Challenging the Spirit of Modernity

Van Dyke Harry

Description

God's word illumines the darkness of society.Dutch politician and historian Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution is a foundational work addressing the inherent tension between the church and secular society. Writing at the onset of modernity in Western culture, Groen saw with amazing clarity the dire implications of abandoning God's created order for human life in society. Groen's work served as an inspiration for many contemporary theologians, and he had a profound impact on Abraham Kuyper's famous public theology.In Challenging the Spirit of Modernity, Harry Van Dyke places this seminal work into historical context, revealing how this vital contribution still speaks into the fractured relationship between religion and society. A deeper understanding of the roots of modern secularism and Groen's strong, faithful response to it gives us a better grasp of the same conflict today.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Political science of religion
• Christian Church
• History of religions

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 02 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683593218
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Challenging the Spirit of Modernity
A Study of Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution
HARRY VAN DYKE
Challenging the Spirit of Modernity
Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology
Copyright 2019 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 (Jordan Station, ON: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1989) .
Print ISBN 978-1-68-359320-1
Digital ISBN 978-1-68-359321-8
Lexham Editorial Team: Todd Hains, Eric Bosell, Danielle Thevenaz
Cover Design: Bryan Hintz

To Nienke
We do not want a theocracy, but recognition of the connection
between religion, authority, and freedom.
Contents
Preface to the New Edition
Introduction
1. Restoration Holland
2. Religious Awakening
3. Groen van Prinsterer
4. Purpose of the Lectures
5. Prototypes and Paraphrases
6. Sources
7. Audience
8. Style
9. Argument
10. Editions
11. The First and Second Editions Compared
12. Translations
13. Controversial Issues
Select Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Scripture References
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
Nearly three decades have passed since this book was first published. It appeared simultaneously in a trade edition as well as an academic edition in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of D.Litt. at the Free University of Amsterdam. The second half of my book contained an English translation of Groen van Prinsterer’s lectures on Unbelief and Revolution ; the first half was a commentary on that classic text, describing its content and its context. The translation has been published separately as Unbelief and Revolution in Lexham Classics . The commentary is reprinted in the present work.
The dissertation was soon out of print, but demand for it never died out. Thus I welcomed the offer by Lexham Press to republish both the translation and the commentary. Below, I have used the occasion to correct a few stylistic details and to expand some footnotes with more recent information. Apart from that, the text remains unchanged.
Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876) was a trailblazer in the struggle for the preservation of the Christian roots of Western culture against the encroachment of secularism since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. His lectures traced the origin and nature of this intellectual and spiritual revolution and articulated the principles by which to respond to it. In his native country, the Netherlands, his book and his career inspired an “anti-revolutionary” movement that engaged society and politics from a distinctively “Christian-historical” orientation. This movement would eventually have a significant impact on Dutch society in the areas of education, industrial relations, social justice and democratic politics under the leadership of Groen’s disciple Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920).
In light of the current revival of interest in the life and thought of Kuyper, Groen van Prinsterer’s seminal work will no doubt find new readers. I hope that the following pages will be of help in understanding and appreciating Groen’s work.
Harry Van Dyke
Summer 2018
INTRODUCTION
The book Ongeloof en Revolutie is the text of a series of historical lectures presented in 1845–46 and published in 1847 . Its historical context is Holland during the Restoration and its author is Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–76). A Dutch classic, it has never had an unabridged translation into another language. The purpose of the present study is to make Ongeloof en Revolutie accessible to the modern English reader who may be interested in its origin and contents in light of its historical impact. My abridged translation of Unbelief and Revolution was published as a stand-alone volume in 2018 . 1

