CHAPTER 1

The Dutch Reformed Church and the World

The International Concerns of the Calvinist Ministry

Amsterdam was growing up. Born as a small fishing village in the flood-prone Low Countries of northern Europe, by 1595 it was a burgeoning metropolis. After centuries of habitation, even the most skilled engineer couldn’t relocate the whole place, but the Dutch could make other improvements, and they were doing so with gusto. Just outside the old eastern border, they had created new islands from the marsh, new harbor space and ground for lumber- and shipyards. They reassigned the old yards for residential construction, then extended and thickened the city’s walls to encompass and defend all these additions from their enemies. Unfortunately, the hefty new gates and bastions didn’t hinder the wind and cold as easily as they thwarted hostile armies. But at least the updated canal system channeled the water more effectively than ever before. And increased private fortunes allowed residents to replace yesterday’s wooden structures with snug homes of stone and brick.1
Stepping from the damp streets of Amsterdam into the sprawling edifice known simply as the Oude Kerk (Old Church), an attentive visitor would have looked around and discovered a different, more controversial transformation. If he had visited the same building, say, thirty years before, and if his memory was very good, he might now notice something about the decorative work: there wasn’t much of it. Where was the grand painting that once filled the space behind the high altar, the picture of a bruised and bloodied Jesus Christ, suffering on the cross? Where, for that matter, was the high altar? Most of the art and statuary that had welcomed the imaginary guest during his last visit were gone. In their place he found only naked, marred walls that hinted at another violent story, much more recent than the Crucifixion.2
If the new austerity inside the church seemed incompatible with the growing affluence outside, global commerce still found its way indoors from time to time, and not just because the Oude Kerk doubled as an early stock exchange.3 The sounds of trade and science sometimes echoed among the pillars even during Sunday services, depending on the date and place of local ministers in their preaching rotation. Regular listeners had learned to expect anything when Reverend Petrus Plancius took the pulpit. Speaking in a Flemish accent, wearing a long beard to match his long, dark cassock, Plancius might begin like anyone else, reciting the Christian creation story and the fall of man. Soon he was talking about India, then America and Africa. His sermons ranged from the western hemisphere to the East and back again, even beyond this planet to the stars. As subjects for Christian clergy, heaven and creation were not unusual, of course; but the words assumed extra significance in the age of Copernicus and Galileo, the age of Christopher Columbus and Francis Drake. Those thinkers and mariners had opened new worlds of spiritual material for preachers who were willing to use it.4
Reverend Plancius wasn’t alone among Dutch clergy in his concern for international affairs and his interest in European expansion. Part minister and theologian, part astronomer and cartographer, he was the human counterpart to the multipurpose edifice in which he worked, a new kind of cleric for Amsterdam’s rising prominence and commercial might. Exactly how he acquired his particular skills is unclear, though his interest in all things foreign probably had something to do with his mobility and travels: from his birth and upbringing in Flanders to his theological training in England and Germany, from his return to Flanders and his exodus to Holland—Plancius crossed many borders in his life. He had converted to Reformed Christianity when it was still dangerous, when, in the 1550s and 1560s, it was an illegal, underground faith and the relationship between the Dutch and their Spanish overlords had nearly reached a breaking point. He was ordained in 1576 and spent his early career founding and shepherding fledgling congregations in his native province, then fled north, disguised as a soldier, when a Spanish army captured Brussels in 1585. By December of that year he was serving the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam.
