In the last editorial we considered the first Christian school of the Afscheiding in Smilde, the Netherlands. This time we return to the Netherlands at the time of the Afscheiding to see the tremendous pressure that the state and the false church brought to bear against the Seceders’ Reformed schools. The Seceders’ desire for freedom to have their own Christian schools became one of the chief factors in their decision to emigrate from the Netherlands. The Christian school is the birthright of Reformed churches, for which our fathers left their beloved homeland.

The Antithesis in the Netherlands

The Afscheiding of 1834 in the Netherlands revealed a sharp division between people. This division between people was the antithesis. On one side was the general public. The vast majority of people in the Netherlands remained members of the Hervormde Kerk—the state Reformed church—which enjoyed the Dutch government’s seal of approval. The people supported their state schools, where the academics were the envy of the world. On the other side were the Seceders. These were the men and women who, due to the apostasy of the state church, had seceded from that church in the Afscheiding, beginning in the town of Ulrum under the leadership of two elders and three deacons. The ministers of the Afscheiding included Rev. Hendrik de Cock, Rev. Albertus van Raalte, and Rev. Anthony Brummelkamp.

The antithesis between these two peoples had been present before the Afscheiding. The one people not only was happy with the state church but also was filled with pride in their impressive institutions. Their churches were full, and their schools were thriving. The other people had already withdrawn from as much of the life of the state church as they could. They did not attend public worship on Sundays but met together in conventicles, instructing each other by means of exhortations and prayers. Nevertheless, they were still members of the state church by name, and they were compelled to send their children to the state’s schools.

With the Afscheiding the division between these two peoples was revealed with all of its sharp edges. The general public remained in the state church, while the Seceders organized their own churches under the leadership of their ministers. The general public remained in the state schools, while the Seceders organized their own private Christian schools at great cost and under tremendous pressure. The general public hated the Seceders and applauded the government for harrying them at every opportunity. The Seceders publicly announced that the state church was apostate; and, while they submitted to the government in all things, they disobeyed the government’s antichristian rules. The division between the two peoples in the Netherlands that had been present before the Afscheiding was brought into stark relief by the Seceders’ separation from the state church.

The Afscheiding illustrates the truth that there is a real spiritual division between people. There is an unbridgeable antithesis between the children of light and the children of darkness. Christ has no concord with Belial, and the believer has no concord with an infidel. The antithesis manifests itself in the believer’s spiritual separation from the unbeliever. Although the believer still lives in the world with the unbeliever, still works in the same fields as the unbeliever, and still shops at the same markets with the unbeliever, there is a wide spiritual gulf between the believer and the unbeliever. They live out of entirely different spiritual principles. The believer is illuminated by the word of God and walks after the Spirit of God. The unbeliever is blind and walks after his own dead spirit. In the Netherlands after 1834, this spiritual antithesis manifested itself in separate churches and separate schools. While the great majority of the population remained in the state church and the state schools, the Seceders formed their own Reformed churches and established their own Reformed schools.

The School Struggle

Life after the Afscheiding was very difficult for the Seceders. They had expected this, and they would not have traded away the gospel that God had restored to them for all of the ease in the world. They well knew that in following their Lord, they had to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow him into the same persecution and suffering that the wicked world had heaped upon the savior.

The Seceders were hated by their neighbors, their coworkers, their former friends, their families, and really the entire society of the Netherlands. The people of the Netherlands saw the Seceders as a threat to their material prosperity and their gilded religion. The people in the Netherlands were fiercely proud of themselves. They were highly educated, and they were very religious. Even the peasants in society could read and write. Dutch merchant ships sailed the world over, bringing home wealth and wonder. Everyone in the nation was a member of the state church. They all had their “Sunday best.” They all appeared in their beautiful church buildings on the Lord’s days and sang until the rafters rang. They had learned ministers. They had diligent statesmen. They had a hard-working society that valued cleanliness and order. But those Seceders threatened it all! They drew people away from the state church and the state schools. One state official made this remark to the Seceders: “You break everything; first you wreck our church, now you wreck our schools.”¹

