Since the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, historical studies of Protestant missions in the early modern period have construed Calvinist (Reformed Protestant) missionary endeavours within a framework of failure. Drawing on a long tradition of scholarship, Charles Boxer's classic treatment of the Dutch empire elaborated on the unimpressive record of Reformed missionaries at converting indigenous peoples, especially when compared to their Roman Catholic rivals.Footnote 1 Subsequent historians agreed that Calvinists failed to make much or any lasting impression among native societies for a combination of two basic reasons. One line of explanation stressed the commercial and imperial priorities of northern European trading companies, which ran counter to proselytizing.Footnote 2 It has become a truism that the drive for profits of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC) severely restricted missionaries’ drive to make Christians.Footnote 3 Another strand of scholarship focused on the incongruities between the theological assumptions of Protestant Christianity and the religious cultures of indigenous societies. James Axtell's study of missionary operations in North America established the standard view that Reformed Protestants insisted on acculturating native peoples, which stifled most interest in Christianity.Footnote 4 Similarly, other analyses of Protestant missions in different parts of the world have drawn attention to the laborious efforts that missionaries undertook to Europeanize natives in order to prepare them for conversion.Footnote 5
Recent research on Dutch Calvinist activity in the East Indies has called into question the longstanding interpretation of failure by revealing successful conversion programmes and calculated outreach strategies. Henk Niemeijer's careful research in Dutch and Indonesian archives demonstrated that the Reformed Church in Batavia (Jakarta) experienced significant growth among Asians and Eurasians, claiming a church membership of 2,300 by 1674.Footnote 6 Furthermore, Gerrit Schutte has also pushed back against the minimalist readings of VOC support for Reformed evangelism. He has pointed out that, even though the VOC was a commercial operation, it still funded hundreds of ministers who exerted enormous energy in spreading Protestant Christianity among the territories of the Indian Ocean.Footnote 7 These and other valuable studies have opened the door for a more balanced assessment of Calvinist missionary work in the early modern period.
Yet current scholarship on conversion in Catholic missionary settings has revealed the value of moving beyond a conventional framework of success/failure to explore cross-cultural interactions between European missionaries and native peoples. A number of historians working on global Catholicism have utilized the concept of cultural hybridity to elucidate the complexities of conveying and consuming religious teachings across cultural borders. Many important studies have deconstructed the syncretistic strategies that missionary priests employed to find common ground with Confucian scholars in China, Hindu Brahmins in India, and devotees of popular cults in central America.Footnote 8 The visible religious hybridities that emerged from these approaches – most famously the rites controversies in China and India – generated well-known debates among Catholic authorities about the boundaries of accommodation. Yet less visible, and thus less contentious, appropriations of Catholic Christianity by native peoples also produced enduring synthetic blendings of religious cultures. Filipinos, Kongolese, Mexicans, and many other peoples incorporated Catholic images and rituals within the cultural matrices of their traditional beliefs and practices.Footnote 9 As Tracy Neal Leavelle argues, ‘the experiences of Native peoples and missionaries argue … for the adoption of a plural, dynamic, and flexible concept of conversion that accounts for the changes in all participants’.Footnote 10 These new approaches have provided historians with much clearer insight into the lived religious experiences of early modern men and women in many parts of the world.
Because of a preoccupation with success and failure, historians working on Calvinist overseas operations have just begun to explore the hybridities within missionary and indigenous encounters. In their study of Dutch colonial identity in Asia, Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben have alluded to the intricate interconnections between Reformed social values and local cultures in the formation of mestizo and creole communities. Focusing more explicitly on missionary accommodation, Chiu Hsin-hui's work on Dutch Formosa has provided clear evidence that missionaries appealed to local religious values, just as many native converts calculated that Protestant Christianity offered effective new means to achieve the traditional ends of divine protection and blessing.Footnote 11
This article attempts to build on this recent work and move scholarship beyond the conventional model of success/failure by examining Dutch Calvinist disputes over the proper administration of the sacraments of baptism and communion. A close inquiry into this subject – one of the most vexing issues for Calvinists – illustrates the difficulties of transplanting Protestant Christianity across cultural boundaries. For Reformed Protestants, baptism and communion denoted one's entry and honourable standing in the holy community of believers. Creating Protestant Christians out of Asians and Euro-Asians raised fundamental questions for Calvinist missionaries. What must an Asian profess, let alone comprehend, to be counted a Christian? What behaviours reflected a genuine conversion in a non-Christian culture? Uncertainties over whom to baptize and admit to communion therefore went to the heart of the problem in identifying a Protestant Christian outside Europe. The debates among Calvinists over the sacraments also provide an enlightening point of comparison with conflicts among Catholics in their proselytizing programmes.
