Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer facts for kids
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (21 August 1801, Voorburg – 19 May 1876), was a Dutch politician and historian.
Overview
Groen's father, Petrus Jacobus Groen van Prinsterer, was a physician, and at adult age operated in aristocratic circles.
He was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, the state church of the Netherlands and of its Royal Family, although he deemed it to be in a poor condition. He was influenced by a then leading evangelical renewal movement known in the Netherlands as the Réveil, the European Continental counterpart to the Second Great Awakening.
He studied at Leiden University, and graduated in 1823 both as doctor of literature and LLD. From 1829 to 1833 he was a secretary to William II of the Netherlands. During this time he attended Brussels Protestant Church under pastor Merle d'Aubigné. After that, he took a prominent part in Dutch home politics, and becoming the leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, both in the Second Chamber of parliament, of which he was a member for many years, and as a political writer.
The doctrines of Guizot and Stahl influenced Groen. They permeate his controversial and political writings and historical studies, of which his Handbook of Dutch History (in Dutch) and Maurice et Barnevelt (in French, 1875, a criticism of Motley's Life of Van Olden-Barnevelt) are the most important. Groen was ardently opposed to Thorbecke, whose principles he denounced as ungodly and revolutionary. Although Groen lived to see these principles triumph in the constitutional reforms implemented by Thorbecke, he never ceased to oppose them until his death in 1876.
Thoughts
The translator of the Dutch political thought and influence of Groen, Harry Van Dyke, has summarized Groen's mature view in this way:
"We are living in a condition of permanent revolution... revolutions are here to stay and will grow much worse in scope and intensity unless men can be persuaded to return to Christianity, to practise its precepts and to obey the Gospel in its full implications for human life and civilized society. Barring such a revival, the future would belong to socialism and communism, which on this view were but the most consistent sects of the new secular religion. To Groen, therefore, the political spectrum that presented itself to his generation offered no meaningful choice. "In terms of his analysis, the 'radical left' was composed of fanatical believers in the godless ideology; the 'liberal centre,' by comparison, by warm believers who warned against excesses and preached moderation; while the 'conservative right' embraced all those who lacked either the insight, the prudence, or the will to break with the modern tenets yet who recoiled from the consequences whenever the ideology was practised and implemented in any consistent way. None of the shades or 'nuances of secular liberalism represented a valid option for Christian citizens." Groen called for a rejection of the entire available spectrum of political positions, calling for a "radical alternative in politics, along anti-revolutionary, Christian-historical lines".
The South African scholar Jan Adriaan Schlebusch describes the basic theme of Groen's anti-revolutionary theory as follows:
"The dichotomy of revolution or rebellion against God on the one hand and faith in God on the other, was one that Groen believed to be ever-present throughout history. Groen therefore also understood this epistemic Revolution to be opposed to history, i.e. the divinely-ordained cosmic-historic telos of evangelistic progress and the glorification of the Lordship of Christ ... ‘Revolution’ for Groen was ultimately a denial of the sovereignty of God in favor of the sovereignty of mankind, with the ‘revolutionary’ ideas of the Enlightenment being the fruits of a rationalist religion wrongly elevating man-made abstractions as truths supreme over the revelation of God. This epistemic perspective shaped his political theory and engagement. Groen argued that the Revolution, not only as a historical-political phenomenon, but as a historical-philosophical development, amounted to an anti-Christian infringement upon the natural rights, established socio-political relationships, and justice system rooted in a divinely-ordained social order. Therefore the anti-revolutionary or Christian-historical position entailed opposing this epistemic Revolution as a path doomed to social disaster and political tyranny."
Works in English translation
- Unbelief and Revolution: A Series of Lectures in History. Amsterdam: Groen van Prinsterer Fund, 1973-1975.
- The History of the Revolution in its First Phase. Amsterdam: Groen van Prinsterer Fund, 1978.
- Christian Political Action in an Age of Revolution. Translated by Collin Wright. Aalten, the Netherlands: WordBridge Publishing, 2015.
