Introduction

In two previous editorials I considered the school issue as it had been faced by two fathers of the Reformed Protestant Churches, Herman Hoeksema and Henry Danhof.¹ For both Hoeksema and Danhof, the Christian school was the first major issue that they had to contend with in their first charges in the ministry. Henry Danhof labored from 1910 to 1914 to instruct his mostly willing but discouraged congregation in Sully, Iowa, to establish a Christian school. Herman Hoeksema labored from 1914 to 1920 to instruct his unwilling and disobedient congregation in Holland, Michigan, to use the already-
established Christian school. Both Hoeksema and Danhof taught that the Christian school was the covenantal obligation of Reformed parents. Both Hoeksema and Danhof grounded the Christian school in God’s covenant of grace with believers and their seed.

In this editorial we make our way much further back in time and much farther away to visit a more distant father of the Reformed Protestant Churches. The year is 1834. The place is the Netherlands. The event is the Afscheiding, in which God separated his people from the apostate state church in the Netherlands. The father is Douwe J. Vander Werp, teacher.

The Church Situation in the Netherlands at the Time of the Afscheiding

By 1834 the Reformed church in the Netherlands was apostate. The essence of her apostasy was her false doctrine. “In the state church preachers were permitted to deny total depravity, sovereign election, the eternal divinity of Christ, the reality of hell, and even the doctrine of the Trinity.”² Some of her ministers were wolves who deliberately and proudly proclaimed the honor of man and the glory of man’s society. The rest of her ministers were hirelings who could not find the gospel in a text even if they would grope for it with both hands, a lantern, and a map (though they did not even grope for it, either). The sermon-fields in which the sheep were made to lie down each week were not the green pastures of Christ but the brown and sear stubble of man. The church was ignorant of the Reformed confessions, even though she paid lip service to them. Her Formula of Subscription was an empty vow, deliberately crafted in such a way that the officebearers could breezily sign it while allowing the doctrine of the Reformed confessions to be savaged on all sides. Her Church Order had been discarded and replaced with the rules of state-appointed bureaucrats. She loved, tolerated, and defended those officebearers and members who raised the banner of man, while she hated and persecuted those officebearers and members who raised their banners in the name of the Lord. She did not sing the rich, spiritual psalms in her public worship but the dribbling hymns of men.

Here is the faithful members’ evaluation of the apostasy of the Reformed church in the Netherlands. After rehearsing the corruption that they had witnessed in the years leading up to 1834, they wrote in their Act of Secession or Return,

Taking all of this together, it has now become more than plain that the Netherlands Reformed Church is not the true but the false church, according to God’s word and article 29 of our Confession. For this reason the undersigned hereby declare that they in accordance with the office of all believers (article 28) separate themselves from those who are not of the church and therefore will have no more fellowship with the Netherlands Reformed Church until it returns to the true service of the Lord.³

The apostasy of the Reformed church in the Netherlands was a grief to God’s people then, as it is now. Two hundred years before 1834, the Reformed church in the Netherlands had flourished in the gospel. Hers was the great Synod of Dordt in 1618–19, at which she wrote and adopted the magnificent Canons of Dordt. In the Canons she confessed with full voice the doctrine of salvation by God’s sovereign, electing grace alone. With the adoption of the Canons, she won the victory over the Remonstrants and their false doctrine of salvation by the will and good pleasure of man. In those years the Reformed church in the Netherlands was a tender mother, with whose breasts of consolation God’s spiritual children were fed to the full and in whose bosom they milked out and were delighted with the abundance of her glory (Isa. 66:11).

But by 1834 she was a poxy old crone. Her years of spiritual whoredom from Christ with the idol-doctrine of man had left her diseased and cruel. Her milk was sour, and her thigh was rotten, so that neither her husband nor her children found any spiritual delight in her. The history of her fall into apostasy, which apostasy was also God’s judgment upon her, makes both of one’s ears to tingle.

