Unbelief and Revolution

van Prinsterer Groen

Description

God's word illumines the darkness of society.Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution is a foundational work addressing the inherent tension between religion and modernity. As a historian and politician, Groen was intimately familiar with the growing divide between secular culture and the church in his time. Rather than embrace this division, these lectures, originally published in 1847, argue for a renewed interaction between the two spheres. Groen's work served as an inspiration for many contemporary theologians, and as a mentor to Abraham Kuyper, he had a profound impact on Kuyper's famous public theology.Harry Van Dyke, the original translator, reintroduces this vital contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religion and society.

Sujets

• Sermons
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683592297
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Unbelief and Revolution
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer
Edited and Translated by Harry Van Dyke

Lexham Press
Bellingham, WA
Unbelief and Revolution
Copyright 2018 Harry Van Dyke
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
This book is a revised edition of Groen van Prinsterer’s Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution , published by Wedge Publishing Foundation, Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada, 1989, pages 293–539.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. Public domain.
Print ISBN 9781683592280
Digital ISBN 9781683592297
Cover Art: Jean-Pierre Houël, “The Storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789,” 1789 . Public domain.
Lexham Editorial Team: Danielle Thevenaz and Todd Hains
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer on the occasion of the completion of his Handbook of Dutch History , some months after he had concluded his lectures on Unbelief and Revolution, fall 1846 .
Contents
Translator’s Introduction
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Lecture I | Introduction
Lecture II | The Wisdom of the Ages
Lecture III | Anti-Revolutionary Principles
Lecture IV | Historic Forms of Government
Lecture V | Abuses
Lecture VI | The Perversion of Constitutional Law
Lecture VII | The Reformation
Lecture VIII | Unbelief
Lecture IX | Unbelief (Continued)
Lecture X | The Conflict with Nature and Law
Lecture XI | First Phase: Preparation (till 1789)
Lecture XII | Second Phase: Development (1789–94)
Lecture XIII | The Reign of Terror
Lecture XIV | Overview: 1794–1845
Lecture XV | Conclusion
Works Cited
Names Index
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Translator’s Introduction
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer’s famous book Unbelief and Revolution is a classic work in public theology, first published over one hundred and fifty years ago . It is a manifesto of a prescient Christian statesman and has become an enduring statement of Christian political thought. A mature work, here offered in an abridged English translation, Unbelief and Revolution functioned as a “tract for the times” and marked its author as an astute critic of the spirit of the age.
The central message of the book is that the French Revolution is not actually over but lives on in its ideas, and these ideas are dangerous for society. The book makes a compelling case for challenging the “permanent revolution” in which Western civilization has engaged since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Our culture, according to Groen, is increasingly in the grip of an intellectual and spiritual revolution that has put secular humanism in the saddle and repeatedly wreaks havoc with the created order for humanity and society. Because this revolution has continued almost unabated to this day, the book’s message has only increased in relevance for the twenty-first century .

