Gerrit Cornelis Berkouwer

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Berkouwer (1965) GCBerkouwer1.jpg
Berkouwer (1965)

Gerrit Cornelis Berkouwer (8 June 1903, Amsterdam – 26 January 1996, Voorhout) was for years the leading theologian of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (GKN). He occupied the Chair in systematic theology of the Faculty of Theology, Free University (VU) in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam Capital city of the Netherlands and municipality

Amsterdam is the capital city and most populous municipality of the Netherlands. Its status as the capital is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands, although it is not the seat of the government, which is The Hague. Amsterdam has a population of 854,047 within the city proper, 1,357,675 in the urban area and 2,410,960 in the metropolitan area. The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country but is not its capital, which is Haarlem. The Amsterdam metropolitan area comprises much of the northern part of the Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe, which has a population of approximately 8.1 million.

Voorhout Place in South Holland, Netherlands

Voorhout is a village and former municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. The former municipality covered an area of 12.59 km² of which 0.33 km² is covered by water, and had a population of 14,792 in 2004. Together with Sassenheim and Warmond, it became part of the Teylingen municipality on January 1st 2006. Voorhout is located in an area called the "Dune and Bulb Region".

Reformed Churches in the Netherlands

The Reformed Churches in the Netherlands was the second largest Protestant church in the Netherlands and one of the two major Reformed denominations along with the Dutch Reformed Church since 1892 until being merged into the Protestant Church in the Netherlands in 2004.

Contents

Berkouwer was born in Amsterdam. He was raised in Zaandam. In 1927 he married Catharina Cornelia Elisabeth Rippen in The Hague. In 1932 he obtained his doctorate from the Free University. His dissertation was entitled Geloof en Openbaring in de nieuwe Duitse theologie (Faith and Revelation in Recent German Theology). In 1949 the first volume of his eighteen-volume Studies in Dogmatics appeared in the Netherlands. In 1962 he was an observer at the Second Vatican Council in Rome. [1]

Zaandam City in North Holland, Netherlands

Zaandam is a city in the province of North Holland, Netherlands. It is the main city of the municipality of Zaanstad, and received city rights in 1811. It is located on the river Zaan, just north of Amsterdam.

He was very influential among the Reformed churches and other groups in North America, where the many volumes of his series, Studies in Dogmatics, were translated and published. He had a continuous flow of seminary graduates to study under him for the degree of Doctor of Theology. Altogether Berkouwer mentored about 46 students who received the ThD degree under his supervision. Many of them became leaders in Christian thought abroad; and, often enough, denominational chief officers. [1]

Seminary, school of theology, theological seminary, and divinity school are educational institutions for educating students in scripture, theology, generally to prepare them for ordination to server as clergy, in academics, or in Christian ministry. The English word is taken from the Latin seminarium, translated as seed-bed, an image taken from the Council of Trent document Cum adolescentium aetas which called for the first modern seminaries. In the West, the term now refers to Catholic educational institutes and has widened to include other Christian denominations and American Jewish institutions.

Doctor of Theology is a terminal degree in the academic discipline of theology. The ThD is an advanced research degree equivalent to the Doctor of Philosophy.

In 1953 Berkouwer became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. [2]

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Society of scientists and institute

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.

Work in the GKN

He came to his post at the Free University after the Second World War in which the Dutch national community suffered much from Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and culminating in the Hunger Winter of 1944. The Free University, like all Dutch institutions of higher learning, had been shut down, so there was no public teaching. Nevertheless, preaching and pamphlet wars raged in church and society.

One issue was the negative tone of Berkouwer's predecessor, Valentine Hepp to use his role of systematician of Reformed theology to attack two movements in the Reformed church. The first was Reformational philosophy led by D. H. Th. Vollenhoven and Herman Dooyeweerd, VU professors of philosophy and law, respectively. The other was the in-church movement led by Klaas Schilder, against whom Hepp scored a Pyrrhic victory with Berkouwer's leading involvement as president of the GKN Council, meeting on and off between 1943 and 1945 when that Council finally forced Schilder, his colleague Seakle Greijdanus, and other theologians and pastors out of the denominational community along with a good number of GKN churches. These reorganized themselves as the Liberated churches. Later, Berkouwer indicated regret that he had helped back the split-off group into a corner, and that some other way of handling the differences should have been found.

Reformational philosophy is a Neo-Calvinistic movement pioneered by Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven that seeks to develop philosophical thought in a radically Protestant Christian direction.

D. H. Th. Vollenhoven Dutch philosopher

Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven was a Dutch philosopher.

Herman Dooyeweerd Dutch philosopher

Herman Dooyeweerd was a professor of law and jurisprudence at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam from 1926 to 1965. He was also a philosopher and principal founder of Reformational philosophy with Dirk Vollenhoven, a significant development within the Neocalvinist school of thought. Dooyeweerd made several contributions to philosophy and other academic disciplines concerning the nature of diversity and coherence in everyday experience, the transcendental conditions for theoretical thought, the relationship between religion, philosophy, and scientific theory, and an understanding of meaning, being, time and self. Dooyeweerd is most famous for his suite of fifteen aspects, which are distinct ways in which reality exists, has meaning, is experienced, and occurs. This suite of aspects is finding application in practical analysis, research and teaching in such diverse fields as built environment, sustainability, agriculture, business, information systems and development. Danie Strauss, the editor of Dooyeweerd's Collected Works, has provided a systematic look at Dooyeweerd's philosophy here.

