An extraordinary Hollander

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the death of one of the great figures in Dutch – and arguably Western – history. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer was born in 1801 and was raised in a Netherlands undergoing significant change. When revolution broke out in France in 1789, it would unleash such instability as to plunge Europe into a full generation of war and bloodshed.

Much as Edmund Burke, whom we visited last month, foresaw the Revolution’s trajectory, it fell to Groen to assess it in retrospect. With the advantage of hindsight and under the influence of the Réveil, a Christian revival then sweeping Protestant Europe, Groen was persuaded that the Revolution was rooted in a rejection of God and in misplaced faith in political ideologies and their false promises of earthly salvation.

The antirevolutionary

So convinced was Groen that the Revolution constituted a fundamental break in European history that he devoted his career, both as archivist and statesman, to combating its influence in his homeland. The key issue for him, as for many confessionally Reformed Christians of that era, was education. In the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, which had replaced the old Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political leaders sought to advance a common school that would bring together a religiously diverse polity in the interest of national unity. For Groen, this approach to education could not do justice to the responsibilities Christian parents have been given to raise their children in the faith.

Today, Groen is largely remembered as a principal mentor to Abraham Kuyper, whose name is better known in North America, Brazil, South Korea and elsewhere. But I recently read Roel Kuiper’s new book, The Antirevolutionary (Pickwick, 2025), a significant biography of Groen that promises to raise his profile in the English-speaking world.

Path of obedience

Although the Europe of the nineteenth century was quite different from our own world, God’s call to live out our salvation in Jesus Christ remains the same. The issues Groen grappled with are perennial ones that still face us today. We still strive to educate our young people and to raise them in the ways of God within a largely unsupportive culture. Much as Groen faced outright apostasy in the national Reformed Church, so we are tasked with maintaining our churches in the true faith and safeguarding them from the myriad false gospels vying for our loyalties.

As one of their intellectual and spiritual heirs, I am grateful that God saw fit to raise up such figures as Groen and Kuyper to advance his kingdom in the many spheres of life to which he has called us. May their legacy serve to keep us following the paths of God in obedience to his word.