by which the rising bourgeoisie justified its status. The new regime was still a constitutional monarchy, but the cabinet was now fully responsible to the States General instead of to the king. It genuinely nationalized politics by having the lower house of Parliament elected directly by the voters rather than by provincial assemblies. It made education a concern of national rather than of local government. At the same time it kept politics an elite preserve. Voting rights were determined by such a high property qualification that the percentage of eligible voters actually declined under the new system, from 3 to 2.5 percent of the population. By 1870 that percentage had increased only to 2.9, placing the Netherlands — third or fourth in Europe in prosperity — close to the bottom in democracy, lagging behind not only France, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries, but also Greece, Portugal, Serbia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The new constitution also separated church and state, a step of fundamental import for Kuyper’s future. For now, Reformed traditionalists were dismayed by the restoration of self-rule to the Roman Catholic Church, then horrified (along with some progressives) when, in March 1853, the papacy reinstituted the old archbishopric at Utrecht, the city of Voetius, and appointed bishops for five dioceses across the land. A wave of anti-Catholic protest exploded the next month (hence called the “April Movement”) in mass demonstrations and a massive petition campaign. The plaintiffs included royalists, who disapproved of constitutions and parliamentary rule in general; conservatives, who disliked the new constitution in particular; and a wide swath of Protestants — orthodox and liberal alike — who took their religion to be synonymous with political liberty and true Dutch character. In the short term the protest toppled the Thorbecke government; over the longer run it put religious questions at the center of political discussion. In between, the Conservative cabinet bungled its opportunity by showing little vision for policy or readiness to rule.
Some Reformed traditionalists were less enthusiastic for the April movement, for they had no love for the older order. The General Regulation (Algemeen Reglement) instituted for the Dutch Reformed Church in 1816 displayed William I’s full centralizing bent. Protestant and Catholic “Departments of Worship” were made cabinet ministries. All public functions of the church — including properties, professorial appointments, and regulatory control — became matters of the national state. All internal functions were consigned to a small synod appointed by and reporting to the king that passed its edicts down a chain of command to local congregations. The system reflected Enlightenment values of order and efficiency, and Protestants who were worried about being swamped by Belgian Catholics in the expanded Kingdom of the Netherlands saw enough merit in its consolidation of forces to accept it. But it reversed the church’s presbyterian order of delegated rule from the bottom up and destroyed its old measure of autonomy. Moreover, the new administrators came from the old Patriot bourgeoisie who valued toleration above doctrinal tradition. Thus, even the belated amendment of the Regulation to make the Synod responsible for the “maintenance of doctrine” had little prospect of effectiveness, especially since no procedures of enforcement were specified.
To its critics, the church’s new name (Hervormde, no longer Gereformeerde) was sadly appropriate; it was more “re-shaped” than truly “reformed.” Scores of local congregations began to secede from the national church in 1834 to “return to the standpoint of the fathers.” King William I responded with a ham-handed suppression that imposed fines, prison terms, and police disruption of Seceder worship services under old Napoleonic restrictions on public assemblies.
The Question of Church Reform
The Seceders prospered despite (or because of) these sanctions. By 1870 they were a denomination of over 100,000 members and had seeded a significant emigration to the United States besides. But most Dutch Protestants disagreed with the step of secession, regardless of how much they faulted the king’s severity. Its most faithful devotees regarded the Reformed church as the providentially appointed instrument of God’s kingdom in the Dutch nation. Even the less ardent esteemed it as “the visible order of a moral society.” From this generic point of view, to disrupt the national church was to threaten the unity of the nation, and to do so in the name of doctrinal precision or grievances about church government was to miss the essential purpose of religion, which was to provide the general population with moral discipline and consolation across the ups and downs of everyday life.
The national church included two parties of “reformers” (in contrast to the Seceder “rebels”) who hoped to revitalize it from within, and renew the nation in the process. The first, known as the “Groningen school” by virtue of being centered at the university there, proposed to tap the native resources of Erasmus and the medieval mysticism on which he drew as the basis of an ecumenical Dutch Protestantism on which national renewal could go forward. If tired of the tepid spirit and compromised posture of the current church, they were just as averse to the dogma and logic-chopping of strict Calvinists — and to the foreign (French!) style that they alleged Calvin had interposed on tolerant Dutch soil. The Groningers were thus ready to ride easy on traditional theological points or to translate them freely into what they regarded to be the more advanced understanding of their day. Their approach proved particularly attractive in the educational sphere. By mid-century the Groningen school not only dominated in the preparation of Dutch clergy but was also effectively promoting literacy and ethical formation in elementary and secondary schools.
The other reformers were more traditional in theology and of fervent evangelical spirit. They comprised the Dutch wing of the Réveil, the wave of Protestant renewal that arose across Western Europe after Waterloo in hopes of filling the void left by the failed revolution with the message of the gospel. The Dutch Réveilers tended to be young, educated, and elite, aspiring leaders who wanted solid ideals but wanted them personally warmed in the Romantic spirit of the day. Thus, the head notions of Calvinism, which they generally affirmed, had to be grounded in heart experience, translated into the reformation of life, and promoted far and near. This led on to significant campaigns for the relief of social suffering, particularly in the domains of temperance, the abolition of slavery, and the improvement of working conditions in farms and factories. That required organization, which raised the question of institutions, also of the institutional church. These were precisely the animating questions of Kuyper’s career, and the children of the Réveil were the audience to whom he first appealed.