Ecumenism

One of Berkouwer's crowning achievements was to be delegated by the Council of the GKN to attend the 1957 assemblies of the International Council of Christian Churches, a world fundamentalist body that met in Amsterdam, and the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body that met that same year in New Delhi, India. In his report back to the GKN, Berkouwer recommended that they join the latter, and they did so, remaining active and becoming one of the first Evangelical denominations to enter the mainstream ecumenical movement.

Middle Orthodoxy

Berkouwer displayed in his Studies in Dogmatics an openness that allowed him to develop a friendship and shared views with Hendrikus Berkhof, the leading professor of systematics in the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church from which the Gereformeerde Kerken had split-off in the nineteenth century). The emerging collegial view of these two theologians became known as Middle Orthodoxy, and it aimed in an even more ecumenical direction than the Hervormde/Gereformeerde relationship of the time would suggest. However, it did not extend so far as to relieve the conscience of the VU theological faculty in regard to their required subscription to the sixteenth-century Canons of Dort, a task which remained to Berkouwer's student and successor in the Chair of Dogmatics, Harry M. Kuitert. (Kuitert, however, went further than his mentor, breaking completely with the Berkouwer and Middle Orthodox tradition and turning publicly to an informal unitarian stance.)

Publications

Besides the Studies in Dogmatics (see below), Berkouwer is known for his two books on Roman Catholicism Conflict with Rome (1948) and, after the Second Vatican Council in 1962, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism and two books on the work of Swiss theologian Karl Barth Karl Barth (1954) and The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (1954). Though this book was quite critical of Barth's thinking at points, Barth considered Berkouwer to be among the few of his reviewers who actually understood him. [3] All of these books were translated into English, and the last was widely read in the English-speaking world.[ citation needed ]

Studies in Dogmatics

Berkouwer wrote a new theological short essay in almost every issue of the GKN weekly Gereformeerde Weekblad, which garnered responses from clergy and laity all over the Netherlands and beyond. A good part of the articles arose from class lectures to his students at VU, where the newspaper letters of response might carry some weight and sometimes occasioned Berkouwer's refinements for his students. The newspaper theological-articles, letters of response, and classroom refinements in turn led to the publication of books over many years under the general series name, Studies in Dogmatics (the last word usually being rendered in English as systematic theology).

The number of titles in the series eventually came to a total of 14 in English, due to the combination of some paired Dutch volumes into a single volume in English. Among key works were The Person of Christ , The Work of Christ, two volumes on Sin, a volume on The Providence of God (which refers to Herman Dooyeweerd's philosophy), General Revelation (again refers to Dooyeweerd), and The Image of God (which especially made the growing movement of philosophers, scientists, and theologians whose thinking was akin to the ideas of Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd much more comfortable than they had been under Hepp).

Berkouwer's leadership within the denomination to which most of them belonged was strengthened by this openness of the leading GKN theologian, and it contributed to Berkouwer's developing in turn his own position in tandem with that of his friend Berkhof. In an end-of-career work published in English but not Dutch, Two Hundred Years of Theology: A Report of a Personal Journey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1989), Berkhof assessed along with many other philosophers, philosophical theologians, and systematic theologians a few leading Gereformeerde historical figures, including Abraham Kuyper and Berkouwer. Berkhof said of the latter, who was in his Studies so leery of speculation, that he suffered from being "not speculative enough." But he added that since Berkouwer wanted to produce work in systematic theology that was grounded in careful exegesis of the biblical texts for all doctrinal teaching, according to a Reformed tradition of interpretation of the Bible, he mentions few philosophers and interacts sparingly with only one contemporary philosopher, Dooyeweerd, who theologically seems to have had some kinship with Berkouwer and Berkhof's Middle Orthodoxy.

Books

The full list in the Dutch originals with their publication dates and pages is presented below with the corresponding list of the English translation titles, publication dates, and total pages. Please note that in subsequent reprints of the English, paginations vary from the original English edition. Also, technical matter in the Dutch that referred to earlier theological debates in that historical context have sometimes been removed in the English translations. The original publisher of the Dutch series is Kok (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); the English, Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA).

Dutch title (Kok: Amsterdam)DatepagesEnglish title (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids)Datepages
Geloof en Rechtvaardiging1949220Faith and Justification1952207
Geloof en Heiliging1949222Faith and Sanctification1952193
Geloof en Volharding1949215Faith and Perseverance1958256
De Voorzienigheid Gods1950336The Providence of God1952280
De Algemene Openbaring1951280General Revelation1955336
De Persoon van Christus1952334The Person of Christ1954368
Het Werk van Christus1953387The Work of Christ1965358
De Sacramenten1954407The Sacraments1969304
De Verkiezing Gods1955414Divine Election1960336
De Mens het Beeld Gods1957416Man: The Image of God1962376
De Zonde I1958230Sin1971599
De Zonde II1960360
De Wederkomst van Christus I1961311The Return of Christ1972477
De Wederkomst van Christus II1963282
De Heilige Schrift I1966234Holy Scripture1975377
De Heilige Schrift II1967463
De Kerk I Eenheid en Katholiciteit1970260The Church1976438
De Kerk II Apostoliciteit en Heiligheid1972273

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 Vanderheide, Al, "Dutch Reformed Leader Dr. G.C. Berkouwer Passes Away", Internet Christian Library., United Reformed News Service, retrieved 2011-03-10
  2. "Gerrit Cornelis Berkouwer (1903 - 1996)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3, p. 173

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