It is perhaps well known that the Seceders suffered much to establish their own Reformed churches. Fines were levied, and people went to jail, including Reverend de Cock. What is perhaps not so well known is that the Seceders suffered as much and sometimes more to establish their own Reformed schools. The Afscheiding was just as much a school struggle as it was a church struggle. One church historian observed, “For the Seceders the restoration of the church was tied irreversibly to the reformation of the schools.”² This stands to reason, for the state church and the state schools had both apostatized from the Reformed faith. Therefore, a reformation of the church also had to include a reformation of the schools. The Seceders considered it wholly inadequate to return to the Reformed faith only in church but desired to return to the Reformed faith also in their schools.

Few Options

Immediately after the Afscheiding in 1834, the Seceders had few options for the education of their children. The first option, which was not really an option, was to keep their children in the state schools. There they would be reared in the same dead religion that plagued the state church. Sometimes a sound Christian teacher could still be found in a state school, so that some Seceder parents felt they could still use the school. But for many the state schools were simply not an option. The historian Janet Sjaarda Sheeres lists several reasons that the Seceders did not want to use the state schools, both before and after the Afscheiding. Portions of four of the most important reasons are quoted here.

1. Heidelberg Catechism

The first has to do with the fundamental difference of doctrine being taught in the school—namely liberal Protestantism versus orthodox Calvinism. Every person, the State declared, could with a good education, become a model citizen, a good and decent person, and a worthwhile member of society. It was all a matter of upbringing. The Seceders, however, argued that a person was born in sin and prone to all matter (sic) of misery and evil, yes, even to damnation itself, unless he was born again…This is what they believed and what they wanted their children to be taught. The prohibition of the Heidelberg Catechism as a teaching tool for the doctrine of sin-salvation-service became a major issue.

2. Fundamental Differences about Human Life and Eternal Life

The authors of the law of 1806 saw these statutes as a means to develop useful citizens for the Kingdom of the Netherlands.³ To further the nation’s well-being in this world—not the next. The Seceders were not concerned with this world. They were not of this world…So for them, the education of their children’s souls was of much greater importance than the mere development of their minds, which only led to perdition…

3. Vaccination

In 1823, the State decreed that all children attending public school had to be vaccinated against smallpox. Many of the Seceders were against vaccination. They reasoned that Jesus clearly stated, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor…”⁴ Also, the Heidelberg Catechism in Lord’s Day 10 stated that “…health and sickness…come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand.” So anyone using vaccination was running ahead of the Lord by protecting himself against any chastisement the Lord might want to impose upon him. Unless a child came to school with proof of vaccination, he or she was not allowed to attend. Nevertheless, parents still had to pay the school tax, whether the child attended or not. This wholesale refusal to be vaccinated only strengthened the State’s prejudice against the Seceders, marking them not only as church trouble makers, but also as a public health threat.

4. Baptismal Promises

Many parents felt that when they promised at baptism, “to instruct these children…in the aforesaid doctrine, and cause them to be instructed therein, to the utmost of your power,” they could not then in good conscience send their children to what they saw as a secular school. Either they had to make a false promise in church, or they had to withhold their children from school.⁵

The Seceders’ second option for the education of their children, which also was not really an option, was to take their children out of the state schools and educate them at home. It was a misguided homeschool movement among the Seceders. This movement proved to be popular among the Seceders, especially since Reverend de Cock advocated it. Many of the Seceders pursued homeschooling to their great disaster.

The…most drastic measure was to keep the children home from school. In the summer of 1837, the consistory of the newly formed Secession congregation in Midwolda, province of Groningen, admonished its members that it was their Christian duty to keep their children out of school. According to Derk Hoksbergen, an influential farmer from Wilsum near Kampen, “The schools are just as rotten as the churches and if we don’t want to attend those churches, how can we send our children to those schools?”