A comparative, global approach reveals the inherent tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy in all early modern Christian missionary enterprises. Early modern Calvinists in the mission field adopted syncretistic approaches, as both Protestant and Catholic missionaries shared basic problems and joined in similar discourses about engaging local cultures. In general, Calvinists and Catholics emphasized accommodation in the early phases of missionary activity, but over time came under increasing pressure from the religious heartland to impose orthodoxy on converts. To highlight these issues, it is necessary to describe Dutch proselytizing efforts within their imperial context, analyse problems among Calvinists in negotiating cultural differences, and then make comparisons with Roman Catholic missionary experiences.
The Reformed Church within the Dutch Asian empire
Since Reformed ministers and lay chaplains came to Asia as part of the VOC's operations, the arc of the Dutch maritime empire, as many historians have noted, framed most aspects of Calvinist missionary activity. Following the success of the Iberian overseas empires, several Dutch syndicates financed expeditions to Southeast Asia at the end of the sixteenth century to search for spices at their sources of origin. Several years later, a newly chartered East India Company forced its way into the Moluccan islands. Driven by the unrelenting force of the first Governor General, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC subdued the local principality of Jakarta on Java in May 1619. Directors renamed the port city Batavia and made it the headquarters of the company's Asian operations. Governors allied with native forces to dislodge the Portuguese and British from a number of locations and set up outposts across the littoral of the Indian Ocean. The most substantial settlements included those in the East Indies (Java and the Moluccan islands), Malacca, Formosa, Ceylon and South Asia, and the Cape of Good Hope.Footnote 12
Reformed congregations usually sprouted in due course after the VOC planted a colonial outpost. The first Reformed ministers arrived in the East Indies almost immediately with the first company ships, and the pastor Adriaan Jacobszoon Hulsebos organized the first consistory (the board of pastors and elders that governed local churches) in 1620. From the 1620s to the 1640s, the primary theatre of Dutch Calvinist activity lay in the East Indies and Formosa. Hulsebos, Sebastiaan Danckaerts, Jacob Anthoniszoon Dubbeltrijck, and other ministers established consistories in Amboina, Banda, Ternate, and Timor, with satellite congregations in more remote regions. George Candidius and Robert Junius undertook aggressive proselytizing in Formosa, but a consistory did not materialize there until 1643.Footnote 13 As the VOC expanded its reach into Malacca, Ceylon, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, and the Cape of Good Hope in the 1640s and 1650s, a conspicuous Calvinist church presence shadowed Dutch conquests in these territories.
Though no church exercised any official authority over another, a core–periphery structure defined relations between the patria and the mission field. The classes (presbyteries) of Amsterdam and Walcheren (in Middelburg, Zeeland), as well as the Synod of South Holland, recruited ministers and chaplains for overseas service, monitored affairs of churches in foreign lands, and advised consistories on a variety of matters. Overseas churches relied on Dutch classes and synods for pastoral resources, political solidarity, and policy advice. In the 1630s, the classis of Amsterdam created a special committee, the ‘deputies for Indian affairs’ (deputati ad res Indicas), to attend to ecclesiastical affairs in overseas churches. Within the Asian theatre of operations, the consistory in Batavia acted as a focal point for the spread of congregations to outlying areas in Southeast Asia and functioned as the primary representative to Church authorities in the Netherlands.
