Hello again, Ron:

Here’s the third installment of my take on how people in the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America are like, and unlike, the vast tribe known as “evangelicals” in North America.

In Part 1 I compared how these two groups treat the how and what of salvation. In Part 2 I unpacked white American evangelical assumptions about history and the worth of the earth. Now let’s talk about Dutch Reformed views of the same subject and how they might help explain the increasing gravitation of this small tribe toward the larger one.

Return

As I see it, there are three concepts of history coursing through the RCA and CRC. The first is a yearning to preserve or restore some past purity. This was the impulse behind the Secession of a hundred-plus churches from the national Reformed Church in the Netherlands beginning in 1834. The Seceders were protesting the “departure” of church authorities from, and their own desire to return to, “the standpoint of the fathers.”

Most of the leaders and a critical mass of Dutch immigrants to the United States in the 1840s and ‘50s were Seceders, and since that immigration founded the CRC and a good part of the RCA, it’s safe to say that the Seceder view of history is baked into these churches.

In this view, the future will probably see decay or falling away, requiring another return to the putative golden past. My favorite States-side example of the phenomenon was the question posed by the rising CRC chieftain Henry J. Kuiper after Calvin College’s very first commencement as a four-year institution: ‘what’s gone wrong at Calvin’? Change spells deviation. Notably, the movement that has recently taken over the CRC started out as The Returning Church. It is now the Abide Project.

How does this reading of history relate to secular affairs, to “the world” and our role in it? Ambivalently. Pure nostalgics cluck about degeneration from the good old days—an era that their own parents regarded as a sad degeneration from their good old days. True conservatives recognize the necessity of change but hope to keep it to a minimum and judge it by exacting standards. The capitalistically inclined—economic “conservatives”—are in a pinch because that system requires incessant change. Alexis de Tocqueville spied the American (or Victorian) solution almost 200 years ago: jettison the 10^th commandment and double-down on the 7^th. Pursue material acquisition within the framework of the patriarchal family.

Engage

A second reading of history can be identified with Abraham Kuyper. To quote, again, his sharp rejoinder to pious contempt for the world: “the world now, as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God, and humanity remains a creation of His hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation here on earth a mighty process, and in its historical development is to glorify the name of Almighty God.” (Lectures on Calvinism, 162)

Kuyper had absorbed a lot of Hegel in his student years at Leiden, and so he tended to see mighty forces at work in the world, vast systems in mortal combat, and he was constantly assessing the role Christians were to play in the mix. Often the picture was daunting: unbelief was on the rise and the faithful were imperiled. But things were never hopeless because God still reigned and the opposition harbored fatal flaws. Thus—and here was the bottom line—God’s faithful were called to action, to engage all domains of life as their part in the great divine drama.

The potential triumphalism in this concept has all too often been realized in Kuyperians’ declaration that they, “we,” are to bring in the kingdom of God. Erstwhile Kuyperian Daniel Meeter sounds the corrective: the faithful are to testify to the divine reign that has already been inaugurated and at God’s hand, not by our work.

Kuyperians recognize that much in life weighs against that reign and that sometimes Christians make things worse. So history is a struggle, an arena for witness and a testing ground for the biblical integrity of that witness. But it’s never a ground for despair and rarely dull. History is a drama, just not one given to the apocalyptic fantasies of the evangelical end-times scenario.

Accept

A third take on history was laid out in a rich article the self-same Daniel Meeter published in the Reformed Journal last month. “The RCA tends to think historically,” he says, “while the CRC thinks doctrinally. The RCA values continuity and relationships more than being right.” Rather than dreaming of a golden past or inflating everyday events, this mentality accepts the steady accumulations of the past as the providential setting for our action going into the future. Also as a set of lessons for guidance and correction, though not a bar of prohibition and excision. We are to appreciate history and learn from it and build on it but not use it to sort out the wheat and the tares.

This mentality can overlap with the other two when they’re in a congenial mode. It’s a solid base for that “long obedience in the same direction” that Eugene Peterson named as the Christian’s calling. But it lacks sex appeal. As Daniel posted in response to my Part 2, the end-times scenario is “so much more exciting than boring catechisms.” Further, tolerance can (note: not must) lead to a bland sort of church, tribal in its own way. “We’re here because we all get along.”

It can also flail when confronted with urgent issues. Daniel’s article shows how since 1850 the RCA functioned as a coalition between congregations founded in the colonial era and those founded out of the Secession-led immigration. Like all coalitions it had fault lines and tensions, which usually could be handled. “But with the [recent] human sexuality debate the tension could not hold and the coalition failed,” with a resulting exodus of some 250 congregations from the fold.

Erosion and Ejection

The CRC is facing its own fracture, though much smaller in scale, at the other end of the spectrum, and via excision, not exodus. At least forty congregations disagree with the 2022 Synodical ban on all same-sex relationships, and if the next Synod changes the Church Order as proposed, it will be able to force the dissenters into “alignment” or out of the church.

Certainly, the drive to recover purity is in play here. But another sense of history—better, its erosion—is at work as well. Call it the Dutch-Name-Bingo sense of history, an immigrant tribe’s sense of a shared past bearing such deep interlinkages that everyone can find a connection via family or friends to everyone else at no more than five removes. So if it is no longer true, as it once was, that the CRC has one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one college, one seminary, and one order of worship, it did have that dense social network.

That network has eroded, for three reasons. First, the CRC is far more multiethnic than it used to be—other bingo cards are in play. Second, any Dutch immigrant memory has utterly faded under thorough Americanization. Third, that process has enmeshed people in a much more complex system of communication and information. And here’s where the Evangelical connection, or gravitation, comes into play.

Some years ago I served on a committee to recommend a future course for The Banner, the CRC’s official magazine. Staff supplied us with survey results that revealed the readership’s #1 theological authority to be Charles Colson. Their #1 ethical guide? James Dobson. A felon and an Arminian. Game over, I feared, but still hoped the results could be reversed. I was wrong.

Communication

It turns out that the 1928 CRC Synod’s strictures against movie-going made some sense. Controlling identity requires controlling communication. But Hollywood posed only one intrusion, and not the most powerful one. That was, first, Christian radio—WMBI, WFUR, etc.—beaming evangelical nostrums, alarms, and hymnody into Christian Reformed homes. More powerful still has been Christian TV.

My bet is that future historians will date the real diminution of Reformed sensibilities in the CRC and RCA to the 1970s when a more glamorous version of the gospel came pumping into the living room on Sunday nights after the two-fold shot of routine at morning and evening services. There remained only the need for Fox News to supply a view of the world that completed a new worldview.

That worldview certainly has connections with the mentalities sketched above. Most of all, with the yearning to return to a supposed golden past (Make Christianity Pure Again!) premised on white patriarchal social values. Then, borrow some of that Kuyperian urgency and triumphalism and presume a tribe of likeminded people who can all get along if only those outside unpleasantries would go away.

It’s been some time coming, and it has fully arrived.