The School Situation in the Netherlands at the Time of the Afscheiding

By 1834 the school situation in the Netherlands was just as bad as the church situation. But in order to see how bad the schools were, one must look with a spiritual eye. From an outward point of view, the schools in the Netherlands in 1834 were excellent. There were many schools, many children, many teachers, and a high level of academics. The schools thrived and were the envy of the world. Great men from Germany and France visited the Netherlands to observe the glory of the Dutch schools. All over Europe men knew that “even the peasants in Holland could read and write well.”⁴

Not only were the Dutch schools the envy of the academic world, but they appeared to be a beacon of Christian virtue. The church had significant influence in the schools, with pastors often serving also as school overseers. The teachers and students sang psalms in the classrooms. They read the Bible in the classrooms. The children were instructed in moral behavior. The teachers prayed in the classrooms. There was a robust Christian form to the schools in the Netherlands in 1834.

And the industrious Hollanders kept improving their schools. When compared to the schools of even a few brief decades earlier, the schools in the Netherlands in 1834 “were better managed, the teachers better qualified, the physical space healthier, and there seemed to be ample accent on Christianity and virtue, prayer and singing.”⁵

But all of the excellence was a façade. Just as the outward excellence of the state Reformed church in 1834—a million members, thousands of ministers, grand church buildings—covered a thorough spiritual rot, so the outward excellence of the schools in 1834 covered their dismal spiritual character. The schools were as corrupt as the church.

What was it that made the schools so corrupt in 1834? This one thing: Reformed doctrine was forbidden in the classroom. The Dutch government, with the connivance of the state Reformed church, permitted and encouraged the schools to display a general Christian veneer, but they explicitly forbade the teaching of Reformed doctrine in the classroom.

It had not always been so. There had been a time in the Netherlands prior to 1834 when the schools had taught Reformed doctrine. In fact, in the more than two hundred years since the Reformation had first come to the Netherlands, the primary goal of the schools in the Netherlands had been to instruct the children in Reformed doctrine. When the Reformation came to the Netherlands, the Reformed church took over from the Roman Catholic Church the education of the children. From that time on “the local Dutch Reformed Church chose the teacher and oversaw the curriculum. Children who attended school were taught the Bible, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Reformed doctrine along with their lessons.”⁶

When the Synod of Dordt met in 1618–19, it adopted an education policy as part of its official decisions. The education policy “involved the entire nation in Christian school education.”⁷ It laid out the calling of the home, the calling of the school, and the calling of the church, “in order that the Christian youth may be diligently instructed in the principles of religion.”⁸ Dordt’s decision was widely implemented throughout Europe and was exported to the new world in America.

The Dort Education Policy of 1618 became the education policy not only in Calvinist strongholds such as Holland, Switzerland, France, Scotland, England, and America but also among several non-Calvinist eastern European leaders, including August Hermann Francke in Germany and John Amos Comenius in Bohemia.⁹

Dordt’s education policy required not only that schools be established but also that the children be instructed in Reformed doctrine in the classrooms. Specifically, the schoolmasters were to teach the Heidelberg Catechism to their students. The section of Dordt’s education decision regarding the schools reads as follows:

Schools, in which the young shall be properly instructed in the principles of Christian doctrine, shall be instituted not only in cities, but also in towns and country places where heretofore none have existed. The Christian magistracy shall be requested that well-qualified persons may be employed and enabled to devote themselves to the service; and especially that the children of the poor may be gratuitously instructed, and not be excluded from the benefit of the schools. In this office none shall be employed but such as are members of the Reformed Church, having certificates of an upright faith and pious life, and of being well versed in the truths of the Catechism. They are to sign a document, professing their belief in the Confession of Faith and the Heidelberg Catechism, and promising that they will give catechetical instruction to the youth in the principles of Christian truth according to the same. The schoolmasters shall instruct their scholars according to their age and capacity, at least two days in the week, not only causing them to commit to memory, but also by instilling into their minds an acquaintance with the truths of the Catechism.¹⁰

