Groen Van Prinsterer on Unbelief and Revolution
A previous article presented an overview of the life, work, and impact of the Dutch theologian and politician Groen Van Prinsterer (1801-1876). Van Prinsterer is primarily known for influencing the beginnings of the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands. His most famous disciple was Abraham Kuyper, who further developed the principles and policies of the movement, eventually serving as the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. The Anti-Revolutionary Party endured in the Netherlands until 1980, and there is an entire movement of “Kuyperians” and “Neo-Kuyperians” today. In a real sense, Groen Van Prinsterer is the grand-father of this movement. His most famous work was Unbelief and Revolution (1847). This article will briefly summarize the main points of Van Prinsterer’s framework, especially as it applies to current debates about the woke movement and implications for education.
The French Revolution was a seismic event, no matter whether one sympathized with it or not. It brought deep and disruptive changes to France and caused shock-waves throughout Europe. People everywhere were either inspired or repulsed by the revolt against the king, the torture and execution of priests, monks, and nuns, and the bloody purges of the guillotine. The causes of the Revolution are complex, and this article cannot hope to do them justice. Van Prinsterer’s great insight was that the French Revolution was just one instance–as horrific as it was–of a deeper principle, the principle of “unbelief.” For Van Prinsterer, there is no neutrality. We either submit to God and his Word, and reap the benefits both personally and politically, or we reject God’s authority and reap the bloody chaos of revolution.
Many apologists for the French Revolution, then and now, argued that the Revolution failed because it did not live up to its own ideals. In other words, the blood-bath was actually a failure to pursue the actual ideals of the Revolution. Or, perhaps they were just an “extreme” development of a movement that had started with good intentions. There were, after all, true abuses and oppressions in the French system before the Revolution. Similar arguments are made by apologists for communism, “communism hasn’t failed because it hasn’t really been tried,” or “Stalin wasn’t a real communist.” Groen refused to surrender the high ground to those who defended the Revolution. He spent copious amounts of ink quoting from other scholars and those who had lived through the Revolution, arguing that the violence and anti-Christian attacks of the Revolution were not simply aberrations. Rather, they were the logical consequences of liberal, revolutionary ideas.
For Groen, the Revolution is rooted in unbelief. At its core, the Revolution is an expression of man’s revolt against God. As he argued in Christian Political Action in an Age of Revolution (1860): “In its essence, the Revolution is a single great historical fact: the great invasion of the human mind by the doctrine of the sovereignty of man, thus making him the source and centre of all truth, by substituting human reason and human will for divine revelation and divine law” (Christian Political Action, 57).
Secondly, the revolt against God necessarily entails revolt and rebellion against God-established authorities like a monarch or the Church. As he responded to his critics: “Why do they not see that the overthrow of the religious, political, and social order was not the result of a revolutionary blip, but of a revolutionary condition, and that perpetual revolution always has been and will always be the inevitable consequence of the denial of man’s dependence on the God of nature, history and the Gospel?” (Christian Political Action, 55-56). He continues: “It has to be torn up by the roots” and “the only antidote for systematic unbelief is faith” (Christian Political Action, 56). Furthermore: “Why do they not see that the anti-revolutionary principle is nothing other than the Protestant Christian principle, the Reformation principle? It alone–standing on revelation and history–can successfully combat this anti-religious, anti-social principle. It alone, through the Gospel, can realise whatever there is of truth and goodness in these revolutionary utopias, and so save both church and state” (Christian Political Action, 56).
Thirdly, the Revolution enshrines the “rights” of man, divorced from any grounding in ultimate reality. Thus, the “rights” of man become a swiftly-changing and unstable edifice which topples at the slightest breath. An individual only has the “rights” granted to him by the majority, and if the majority decides that he is a danger or threat to society, the guillotine terminates his rights and protects the majority. A movement which begins with the goal of protecting the “rights” of people from a corrupt king or government devolves into a movement controlled by a powerful minority who get to determine the fate of the majority. We see this wherever revolutionary ideas have taken hold, whether in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, or the current Rainbow Reich attempting to assert dominance. We must all bow down and serve the oppressed minority-of-the-month. Our freedom to bake a wedding cake must be coerced to serve the “rights” of others, as determined by the revolutionary elites of our own time.
Van Prinsterer argued that we must learn from the history of the French Revolution and discern the similar patterns that continued to rock Europe. The same basic forces of unbelief also inspire the current revolutionaries who are seeking to dismantle the relics of Christendom, Western civilization, and the America of the founders. There is no neutrality here. Principles have practical and political effects. The only question is which principles we will hold to, and which principles will guide our efforts, especially in the work of classical Christian education.
Van Prinsterer also reminds us of the need for Christian civic theory, civic education and Christian statesmanship. At the end of his classic work, Unbelief and Revolution, he wrote: “But, instructed and guided by experience and by the everlasting Word of Revelation, I maintain the immutability of truths the forsaking of which has led to those false ideas whose impotence and perniciousness is becoming clearer every day. The real need of our time is the application, modified in accordance with circumstance, of Christian constitutional law” (243). Although the work of Christian education has a central role to play in resisting the progress of the Revolution, Van Prinsterer reminds us that we all have an anti-revolutionary role to play, and that “Resistance and Reformation” (to borrow George Grant’s phrase) begin and end with everyday faithfulness: “Let us be faithful, each in his station. If it be not given us to accomplish great things, let us remember that when the opportunity to witness to the truth is there, the greatest unfaithfulness can be committed in the smallest things” (Unbelief, 246). Conversely, the smallest acts of obedience, especially in the realm of education, can be the greatest acts of faithfulness, and can help lay the foundations for a culture that resists the forces of revolution with the spirit of the Reformation.
Recommended Reading
Roel Kuiper - The Antirevolutionary: Life and Works of Groen Van Prinsterer (1801-1876)
Groen Van Prinsterer - Unbelief and Revolution (translation and helpful introduction by Harry Van Dyke)
Groen Van Prinsterer - Christian Political Action in an Age of Revolution
David W. Hall - Arrogance of the Modern: Historical Theology Held in Contempt (has a helpful chapter summarizing Van Prinsterer’s thought)
