God picks up the pieces

“My breathing patterns change daily,” Seerveld emailed me on July 24. “Often within a day. It has been bad.” He then fell asleep in the Lord on August 5, 2025, four days before his 95th birthday. I combed through some of his writings to bring some of the pieces of his life together.

Cal Seerveld’s first breath was in 1930, on Long Island, New York. “I had good parents,” he recalled. “Somehow they gave me biblical structure and room for myself to find the Way… I never had to rebel against my parents or the church into which I was born.” His Reformed church didn’t allow dancing, playing cards or going to movies, but his parents were not legalistic about “worldly amusements.” He has many good memories from Long Island, including using cow patties for the bases in a game of baseball.

Kleine Luyden

He was never ashamed to say his father was a fishmonger. From age 10 to 22, he worked alongside his father at the Great South Bay Fish Market. There he learned to see whatever daily labour done in thanksgiving was a calling from the LORD. Seerveld’s working-class upbringing was among what Abraham Kuyper called “the kliene luyden” – ordinary folk. When speaking at a Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) gathering of loggers in Smithers, B.C., Seerveld observed that “their rugged profiles and gnarled hands reminded me of every good thing I had learned intuitively from my dad in the fish market.”

Seerveld was an exceptional student but he didn’t always colour within the lines. At Calvin College in 1948, one chapel he prepared was disallowed by staff mentors; an editorial he wrote for The Chimes was censored out (editor Nicholas Wolterstorff ran it as a blank space to make the point). He was also called into the President’s office for publicly criticizing a major donor. Still, he was deeply transformed there. “What changed my life,” he writes, was the pursuit of “a biblically-grounded Christian philosophy that could frame action for literature, labour and the laboratory.”

He broke an engagement with a young woman in his final year in Grand Rapids and then hopped over to the University of Michigan for an MA in literature, and soon after that a Fulbright Scholarship for the Free University in Amsterdam for his PhD.

Many of us are duly impressed with Seerveld’s intelligence. He knew at least five languages, wrote at least 21 books and composed 39 songs, plus hundreds of articles and essays. But when he knocked on Karl Barth’s door in Basel, Switzerland, back in the 1950s, to press him with some questions, he was given a jolt. He summarized the experience: “He was a genius and I wasn’t.”

Experiencing God’s presence

I grew up with Cal as my ward elder at Willowdale Christian Reformed Church in Toronto. When I was 18, I visited him in his home and asked: “Have you ever experienced God yourself?”

He told me of an incident when he was hitchhiking in Italy and was picked up by some unsavoury truck drivers. They were poised to sexually assault him, but the truck had to stop for a red light and Seerveld jumped out of the vehicle. “I believe one of God’s angels saved my life that day,” he explained. In fact, Seerveld was a firm believer in angels, something he picked up from Karl Barth.

A second event came when he had an oral exam and spent two weeks locked up in a house translating the book of Romans from Greek to German. When he came to chapter 8 something stirred: “Suddenly I became afraid of the book in my hand as if it throbbed with the very presence of the holy Lord God Almighty. It was like a burning bush that had just spoken directly to me. So I put the Bible on a chair, got down on my knees and prayed, shaken and awed by the power of what was written there,” he recalled. “The sense that the Bible is my God talking to me live has never left me.”

He married Inès Cecile Naudin ten Cate in 1956 and together they had three children, Anya, Gioia and Luke. When he completed his PhD at the Free University in 1958, he went on to teach for a year at Belhaven College (Mississippi) and from there to the fledgeling Trinity Christian College in Illinois. The Chicago years would prove to be extremely fruitful years for Seerveld; many students were inspired by his Reformational vision and he was able to help found the Patmos art gallery in town.

Seerveld was a Neo-Calvinist philosopher of aesthetics in a Dooyeweerdian vein, passionately promoting a “committed world-and-life vision.” What he said of his vocation, however, was more down-to-earth. “My art is rhetoric,” he wrote once. “I make speeches and song texts.”

Concern for the Church

Some will recall Seerveld’s “Modest Proposal” in 1970: “Close Calvin Seminary. Disband all denominational boards and standing committees. Strip yourselves of ministerial status.” It was a rhetorical move and it caused a firestorm in the Christian Reformed Church. But Seerveld was zealous against middle-class hypocrisy in the church, warning against “bureaucratic creep … that leaves the manipulation of things to a few insiders…” and leads to “establishmentarian petrifaction.”

Later in life Seerveld mellowed and took a less preachy tone. He participated regularly in his own home congregation in Willowdale, serving as elder and also preaching, teaching, praying and leading in music and singing from the piano. He would sometimes offer his own fresh translations of Scripture and read them as part of the Sunday service. He would also write kind and encouraging emails to those who served in the church.

Seerveld spent years on a denominational Psalter Hymnal committee. Craig Bartholomew reports that Seerveld regards this endeavour as “some of the most important work he has done.”

Seerveld’s own “Congregational Lament” gets pew-sitters singing “Why, Lord, must broken vows cut like a knife?” (#576) His rendition of Song of Songs (#191) must be the only hymn with the words “erotic love” and “passion pure as blazing fire.”

The ICS Years

Seerveld served as a senior member at the Institute for Christian Studies from 1972-1995. He joked that his first class of students, eager to learn about the philosophy of aesthetics, almost all dropped the course. He suspected he gave them too much Immanuel Kant and not enough Jesus. Still, he named some of his former students as current friends and collaborators, which was one of the joys of his career.

He described the ICS as “a kind of L’Abri centre for brilliant misfits fleeing the secular university system and the anti-intellectual evangelical church backgrounds”; “a genuine concrete community of sinful saints trying to put creatural ordinances into practise under the searchlight of Holy Scripture in obedience to the Rule of Jesus Christ on earth in history.”

Seerveld admitted to being a workaholic, and could work all through the night, especially in the early years of Trinity. He had many idiosyncrasies, including keeping his telephone number unlisted. He would send letters with envelopes marked by a collage of colourful stamps, including two cent stamps. He wrote the letters with pen and ink.

After a number of years with Alzheimer’s, in November 2021, his dear wife Inès went to sleep. At her Memorial and Celebrative Service he said a few words, including a small confession: “Perfectionist me over-worked, and only later realized the family burden Inès had cheerfully, as if normal, and meaningfully absorbed. […] I love her as the woman I owe my life to.”

Always wary of sentimentality, he wrote for a memorial service in 2021: “So let me dare say: Do not be sad or lament when I have gone to sleep, people, even if you should miss me, because I will ‘be at home with the Lord’ (II Cor 5:5-8).”

Cal is now at home, and as he was fond of saying, “There will be no deadlines on the new earth!”