The overriding aim of Dutch Calvinists in the East Indies was to provide religious services for company employees and Dutch expatriates. Nonetheless, all ecclesiastical figures consistently heralded the high-minded missionary purpose of the overseas churches. The stock phrase that appeared among correspondents in Asia and the Netherlands recurrently throughout this period was the Church's mission to promote ‘the expansion and propagation of the kingdom of Jesus Christ among the blind heathens’.Footnote 14 The Indies Zion (Indische Zion) became the commonplace moniker for the Dutch overseas churches in Asia, an appellation that signified their intent to construct a spiritual Jerusalem as a religious beacon to non-believers in non-Christian domains.Footnote 15
To carry out the task of converting ‘heathens’, ‘Moors’, and ‘papists’, in the Indies, church leaders organized congregations in the Reformed Protestant mould. Under the supervision of consistories, ministers preached the gospel, administered the sacraments, and exercised moral discipline over members. Schoolmasters, comprised of chaplains from the Netherlands and later indigenous converts, taught catechism classes several times a week and operated schools. Dutch missionaries oversaw a considerable network of schools in the East Indies, Formosa, and Ceylon. In 1706, Batavia maintained 34 teachers for 4,873 children, Ceylon supported approximately 30 schools with 18,000 children in the late 1600s, and the company in Formosa also opened numerous schools.Footnote 16
The Reformed congregation in colonial Batavia grew slowly but steadily during the period of VOC rule. Dutch churches encountered many Portuguese-speaking slaves and free settlers (Mardijkers) who had migrated originally from South Asia as enslaved labourers and had already undergone baptism by Catholic missionaries. Though the religious status of these peoples generated a great deal of discussion among Dutch pastors, in general they treated the slaves and Mardijkers as baptized Christians. Malay-speaking people, indigenous to maritime Southeast Asia, comprised a much smaller yet still substantial group of converts, whereas Dutch-language churches ranked at the bottom according to size. In a 1706 list of 4,873 catechumens, 4,440 were Portuguese-speaking, 323 spoke Malay, and only 110 spoke Dutch.Footnote 17
Thus, Dutch consistories for the most part did not unleash any full-scale preaching campaigns designed to convert large numbers of indigenes. Rather, they operated within the confines of traditional ecclesiastical functions, convinced that church planting constituted propagating the gospel in ‘heathen’ lands, and trusting providence to yield appropriate growth. There were, however, two notable exceptions to this model. Beginning in the 1620s, a number of ministers, including Danckaerts and Hulsebos, preached across the Moluccan islands and found success in several locations on the Banda islands and in Amboina.Footnote 18 George Candidius and Robert Junius aggressively sought converts in Formosa in the 1630s and 1640s, even to the point of minimizing service to the Dutch-language church in Taiyouan in favour of preaching and teaching in other villages. By the 1640s, they had baptized over 5,000 converts, half the adult population in towns with missionary activity, and claimed them as church members in good standing.Footnote 19 In the East Indies, Ceylon, South Asia, and South Africa, however, church planting rather than aggressive campaigns remained the typical mode of operation.
These particular perspectives on overseas mission stemmed in part from an outlook embedded in the religious settlement in the Dutch Republic at the end of the sixteenth century. In the political complexities of war in the 1570s, the Reformed Church became the only official denomination, yet the 1579 Union of Utrecht also provided for freedom of conscience, ensuring religious pluralism in the new nation and voluntary membership in the state Church. Even though all other denominations were proscribed, few Netherlanders rushed to join a Reformed congregation. By the mid seventeenth century only about half the Dutch population had enlisted as Church members, eighty years after the public establishment of the Reformed faith. Since the overseas missions were getting underway in the early 1600s, Church leaders had grown accustomed to functioning as a minority confession in a society full of heretics, papists, apostates, Jews, and free thinkers. Pastors consistently decried ungodliness and denounced error, but they did not launch any full-scale assault to convert the ungodly to the Reformed faith. Church authorities and pastors seemed satisfied that preaching, administering the sacraments, and maintaining good discipline would produce appropriate increase.