Plancius expressed his global concerns in his sermons and in the work he did outside the church. He was a director of the Oude Compagnie (Old Company), which would ultimately merge with other firms to form the East India Company, and some of the first Dutch ships that sailed to Asia in the 1590s used his maps and instructions. For more than two decades he taught lessons in navigation, examined potential captains and other officers, inspected naval equipment, and advised Dutch authorities on all matters related to expansion. For good reason, his biographer described him as “the intellectual center of Holland’s expeditions to the East and West.”5
Petrus Plancius teaches lessons in navigation from his pulpit in Amsterdam. Originally printed in De Vyerighe Colom, by Jacob Aertsz Colom (1652). Courtesy of the Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.
Plancius was unique among ministers in the extent of his extracurricular activities and the depth of his secular expertise. His general curiosity or interest in the wider world—his cosmopolitan worldview—was far more common, shared by clergy and merchant, shopkeeper and artisan alike. No one in Amsterdam could have missed the relationship between the city’s ongoing transformation and the harbor, and only a true recluse could have been apathetic. Many Netherlanders also had personal reasons to pay attention. Never mind the simple, terrible excitement of finding continents and cultures that, until recently, were as distant and unimaginable as heaven itself. They had stories like that of Plancius: newcomers and refugees, they might be worried about family and friends living in other lands or family going abroad to work in one of Europe’s growing empires.
Beyond these general interests, clergy claimed a special international charge because they were supposed to interpret and communicate all religious matters, and the major political, imperial developments of the time were saturated with religious meaning. It wasn’t enough that Spain threatened to overrun the Dutch and reestablish foreign rule; Protestants cared especially that it was Catholic Spain and Catholic rule. They didn’t just fear that Spain and Portugal, united under the Hapsburg Crown, might conquer Europe and the world. The expansive new empires in America and Asia were odious because they spread the wrong faith. The Protestant Reformation and endless wars created a strong anti-Catholic strain that fed and colored global developments, making it easy, even in a land that still had a large Catholic population, to associate “Catholic” with “enemy.” Ministers simply built on the predisposition among contemporaries to see life through a spiritual lens and interpret their religion in light of temporal events.
As the Dutch began their own imperial adventures under the aegis of the East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC), Reformed clergy in the Netherlands learned that managing ecclesiastical growth was challenging, often contentious, because they belonged to a new institution with a newly determined and possibly still vulnerable creed. Equally challenging were the tremendous distances between them and the new congregations they were supposed to help found and supervise. Most clergy never served abroad, but they cared enough about exporting their faith to monitor colonial affairs and quarrel about methods and oversight, usually asserting the authority of the churches and councils of the Netherlands over colonial churches and councils. While their obvious intent was to aid and strengthen the religious mission, they produced at the same time a uniquely subordinate, controlled position for colonial clergy in the Dutch Reformed system, sometimes stifling the creation of colonial councils. Amsterdam offered—if not a front-row seat—one of the best places in Europe both to direct and observe these exciting, divisive changes. Its far-flung commercial and financial connections made it a global religious center, as well. From Amsterdam’s crowded docks and warehouses, its cold chapels and hard pews, believers watched and waited for the destruction of Catholic power and the triumph of “the true Reformed religion.”6