It was the policy of the Synod of Dordt that there be schools and that the schools teach Christian doctrine. This policy was carried out throughout the Netherlands from that time on. We even know the textbooks that were used in the city of Utrecht in 1650 in the implementation of this policy: The Great and Small ABC Book, the Heidelberg Catechism and the gospels and epistles, The Stairway of Youth, The Mirror of Youth (Dutch history), the history of David, and Proverbs and Psalms.¹¹

The policy of the Synod of Dordt requiring Reformed doctrine to be taught in the classroom was reversed almost two hundred years later by the French, who had occupied the Netherlands under Napoleon Bonaparte since 1795. In 1806 the government passed “a new national education law—the Law for Primary School Attendance and Education in the Batavian Republic.”¹²

The education law of 1806 appeared to be a real advance in education in the Netherlands. It codified teacher training and certification, ensured proper teachers’ salaries, provided clean and safe buildings for instruction, and specified oversight of the education, among many other things. But the real aim of the education law of 1806 was “to instill in the pupil good citizenship, patriotism, Christian virtues, and after 1815, a love for the Dutch Royal House.”¹³ The focus of the classroom was no longer Reformed doctrine as that applied to all of life but serving one’s country and patriotic unity with one’s fellow citizens.

What stood in the way of a united populace, so the government thought, was Reformed doctrine. If the Jew and the Roman Catholic, the Arminian and the Baptist, the Lutheran and the Reformed were all to coexist in society, then they must first coexist in the classroom in their youth. And if they were to coexist in the classroom, then no particular denomination’s doctrine could be allowed in the classroom. The most that could be allowed was a thin patina of Christianity, a veneer of virtuous moralism. Therefore, the education law of 1806 forbade the teaching of Reformed doctrine and forbade any instruction in Reformed doctrine.

What did the corrupt state Reformed church think of this? She embraced the law with both arms. The historian Janet Sjaarda Sheeres reports the state church’s response.

The Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church came out in favor of this public school system, not surprising since the Reformed Church’s hierarchy were all handpicked by the Government. For men like Petrus Hofstede de Groot, professor of theology at the University of Groningen and a school supervisor, this new law was “…a brilliant law…the crown jewel of all our laws.” For the overwhelming majority of the population, it seemed right to have one educational system available to all, with its aim being the welfare of society as a whole.

Hofstede de Groot, the man well known as Hendrik de Cock’s adversary, saw the need for a uniform public school system as a way to prevent national unrest and disunity. According to De Groot, “Just think what could happen if many schools would arise. All these schools would immediately become sectarian schools. First, schoolboys from the various sectarian schools call each other names, soon they engage in fistfights, later when grown, they use swords against each other, and the next thing you have an entire overthrow like that of 1795, and the fact that the house of Orange could be driven into exile becomes a real threat.”¹⁴

That is all it took for the schools to become rotten: the removal of Reformed doctrine from the classroom! The schools could be outwardly excellent, but without Reformed doctrine they were antichristian. Reformed doctrine is the gospel. Only Reformed doctrine is the gospel. Roman Catholic doctrine is not the gospel. Lutheran doctrine after Luther is not the gospel. Baptist doctrine is not the gospel. Arminian doctrine is not the gospel. Not even the doctrine of nominally Reformed churches is the gospel. Only Reformed doctrine is the gospel. When Reformed doctrine was removed from the classrooms in the Netherlands, the entirely predictable and inevitable result was that the schools became corrupt. Without Reformed doctrine all of the instruction was merely shallow moralism. The living, vital gospel of Jesus Christ and his truth did not infuse the instruction, but only the empty virtue of the pagan. In such a classroom the Jew and the Roman Catholic, the Arminian and the Baptist, the Lutheran and the nominally Reformed could all comfortably coexist. And coexist they did.