Dividing the sacraments
The cultural landscape across Southeast Asia obviously formed a very different background from the Dutch Republic for the workings of Reformed Protestant churches. Hulsebos, Danckaerts, Caspar Wiltens, and others labouring in the Moluccas and Java were among the first missionaries from any European land to carry Protestant Christianity outside the West. Early missionaries often expressed a heady optimism that underestimated the cultural difficulties of converting non-Europeans to a Protestant faith and pious demeanour. Hulsebos and two of his colleagues, for example, claimed in March 1622 that, by setting up church services in Banda, ‘the Lord, who by one means or the other and at some time, will be pleased to call many Moors and heathens into belief and eternal salvation …’.Footnote 20
Despite the sunny outlook, a cluster of serious problems surrounding the sacraments of baptism and communion clouded the mission as soon as Dutch pastors were getting underway in the late 1610s and 1620s. At issue were the requirements and expectations for people who desired baptism but had little or no introduction to Protestant Christianity. In 1617, for instance, Meijnert Meijnertszoon, a missionary working at Nera on the Banda islands, described the confusion and disagreement among ministers about who qualified for baptism. He wrote,
It worries me that so many people are baptized here, it seems better to wait until they are taught first. I have also spoken out against this to Caspar [Wiltens], who responded that this was the way it was done before his time. It is an old, harmful practice that for definite reasons [we] here can no longer neglect to report.Footnote 21
Since Wiltens was the first Dutch missionary in the region, his comment about a previous practice of baptizing liberally suggests that Jesuits, who had accompanied the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, had established a precedent that now confronted Calvinists. Reformed ministers continued to express concern about baptizing indigenes with almost no preparation. Less than two years later, Danckaerts related that Wiltens and other missionaries were baptizing children and adults with little discrimination, leading to an influx of initiates who understood very little about Christianity and who often reverted to their former practices.Footnote 22 And in 1625 the Banda consistory noted ‘great unrest in the congregation’ over whether to baptize children whose parents were ‘Moors’ and ‘heathens’.Footnote 23
The consternation about baptism was no obscure, technical matter, but instead touched on fundamental practices of the faith and exposed the tensions between Reformed theology and the cultural landscape of the East Indies. Dutch Reformers held to the Belgic Confession of Faith that defined baptism as the rite by which one ‘is received into God's church and set apart from all other people and alien nations’.Footnote 24 Protocol called for ministers to baptize adults who made a profession of faith, demonstrated a rudimentary knowledge of Christian teachings, submitted themselves to Church discipline, and gave evidence of a moral lifestyle. Only children of Christian parentage could receive baptism. According to Reformed doctrine, baptism for adults and children signified God's grace to an individual and to God's special people.Footnote 25 For Calvinists, baptism marked one as a Christian. In all Dutch territories, missionaries and pastors even referred to those who had undergone baptism at the hands of Catholic priests as nominal Christians.
Reformed theology also linked baptism to communion in a sacramental union, so all adult Christians in good standing were expected to take part in the Lord's Supper whenever a congregation offered it, usually between four and six times a year. As the ‘gathering of God's people’, the Lord's Supper represented the pure eucharistic assembly of saints. Thus, the sanctity of the Lord's Table had always animated Calvinist church authorities, and had given rise to extraordinary pastoral labour in disciplining congregations throughout the Reformed world.Footnote 26
Initiating someone into a congregation before he or she was prepared intellectually and morally, or baptizing the child of non-Christian parents, could therefore cast tremendous dishonour on the Reformed community, as the comments by Hulsebos, Danckaerts, and the Banda consistory attest.Footnote 27 When an Asian convert and communicant continued to engage in traditional religious observances or violated Reformed moral norms, it made a mockery of what Calvinists considered sacred, and invited the wrath of God. Because the Catholic Church operated under a very different theological conception of the sacraments, its missionaries possessed a much stronger sense of urgency in baptizing non-Christians. According to the Roman Catholic view, baptism not only inducted one into the faith but it also remitted all past and present sins. As a result, Catholic missionaries believed salvation was at stake, so they baptized indigenous peoples liberally, then later tried to make them better Christians.Footnote 28 In the wake of all the Jesuit activity in the region, Calvinist ministers faced a difficult dilemma: defer baptism for Asians and risk losing them, or baptize them and risk disgracing the religious community. For those already baptized by Jesuits, Dutch missionaries did not allow them to take communion but tried to educate them in the Reformed faith so that they could participate as fully fledged, communing members.
As questions swirled about baptism, ministers in the Moluccas and Batavia in the late 1610s and 1620s adopted an approach that accommodated the otherness of Protestant Christianity to Asians and Euro-Asians in the East Indies. Ministers permitted baptism for those who professed faith and exhibited a minimal comprehension of Reformed teachings. But they withheld communion until converts demonstrated a clearer knowledge of the faith and a moral lifestyle. Those who had received a Catholic baptism also needed to make a profession and show comprehension to become a bona fide member and take communion.