The Reformation in the Netherlands

For as long as anyone could remember, the Dutch had been ruled by outsiders: noble families like the Burgundians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then the Hapsburgs, based in Spain and Austria. Through war and marriage, the Dutch were always part of someone else’s kingdom or empire, never the cohesive people implied in convenient terms like “Dutch.” In reality, the Netherlands (or Low Countries) were many different provinces, principalities, and city-states, and they sometimes even made war on each other. Whatever unity the Burgundians and Hapsburgs managed to impose, it was a loose, uncomfortable association that the Dutch eventually resisted with violence. Ironically, real unity and international power was only born in reaction to Hapsburg centralization and the loss of local control. The Dutch would live with this tension between local and national, local and international, for most of their history.7
Efforts to increase Hapsburg power in the Low Countries were still new when, in 1517, a German priest named Martin Luther inadvertently started the Protestant Reformation by criticizing the Catholic indulgence system, which undermined the true faith-based message of the Gospel, he said, because it linked salvation with money and personal endeavor. He thought salvation came only through God’s gift of grace to those who believed, and he worried that in buying indulgences, drawing on the good works of others to escape penance, Christians might come to see works rather than faith as the source of salvation. Likewise, the long-dead Christian saints whose righteous lives had created this accessible excess of works, this “store of merit,” might replace Jesus Christ. Luther’s original plan in sharing these ideas was merely to start a discussion and identify potential areas for ecclesiastical reform. In time he grew further and further apart from the Catholic Church, and his message grew to include a critical reassessment of papal power and church government in general.8
The Dutch were receptive to these criticisms because they had heard them before. More urban and literate than much of Europe, the Low Countries had always been a place of religious innovation, beginning with a spiritual, educational movement called the Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion) in the late medieval period, continuing through the Renaissance with the reforming impulses of Christian humanism. Some ideas that people now began calling “Lutheran” were actually just iterations of old concerns within the church. Still, Luther’s example and writings inspired a new wave of dissent among the Dutch. Other influences would soon include Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, John Laski, and more. None of them ever lived in the Netherlands, but their ideas arrived indirectly through the printed word and other international channels. Dutch priests traveled for ecclesiastical training with some influential reformer, studying at Luther’s monastery, for example. Then they returned and shared their learning at home.9
Among so many reformers, the Dutch Reformation is hard to characterize with precision. Some dissenters expressed anger about indulgences, others about infant baptism. Some disliked clerical celibacy, others the veneration of Mary and the saints. They saw saintly devotion as just another misguided, blasphemous distraction, similar to indulgences in that, by venerating a saint, one might soon forget about Christ. Above all else, these “heretics,” as Hapsburg law described them, wanted the word of God (i.e., the Bible) translated in their own language, and they wanted preachers who preached from the scriptures. They probably couldn’t have identified their ideological pedigree with any more precision than historians today. Humanist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed: they pooled at first into a muddled, eclectic Protestantism that existed very uneasily with the public Catholic Church. In fact, between the 1520s and 1560s, more people were executed for religious beliefs in the Netherlands than anywhere else in Europe. The bloodshed and repression of the Inquisition paralleled efforts to centralize Hapsburg control and reform political, judicial arrangements in general. While the Spanish failed in the religious sphere, never stopping illicit activity altogether, they did succeed in preventing any one Protestant movement from rising above the rest.10
Reformed religion (sometimes called Calvinism) was a latecomer to the Reformation in Holland and other northern provinces. The first congregations appeared there in 1566 in the wake of the beeldenstorm (Iconoclastic Fury), when mobs descended on Catholic chapels and destroyed their “idolatry,” meaning statues, paintings, and other symbols of the old faith. The uprising began in the south and spread rapidly north in the summer and fall of that year. Again, no Reformed Church had existed in Holland before. It would become the public church of the new Dutch state not because it had the most adherents, but because its supporters were the most outspoken, organized, and militant during what soon became a more general revolt against Hapsburg rule. They took advantage of the widespread antagonism toward the Inquisition and, by extension, the Catholic Church. In that sense, the Hapsburg monarchs Charles V and Philip II prepared the ground more than anyone else for the reformation they wanted so desperately to prevent.11
When Philip responded to the beeldenstorm with a large army, the most active political agitators and religious dissenters fled to foreign cities like London and Emden. The rebels lost their homes and livelihoods, and their churches in the Netherlands dissolved. They quickly regrouped, however, and at the Synods of Wesel (1568) and Emden (1571) they aligned themselves with John Calvin by adopting his ecclesiastical offices and organizational preferences, modified slightly to meet Dutch needs. Building from the ground up, the reformers intended the new scheme as a remedy to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the spiritual tyranny it allegedly engendered. A kerkeraad (“church council” or consistory) would lead each congregation, and the consistory would send elders and ministers to a regional classis to meet with representatives of other consistories and select envoys for infrequent provincial synods. Still somewhat hierarchical, it was at least a hierarchy of councils. And the onus of teaching, preaching, charity, and discipline now fell at the regional and local levels (where the rebels preferred everything).
The following year, many exiles returned to the Netherlands and began freeing Dutch towns from Spanish control, expunging Catholic worship as they went. Some towns only opened their gates to these pirates or “Sea Beggars” on the promise that they would leave Catholic in...