But there was one religion in the Netherlands that suffered under the corruption of the church and the school in the 1800s. That religion was the only true religion: the Reformed faith. The ones who suffered were those who were not Reformed merely in name but who believed and held the Reformed faith according to the Reformed confessions. Although most of the members of the state church rejoiced in the new school laws, these few Reformed folk mourned the loss of the Heidelberg Catechism and Reformed doctrine in their schools. They were held as spiritual captives in a spiritual Babylon, and they longed for the recovery of the gospel in both the church and the school.

The Afscheiding

God’s people in the state church had used every means at their disposal to bring reformation within the church, but the church persisted in her wicked false doctrine. God brought reformation to his beleaguered people in the Netherlands on Tuesday, October 14, 1834. On that date two elders and three deacons in the church in Ulrum, the Netherlands, presented to their congregation an Act of Secession or Return, which the five officebearers had signed the day before. Most of the congregation gathered on the evening of October 14 to hear and consider the Act, after which they voiced their agreement. By this Act of Secession or Return, the congregation of Ulrum formally separated from the apostate state church and reformed the church on the basis of scripture and the confessions. The Afscheiding had begun.

Because of this Act of Secession or Return, the congregation of Ulrum became the object of the wrath of the populace and the opposition of the authorities. Janet Sjaarda Sheeres tells the gripping events of the first Sunday after the signing of the Act of Secession or Return, when the congregation of Ulrum and its pastor, Hendrik de Cock, attempted to worship in their church building.

The following Sunday the people marched en masse to the church building, mistakenly thinking it was theirs. The police had been informed and would not allow De Cock access to the pulpit. When Johannes van der Helm from Niekerk, who had been called [by the state] to preach that day, attempted to gain access to the pulpit, the people would not let him pass. Fearing trouble, he left. De Cock then tried to make his way to the stairs of the pulpit but was halted by an officer. Still determined to preach, he climbed on one of the front pews and preached from there. After the service, when the people had left the church, the doors were locked behind them. Since they were now effectively barred from their building, they held their afternoon service outside. The Secession had become fact; there was no going back.¹⁵

Douwe J. Vander Werp and the Afscheiding

Staying at the home of De Cock in Ulrum at the time of the Afscheiding was a young schoolteacher by the name of Douwe J. Vander Werp. Before the Afscheiding, Vander Werp had taught for a few years in a neighboring town. But because of Vander Werp’s support for Hendrik de Cock, who had been suspended by the state church, Vander Werp had been dismissed from the school in May of 1834. De Cock took Vander Werp into his home, where Vander Werp continued to assist De Cock “full time with his enormous amount of paper work.”¹⁶ In De Cock’s home Vander Werp not only had a front-row seat to all of the events that would lead up to the Afscheiding, but Vander Werp also played a role in those events. For example, while De Cock was suspended but before the congregation of Ulrum separated from the state church, Vander Werp read sermons on Sundays to an assembly of those children of God who could not in good conscience attend the corrupt state church.

The week after the Afscheiding, the De Cock family suffered the wrath of the authorities. De Cock was fined and sentenced to three months in jail, and his family eventually would be evicted from the parsonage. Vander Werp was not yet fined, but he was evicted from the town of Ulrum.

Tensions ran high during the week that followed, and the authorities, fearing another mob the following Sunday, called in the military. On the Saturday preceding, one hundred soldiers marched into Ulrum, took over the town, and posted twelve men in the parsonage. No one was allowed in or out of the house. Vander Werp, working on some correspondence, was asked if he was a member of the family. When he said no, they pushed him out the door and told him to get out of town.¹⁷

Where would Vander Werp go then? His only option seemed to be the town of Smilde in the province of Drenthe. God’s people in Smilde were eager for reformation. They mourned the apostasy of the state church, and they were thrilled with De Cock’s preaching. A peat farmer from Smilde, Luitsen Dijkstra, would often walk the nine hours from Smilde to Ulrum to meet with De Cock and to worship with those saints in Ulrum who could not attend the state church.

