“The basic thought-form that controls everything is this,” wrote Hofstede de Groot, “that the foremost thing about Christianity is the revelation and the education that God grants us in Jesus Christ in order to bring us into greater conformity with God…”[1] They drew upon Platonism, especially as mediated to them by the philosopher Philip Willem van Heusde (1778-1839), to articulate their understanding of Christian formation; Hofstede de Groot charged the church with the task that Plato had mistakenly assigned the state in his Republic, namely, that of forming its citizens.
The Groningen theologians looked back to Thomas à Kempis, Wessel Gansfort, Desiderius Erasmus, Cornelius Jansen, and Johannes Coccejus, among others, as spiritual predecessors.
In 1842, a circle of orthodox laymen associated with the Réveil and led by Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer called upon the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church to declare the Groningen School in contradiction with its confessional standards.
After the synod rejected that petition on technical grounds, these so-called “Seven Gentlemen from the Hague” appealed directly to church members, urging them to rise up against the influence of the Groningen School.
Although the Groningen School was a major influence in the Dutch Reformed Church of the nineteenth century, the middle ground it occupied proved unstable and unable to holdback the growing split between modernist and orthodox factions.