his childhood, Dorus wanted to be a doctor. In 1840, medicine was an ideal career for a serious-minded, upwardly mobile parson’s son with an appetite for hard work and a vague urge to do good while doing well. He even considered signing up to serve in the East Indies (where his brother Jan was stationed at the time), which would have made him eligible for free medical training. But when his father’s disappointed ambitions belatedly fell on him, he could not refuse.
The ministry was by no means an obvious choice. Like his brother Cent, Dorus enjoyed the temporal pleasures that Paul had warned the Galatians against. Quoting a favorite poet, Dorus later referred to his youth in unmistakably lusty terms, comparing it to “a wheat field, delightful and beautiful for the eyes; howling, churning, and swelling in the early morning wind.” By his own admission, his student years were filled with “intimate interactions” and “crazy things.” Years later, when his own sons began to yield to the temptations of the flesh, Dorus admitted, “at your age I went through the same.”
He found university life in Utrecht lonely and strange. But this was the field that fate had given him, and he was determined to make it bear fruit, no matter how barren and unpromising it seemed. “I am happy I have chosen to become a minister,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I find it to be a beautiful profession.” He worked so hard at his studies that he repeatedly fell sick. One year, he almost died.
In Holland in the mid-nineteenth century, only someone with blind resolve could see the ministry as a “beautiful profession.” In fact, by 1840, the Dutch Reformed Church was in upheaval. The simultaneous storms of revolution and science had loosened theology from its moorings in revealed truth. Only five years earlier, a German theologian had placed a bomb under Western Christianity with the publication of
Das Leben Jesu
(
The Life of Jesus
), a book that analyzed the Bible as history and Christ as a mortal man.
As Dorus began his studies, the clergy’s long monopoly over Dutch thought was collapsing around him. The powerful new bourgeois classes were demanding a less punitive, more accommodating religion—a
modern
religion that would permit them to enjoy both God’s favor and their newfound prosperity. In response, a new kind of Dutch Protestantism had emerged. Calling itself the Groningen Movement (after the university in northern Holland where most of its proponents taught), and claiming the biblical humanism of Erasmus as a model, it rejected not only the old dogmas, but the whole notion of dogma. Instead, it embraced a new idea of Christ that included both the historical Jesus(“as He lived on earth 1800 years ago”) and the spiritual Jesus who came “to make humanity ever more conformed to the likeness of God.” As a retort to
Das Leben Jesu
’s debunking of the Christ myth, the Groningers revived the Jesus of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi
(
The Imitation of Christ
), a fifteenth-century vade mecum filled with down-to-earth guidance on living a Christlike life. “Make use of temporal things, but desire eternal things,” Jesus advises in
Imitatio
, confirming that even a rich man could be blessed so long as he achieved a “union with Christ” in his heart.
T HE Z UNDERT C HURCH ( Illustration credit 4.3 )
Even Dorus’s own family conceded that he was “not talented” as a public speaker. His sermons—long, convoluted affairs, filled with the leaden pedagogy typical of the Groningers—resembled his handwriting, described by his son Theo as “very fine but also very illegible.” To make matters worse, his voice didn’t carry well and his words often got lost or garbled. During one early sermon he tried to clear his throat by putting some candy in his mouth and rendered himself so unintelligible, according to a witness, that the congregation “feared something was amiss with his speech organs.”
But
The ministry was by no means an obvious choice. Like his brother Cent, Dorus enjoyed the temporal pleasures that Paul had warned the Galatians against. Quoting a favorite poet, Dorus later referred to his youth in unmistakably lusty terms, comparing it to “a wheat field, delightful and beautiful for the eyes; howling, churning, and swelling in the early morning wind.” By his own admission, his student years were filled with “intimate interactions” and “crazy things.” Years later, when his own sons began to yield to the temptations of the flesh, Dorus admitted, “at your age I went through the same.”
He found university life in Utrecht lonely and strange. But this was the field that fate had given him, and he was determined to make it bear fruit, no matter how barren and unpromising it seemed. “I am happy I have chosen to become a minister,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I find it to be a beautiful profession.” He worked so hard at his studies that he repeatedly fell sick. One year, he almost died.
In Holland in the mid-nineteenth century, only someone with blind resolve could see the ministry as a “beautiful profession.” In fact, by 1840, the Dutch Reformed Church was in upheaval. The simultaneous storms of revolution and science had loosened theology from its moorings in revealed truth. Only five years earlier, a German theologian had placed a bomb under Western Christianity with the publication of
Das Leben Jesu
(
The Life of Jesus
), a book that analyzed the Bible as history and Christ as a mortal man.
As Dorus began his studies, the clergy’s long monopoly over Dutch thought was collapsing around him. The powerful new bourgeois classes were demanding a less punitive, more accommodating religion—a
modern
religion that would permit them to enjoy both God’s favor and their newfound prosperity. In response, a new kind of Dutch Protestantism had emerged. Calling itself the Groningen Movement (after the university in northern Holland where most of its proponents taught), and claiming the biblical humanism of Erasmus as a model, it rejected not only the old dogmas, but the whole notion of dogma. Instead, it embraced a new idea of Christ that included both the historical Jesus(“as He lived on earth 1800 years ago”) and the spiritual Jesus who came “to make humanity ever more conformed to the likeness of God.” As a retort to
Das Leben Jesu
’s debunking of the Christ myth, the Groningers revived the Jesus of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi
(
The Imitation of Christ
), a fifteenth-century vade mecum filled with down-to-earth guidance on living a Christlike life. “Make use of temporal things, but desire eternal things,” Jesus advises in
Imitatio
, confirming that even a rich man could be blessed so long as he achieved a “union with Christ” in his heart.
T HE Z UNDERT C HURCH ( Illustration credit 4.3 )
Even Dorus’s own family conceded that he was “not talented” as a public speaker. His sermons—long, convoluted affairs, filled with the leaden pedagogy typical of the Groningers—resembled his handwriting, described by his son Theo as “very fine but also very illegible.” To make matters worse, his voice didn’t carry well and his words often got lost or garbled. During one early sermon he tried to clear his throat by putting some candy in his mouth and rendered himself so unintelligible, according to a witness, that the congregation “feared something was amiss with his speech organs.”
But
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