Because he was against vaccination, and because of liberalism being taught, Hendrik De Cock, the leader of the Secession movement, kept his own children out of school and advocated the Seceders to do so as well. That they heeded his words and kept their children home is evidenced by county reports such as the one in Heerde which mentions a decrease in attendance year after year beginning in 1835.⁶

This homeschooling movement proved to be a tragedy for the Afscheiding. The generation who was homeschooled was hardly educated. This was not merely an intellectual or technical tragedy, as if the only ill effects were that that generation did not know some facts and could not find jobs. This homeschooling movement was also a spiritual tragedy. The purpose of Reformed education is twofold: that the covenant children learn to know God in all his works and that the children be prepared to serve God in all their callings. God’s works include the whole creation; all of history; the gifts of language, numbers, and beauty; and every other facet of human life on earth. Therefore, the study of mathematics in a Reformed school does not merely teach the children how to add numbers but also shows them the glory of our orderly God. Every subject in the curriculum—from history to science to art to literature to choir to band to foreign language to mathematics—teaches the children to know God in all his works. And the children will someday be called by God to serve him in a particular vocation, whether mother in the home or farmer in the field or accountant in an office or business owner or building subcontractor or ditch digger or senator or father or elder or deacon. The children will take up those vocations not merely as jobs but also as children of God’s covenant who have been called by their God to serve him in that particular station and calling. Every subject in the curriculum—from college prep classes to shop class to home economics class and everything in between—prepares the children to serve God in their callings. A child who is hardly educated is not merely a child who lacks some facts or can’t find a job but also is a child who has not properly been taught his covenant God.

For the Afscheiding the effect of this homeschool movement was that the homeschooled generation of young men was not at all ready for seminary. In 1854, twenty years after the Afscheiding, the Theological School at Kampen opened to prepare Seceders for the ministry. Forty men applied for admission. Three of the forty men could not read or write well enough to submit an admissions essay. Not one of the forty men had had any high school education. All forty of the men had received “only a very poor elementary education.”⁷

The Afscheiding’s dabbling in homeschooling illustrated why God requires that the Christian schools be maintained. The Reformed confession regarding God’s requirement of the schools is found in Lord’s Day 38 of the Heidelberg Catechism.

Q. 103. What doth God require in the fourth commandment?

A. First, that the ministry of the gospel and the schools be maintained. (Confessions and Church Order, 128)

Although not the only reason, one reason that God requires Christian schools is that without them there can be no ministers of the gospel. The church can establish a fine new seminary. It can build up ample funds for its active and emeritus ministers. But if there are no schools, all of the seminaries and simoleons in the world will not make a single minister of the gospel.

Zacharias Ursinus explains this need for Christian schools in his commentary on Lord’s Day 38.

The maintenance of schools may be embraced under this part of the honor which is due to the ministry; for unless the arts and sciences be taught, men can neither become properly qualified to teach, nor can the purity of doctrine be preserved and defended against the assaults of heretics.⁸

When the fathers of the Afscheiding adopted this homeschooling mentality, they got the first part of the equation right: take the children out of the corrupt state schools. Derk Hoksbergen was absolutely correct when he said, “The schools are just as rotten as the churches and if we don’t want to attend those churches, how can we send our children to those schools?” But those fathers of the Afscheiding who homeschooled got the second part of the equation wrong: leave the children at home. The solution to the corruption of the state schools was not homeschooling but the establishment and maintenance of the Afscheiding’s own Reformed Christian schools. The establishment of their own schools was the third and best option, and really the only option, for the Seceders in the education of their children.

Afscheiding Schools

Many of the Seceders pursued with great zeal the establishment of their own Reformed schools. At every turn they were met with opposition from government officials, who enjoyed the full support of Dutch society in general. Sheeres tells the tale.

