I had walked past it numerous times and never paid it much attention. But this time I stopped because something peculiar had caught my eye. I stood before the bronze sculpture of Albertus C. van Raalte, the founder of Holland, Michigan and Hope College.
The sculpture catches him mid-sermon. Van Raalte stands tall with right hand raised to the congregation and left hand touching the Bible.
What caught my eye was the object upon which the Bible rested. Covered with a thick cloth but bark clearly visible, it was a tree stump. The sculpture depicts van Raalte preaching to the hard-pressed and hard-working immigrants who are in the process of cutting down the forest and making a home for themselves in the Michigan wilderness.
More than curious, I did a little research. The noted Chicago sculptor, Leonard Crunelle crafted a model of this sculpture in 1922, called a maquette, possibly in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of van Raalte’s death. For some reason the sculpture was never completed and the maquette lost.
Years later at the approach of Holland’s sesquicentennial, a committee found a photograph of Crunelle’s maquette in the archives of The Holland Museum and commissioned another Chicago sculptor, James L. Gafgen, to cast the sculpture in bronze. They placed it in Centennial Park and dedicated it during the celebration of Holland’s Sesquicentennial in 1997.
Both artists, Crunelle and Gafgan, were trying to honor the life of van Raalte and express the values that animated him and undergirded the community that he founded.
One value was the centrality of the Bible. The sculpture depicts van Raalte touching and drawing inspiration from the Bible. Van Raalte and his fellow immigrants believed that the Reformed tradition offered the most comprehensive and coherent summary of biblical teaching, the distillation of which was the Latin phrase, coram deo, itself a translation of the Hebrew phrase, liphne Adonai, “standing in the presence of the Lord.” This phrase celebrates the great mystery of the faith. Reformed believers then and now affirm both the transcendent power of God and the immanent love of God. God is a Sovereign who has lowered the scepter and has drawn all humankind into God’s presence, pre-eminently so in the incarnation of Jesus.
In the midst of all the hardships of establishing a community in a wild world, van Raalte and the immigrants knew comfort because they belonged to God, and, at their best, they understood themselves agents of the love of God in the world.
Another value was human dominion over the created order. The sculpture depicts a tree stump as a pulpit for the Bible. This stump-pulpit references all the trees that the immigrants cut down. Within 60 years, every forest in and around Holland would be razed, indeed every forest in the lower peninsula of Michigan. Van Raalte and the immigrants believed that God had given them dominion over the land and forests to use as they saw fit.
Michigan was forever changed, its abundance forever diminished. Such diminution seems incongruous for Reformed immigrants who drew inspiration from both the book of nature and the book of scripture, who read in the Belgic Confession that every species was a letter in the book of nature. But they did not see themselves as tearing pages out of the book of nature; instead, they believed that nature was cornucopian, its resources inexhaustible.
In cutting down the forests, van Raalte and the immigrants were also cutting out the heart of the indigenous peoples and clearing them from their land. Exercising dominion over nature was part and parcel of exercising dominion over the indigenous peoples.
While there was a great deal of diversity in the religion of indigenous peoples, they shared a sense that the Great Spirit had breathed life into the various systems of the world and that Gitchi Manitou had woven these systems together in order to produce the abundance of the world. Indigenous peoples strove in their life together to maintain the integrity of these systems. All forms of life shared a portion of the Great Spirit’s breath and were therefore related. Land and forests were kin to humankind, and one could no more own them than one owned a brother or a sister.
The forests played a particularly important role in the religion of indigenous peoples. The tall trees with their overstory were cathedrals. Certain trees and groves became places of worship. As western Christians in Europe and later in America impinged on indigenous lands, often they ceremonially cut down these old trees and groves to demonstrate their superiority to indigenous religion and to demoralize indigenous peoples.
Like most Americans in the rapid expansion westward, van Raalte and the immigrants assumed that the natural world was cornucopian and a God-given resource for their welfare. Carried forward even today, this assumption has fostered economic arrangements that are not viable.
Nature’s resources are not limitless, and we face the mass extinction of species and environmental collapse. The assumption that the natural world will forever resource our consumption has more in common with fertility religions like Baalism than with biblical religion. In fact, the indigenous peoples’ understanding of a God-breathed natural world and human embeddedness in it is closer to biblical religion than is western Christianity in its present iteration.
The depiction of van Raalte preaching to the immigrants from a tree stump troubled me. However, the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate its honesty. It portrays the conflicting values operating at the founding of Holland, some leading to life and abundance and others to destruction and death. This inner conflict is true of all communities, and only by waking up and acknowledging our checkered history can we become a “more perfect union,” and realize our life together as a “treasure in clay jars.”
In Bruce Caton’s wonderful one-volume history of Michigan, he tells the tale of not only the wholesale deforestation, but also the coincidental extermination of much of its wildlife, also for profits.
Thank you, Tom. The story of Holland is the story of nearly every community in the U. S. Yet we continue our consumptive lifestyles with virtually no concern or awareness. I lose hope.
Thank you, Tom. Your piece makes me wonder why we are so afraid of telling the truth about the people of our community’s past. As Frederick Buechner says, “Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.” Pretending otherwise about those who came before us only delays us from getting any closer to that treasure we’ve been promised. As always, I really appreciate your truth and insight here.
Thanks, Tom. I’m left to wonder about blogs written about us in a century or two. What will we be commended for and where are we missing the mark — widely, tragically, blindly? Lord, have mercy. I also wonder about another sculpture honoring van Raalte in Holland, between the campuses of Hope College and Western Seminary. Do you, or anyone else, know if the artist is trying to express something specially about van Raalte, or is it simply non-representational art?
By the turn of the 20th century, if not earlier, movements to rectify those mistakes of the past included the fabulous Forest Preserves of Cook Co. Illinois: https://fpdcc.com/about/mission-history/
Thank you for this thoughtful post, Tom. It reminds me of Desmond Tutu’s emphasis that reconciliation requires confronting and lamenting the pains of the past. Most North American Christians have not been taught about the tragedies that resulted from the Doctrine of Discovery – tragedies both to the land and the people on this continent and in other places where colonization occurred. And as you highlight, much damage was also done here in West Michigan by our Dutch Reformed ancestors for the sake of advancing the faith. Bringing this history to light is critical if we are to move forward into a more hopeful future.
In the mid to late 1800″S, the world population stood at 1 billion people. It could withstand, to some degree, a “cornucopia” mindset. With about 8 billion people, our world is in a much more serious predicament. Rain forests in South America and Indonesia are being cut down because the people have no where else to go. With the world population this large, it was inevitable that a large amount of people would eventually find their way to North Amerca. It was only a matter of time befpre the way of life of the Native Peoples would have eventually come to
end. The northern Europeans arrived here first, and established well functioning communities, like Holland, Michigan, which are now in a position to absorb the many new immigrants who are coming from all over the world. A future of living in North America is a wonderful dream
come true for many!
I am not an art historian but the motif of a civilizing agent standing next to a meadow or cleared forest was a recurring motif in 19th century frontier art. My interpretation was that wilderness was associated with the devil and by “developing” the land Christians were creating a “City on a Hill” and fulfilling God’s mandate after being cast from Eden to be fruitful and multiply. The 19th-century civilizing mission was homocentric and its Christianity was teleological. Old Testament motifs like the Tree of Life provided a metaphor of living systems that is more conformable to modern ecology but that is not a symbol I have seen in 19th century landscape paintings.