Separating Preaching (6)

We have now arrived at the discussion of a second objection against separating preaching. Calvin supposedly preached so entirely differently from the men of the Nearer Reformation, and also so entirely differently from what, for example, is preached in our congregations at the present time.

In our times the writings of Calvin meet with an increasing interest. Once again reprints of his Institutes and his commentaries and new editions of his sermons have appeared. In itself, the interest is heartening. It always makes me glad when on house visitation I hear from our young people that they still read the Institutes; it is a thousand times better than a novel. Nowadays, however, one may have the misgiving that some delve into Calvin not for their own edification or instruction, but to extract venom against the preaching which is heard in our congregations. By listening, one receives the distinct impression that some have dug up more knowledge than wisdom from Calvin’s writings. It is especially disturbing when someone who has once read one sermon of Calvin or who has read a small piece from his Institutes presumes that he now knows the whole Calvin. Knowing Calvin — that is something! His entire Institutes, his countless polemical writings and letters, his massive commentaries on the Bible, his 2,304 (!) written sermons — who shall dare to say that he knows the whole Calvin?

But to get to the point at hand: Calvin supposedly did not preach in a separating manner, at least not in the way we are accustomed to it. How then did Calvin preach, according to these opponents? Let us listen once again: “Over against a barren, humanly structured classification of the hearers into regenerate and unregenerate with all the subdivisions, there stands with Calvin a lively, Scripture-bound totalizing of faith and of unbelief in all their variations as reaction upon, and the outworking of, a directly addressed preaching of the promises” (T. Brienen, Prediking van de Nadere Reformatie, p. 296). If we understand Dr. Brienen correctly, he expresses here as his opinion that the separating preaching of the Nearer Reformation is rather barren and that of Calvin, on the contrary, was lively; that the first-mentioned preaching classifies, and in that of Calvin faith and unbelief are supposedly totalized. Of course, Dr. Brienen was writing a dissertation, and in such a discourse difficult words may occur. However, I had to look up the word “totalizing” in my dictionary. I did not find it, but that is probably the fault of my dictionary. I suspect that Dr. Brienen means that the preacher must call the congregation to faith and must warn against the sin of unbelief, but he may go no further. He may not separate between God’s children and the unconverted, he may not point to the standings in spiritual life, he may not separate between the different forms of impenitence. And all of this is supposedly following in the footsteps of Calvin!

In this connection we want to refer to an important book, written in 1959 by the well-known Professor C. Veenhof, entitled Prediking en Uitverkiezing [Preaching and Election], In this book Professor Veenhof sketches the history of the Seceding Churches in the years 1850 to 1870. He dealt particularly with the doctrinal differences which originated among the Seceders about the place of preaching in election. He observed that there were at that time three groups among the Seceders. We quote: “One was sometimes called the Drente group. Another, the one of Van Brummelkamp and his followers, was often designated as the Gelderland group. [Drente and Gelderland are provinces in the Netherlands.] Of course, the boundary between these two groups cannot be drawn precisely. And furthermore, there existed a large middle group which absolutely did not want to be classified with the one group or the other” (p. 13). The sympathy of Professor Veenhof is very clearly on the side of the Brummelkamp group, and not with the one from Drente. He sketches the latter as the “conservative flotilla of the Seceders,” and he characterizes them as self-satisfied, narrow-minded, faithful to the “skirts of seventeenth century theology,” lovers of Brakel’s Redelijke Godsdienst [Reasonable Service], strongly subjective, legalistic, etc. It would not have been Professor Veenhof s intention, but under this stream of negative qualifiers, we would almost be sympathetic with the group from Drente.

However, Professor Veenhof becomes enthusiastic when he describes the views of the “Brummelkampians”! On page 17 of his book we read the sentence that is crucial in this connection to Calvin and separating preaching. We quote: “Gripped by the living speaking of Scripture, as Calvin had taught him to understand this, he [Brummel-kamp] could not be at home in the rigid constructions and scholastic method of teaching of the group from Drente.”

It is not our current purpose to form a judgment about the group from Drente, nor to trace whether Professor Veenhof was just towards them in his characterizations. Our point is that he observed that already in the previous century a group originated among the Seceders, who, by appealing to Calvin, began to put a different emphasis into the preaching. Professor Veenhof views this development positively. He writes openly: “From the very beginning, the preaching of Calvin has in this way exercised a large influence in the Seceded Churches, and this has become continually stronger in spite of the opposition of all kinds of scholastic, mystic, and pietistic tendencies in the Seceded world” (p. 247).