The Chief Inspector, H. Wijnbeek, an honorable, hard working Christian, could not be objective when it came to the Seceders. “He detested people who joined separatist churches, were against vaccination, wouldn’t sing hymns, and who would have nothing to do with the concept of ‘one church’ but instead endorsed sectarianism.” Wijnbeek took it upon himself to visit almost all the schools in the Netherlands between 1833 and 1844 (some 5000), and made reports on all of them. And woe to that schoolmaster found teaching anything other than the authorized curriculum. Time and again, the Seceders desire for their own schools was seen as extreme antisocial behavior. Wijnbeek’s observation: “First you wreck our church, now you wreck our schools.”

The Seceders begged the King for permission to start their own schools. After all, the law allowed for private schools. They were willing to pay all the costs themselves as long as they could appoint their own teachers. Although it allowed these schools, the State retained the right to approve the application and to inspect the schools, and if they were found wanting, to close them down. The authorities used this leverage to keep private schools from sprouting up, as was the case with the very first Christian School started in Smilde, province of Drenthe, with Douwe Vander Werp as the first teacher. He had the required teacher certification, and the parents were willing to pay Douwe’s salary, yet the State came to inspect the premises, found it wanting, and closed it down.⁹

Nevertheless, the determined fathers and mothers of the Afscheiding continued to find ways to maintain schools. These schools rarely had all of the form that one would expect in a school. There were no school buildings and no registration with the state, and all of that was against the law. The parents gathered the children in barns and homes. Sometimes the parents could hire a teacher; sometimes a mother took over the instruction. But for all of their lack of form, these were good Christian schools, as the parents of God’s covenant educated their covenant seed together. And for their obedience to God in laboring together to rear their children in Reformed education, the Seceders faced increasing persecution from the state. Again, Sheeres tells the tale.

Others bypassed the law by forming clandestine schools. The State said that it was not the business of the State to teach religion since that was the parents’ duty, and hence, it allowed for children to gather for religious education. In Heerde, Smilde, Dwingelo, Hoogeveen, and many other places in the province of Drenthe, parents gathered children in homes or barns and hired a teacher to give religious instruction. However, with the approval of the parents, (not the law) these teachers also taught the children reading, writing, and arithmetic.

That is, when the coast was clear. If a school inspector was found to be anywhere in the vicinity, all ABC primers were hid, and the Bible and catechism booklets put on full display. Albert Gort, deacon of the Secession church in Hoogeven taught in this manner for four years. After the children were all inside, he simply bolted the door, giving him enough time to put away the illicit materials and have the children sing a psalm should the inspector knock on the door. Because of the growing number of such “clandestine” school groups, the school inspector of Drenthe wrote to the Minister of the Interior “to step in with force, because unpunished, these schools would flourish like weeds.” Indeed, the inspector encouraged civil actions against anyone attempting to teach unlawfully…

Women were not exempt from prosecution either. On January 23, 1838, the Civil Court at Arnhem dealt with the matter against Grietje Takken, wife of Hendrik Bosch at Heerde. Grietje was accused of giving lessons to children without having the proper license to do so. On December 28, 1837, Grietje taught children in the wooden shoe factory of her husband. The ABC primer that she used was taken as evidence, and Grietje, six months pregnant at the time, was sentenced to three days in jail and courts costs of f5.29.¹⁰

Emigration for the Sake of Schools

The Seceders’ spiritual and godly desire for their own Christian schools meant that life became more and more intolerable for them in the Netherlands under the harassment and persecution of the state. As the persecution continued, the saints of the Afscheiding began to consider leaving their homeland behind.