NATURE OF GROEN’S BOOK
Like a much smaller but rather more famous publication of the following year, the Communist Manifesto , Groen van Prinsterer’s book defies all categories of conventional classification. Unbelief and Revolution might be called a political or philosophical work if it were not so obviously also a historical study. Conversely, many historians feel that the work contains too little description of empirical phenomena and too much analysis in terms of recurring phases and logical relationships to rank it among history proper. Again, although it is expressly Christian in its message, it is neither a theological treatise nor merely a ‘tract for the times.’
Unbelief and Revolution is at once a protest against the increasingly secular spirit of the times, an attack on the prevailing liberalism in church and state, and a plea for reform in a historically sensitive direction guided by Christian principles. Like the works of Tocqueville that would come out a decade later, Unbelief and Revolution confidently weaves in and out of historical description and theoretical analysis, achieving a synthesis that gives its pages their unique and enduring significance. Reminiscent of Burckhardt’s gloomy premonitions, Unbelief and Revolution ’s ominous predictions about the inevitability of future tyranny if contemporary trends continued mark it as a prophetic work of an astute mid-nineteenth-century observer. Twentieth-century parallels of the book are Christopher Dawson’s Gods of Revolution with its religious penetration and Eric Voegelin’s From Enlightenment to Revolution with its original periodization of the history of Western Civilization. In its sustained explication of the Enlightenment as a new gospel Groen’s book resembles Paul Hazard’s twin works, La Crise de la conscience européenne and La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle , Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers , and Crane Brinton’s The Shaping of the Modern Mind. A contemporary of Groen’s book was Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli , which formulated a similar socio-political prescription for treating its country’s malaise: neither liberalism nor socialism but “a free Monarchy and a privileged and prosperous People.” A closer parallel in terms of an avowed Christian orientation is Gladstone’s The State in Its Relation to the Church of 1837 , albeit that Groen did not later have to make quite so drastic a turnabout on the issue of the church’s “public rights” as Gladstone did.
Unbelief and Revolution , as I hope to show, is one of those seminal works which are written only once in a generation and which so capture the central issue emerging from the past that they help set the debate for future generations. In point of fact, Unbelief and Revolution is today a major source document for the history of the rise of the anti-revolutionary movement in the Netherlands. This movement, whose peculiar name betrays its Groenian origin, is essentially an early, Dutch Calvinist manifestation of that multi-faceted phenomenon of modern times variously known as Christian action, Christian social action, Christian politics, Christian democracy—the conscious, organized resistance of European Christians to modern secularism.
If the above comments serve to introduce the book’s general thrust and historical significance, its spirit, tone and style can perhaps best be indicated through further comparisons with works more generally known, some of which constituted its sources. Unbelief and Revolution , then, resembles Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in historical approach, and Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace in unflinching opposition to prevailing policy. In passionate eloquence it resembles Lamennais’s Essay on Religious Indifference , and in monarchical sympathies it is a belated footnote to Haller’s Restoration of Political Science. Antedating the following by at least half a decade, Groen’s work is as sure-handed as Stahl’s What is the Revolution? in pinpointing the nature of the spiritual crisis of European Civilization, and it is as firm-minded as Stahl’s Protestantism as a Political Principle in advocating the introduction into modern politics of a party committed to a biblical confession and a biblical worldview for the purpose of competing with the traditional parties of left and right which have a non-biblical, humanistic orientation of one sort or another. As a spirited repudiation of secular humanism Groen’s book of 1847 constitutes the polemical prelude to Abraham Kuyper’s positive espousal of Calvinism as a political creed and program in his third Stone Lecture of 1898 . Finally, in diction and style, tone and appeal, Unbelief and Revolution of 1847 falls somewhere between Coleridge’s magnificent On the constitution of the church and state of 1830 and Newman’s masterful Apologia of 1864 .

CENTRAL THESIS OF UNBELIEF AND REVOLUTION
The very title of Groen’s work has the ring of a manifesto and hints at a grand indictment of the age. Its theme is the secular roots of the age of revolution. Its central thesis is that the French Revolution of 1789 was the mature fruit of Europe’s intellectual revolution which had subverted the spiritual foundation of society. The subjectivism and consequent skepticism as a result of which the Enlightenment had dismissed divine revelation and Christian traditions were followed—very logically, according to Groen—by a political philosophy which brooked no authority beyond man and his reason and which generated the novel creeds of religious atheism and political radicalism. The new “theory of liberty” was responsible for an insatiable desire to reconstruct everything—religion, morality, state, society—on a new foundation, in a crusade for the final emancipation and salvation of mankind. This intellectual-spiritual revolution is pictured by the author as surfacing in 1789 with all the