Servants of the Kingdom is a modest abridgement and translation of a dissertation which, at its 1999 Dutch publication, was greeted with a breadth of interest that would surprise most North-American scholars. It engages a small but spirited field of scholarship on the Netherlands Reformed ministry as a “calling” and as a corps (in which the concept of professionalization figures prominently), as well as the larger literature on the clergy of other state sanctioned churches.

Scholars tend to divide into two camps regarding the timing of the professionalization of Dutch clergy: those who find significant evidence thereof in the latter decades of the Republic (to 1795) and those who argue that the most important developments did not occur until well into the nineteenth century. David Bos differs—obliquely but categorically—with both camps. Bos argues that by a rigorous application of a conventional definition, professionalization was stymied until the 1918 formation of the “Dutch Ministers’ Union,” the first body which satisfied a professional sine qua non: an autonomous association for concerted action in the group interest (25). More importantly, however, Bos rejects such conventional definitions. Instead, he offers an approach adapted from the social sciences, under which a profession is understood as a “figuration, ‘a structured and changing pattern of interdependent people’”; professionalization is, thus, “the developmental history of the profession.” Consequently, Bos examines “changing relationships” among subsets within the corps itself, and between it and other collective actors: the “clientele,” educators, the state, and “closely connected” professions (26, 27).

Bos wholeheartedly embraces a Weberian understanding of social position as consisting of both Klasse and Stand, a distinction which seems to him “almost to have been designed especially for our purpose” (13). It is the changing social position of the ministry (both as calling and population) which supplies what Dutch scholars call the “red thread” of his work: carrying the reader throughout is an assessment of the gains and losses to what one might call the ministry's “portfolio” (my term, not his) of political, social, cultural, and economic capital.

Bos begins his study with the founding of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and the policies of William I, following Napoleonic rule. During this period, responsibility for ministers’ base salaries were accepted by the state. Though the state also deprived ministers of authority and autonomy at the highest levels of church governance, that was more than offset by gains resulting from the stipend, in autonomy from local elites and an “independence from the congregation” which many ministers “cherished” (139), as well as by capital derived from the attentions of a state seeking a dance partner suitable for nation building. The accession of William II marked the beginning of the gradual withdrawal of state support for the church and, with it, the decline of the portions of the status-portfolio in which state support had buoyed. Other indexes rose, however. In higher education, for example, the integration of theology students into the body of aspirants to other professions, “connected them to political, cultural, and (to a lesser extent) economic elites,” and “ministers were accepted into high society” (213). Conversely, subsequent marginalization at universities in the final decades of the century reversed those gains.

It is impossible, of course, to do Bos's work justice in this context, but the general trajectory of the profession's portfolio is one bolstered initially by governmental support which, from mid-century on, declined. At first it was replaced by status conferred through associations with cultural, intellectual, and economic elites. Finally, however, in the last decades of the century, ministers became more attentive to “their congregations and the general public,” gaining “sympathy” among consumers. From then on, the value of their portfolios came to rely, “more and more on that public support” (244). Whereas in earlier decades, “ministers had modeled themselves after legal professionals” with whom they had shared the pursuit of “public eloquence,” in these later decades ministers increasingly “looked toward physicians.” This, Bos argues, was not merely because clergy “envied” medical doctors for “their standing, income, authority and autonomy, but also for the special relationship between doctors and their patients” (385).

The title points toward two of the book's limitations. First, given the subtitle, readers could justifiably expect to gain insight into the process through which the Netherlands Reformed ministry was transformed from something that could not properly be called a “profession” into something that could. Bos's turn empties “professionalization” of all of its commonly understood connotations, a questionable choice in a field in which a more familiar understanding has proven to be a useful category of analysis. Indeed, Bos himself seems occasionally to want a familiar definition back, in one case arguing that an 1819 regulation augmenting ministerial authority was not necessarily good for the welfare of congregations, “but it did encourage the professionalization of ministers”; in other instances he finds evidence of “textbook” professionalization (113, 143, 391).

Second, the title itself is intended to be at least a double entendre: Reformed ministers were servants of both the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of God. Bos attends much more carefully to their role in, and relationship to, the former than the latter. Bos quotes a seventeenth-century Dutch poet who described the minister as a “dealer in unseen things” (27). For better or worse, the unseen things to which the poet referred remain largely invisible in Bos's book, which focuses on other unseen things; when he does delve into spiritual matters or intellectual or theological developments he relies heavily on secondary sources.

As a social and cultural history of a profession Bos's work is valuable and engaging. He has mined a vast body of primary sources, particularly serials (appropriate for his focus), with a keen eye for the ironic, irreverent, humorous, and that which can fruitfully be tallied and represented in tables. He deftly harnesses those sources to plot changes in the value of the portfolio of various types of status-building capital held by Netherlands Reformed clergy, while also offering a new standpoint from which to view many of the important ecclesiastical, educational, and political as well as some theological and intellectual developments in the nineteenth-century Netherlands.