THE AUTHOR
Willem Groen van Prinsterer ( 1801–1876 ) was a Dutch historian and statesman. His official Christian name, Guillaume, was given to him at his baptism in the fashionable French-speaking Walloon Church of The Hague. 1 Dr. Groen—the double surname is usually shortened to the first part—made an indelible mark on the society and culture of the Netherlands. He is known as the father of the “anti-revolutionary” movement in his native country as well as a fearless commentator on politics in and out of parliament.
By his own admission Willem Groen grew up a lukewarm, if not nominal, Christian, but by the age of thirty-three he accepted the historic Christian faith. That decision was providentially prepared by the sermons of court chaplain (and later church historian) Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné ( 1794–1872 ) and by the gentle influence of his pious wife Elisabeth van der Hoop ( 1807–1879 ) as well as friends in The Hague and Amsterdam who belonged to the revival movement of the time known throughout Europe as the Réveil . In later life Groen described himself as “an offspring of Calvin and a child of the Réveil .”
Young Groen had an auspicious beginning. An eager student, his mother made French his mother tongue and father made sure he mastered the native Dutch. Wim, as he was known in his youth, grew up in an aristocratic milieu and was given a classical education. By age 22 he completed a brilliant course of studies at Leiden Academy, where he earned two doctorates, one in law and one in letters, giving his public oral defense of both dissertations on the same day.
After a perfunctory few years as a barrister—which he enjoyed very much as it gave him time for historical study—he served King William I ( 1772–1843 ; reigned 1813–1840 ) as cabinet secretary in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. This rather artificial kingdom was a union of Protestant Holland and Catholic Belgium which the Allied Powers—England, Prussia, Austria and Russia—created to keep France in check after they had defeated Napoleon.
In his role at the court, Groen was a close observer of the political tensions that exploded in the Belgian Revolt of 1830 . He analyzed and assessed this traumatic event with great clarity and candor in a series of privately published pamphlets which he entitled Nederlandsche Gedachten (Netherlandic Reflections) . The experience made him decide to study the recurring revolutions of his time.
Not long after the Allies recognized Belgian independence, Groen resigned from the cabinet and was appointed supervisor of the archives of the House of Orange. In this capacity he would over the years edit and publish fourteen volumes of correspondence by members of that royal house. When the first of these volumes came out some members of polite society censured him for publishing all letters in full, without omitting passages that were less flattering to the writer. Groen defended his editorial policy and in a separate publication stressed the importance of pursuing historical science impartially on the basis of unrestricted access to truthful and reliable primary sources. 2 In this he was a pioneer in his country and earned the name “father of modern Dutch historiography.”
In addition to these historical publications Groen spent nearly a decade studying the roots and driving force of the French Revolution of 1789 . The shadow of the French Revolution fell over Groen’s generation as the Holocaust does ours. 3 In the Groen Collection in the National Archives in The Hague are found several hefty folders containing notes, extracts, and summaries in French and Dutch testifying to many years of thorough study in a great variety of sources. These materials were destined to become the preliminary drafts for a more definitive composition. By the fall of 1845 Groen felt confident enough about his understanding of this earthshaking event and its undiminished influence up to his own time that he invited a score of friends and close acquaintances, twenty-one in all, to come to his house on Saturday evenings to hear him lecture on the results of his findings. (Holding lectures to a select audience in the privacy of one’s home was not uncommon at the time.) Out of these evening sessions were born the fifteen lectures, published virtually unchanged in 1847 with the title Ongeloof en Revolutie (“Unbelief and Revolution”). The book turned into a diagnosis of his time and laid down basic principles for conduct in an age infected with a complex set of beliefs and assumptions, an ideology which Groen captured under the single term “the Revolution.”
The completion of this work marked a significant reorientation in Groen’s career. Having formulated his basic worldview and stance in life, he stepped out of this time of study into public life. As a man of independent means, he owned and edited a daily newspaper and for five years was its chief editor. For several terms he held a seat in the lower house of parliament, where he participated in the debates on many issues, notably freedom of education, the relation between church and state, and provincial and municipal autonomy. In his above-mentioned pamphlets entitled Netherlandic Reflections , published between 1829 and 1832 , he debated the current issues of the day; later in his career he resumed his trenchant commentaries in a second series of pamphlets under the same title; these installments were published intermittently and then bound in five volumes between 1869 and 1876 , the year of his death.
Groen rejected the choice between conservative and liberal, striking out for a third way. (At this time in Europe, conservatism favored paternalistic, interventionist government, while liberalism stood for free enterprise.) He considered conservatism, to which many of his Christian friends belonged, to be out of step with what was gaining strength in society, referring to conservatives as “hand-wringing onlookers of the Revolution.” At the same time, he insisted that liberals, moderate or progressive, were cautious but convinced proponents of the Revolution, while more radical groups like socialists were simply “more consistent liberals” or “liberals in a hurry.”
Throughout his career he defended the rights of parliament and aided in the country’s development toward a genuinely constitutional monarchy. He scorned “census democracy”—the liberal policy that favored the middle classes by limiting the franchise to the higher taxpayers. He often made himself the spokesman of the disenfranchised “people behind the voters,” many of whom he knew held deep sympathy and affection for him. In both his personal life and his parliamentary conduct he showed concern for the working classes and stood up for their right to better treatment in what was then still a highly stratified society entering the seamy stages of early capitalism and exploitive labor practices.
His prominence as a leading spokesman for go