What was striking about the Reformed in Smilde was that their desire for reformation went hand in hand with their desire for a good Christian school. By 1834 the saints in Smilde were well aware of the corruption in the schools. They longed for a school of their own in which they could rear their children. With that in mind, Dijkstra had some time earlier invited Vander Werp to come to Smilde. “Dijkstra hoped that as soon as the people in Smilde had formed a Secession congregation, they would also start a Christian school for their children.”¹⁸ Cast out of Ulrum, Vander Werp now made his way to Smilde in the province of Drenthe.

The Afscheiding’s First Christian School

The Afscheiding in Ulrum was only a few weeks old when Vander Werp arrived in Smilde. Janet Sjaarda Sheeres tells the story of how the members of the congregation in Smilde joined with their brethren in Ulrum in separating from the state Reformed church.

[In Smilde Vander Werp] soon found himself the center of attention, as the secession-minded Christians in the community were eager to hear about the events in Ulrum. For the next several days, Vander Werp, who boarded with the Sickens family, met with various families in the area to discuss secession matters. 

Sunday, November 9, 1834, at Dijkstra’s invitation, Vander Werp led a large group in worship, after which the former read the procedures for secession. The group decided to meet the following Friday to sign the Act of Secession. They dispatched Dijkstra to Ulrum to bring De Cock to Smilde to formally organize the congregation. When De Cock arrived, he brought with him the news that Scholte had also seceded with his congregation from the Reformed Church in Doeveren—news that greatly encouraged the Ulrum and Smilde seceders.¹⁹

The saints in Smilde saw the formation of a Christian school as going hand in hand with the reformation of the church. Indeed, one of the reasons the saints in Smilde so longed for the reformation of the church was that they might also form a Christian school. Upon their decision to join the Afscheiding, the saints in Smilde immediately formed a Christian school. And with the formation of their Christian school, they immediately faced the opposition of their enemies. Again, Sheeres tells the tale.

Another item heavy on the hearts of the Afgescheiden at Smilde and elsewhere concerned the school situation. Many parents were keeping their children out of school because of new state requirements barring the Bible and the Heidelberg Catechism from being taught in the public schools, and also because in 1823 the state had decreed that all children attending school be immunized against smallpox.

Many of the Seceders were against vaccination…

Dijkstra and two other men formed a Christian school board and hired Vander Werp to teach at five cents per child per week. The day after they had pledged to incorporate themselves as an Afgescheiden congregation, they brought their children to the barn of Willem Snippe²⁰ to begin school. Taking in his new teaching surroundings, Vander Werp undoubtedly was reminded of Jesus’ humble beginnings in a barn. Tables and benches had been set up for the pupils in one corner of Snippe’s barn, while in another corner there were pens for pigs, cattle, and poultry. Faggots of dried heather for fuel and hay for the cattle were stored in yet another corner. Twenty children attended the first day. This became the very first organized private school based on Reformed teachings in the Netherlands, with Vander Werp as the first teacher. The date was November 10, 1834.

In their enthusiasm, or perhaps their ignorance, the organizers made a grave error by not applying for permission from the provincial authorities to operate a private school. They also neglected to note that H. Doorenbos, pastor of the Smilde Reformed Church and school supervisor for the district, had kept them under strict surveillance. Doorenbos’s preaching had not sat well with the conservative element of Smilde’s Reformed Church. Soon after his arrival in 1820, the congregants quietly began to stay away from the services, meeting instead in conventicles led by lay preachers. Now seeing how this new school was draining students from the existing state-run public school, Doorenbos wrote immediately to the governor of the province of Drenthe, citing names and places and calling Vander Werp a troublemaker who defied the existing school laws. The letter, dated November 11, 1834, brought swift retribution.

On November 13, at eleven in the morning, the mayor, a policeman, and a municipal clerk appeared in the barn with a court order to fine Vander Werp for operating a public school without proper permission. They also declared the schoolroom a fire hazard and an unhealthy place. They closed it the same day. According to Mayor Kymmell, “The children were so afraid of that dark place and the fiery teacher that some had run away crying, while others could not sleep at night.”

