Reconstructing Protestant identity — a variety of Further
Reformations
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The central question addressed in this, the concluding part of the overall project, is how changes
in the accepted views on the true nature of religion, and its proper place in society in the Dutch
Republic around 1700, as traced in the previously described parts, were reflected in academic
theology and more popular, devotional media.
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Building upon the study of satirical prints (Spaans 2010), theological and theologico-political
discussions will be sampled from the late seventeenth through the first half of the eighteenth
century. This is a period in which Reformed orthodoxy formulated at the Synod of Dordrecht is
gradually transformed. An orthodox civil religion is still enforced, but the old confessional order
is breaking up. Central and local government have attained an effective dominance over the
public church, and individuals experience an increasing liberty of choice between confessional
allegiances, styles of piety and religious ethics in personal life. The initial emphasis placed by
most established churches on communal worship and conformity to the tenets of the public
religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is gradually replaced by a preference for a
personal appropriation of doctrine and an interiorized religious lifestyle, directly based on Biblestudy and the judgements of the individual conscience — a type of religion that the first
generation of Reformers would have considered ‘Anabaptist radicalism’, but which eminently
suited the increased literacy of the general public and a more ‘republican’ conception of the state
after 1700. It has become the defining characteristic of Protestantism in modern times.
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All this forced theologians and politicians to formulate new underpinnings for ‘national’
churches. As practically all confessions, including Catholics and Jews, went through a similar
transformation, a variety of religious cultures could gain acceptance as valid pillars of the one
nation (Van Rooden 1996, ch. 3), leading to semi-public acknowledgement of hitherto tolerated
religious communities (Spaans 1998). The relation between civic and personal religion was
reconfigured, with important consequences for the position of clergy (Spaans 2001, 2008). The
‘altprotestantische’ reliance on the doctrines of unconditional election and the perseverance of the
saints was replaced by a perceived need for a clear and distinct, even overwhelming, conversion
experience, and spiritual rebirth became the only safe foundation for inner certainty of faith.
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These adaptations, leading to ‘Neuprotestantismus’, have not been systematically studied in
relation with the intellectual debates of the time. Contemporaries conceived these as
modernization, either in a positive or in a negative sense. Church historians usually translate this
into ‘progress’ or ‘decline’, and interpret the entire discussion in the light of an, on the whole
often archaic, understanding of a secularizing Enlightenment versus a godly Further
Reformation. The proposed concluding monograph to the overall project will argue that in fact,
in the period under review we should speak of a variety of further reformations, that is,
directions into which the heritage of the sixteenth century (Protestant, but also Catholic and
Radical Reformations) was developed, to answer the needs of changing times.
In this concluding monograph, the results from the projects I-III will be confronted with a
number of in-depth studies into the interface between academic (Reformed) theology and its
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translation into more popular media. A selection will be made of theologians, representing the
band width of theological schools, ranging from enlightened to pietist, from committed to the
confessional state to verging on the separatist (e.g. Balthasar Bekker, Jacobus Koelman, Johannes
D’Outrein, Johannes Vollenhove, Wilhelmus van Irhoven, Theodorus van der Groe). By
choosing men who published in several media, for learned as well as for a more general
audience, on true religion as well as on church-state relations, this project can be expected to
produce an overview of the various ways in which shifts in theology were ‘popularized’ in
sermons, pamphlets, catechisms and/or edifying poetry. Rather than offer definitive answers, it
will explore new directions for research, which will benefit the study of religion in the Dutch
Republic in the eighteenth century, now an understudied field, and open up comparative
approaches in the wider field of European church history. Putting theology last, instead of first,
will allow us to see ‘further reformation’ not exclusively in the light of a protection of revealed
religion against the encroachments of a vain and worldly generation, but rather as a series of
translations and retranslations of the faith, to answer new needs, within an ongoing conversation
– in the restricted area of the academy but increasingly also in a public arena.
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View bibliography here.
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