Above:  Washington Square Reformed Church, New York, New York (1840-1879), Pastorate of the Reverend Mancius Smedes Hutton, Chairman of the Committee on Revision, 1870-1873

Image in the Public Domain

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U.S. DUTCH REFORMED LITURGY, PART III

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That it may please Thee to remove all sects and scandals.

—The Liturgy of the Reformed Church in America, As Approved by the General Synod of 1873, By the Committee on Revision (1873), page 14

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I.  PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION

One of the temptations to which I have refused to yield while planning and writing this post is the lure to include too many details, especially with regard to the minutae of liturgical revision.  No, I have resolved to provide summaries, supported by selected examples, instead.  Those who wish to read all the details may follow my bibliography and hyperlinks.  Such interest makes the heart of this liturgical geek rejoice, actually.  Yet I prefer not to lose that part of my readership which prefers that I not overwhelm it with, for example, every instance of Anglican influence upon revised Dutch Reformed liturgies since 1857.

This post begins with 1857 and concludes with 1913 for excellent reasons.  1857 aside from being the birth year of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA or just CRC), was also the year the first post-John H. Livingston liturgy of the Reformed Church in America (RCA) debuted.  1913 was the year prior to the start of World War I, the de facto beginning of the twentieth century.  1914 was also the year the CRCNA published its first English-language Psalter, a landmark change for a denomination strongly attached to its Dutch heritage.  The war changed the United States, the world, and both denominations.

That  is a long story, part of which I plan to tell in Part IV of this series.

And yes, just in case anyone wonders, I chose the quote for the title of this post with a strong sense of irony.

II.  THE MASONIC LODGE AND THE SECESSION OF 1882

Theological disagreements over Freemasonry, a minor issue in the Secession of 1857, were central to the Secession of 1882, which actually occurred in 1881-1884.

In Part I of this series I wrote that critics of Freemasonry involved in the Secession of 1857 did not distinguish between European Freemasonry and American Freemasonry, for those who seceded from the Reformed Church in America in the Midwest that year thought as transplanted Europeans, not as Americans.  I did not support the first part of that statement in that post, so I do so now.  European Freemasonry was an Enlightenment project.  Many ideals of that intellectual and political movement stood in opposition to Christendom (sometimes appropriately, I am convinced, as in the cases of liberty of conscience and the proposition that political power flows properly from the consent of the governed).  Many European churches from Rome to the Reformed forbade its members to belong to the Masonic Lodge.  U.S. Freemasonry, however, had a different flavor–one which many Christians considered consistent with their faith.  Thus many prominent Christians were also staunch members of the Masonic Lodge.

The question  of whether a member of the Reformed Church in America should or could belong to the Masonic Lodge was a minor issue until 1867, when the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, which then called itself the True Dutch Reformed Church (TDRC) forbade its members to belong to the Lodge.  Thus the RCA, which had Midwestern congregations competing with CRC/TDRC counterparts, had to address the question, a non-issue in the East yet a major concern in the Midwest.  The 1868 General Synod did nothing, despite the request of the Classis of Wisconsin.  The following year, however, the General Synod, prodded by the Classes of Holland and Wisconsin, referred the question to a committee, which reported to the 1870 General Synod.  The decision in 1870 was that, although no member of the RCA should belong to any secret society, such as the Masonic Lodge, the denomination had no right to impinge upon each congregation’s prerogative to address the issue as it saw fit.  This was a compromise, one which the Reverend Albertus C. Van Raalte (1811-1876), who disliked Freemasonry, accepted.  He was able to contain the controversy in his section of the RCA for a few years, but his absence after 1876 proved critical to the Secession of 1882.

The controversy over the RCA’s handling of financial troubles at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, led to a conspiracy theory, the renewed Masonic controversy, and the Secession of 1882.  Hope College, which the RCA had founded, was in deep financial trouble.  The denomination sent the Reverend G. Henry Mandeville, from the East, to assume the leadership of the school.  The Provisional President closed the theological education program there.  Some critics concluded that this action proved the existence of a Masonic plot, for Mandeville was a Freemason.  The application of Ockham’s Razor would have helped in this instance, would it have not?

Ironically, First Reformed Church, Holland, Michigan, Van Raalte’s former pastorate, joined the Secession of 1882 and kept the building, with its distinctive front pillars.  An RCA congregation, retaining the name of First Reformed Church, continued–and still exists.  The seceded congregation, known alternately as the Ninth Street Church or the Pillar Church,

reestablished itself around a vision of reconciliation

in 2012, retaining its CRCNA affiliation while resuming its old RCA membership, according to its website.