Their first choice for emigration was the tropical island of Java in Indonesia, about as different a place as one can imagine from the swamps of western Michigan, where the Seceders who emigrated would ultimately end up establishing the town of Holland. Indonesia, known at that time as the Dutch East Indies, was appealing to the Seceders because it was a Dutch colony, heavily involved in the spice trade. If the Seceders could join the colony in Java, they could remain citizens of the Netherlands. The Seceders approached the Dutch government with the request that they be permitted to help colonize Java.  Reverend Scholte, one of the main leaders of the Afscheiding, and a certain Reverend Heldring “took it upon themselves to go to His Excellency, the Minister of Colonial Affairs, to acquaint the government with this matter and to persuade it to guide the movement of emigration in that direction by giving freedom, opening the way, and granting privileges. Their answer, as far as Java was concerned, was negative.”¹¹

After receiving the government’s negative answer and after publishing their own answer to the government’s objections, the Seceders began to rethink their initial plan to go to Java. Positive reports from North America were flooding the Netherlands, and it appeared to the beleaguered saints of the Afscheiding that God was opening a door to the West rather than to the East. Finally, in 1846, two leading ministers in the Afscheiding, Rev. Albertus van Raalte and Rev. Anthony Brummelkamp, published a pamphlet, Emigration, or, Why Do We Promote the Migration of People to North America and Not to Java? That very year Reverend van Raalte would lead a vanguard of Seceders from the Netherlands to North America, eventually settling Holland, Michigan.

What is striking about the two ministers’ pamphlet is that they repeatedly cited the need to establish their own Christian schools as a compelling reason for emigration. They lamented the opposition to the Reformed school that they faced in the Netherlands and that they undoubtedly would have faced in Java. For the sake of the Christian school, they called their fellow Seceders to emigrate to America.

And are not those, who in the way of prayer to God are prepared to put forth effort, and spend money to establish their own Christian schools, and thus to do something to rescue the perishing people, denied the very foundation on which they stand?¹²

Lacking means of support, we feel the heavy hand of the Government which encroaches on the most sensitive rights of a father, compelling him to choose between two extremes, both leading to a state of wretchedness: either to let his children grow up in ignorance, or send them to a school, where, according to the father’s deepest convictions, their mind will be corrupted, and where the Bible, the Word of God, is banned from the curriculum. Children as well as adults need to feed on the bread of life and drink of the water of life. The Bible is banned at the request of a third party, who bows down to idols, or teaches that children must not be encumbered with the Word of God. Those wanting to ban the Bible from the schools may differ in many things, but they agree in the view which dishonors God and glorifies man, that man is saved, at least in part, by his own works and not through faith alone. And does not proof abound that the well-meaning teacher, when his teaching makes reference to the Bible, is regarded as a lawbreaker and loses his job?

That is the present situation here in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, mind you! May we expect that it will be better in the colonies where the same government rules with the same arbitrary spirit?…

Suppose that we colonized in the East and a preacher of the Gospel dared to proclaim the Word of God, or a brother spoke a word to brethren to edify and admonish; suppose that discipline was exercised in the congregation according to the will of God, or a Christian school was opened for children; suppose that preaching so as to lead sinners to repentance created a disturbance in the peaceful circles of the service of sin and luxury, and that the Governor-General was offended. Do you suppose we are mistaken if we judge that the Governor-General would consider it his high calling to ban that preacher, that brother, from the colony?…

But to seek residence deliberately where you know that the government does violence to one’s freedom of conscience, and where parents are hindered from educating their children in the fear of God—to choose to live there for the one reason that you would then live in a colony of the Netherlands,—who would be attracted to that?…

But we do desire to live a quiet life in all honesty and godliness, and to bring up our children to fear God and teach them to love the principles to which we hold. Because this is denied us and made impossible to most of us, for that reason we direct our eyes to a strange land. Because of our deep concern for our children we need not think of our own colonies.¹³

The Seceders who emigrated desired “complete freedom—freedom in their civilian life, freedom in their religious life, both with reference to the school and the church.”¹⁴

The historian Janet Sjaarda Sheeres contends that freedom to establish Christian schools was as much a driving force for the Seceders’ emigration as anything else. She provides several additional citations from primary and secondary sources to demonstrate it.