Two figures in whom he found lasting inspiration personified the choice at hand. Isaac da Costa, a Réveil convert from Sephardic Judaism, defined the evangelical option. Like his mentor, the fierce Romantic reactionary William Bilderdijk, Da Costa published extensive poetry and conducted private seminars in literature and history to counter the perceived liberal disposition of the universities. To these he added biblical studies of an increasing millenarian bent. Eventually he came to a more benign reading of the times than Bilderdijk had been able to muster. He likewise moved toward a more progressive view of revelation, trusting that readers who loved Christ and were led by his Spirit would get from Scripture greater light than had their predecessors. For that reason, and for fear that doctrinal precision would prove divisive, Da Costa was reluctant to invest binding authority in the church’s confessional standards. None of this made him remotely like a theological liberal or lessened his dismay over conditions in the Reformed church, but he viewed these “medically” — as illnesses to be cured by the free and faithful preaching of the Word, through which the Spirit would breed conviction in the needy heart. In twentieth-century terms, Da Costa became a parachurch evangelical of irenic disposition.
The alternative churchly and confessional path was personified by Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer. Educated as a classicist and jurist, archivist of the House of Orange and eventually a member of Parliament, Groen was steeped in texts and law. Further, his conversion came under the influence of Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné, William I’s court preacher and a giant in the Réveil by virtue of his magisterial, if polemical, history of the Reformation. Merle thus reinforced Groen’s appreciation of history and institutions and helped engender his “juridical” approach to ecclesiastical affairs. That is, Groen thought the church not to be ill but in error, thought the error to be theological, and thought the corrective to be enforcement of confessional standards by church judicatories. Accordingly, he brought formal charges against the Groningen theologians for deviating from Dortian orthodoxy, only to have the Synod declare itself procedurally unable to pass judgment. The impasse moved William II to institute some church reforms in 1842, alongside his first political modifications. It prompted the Synod to mandate that pastors and officials show agreement with “the essence and chief themes of the Reformed Church.” Defining those themes would be the work of the next generation of Dutch theologians. That enterprise that would leave behind both the Groningers and the Réveil and help launch Kuyper’s own efforts.
Theology and Politics at Home
Kuyper’s father shared little of these worries. On the contrary, Jan Frederik valued the church as it was, not only for its moral and spiritual resources but also for his own career aspirations. Rejecting family plans that he take over the brush-making shop, he joined a commercial firm in Amsterdam whose considerable English trade could make use of his gift for languages. That talent in conjunction with his pious upbringing brought him to the attention of Algernon Sydney Thelwall, an Anglican missionary to the city’s Jewish quarter and a member of the Dutch Religious Tract Society. Soon busy translating English tracts into Dutch, Jan Frederik showed theological acumen as well. The Society’s general secretary, Amsterdam pastor D. M. Kaakebeen, arranged a scholarship for him at the Amsterdam Athenaeum, where Jan Frederik started prep school in 1823, a twenty-two-year-old among teenagers. In two years he was ready for theological studies at Leiden, and in 1828 he was ordained to the ministry of the Reformed church. That same year he married Henriëtte Huber, an accomplished French-language teacher at a girls’ boarding school. Having been nurtured in the same sort of piety, when the two met at a soiree where card-playing was on order, they turned away from worldliness and fell to elevated conversation with each other, he in English, she in French.
Meanwhile, a dispute at the Tract Society confronted Jan Frederik with a revealing choice. Thelwall wanted the Society’s literature to bring out Calvinist distinctives; Kaakebeen favored more generic flavors. Notably, it was Kaakebeen who installed Dominie Kuyper in his first church, in the village of Hoogmade, near Leiden, and eventually arranged for him to be called to Middelburg, the provincial capital of Zeeland. In between those pastorates Kuyper served one other village post and then his first city pulpit, in Maassluis, where he was installed in 1834, the year of the Secession. Nothing of the strife or dogmatism in that protest would come near him. From Kaakebeen he had learned to abhor “extremes”; from Thelwall, a friend of Da Costa, he had absorbed an earnest evangelical spirit exhorting unto “joy, humility, simplicity, and seriousness.” From the record of Jan Frederik’s extant sermons, he favored two themes: that at the Cross, atonement was rendered for the sins of all the world, and that under benign Providence the faithful could move forward in simple trust. He was most emphatic in urging household devotions, careful nurture of the young, and daily Bible study. That is, Jan Frederik aspired to conventicle qualities in the household, unity of spirit in the congregation, and respect for his professional standing in the world.