The Secession of 1882 strengthened the Christian Reformed Church, which called itself the Dutch Christian Reformed Church (DCRC) at the time.  Although immediate losses to the RCA were minor, the long-term impact was major.  The CRC/DCRC became stronger in the Midwest, heightening tensions between approximate RCA and CRC congregations.  Furthermore, the main Seceder denomination in The Netherlands switched its allegiance from the RCA to the CRCNA, referring its emigrating members to the latter, not the former.  This influx made the CRCNA more resolute in its opposition to Americanization.

III.  WORSHIP RESOURCES IN THE REFORMED CHURCH IN AMERICA, 1857-1913

The Liturgy of the Reformed Church in America, long composed of obligatory rites and recommended rituals, has proven to be a matter of controversy and varied opinion.  Liturgical practice in the RCA has spanned a wide range of practices, including the choice of hymnals, for a long time.

The Liturgy of 1857

The High Church wing of the RCA, seeking to reclaim the denomination’s historic status as a liturgical body, resisted the Low Church Evangelicalism which was ubiquitous in the denomination.  Thus the introduction of Anglican influences into the RCA began.  The General Synod of 1853 created a committee to revise the Liturgy.  That committee unveiled its product four years later.  The Liturgy of 1857, although always unofficial and never Constitution, as the majority of Classes never approved it, did circulate widely in the RCA and influence the worship patterns of many congregations.

The Liturgy of 1857 was a milestone.  For the first time the RCA published a complete order of public worship–one which borrowed generously from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1789).  There were also distinct Sunday morning and evening services, which followed the same basic pattern, but with slight differences distinguishing the two from each other.

Much of the Liturgy of 1857 influenced worship in one New York City congregation, which published its own Church Book (1866).  The service book named neither the congregation nor the minister who edited it at the behest of the consistory, or church council.  Nevertheless, the existence of such a volume, which also contained non-RCA rites, documented a degree of variety of liturgical practice in the denomination at the time.

Hymnals

The General Synod approved a variety of hymnals, most of them not of RCA origin, for use.  A new official hymn book Hymns of the Church, debuted in 1869.  This volume bore a striking similarity–some would even say due to plagiarism–to the Anglican Hymns, Ancient and Modern (1861).  (If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what is plagiarism?)  The strong Anglican-Reformed flavor of Hymns of the Church dissatisfied much of the RCA.  That branch of the church did have options, however.  General Synods had already approved the Sabbath School and Social Hymn Book (1843) and the Fulton Street Hymn Book (1862).  Subsequent General Synods, honoring requests, approved other non-Anglican-Reformed hymnals:

• Christian Praise (1880),
• Laudes Domini (1884),
• Church Hymnary (1891), and
• Hymns of Worship and Service (1905).

The Liturgy of 1873/1882

Liturgical reform continued.  It resumed in 1868 with a committee chaired by the Reverend Elbert S. Porter, an opponent of the High Calvinistic Mercersburg Theology prominent in the U.S. German Reformed Church.  After two years, however, Porter stepped down and the Reverend Mancius Smedes Hutton, pastor of the Washington Square Reformed Church, New York, New York, assumed the chairmanship.  Hutton supported the Mercersburg Theology, which called U.S. Reformed Christians back to their Protestant Reformation liturgical roots and opposed Pietism and Revivalism.  The chairman, in his report to the 1871 General Synod, listed three guiding principles of liturgical revision:

1. Greater congregational participation,
2. Acknowledgement of the RCA’s liturgical roots, and
3. John Calvin’s Strasbourg Liturgy as a model from which to work.

The Committee on Revision, laboring from 1871 to 1873, increased Anglican influences in the Liturgy, stopping short of creating an RCA version of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1789).  They drew from the Prayer Book heavily, though.  And the Committee bowed to pressure, revising Datheen’s order for the Lord’s Supper conservatively, mainly by introducing some rubrics and dividing some prayers.  The Committee also adapted a Eucharistic Prayer from the Church of Scotland’s Euchologion, or a Book of Common Order (1869), and placed that prayer in the Prayers for Special Occasions section.  This was a prayer for use in addition to, not in lieu of, the one in the Datheen rite.

A note early in the proposed service book defended the volume’s existence:

This Revised Liturgy is set forth as a general expression of the way in which the public services of religion should be performed.  It is to be understood that it is not of binding authority, but is only recommended as containing suitable offices for public religious service.  The only parts of our service book which are obligatory, are those which are enjoined by the Constitution of the Church.

