Book Review: Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham Kuyper's Struggle for a Free Church in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham Kuyper's Struggle for a Free Church in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands . By John Halsey Wood Jr. New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. x + 235 pp. $74.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn Going Dutch in the Modern Age, Wood has offered a detailed theological study showing the key steps that Abraham Kuyper followed as he attempted create an that considered the fundamental importance of an institutional church, as well as the significance of a voluntary commitment the corporate body in an organic church. Wood carefully demonstrates that over the course of his pastoral ministry, Kuyper moved from a ecclesiology within a public a free-church ecclesiology that supported a ecclesiology (25).This impressive study of Kuyper has wider implications beyond one man's struggle organize and lead a protestant denomination. Despite a European agreement in 1648 tying state churches the monarchy (Cuius regio, euis religio ), the Dutch Republic (1581-1795) did not allow any particular official status, even though the Reformed exercised the most power. In post-French revolutionary Europe, when many states began rejecting or reducing the power of monarchies, the Netherlands founded one in 1815. King Willem I established an official connection with the Dutch Reformed Church, restricting the ability for doctrinal discussion or dissent within the church; with this, the era of free churches was born.Kuyper wanted keep the role of the institutional central in modern society since it offered common grace the nation, curbing evil and promoting the common good. Wood shows that in his early years as pastor Kuyper could not separate the institutional church, which represented the Dutch nation, from the organic church, the inner essence and the mystical body of Christ, where the truly redeemed belonged. He accused those who broke with the as reducing the importance of the as organic. He found that the European Reveil circumvented the church, and placed individual conversion and piety at the forefront. Rather, for Kuyper, the was not a gathering of individuals but a Mystical Body, which had a two-fold mystical organic bond established by God--first with Christ the head, and then between the members--virtually identical Kuyper's organic church (66).In 1866 Kuyper found himself in a deep crisis, when, after a series of events, he formed a new denomination, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerken, and then in 1892 amalgamated with other bodies form a larger Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland, with its own Free University in Amsterdam. While this was a necessary move protect purity and Reformed doctrine, it did not fit with his ecclesiology. Wood makes an excellent point in showing that, to leave the Netherlands Reformed Church, Kuyper needed delegitimize it, and that required deemphasizing the church's institutional presence (85). But Kuyper's free was different than many others. While he developed a believers' (voluntary membership, personal experience of the Spirit), what separated this from the growing number of evangelical churches was infant baptism, since it required no individual commitment (on the part of the infant), but, rather, was grounded in the sacramental element and covenant of the organic church. …