***

 

On June 30, 2023, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) had to confess its sins for committing a crime against humanity. Through its general secretary, René de Reuver, it was confessed that “wij als kerken hebben bijdragen aan het in stand houden van de slavernij en dat wij door onze theologie het misbruik van mensen gerechtvaardigd hebben” (“we as churches have contributed to maintaining slavery and have justified the abuse of people through our theology”). This confession might suggest that the church’s involvement was merely theological—and thus theoretical. The opposite is proven by colonial practice in Suriname. Its first minister, Reverend Johannes Basseliers (1640–1689), a graduate of the University of Utrecht, kept more than fifty people in bondage and forced them to labor like animals on his sugar plantation. Although Black people, regarded as non-human, could not become members of the Reformed bakra kerki, they were present there as livestock and property. The church of Reverend Henricus Rosinus even served as a stable where animals and enslaved persons were traded.

Against this background, the biblical account of the dove sellers trading in the temple of Jerusalem seems almost harmless. Yet it was one of the most extraordinary moments in which we see Jesus consumed with zeal for God’s house (Ps. 69:10). The Prince of Peace erupted in fury, drove all the merchants out of the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the chairs of the dove sellers. “It is written,” He said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers” (Matt. 21:12–13). Seventeenth-century Reformed Christians were, in that respect, inferior—not merely because they had turned God’s house into a den of robbers where people were traded, but because they made the Living Word itself a slave to their power. Christianity was conscripted into the service of colonial rule—an ideology that exploits and excludes.

Many enslaved people had their first encounter with the church closer to home, in Africa, in places like Fort Elmina. There, Sunday services were held in a church built above warehouses where enslaved women were locked up, awaiting transport across the Atlantic Ocean. In that church, an old Dutch inscription is still visible, referring to Psalm 132: “Sion is des HEEREN ruste. Dit is Syn woonplaets tot in der eeuwigheyt.” (“Zion is the Lord’s resting place. This is His dwelling place forever.”) On Sundays, in addition to the psalms, the Ten Commandments of the Lord who delivered His people from the house of bondage were undoubtedly read aloud, along with the summary: “heb God lief bovenal, en je naaste als jezelf” (“love God above all, and your neighbor as yourself”). Although the sounds of such services must have echoed down into the slave quarters below, they hardly brought good news of liberation or neighborly love. What was believed, however, was that the Dutch—seen as a holy and elect white people—were entitled to exploit the Black descendants of Ham, who were said to be cursed to slavery, a curse supposedly not lifted even in Christ.

It may serve little purpose to curse seventeenth-century Reformed believers with today’s knowledge, yet even with the knowledge of their own time, they are not excusable. The Dutch themselves had compared their condition under Spanish rule to slavery and condemned it as contrary to God’s commandment, as shown in the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (1581), which accused the Spanish monarch of being a tyrant who “zijne onderzaten voor slaven ende lijffeygenen mishandelt” (“mistreats his subjects as slaves and serfs”). Slave trading practiced by the Spanish and Portuguese was condemned as a papist crime and vile trade—but when carried out by their own people overseas, it was tolerated and even legitimized. In sermons and catechism instruction, the slave trade was sometimes denounced as a form of man-stealing forbidden by God’s Eighth Commandment, for example by Reverend Smytegelt, yet such condemnation had no effect or following. The same Reverend Smytegelt retained his shares in the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and is still regarded as one of the great leaders of the Nadere Reformatie (Further Reformation)—a movement ostensibly devoted to sanctified living.

An appeal to innocence through ignorance therefore does not hold. It is not so surprising that the church had to confess guilt, but rather that it stubbornly persisted for centuries in a theology and tradition that had completely obscured the meaning and observance of God’s commandments (Matt. 15:6; Mark 7:13). The synod of the Dutch Reformed Church did not speak out against slavery until 1858—just a few years before its abolition—and even afterward it continued to look down upon both Black people and Jews. Although in 1936 the General Synod of Amsterdam declared that membership in the NSB (the Dutch Nazi party) was incompatible with church membership, this did not prevent the church’s replacement theology from sowing hatred and teaching that God’s election of Israel had passed to the church itself. Jews were thus regarded as inferior and apostate. After the horror of World War II, in 2000 the PKN again had to apologize for the fact that “de kerk mede de voedingsbodem heeft bereid waarin het zaad van antisemitisme en haat kon groeien” (“the church helped prepare the soil in which the seeds of anti-Semitism and hatred could grow”).

In 2004, the PKN revised its theology, affirming that God’s election of Israel is permanent—meaning that the church does not live in place of, but inseparably connected to Israel. Yet even that has changed little; now the problem has shifted to the Minor Asia, where genocide in Gaza and colonization of the West Bank are silently tolerated. After all, the “promised land” is said to belong to the Jews. This silence of the PKN was protested during the Red Line Protest of July 8, 2025, but the church seems unwilling to recognize the pattern. Once it looked down on Black people and Jews—now it is Arabs and Muslims. Time and again, others pay the price for a Christianity that serves a colonial occupier convinced of its own divine election: first “Neerlands Israël” (“the Netherlands as Israel”), now also “Modern Israel.” Every year the PKN celebrates so-called Israel Sundays, during which the modern state of Israel is often glorified as a miracle of God. Rarely, during such celebrations, is it mentioned that the state of Israel—founded in 1948—was necessary because Jews had become victims during World War II, partly as a result of Christian Reformed confession.

Do not be deceived by false signs, powers, and rhetorical arguments (2 Thess. 2:8–10). Alternative and more inclusive forms of Christianity are needed—to serve Him in spirit and in truth.

 

***