–Page 5

The Liturgy of 1873/1882 was a combination of the old and the new.  The familiar parts of the RCA Liturgy were present.  There one found forms of the Lord’s Supper; Baptism; Marriage; Church Discipline; the Ordination of Ministers, Elders, and Deacons; and the Creeds; as well as various prayers.  Some of the orders had changed , of course,  and some of the prayers had not appeared in previous service books of the RCA.  And the legacy of the Liturgy of 1857 was evident, as in the Order of Scripture Lessons, a lectionary setting forth an Old Testament lesson and a New Testament lesson for each Sunday morning and Sunday evening service, according to the church year.

The Classes approved the Liturgy, which the denomination republished in 1882.  Even after that years-long process the controversial nature of the book was evident in the 1882 Preface, which noted that the only obligatory rites were the Administration of the Sacraments, the Discipline, and the Order of Worship.  Then the Preface concluded:

With these exceptions, this Liturgy is not of binding authority, but it is set forth as a general expression of the manner in which the Public Worship of God should be conducted, and, in the words of the late Rev. Mancius S. Hutton, D.D., the chairman of the Committee through whose labors the Revised Liturgy was first prepared and presented to the Church, “With the hope that it will so commend itself to the piety and wisdom of the Church, that its increasing use will place us before the world in our true historic position as a spiritual Liturgical and Reformed Church.

–Page 6

The Liturgy of 1906

The process of creating the Liturgy of 1906, in full The Liturgy of the Reformed Church in America Together With the Psalter Arranged for Responsive Reading, required two starts.  The Reverend Mancius Holmes Hutton, son of the second chairman of the Committee which created the Liturgy of 1873/1882, chaired the 1902-1903 committee.  Hutton the Younger, however, was not equal to his father in liturgical scholarship, so the committee made some awkward and arbitrary decisions.  Most Classes rejected the report to the 1903 General Synod, so the 1904 General Synod created a new committee with a different chairman.  The resulting service book lasted for sixty-two years.

The Liturgy of 1906 was sufficiently similar to its 1873/1882 predecessor to be easily recognizable yet sufficiently different as to be distinct.  The Sunday morning and evening orders of worship, for example, were slightly different from their immediate predecessors.  The Eucharistic Prayer of 1873 was still present, but no longer exiled to the Prayers for Special Occasions.  The old form of the Lord’s Supper was also present, for those who preferred it.  And there were two forms of Baptism–one old and the other new.  This practice of including two forms for both the Lord’s Supper and Baptism continued in the 1968 Liturgy and Psalms but not in its immediate successor, Worship the Lord (1987).

The New Metrical Version of the Psalms (1905 and 1909)

The New Metrical Version of the Psalms (first edition, 1905; second edition, 1909) was an ecumenical Reformed project.  Nine denominations participated in its creation.  They were:

1. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, the old “Northern Presbyterian Church;”
2. The Presbyterian Church in Canada, part of which is now in The United Church of Canada;
3. The United Presbyterian Church in North America, which merged with #1 in 1958 to create The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America;
4. The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, which still exists;
5. The Reformed Presbyterian Church (General Synod), whose legacy lives on inside the Presbyterian Church in America;
6. The Reformed Church in America;
7. The Christian Reformed Church in North America;
8. The Associate Presbyterian Synod of North America, whose legacy lives on inside the Presbyterian Church in America; and
9. The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which still exists.

This Psalter, one of the most widely used books of its genre in the twentieth century, was more significant for the CRCNA than for the RCA, which had established its commitment to church unity and had worshiped God in English for a long time.  The CRCNA, however, had worshiped God mostly in Dutch and had been standoffish, guarding its Dutch identity stubbornly.

IV.  WORSHIP, LANGUAGE, AND IDENTITY IN THE CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA, 1857-1913

Prior to the CRCNA’s Psalter of 1914, based on the United Presbyterian Psalter of 1912, in turn based on The New Metrical Version of the Psalms (1905 and 1909), most worship of God in that denomination had occurred in the Dutch language.  The CRCNA had used the old Dutch liturgy and the Psalmen Davids (1773), which included all the tunes from the Genevan Psalter (1562).  There were  no “innovations” in the bulk of the church’s Liturgy, as there were in the RCA.  This conservatism typified the CRCNA, where change came slowly.  Such conservatism also led to more uniformity than in the RCA, a pattern which remains true today.

There was not unanimity, however.  Some German-speaking congregations had joined the CRCNA in the middle 1800s.  They, with CRNCA Synodical approval, continued to use their service book and hymnal, which included all 150 Psalms plus 355 hymns.  (The CRCNA, in contrast, did not publish its first denominational hymnal (as opposed to Psalter) until 1934.)  And in 1890, much of the True Protestant Dutch Reformed Church (TPDRC), also known as the True Reformed Dutch Church (TRDC), an 1822 offshoot of the RCA, joined the CRCNA as Classis Hackensack.  (At that point in time the CRCNA adopted its current name.)  The 1822 group, which had already adopted the 1887 United Presbyterian Psalter and amended it to include 190 hymns (drawn mostly from John H. Livingston’s Psalms and Hymns (1814) and pegged to the Heidelberg Catechism, continued to worship from their familiar resource.