Vander Werp decided not to challenge the law. He gave up his teaching career, but not without consequences. For teaching without a license he was fined fifty guilders and court costs of two guilders and thirty-nine cents—a hefty sum for someone getting paid only in nickels.²¹

The timeline of the first school of the Afscheiding is astonishing. The school was established the day after the saints in Smilde joined the Afscheiding. On Sunday they announced their intention to secede. On Monday they opened their own school. And before a week had passed, they had been closed down by their opponents.

A Few Observations

First, the history of the Afscheiding’s first Christian school illustrates the inseparable relationship between church reformation and the Christian school. It is imperative for the true church that she have her own schools. The doctrine of the church is the doctrine of the schools. A Reformed parent who will not suffer his family to be indoctrinated in a false church cannot then turn around and suffer his children to be indoctrinated in the schools of the false church. This history serves as a rebuke to me and to many Reformed Protestant people who thought that we could still be part of the Protestant Reformed schools after our own Act of Separation from the Protestant Reformed Churches. Whether we thought that we could only finish the 2020–21 school year in the Protestant Reformed schools or that we could use the Protestant Reformed schools indefinitely, we were inconsistent in our view of the church and our view of the school. We thought that we could tolerate the one even as we could not tolerate the other. The Lord graciously delivered us from our own folly by closing the Protestant Reformed schools to some of us, so that we were left with no choice but to start our own Reformed Protestant schools. No Reformed Protestant man can say that his own faithfulness accounts for the schools. All Reformed Protestant men must say that we are poor and blind and naked, that the Lord alone gave our Reformed Protestant schools to us, and that he did so at a time when we particularly did not deserve them. The history of the Afscheiding and our own history remind us that, truly, “the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations” (Ps. 100:5).

Second, the history of the Afscheiding’s first Christian school in Smilde resonates with the Reformed believer who knows the Christian school to be the demand of the covenant. God’s covenant of grace with believers and their seed does not—cannot—leave the people of God adrift from each other. God binds his people to himself in covenant love and, in so doing, binds them to each other. Also in the rearing of their covenant seed, God’s people are bound together in God’s covenant of grace with the covenant cords of God’s covenant love. It is not a shock to the Reformed believer that the church in Smilde joined the Afscheiding on Sunday, November 9, and started a school on Monday, November 10. The Reformed believer simply recognizes the establishment of the school as the necessary and inevitable and required fruit of the covenant. To paraphrase one Reformed Protestant man’s comments of late, “The spirit of the covenant asks what time church starts on Sunday and what time school starts on Monday.”

In fact, the establishment of Christian schools would become a prominent legacy of the descendants of the Afscheiding in America. Writing about the Christian Reformed Church, which in its early days of orthodoxy could trace its history and doctrine directly to the Afscheiding, Marvin Kamps relates,

Parents in the Christian Reformed Church sacrificed to establish Christian grade schools, high schools, and even colleges for the training of covenant children. From New York to California and throughout the United States, Christian teachers taught the children the entire curriculum in the light of scripture. It was a labor of love for God and for their Lord Jesus Christ. Parents saw their commitment to Christian education as a solemn duty. No sacrifice was too great. One reality characterized the parents’ rearing of their children: they were focused on and aimed at the glory of God’s name in the lives of their children. They possessed a covenantal, generational perspective in all their teaching and guiding of their redeemed and sanctified children according to God’s purpose of election; they knew they were laying the foundation for the rearing of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were Reformed, that is, they cherished a covenantal perspective in the care of their children; they were the spiritual descendants of De Cock and the church of Ulrum.²²

Third, the history of the first Christian school of the Afscheiding demonstrates that life for God’s people in the Netherlands was becoming more and more impossible. The first Christian school lasted only four days before the government closed it down, with Vander Werp’s acquiescence, according to the official record.²³ The government’s oppression of the Afscheiding churches and schools was more and more squeezing God’s people in the Netherlands, so that they began to look overseas. It is to that history that we will turn our attention next time, the Lord willing.