After agreeing with Professor Veenhofs book, Dr. Brienen makes some especially revealing remarks in his dissertation. Literally he writes: “Until the present this is still the situation of preaching in the Christelijk Gereformeerde Kerken [Free Reformed Churches]. A small group directs itself to the classes of the hearers and addresses them with a message structured according to the order of salvation. The majority of the Christelijk Gereformeerde [Free Reformed] preachers plead for preaching of promises from the salvation which is to be found in Christ, and they speak to the congregation as to what she may be from God’s side, namely, His covenant congregation, that is, of herself lost, but for every one of whom the promise of deliverance, forgiveness, and renewal is valid, and who must be called upon to faith in these promises, and to whom guidance in the life of faith may be given” (p. 234).

Thus, according to Dr. Brienen, the latter is the way the minister must preach, and he rejoices in the fact that in a large part of his church they do preach like that. May the Lord keep our congregations from such preaching, in which the dangers of the three-covenant doctrine in all its consequences, noticed by Rev. G. H. Kersten, are standing in front of us in black and white, as large as life. Where, we would like to ask, is the place of true regeneration in such preaching? What function does God’s law yet have here as the source of knowledge of misery? If God’s promises are valid for the entire congregation, for every single person, and yet not everyone is saved, what about God’s faithfulness in fulfilling His promises? Where is the speaking about the way that leads unto Christ, the necessity of knowing our lost state?

But enough about this. After all, we are concerned about Calvin and separating preaching. Supposedly Calvin preached like this! Supposedly Calvin was the man of pure preaching of promises, of calling to faith. Over against the barren, systematic, scholastic preaching of the Nearer Reformation, with all its other shortcomings, supposedly stands the living preaching of Calvin, averse to all schemes. We do not want to deny that Calvin’s manner of preaching is lively. His sermons are full of experience, sparkling with spiritual life, full of comfort, instructive. Let our people steep themselves in them. However, what we want to oppose strongly here is the suggestion that such a deep chasm supposedly gapes between Calvin’s preaching and that of the time of the Nearer Reformation!

Certainly, there are differences of emphasis. Is that strange? Two centuries lie between Calvin and Comrie. Two more centuries lie between Comrie’s preaching and that of our own time. Every period impresses its own stamp upon the preaching. By this we do not mean that phenomenon which deserves to be disapproved, that the spirit of the time is going to determine the contents of preaching, but we have in view the fact that preaching in every age shows its own choice of words, construction, and outward form. If a minister nowadays says, “boys and girls,” instead of “young men and maidens,” nobody takes offense at that. But regardless of such outward differences, we dare to maintain that Calvin, indeed, did preach separatingly, and that the chasm which gapes between his preaching and that of the Nearer Reformation is fiction, of which some make clever use to get rid of the preaching of the Nearer Reformation.

We want to point out that the manner in which one joined a congregation of Protestants in Calvin’s days was indeed somewhat different from the manner in which one thought about becoming a member of the Reformed church of the Netherlands after the heat of persecution had departed. Naturally, this had consequences for the character and composition of the congregation. In this connection, Professor Dr. D. Nauta remarks about Calvin’s congregation at Strasbourg: “An additional favorable circumstance was that the congregation was entirely without what they would later call the character of a church for all people.... Calvin could in general proceed from the basis that each of the members of the congregation had made a personal decision. With a more or less clearly conscious conviction, they had joined the cause of the Reformation” (Zicht op Calvijn [View upon Calvin], p. 125). Everyone will understand that this has consequences for the way in which one addresses the congregation. People such as Smytegelt and Van Lodenstein stood in a privileged church, in which membership did not bring along any danger to life but only advantage. Is it then strange that the chaff among the corn increased considerably? Is it wrong that the preachers point this out with great emphasis?

Therefore we strongly oppose the conclusion of Dr. Brienen that “only by way of influences that are essentially foreign could the preaching of Calvin become that which it was in the Nearer Reformation” (p. 296). Dr. Brienen himself has to admit that Calvin in his preaching definitely drew the great line of separation between God’s children and the unbelievers (p. 295). No one can maintain that Calvin did not know or did not preach the standings in spiritual life. At most, one can posit that he did not use the terms which became commonplace in later days to indicate those different standings. But the Swiss theologian Dr. L. Goumaz pointed out in 1948 that Calvin quite often advised preachers to use a duplex vox (double voice) in their preaching (Het ambt bij Calvijn [The office with Calvin], p. 65). This means that in preaching they have to aim for two goals. In the first place they have to “gather the sheep and assemble them,” but in the second place they have to withstand the unwilling ones in a conclusive way. In conclusion, we want to remark that in our opinion the thesis that Calvin supposedly assumed his entire congregation to be God’s children, and that he did not at all, or rarely, preach with separation, is untenable.

— to be continued —

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