In family ways Jan Frederik was nearly as prolific as his father. Bram’s two older sisters (Anna Christina and Henriëtta Johanna) were also born in Maassluis; a third, Sophia, arrived in 1839, only to die soon after the birth of a fourth daughter, Anna Cornelia, in autumn 1840. The move to Middelburg came a year later; there Bram’s only brother, Herman, was born in 1843, and his youngest sister, Jeanette Jacqueline, in 1847. Mother Henriëtte did not seem fazed by all these labors, joining her husband in home-schooling the children. Dominie Kuyper fared worse, losing a year to illness and (his son Abraham would recall late in life) losing more and more of his audience to rival preachers in town.
Meanwhile, little Bram snapped out of a dreamy early childhood and began to explore the world. He liked to visit a neighboring gardener, a pious Seceder, who would let him pick some fruit and take him home for lunch. He undoubtedly absorbed the grand memorials in Middelburg’s venerable Abdijkerk to the thirteenth-century Count William II of Holland, who had perished in battle just before being crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and to the Evertsen brothers, who died leading Zeeland’s fleet against England in 1666. Late in life Kuyper testified to a yearning for the seaman’s life kindled in him by the wharves of this old hub of the West Indies Company. Family lore added that Bram already now showed a tactical knack by lifting cigars from his father’s desk and dispensing them to the sailors in exchange for their attention to his little sermons. He also rebuked their cursing.
Additional family lore held that Dominie Kuyper accepted a call to Leiden, his fifth and final pastorate, because of his daughters’ demands to reside in a more fashionable city; in the process, supposedly, young Bram renounced his hopes for the sea for the toils of formal education. The latter was likely the real priority in the matter, for Kuyper enrolled at the Leiden gymnasium right after the family moved there in the summer of 1849. Equally to the point was Dominie Kuyper’s move from a difficult to a more favorable post — a site with more prestige, greater family opportunity, and the prospect (not fulfilled, it turned out) of less theological strife. As Abraham would put it late in his own life, his father, never having been strictly Reformed, had run into difficulty in Middelburg in the face of orthodox competition. By contrast, he recalled, “in Leiden at that time it was so utterly impossible to call a genuine Calvinist preacher that one had to be content with the appearance of a supernaturalist, in the spirit of my father.” In any case, Jan Frederik stayed there for twenty years.
The Leiden gymnasium was propitious for Bram. It was, like him, just eleven years old, having been founded amid the national renewal campaign of the 1830s. It followed the traditional classical curriculum of immersing students in the humanities and languages so as to mold them into wise and virtuous leaders, able to discern the transient and permanent in human affairs. Thus Kuyper began Latin in his first year, Greek in the second, and French, German, and English thereafter, all intermixed with history, philosophy, and Dutch literature. Because he had plans for the ministry he was allowed to start Hebrew his last year, as a seventeen-year old. The rising star on staff was the historian Robert Fruin, who would one day at the university become the founder of modern Dutch historiography. For now he drilled his schoolboys in a liberal narrative of true freedom. At the same time, Fruin gave credit to Calvinism for sustaining the war for independence. Kuyper would one day extend that lesson to the present, as his rationalist teacher did not.
For the moment, however, Kuyper’s historical interest tracked the era’s fascination with all things medieval. Kuyper chose for his graduation oration the figure of the bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila, c. 310-83), whose translation of the Bible into Gothic is the oldest document in Germanic literature. The speech was pure hagiography, but the linguistic command Kuyper showed in his research, not to mention the quality of his high-German text, was an accomplishment worthy of class salutatorian. (Only a rival who had taken on more summer homework outdid him.) As to its convictions, Kuyper’s essay blended Romantic hero-worship with patriotic verve. That by the standards of Reformed theology the Arian Ulfilas was a rank heretic Kuyper mentioned not at all. This comports with his own later confession that he had been no Calvinist as a youth. Rather, he traveled “in half-believing conservative circles that honored the old tradition and took Rome to be the arch-enemy of the nation’s honor,” that felt “bitter disappointment” at the innovations of Thorbecke, and that exacted their revenge in the April Movement. He had been unequalled in his fiery anti-papist stance as a gymnasium student, Kuyper recalled, and seen few happier days than when he burst into his father’s study in 1853 shouting, “Father, father, Thorbecke has fallen!”
But in fact, Kuyper owed Thorbecke a lot. His new constitution had nationalized politics; Kuyper would found the state’s first nationally organized political party. The Reformed church as well as the Roman Catholics had new possibilities for self-rule, and if it took the former longer than the latter to seize the opportunity, Kuyper would be among the upstarts to lead the way. By the mid-1850s a new economic vitality was clearly evident, as Thorbecke’s free-trade policies converged with William I’s infrastructure investments to sustain rapid growth. On the religious front, the council of “Christian Friends” that tried to coordinate the two wings of the Réveil held its last meeting in 1854. The next year Kuyper began university by enrolling, just like his father, in the theological faculty at Leiden, where a new tough-minded movement was rising to challenge the Groningen theology from the Left. All in all it turned out to be a propitious moment for an ambitious young man to start his course.
*The Swiss town by that name is less than ten kilometers from the site where Kuyper and his wife, Jo, were vacationing when she died suddenly in 1899.