Willem Teellinck and Gisbertus Voetius

Chapter 19 Willem Teellinck and Gisbertus Voetius

Willem J. op ’t Hof

For the non-Dutch reader, the terms Dutch Reformed Pietism1 (hereinafter referred to as Pietism for short) and Further Reformation2 require some un- packing. By Pietism is meant that spiritual persuasion within Dutch Reformed Protestantism that made a particular priority of the need for piety. It took this stance as a reaction to the fact that while many Dutchmen had outwardly made the transition from the Roman Catholic to the Reformed Church, in- wardly they had remained unconverted and were retaining what appeared to Protestant eyes as an unbiblical lifestyle. Pietism strove for a brand of piety that contained two elements. First and foremost, the Pietists were concerned with the inward experience of Reformed doctrine. They paid attention to all facets of the process of spiritual conversion and to the whole gamut of thrills and disappointments of the life of faith, considering also the requisite self- examination, an examination informed by a series of hallmarks that they held to distinguish the real from the false. The Pietists also argued that specific sanctification of life at the personal, familial, ecclesiastical, and societal levels was absolutely essential. The sanctification for which they pleaded rested on a stringent exegesis and application of the Ten Commandments. The Pietists ex- pressed their ideals not only orally, by means of preaching and pastoral work, but also in writing, through publications. The intensity with which they under- took the latter was so great that one can well speak of a Pietist book culture in its own right. In the seventeenth century, the Pietist segment of Dutch book production was the largest in the market.3 Its significance rapidly diminished in the eighteenth century, however. Pietism as a movement in the Netherlands is historically discernible as far back as the late sixteenth century; it remained a social current for the following two centuries. Within the larger, looser movement of Pietism, we may from 1608 on- ward distinguish a more coherent project: the Further Reformation, whose

1 Graafland, op ’t Hof, and van Lieburg, “Nadere Reformatie,” 111–113, 119–122; op ’t Hof, Het gereformeerd Piëtisme, 14–36, 52–61. 2 Beeke, Assurance of Faith, 383–413; Graafland, op ’t Hof, and van Lieburg, “Nadere Reforma- tie,” 113–118, 123–178; van Lieburg, “From Pure Church.” 3 op ’t Hof, “Lusthof des Gemoets,” 148–149.

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adherents turned the Pietist desire for godliness into a programmatic agenda.4 Without de-emphasizing the inner-life aspect of Pietism, they converted its words and its grievances into deeds, not only by developing elaborate programs that spelled out which aspects of the church, politics, society, and the family had to be reformed and in what ways, but also by submitting these programs to the relevant ecclesiastical, political, and social bodies as concrete reform proposals. Besides reform programs, other key points of the Further Reforma- tion were church discipline, theocracy, and Sabbatarianism. Willem Teellinck5 (1579–1629) is regarded as the father of this piety movement; its academic mainstay was the Utrecht professor Gisbertus Voetius6 (1589–1676). From its beginning to its end, the Further Reformation falls within the historical period of Pietism. Unlike its beginning, however, its end cannot be dated precisely. Whatever range one takes, it was in the eighteenth century that the movement came to an end. Although the borders defining Pietism against the Further Ref- ormation were sometimes in flux, it was particularly the Further Reformation that characterized Reformed piety in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. A Dutch-language encyclopedia of both these historical Pietist phenomena is currently in production. The first two volumes have already been published and are biographical in nature.7 The three volumes yet to appear will be the- matically ordered and are due to come out shortly. Also in Dutch, an academic journal has been in circulation for forty years, exclusively dedicated to Dutch Reformed Pietism during the period of the United Provinces: Documentatie- blad Nadere Reformatie. More recently, at VU University Amsterdam, an Eng- lish-language online journal was launched in 2015 with international Reformed Pietism as its research topic: Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism.

I General Overview of Prior Research

Because the Pietists and the advocates of the Further Reformation (hence- forth, we shall use the term promoters of piety as a combined reference to these two groups) were strongly focused on piety, there was a far greater role played by medieval devotion and mysticism in their work than there was in

4 It was in 1608 that the first publications by Willem Teellinck, mentioned below, came out, and that Teellinck began to cooperate with other promoters of piety to effectuate a reformation of morals. 5 op ’t Hof, Willem Teellinck; op ’t Hof, De theologische opvattingen; op ’t Hof, “The Eventful Sojourn.” 6 Duker, Gisbertus Voetius; van Oort et al., De onbekende Voetius; Beck, Gisbertus Voetius. 7 Encyclopedie Nadere Reformatie.