The CRCNA, which began its liturgical transition to English in earnest with The New Metrical Version of the Psalms (1905 and 1909), sped up that process with related projects.  The Synod of 1910 permitted use of the forthcoming United Presbyterian Psalter (1912) throughout the denomination.  Classis Hackensack used a modified version, one which included its 190 hymns.  The 1912 United Presbyterian Psalter, with some material unique to the CRCNA, became the Christian Reformed Psalter of 1914, modified slightly and republished in 1927.

Separatism and the Kuyperian Paradox

The CRCNA, prior to and well into the twentieth century, defined itself not only as a bastion of doctrinal purity but of Dutch identity.  Thus it remained separate from the mainstream U.S. society and other denominations.  In the 1890s reunion talks with the RCA failed, as did merger discussions with the United Presbyterian Church of North America–the former for doctrinal reasons and the latter for ethnic ones.  This separatism had both cultural and doctrinal reasons.  Given the fact that one of the main historic purposes of free public education in the United States has been to Americanize students, the CRCNA’s long-standing practice of operating parochial schools had a cultural purpose.  It also had a theological purpose, as in other denominations.

There were three distinct theological parties within the Christian Reformed Church relative to the Kuyperian Paradox, at the center of which was Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), a Dutch theologian and politician who served as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905.  Kuyper, early in his career, favored Christian separatism from society, with all the unredeemed people in it.  Later in life, though, after he had joined a coalition government, Kuyper concluded that even unsaved people could do good things and function as instruments of God.  The label for this theology was Common Grace.  Many members of the CRCNA, caring deeply about what Kuyper had said and written, divided into camps relative to the Kuyperian Paradox:

1. The Antitheticals supported his first position only.
2. The Positive Calvinists affirmed his second position only.
3. The Confessionalists found a way to favor both positions.

This debate, which pertained to salvation, preaching, and sacraments, went to the 1906 CRCNA Synod.  The Antitheticals and the Positive Calvinists were Supralapsarians, meaning that they stated that election (as in Double Predestination) had occurred before the Creation.  Thus, they argued, redemption and damnation were already realities at birth, so preaching and the sacraments merely confirmed regeneration.  The Confessionalists, however, were Infralapsarians, meaning that they stated that election had occurred after the Creation and before the Fall of Man.  Thus, they argued, preaching and the sacraments induced regeneration.  The 1906 Synod sided with the Confessionalists.

The RCA, meanwhile, supported the reforms of the Progressive Era instead of becoming bogged down in polysyllabic theology and the politics of doctrinal purity.

V.  CONCLUSION

The Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church in North America traveled along divergent paths from 1857 to 1913.  They shared a few things, such as The New Metrical Version of the Psalms (1905 and 1909) and resentments and suspicions, however.  The two paths continued to diverge for years to come.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HARDCOPY SOURCES

Brink, Emily R., and Bert Polman, eds.  Psalter Hymnal Handbook.  Grand Rapids, MI:  CRC Publications, 1998.

Bruins, Elton J., and Robert P. Swierenga.  Family Quarrels in the Reformed Churches in the 19th Century.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.  The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 32.

Brumm, James Hart, ed.  Liturgy Among the Thorns:  Essays on Worship in the Reformed Church in America.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.  The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 57.

The Liturgy of the Reformed Church in America Together With the Psalter Arranged for Responsive Reading.  New York, NY:  The Board of Education of the Reformed Church in America, 1968.

The Psalter, Doctrinal Standards, Liturgy, and Church Order of the Christian Reformed Church in America.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1927.

Psalter Hymnal:  Doctrinal Standards and Liturgy of the Christian Reformed Church.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Publication Committee of the Christian Reformed Church, 1934.

Smidt, Corwin, et al.  Divided By a Common Heritage:  The Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America at the Beginning of the New Millennium.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006.

Worship the Lord.  Edited by James R. Esther and Donald J. Bruggink.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987.

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KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR

MAY 22, 2014 COMMON ERA

THE FEAST OF RICHARD BIGGS, ACTOR

THE FEAST OF JULIA BULKLEY CADY CORY, U.S. PRESBYTERIAN HYMN WRITER

THE FEAST OF ROTA WAITOA, ANGLICAN PRIEST

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