While it is commonly acknowledged that the Seceders under Van Raalte left the Netherlands to settle in America for freedom to worship and to improve their lot materially, there was a third, equally compelling reason why they chose to pack their bags for America, namely freedom to give their children a religious-based education in keeping with their beliefs…

After arriving in America, Van Raalte wrote to Brummelkamp on January 30, 1847, “I am glad that I can now say with my whole heart to the Seceded Churches, which in Holland enjoy a limited freedom, but in the education of their children no freedom at all, Come over, and enjoy this good land of liberty.”

Dutch historians, Alle and Hendrik Algra wrote: “One of the most important motives for emigration by the Seceders was that in the Netherlands there was no freedom of education. One must take that literally. It was not possible for anyone to organize a private school.” Dutch historian, I. J. Brugmans observed, “There have been complaints that it was easier to obtain permission from The Hague to run a brothel than to run a private school.”¹⁵

Concluding, Sheeres writes the following:

Because there are no specific entries in the emigration ledgers stating “school issues” as a reason for emigrating, and we therefore do not have a precise count, we may be sure that many who wrote “religious freedom” as the cause of their emigration meant “freedom to teach our children as we see fit.” To them, these two freedoms were indistinguishable. Anthony Brummelkamp wrote to Groen van Prinsterer: “For us, who have landed outside of the Reformed Church denomination, the question of Church and School was one. We saw the schools equally as decayed as the church.”

The 1846 synodical gathering of the Secession churches identified the school situation as the cause of emigration. In a (1846) letter to the king pleading for the right to have private schools, the consistory of Hoogeveen informed his majesty that many were emigrating for this reason, and unless the king dealt with the problem, all those who desired freedom of education for their children would leave the country.

The first ones to be shipped out under the auspices of the newly formed Emigration Society on May 28, 1846 were Derk and Louise Arnoud and children; William and Neeltje Kwinkelenberg and children, and Jan Jacob and Nieske Arnoud, all driven by the hope to be able to achieve Christian education for their children.

Egbert Dunnewind, a teacher at Rheeze, ran into trouble with the law when he became an elder in Van Raalte’s congregation. The school supervisor brought charges against Dunnewind on grounds of article 23 “…that the teaching of denominational doctrines by schoolteachers will not be allowed.” After considerable struggle with the authorities, Dunnewind threw in his lot with Van Raalte, and although the reason for his departure in the official record states “religious freedom,” the reason noted in the church minutes of Heemse, dated August 1846, state: “The principle reason for our departure is as follows: to seek for our children Christian schools which we cannot find here.”¹⁶

And what of mother Grietje, who was jailed for three days for teaching children in the wooden shoe factory?

As a result, she and Hendrik and their children sailed to America in 1847. On their way west, Hendrik and two of their children passed away in Buffalo, N.Y. Later, in the colony, Grietje married Aalt Kamper. She died at age eighty-eight, having seen all the promises of freedom in spite of hardship. She was one of the many who looked to America for freedom, not only to worship, but also to educate.¹⁷

Conclusion

Wherever one turns in the history of the Reformed churches, the school issue is a prominent theme. Not only was the Afscheiding a school struggle as much as it was a church struggle, but the Seceders’ emigration to North America also was largely driven by the need for Christian schools. The Reformed father and mother who feed on the gospel of Jesus Christ on Sunday can be satisfied with nothing less than that their children be reared in that gospel the rest of the week. The Reformed people who suffer the reproach of Christ together at the hands of the world and the false church are also privileged to labor together in God’s covenant in the rearing of their covenant seed. God has been good to the Reformed Protestant Churches in giving us this conviction and in establishing our schools. The Christian school is our Reformed birthright. Let us be grateful for it, treasure it, and not sell it.

The history of the Christian school also illustrates that God does not despise the day of small beginnings. Barns, wooden shoe shops, and humble homes have been God’s setting where his people have reared his covenant seed. Teachers, deacons, and pregnant mothers have been God’s instruments in bringing to pass his grand covenant purpose of Christian education. What all men must count as nothing, God makes the nursery of his church.

The Reformed school. How humble! How grand!