The Antirevolutionary: a review

Imagine growing up in a time of great political and social upheaval and coming to maturity in its aftermath. This was the experience of the young Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, who was born the first year of the 19th century and died 75 years later. At the time of his birth his native Netherlands had been under French influence for several years. The former Dutch Republic of the 17th and 18th centuries had been replaced in 1795 by the Batavian Republic, a centralized state modelled along revolutionary lines. In Groen's fifth year of life, the republic was further supplanted by a puppet monarchy under one of the Napoleon's brothers. This lasted for four years until the Netherlands was annexed outright to France. Groen was reaching adolescence as the Congress of Vienna was establishing a new European order at war's end. One of the features of this new Europe was an enlarged Kingdom of the Netherlands under a strong monarch from the House of Orange. Often referred to as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, it included what in 1830 would become an independent Belgium.

Up to now Groen has not been widely known outside of the Netherlands and the global community of Neo-Calvinists aware of his influence on Abraham Kuyper. The new biography by Roel Kuiper, The Antirevolutionary, promises to change this within the English-speaking world. Unlike Kuyper, whose origins were modest and whose ancestry cannot be traced beyond a few generations, Groen was an aristocrat with an ancient pedigree and travelled in prominent circles. He knew personally the first three kings of the Netherlands and was a defender of the House of Orange, which he held responsible for securing the country's independence from Spain and for protecting the cause of Reformation in the church. He was a churchman who, while remaining with the national Hervormde Kerk, sympathized with those Christians who had seceded from that body in 1834 and sought to protect their right to do so. He was a man of the Réveil, an ecumenical Christian revival that swept through Protestant Europe during the first half of the century. Finally, he was a founder of the Antirevolutionary movement that his better-known successor, Abraham Kuyper, would organize into a potent force after Groen's death.

I will not here take readers through the major stages in Groen's life. I strongly recommend that you read the book for this. But I will comment on a few elements that stood out for me.

First, Groen did not oppose all revolutions. He defended the Dutch revolt against Spain and England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 (175). But he believed that the French Revolution was qualitatively different from these earlier events. It represented nothing less than "a colossal break in the history of European civilization" (104). In this he was at one with such figures as Edmund Burke, Friedrich Julius Stahl, François Guizot, and Jacob Burckhardt. Groen composed and delivered a series of lectures on the subject for a select group of men by special invitation to his home in The Hague. These lectures would be published in 1847 as Unbelief and Revolution, easily Groen's best-known work. My good friend and colleague, Harry van Dyke, translated this book many years ago and up to now has done more than anyone else to raise Groen's profile in the English-speaking world.

Second, Groen was not a partisan man. During the years that Groen served in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament (1849-1857, 1862-1865), leaders still eschewed factionalism in principle even as they divided in practice into parliamentary groupings. Groen was the leader of the Antirevolutionary movement, whose principal motivating issue was education, but he was not an organization man. He retained a posture of deliberate personal independence, even as he sought to influence his country's politics in a more Christian direction. It would fall to Kuyper, who appeared fairly late in his life and appears for the first time on p. 183 of this biography, to mobilize a sizeable constituency in support of their shared goals. Kuyper would establish the first modern political party in the Netherlands and the first Christian democratic party in the world. By then Groen had passed from the scene.

Third, while Kuyper would lead a secession from the Hervormde Kerk in 1886 and unite with the 1834 seceders to form the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland in 1892, Groen himself was critical of those who had left in the earlier secession. "The Seceders had abandoned their 'appointed station' and avoided the 'obligatory struggle.' He criticized the spirit of hair-splitting, division, and schism that had begun to manifest itself among them" (114). Although Groen was a Reformed Christian, some of us will be surprised to learn that he took a somewhat less than strict approach to the church's confessions: "the question was not whether the confessions had to be binding in every detail, but whether one was willing to recognize that the confessions contained truths that the church must consider precious and indispensable" (113). Groen was particularly critical of the Revs. Hendrik Pieter Scholte and Albertus Christiaan van Raalte, seceder clergy who led many of their flock to America, including Michigan and Iowa.

Fourth, one cannot but note how much Groen argued from history to support his positions, both in politics and in the church. There is something to be said for following precedent, a key principle of the English common law and thus familiar to those of us living in English-speaking constitutional democracies. But every historical legacy is inevitably a mixture of good and bad. We must assess our traditions in accordance with criteria in some fashion transcending the historical process itself. Groen opposed the separation of church and state as the product of revolutionary thinking, but his argument for the influence of the "Reformed persuasion" in the public sphere was based on its historic place in the Dutch nation (115). One looks in vain for an explicit recognition of the role of the Christian faith in facilitating public justice for all citizens, whatever faith they might profess. But this would come after Groen had passed from the scene.

When I first read Groen's Unbelief and Revolution many years ago, I was struck by this passage:

Half the declamations against the nobility and the clergy fall to the ground if it is kept in mind that these were not institutions for the common good, accountable for power entrusted, but corporations whose free disposal of possessions was based on property rights. The same can be said of royal authority: much that would be unpardonable in a supreme magistrate needs no apology in him who wields dominion in his own name. Most of the seigniorial rights and personal obligations were the terms on which pieces of land had been granted, and were thus the enduring signs of favours received. I shall not praise the imprudence of the kings of France in not convoking the Estates General for more than 150 years, thus neglecting the most powerful means of drawing throne and nation closer together; nevertheless, they were free to convoke or not to convoke (97).

Here Groen appears to be unduly influenced by the restorationist trends in post-Napoleonic Europe seeking to bring back the vestiges of feudalism. It turns out that, shortly after he wrote this, Groen came into contact with the writings of Stahl, "the last representative of the historical school of jurisprudence," and this changed his approach, as Roel Kuiper indicates: "Freed from his 'private law' definition of sovereignty, he now thought of it in 'public law' terms" (174). Whether Groen ever explicitly repudiated his earlier view I cannot say, but his later thought appears to recognize that even a constitutional monarchy is in truth a monarchical republic, in which the prince, as chief magistrate, is bound to seek the welfare of the citizens in the conduct of his or her office.

Fifth and finally, many of us are aware that, despite Dutch neutrality during the Great War, Abraham Kuyper was personally favourable to the German cause. There is a history behind this. Dutch Protestants were generally sympathetic towards Protestant Prussia in its conflict with vestigially Catholic and recently revolutionary France. When Bismarck provoked a war with Napoleon III's France in 1870, using it as a pretext to establish a new German Empire, Kuyper expressed approval at the result, at least at first. Groen strenuously objected, seeing it as a consequence of a new and dangerous nationalism infecting the continent (201). If this nationalism gained the upper hand, Groen predicted, "we shall see the atrocities of a new barbarism amidst the most exquisite refinements of civilization" (189), accurately anticipating the horrors shortly to be unleashed in the 20th century. It is worth noting that, despite their initial disagreement on this score, Kuyper would eventually come to see Groen's superior wisdom (201-202).

Many of us were pleased to see James D. Bratt's definitive biography of Kuyper published in 2013. Thirteen years later we are similarly happy to see Roel Kuiper's biography of Groen appear. Reading it will give us a deep appreciation for a man used by God to advance his kingdom in public life during a turbulent era in history.