Consequently, a wide chasm yawned between the requirements for baptism and those for communion. The consistories in Banda and Batavia even resolved in April 1622 not to allow a baptized member to take communion unless they grasped the Dutch language, to ensure that they understood the word of God.Footnote 29 Under this policy, large numbers of Asian converts, even entire congregations, would claim membership in the Reformed Church but never take communion. The early missionaries also attempted to accommodate children of non-Christians, stipulating that they could receive baptism as long as members in good standing sponsored them and promised to see that they were raised in the Reformed faith.Footnote 30 According to the consistory in Banda, this baptism policy would ‘now throw the door of grace wide open … now for all tongues, peoples, and nations’.Footnote 31
The consistories in Banda and Batavia asked the advice of Dutch church authorities, who had recently concluded the landmark national synod at Dort in 1619, which reinforced the central place of Calvinism in the Republic.Footnote 32 Even while the synod was in session, Hulsebos had requested clarification on the propriety of baptizing children of ‘Moors’ and ‘heathens’.Footnote 33 In the early 1620s, when the classes of Walcheren and Amsterdam in the core learned of this gradualist approach to conversion and Church membership in the periphery, ministers in the Netherlands expressed strong opposition to administering sacraments in any protocol that deviated from the standard Reformed practice.Footnote 34 According to the Synod of Dort, the sacraments, the word of God, and discipline formed an inviolable unity.Footnote 35 Delegates from the Dutch classes interpreted this provision to mean that all baptized members were to partake of the Lord's Supper. Denying the Lord's Table until they became better Christians therefore violated the sacramental unity of the Reformed community and the universality of the Reformed communion. Thus, orthodox critics labelled this accommodating missionary approach as ‘dividing the sacraments’, which became the stock epithet for the dispute. While no Reformed pastor, chaplain, or lay elder contested the unity of the sacraments in any theological sense, the problems that arose in the East Indies churches were practical ones, which necessitated adjustments for local conditions. Orthodox opponents in the Netherlands and in Asia, however, likened this incremental strategy to Jesuit accommodation.Footnote 36
Since the sacraments ritually marked entrance into, and unity within, the body of believers, they formed essential signifiers of both an honourable Christian and a pure congregation. Consequently, disputes over baptism and communion were central to the Reformed faith, which was one reason why they plagued all overseas churches off and on for over a hundred years, including those in Ceylon, Formosa, Cape Town, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Suriname. Ministers in Banda sought clarification from their colleagues in Batavia in 1624 about baptizing children of Muslims.Footnote 37 In 1636, questions came from Brazil about whether to baptize children of non-Christians, and from Curaçao (in the Caribbean) about the baptism policy for orphans of ‘heathens’.Footnote 38 The Curaçao church asked in 1661 about the propriety of dividing the sacraments.Footnote 39 The Reformed Church inherited thousands of baptized Catholics when the Dutch wrested Ceylon from the Portuguese, which generated many questions about administering the sacraments.Footnote 40 In 1650 both the Palicatta community (on the Malabar coast of India) and the Batavia consistory complained to the Amsterdam classis that requiring local people to undergo an extensive education before baptism caused many to seek baptism from Catholic missionaries.Footnote 41 Pastors in Suriname registered the same grievance in 1721.Footnote 42 In 1667 and 1670, Amboina requested exceptions to Dort in baptizing adults and children.Footnote 43 In 1679, the consistory at the Cape of Good Hope made the same petition.Footnote 44
While questions about the sacraments surfaced persistently throughout this period, the most intense disputes in the East Indies occurred in two distinct episodes. The first ran from the 1620s until 1648, pitting Dutch church districts, which opposed dividing the sacraments, against Indies pastors, who largely favoured it. The primary principles up for debate put theological orthodoxy and universality of practice at odds with practical necessity in a mission environment. In 1648, the Batavia church acceded to the demands of ministers in the patria and renounced the practice.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, in areas outside Batavia, namely in Amboina, and other locations in the Moluccas, missionaries continued to baptize in a less constrained manner, and yet restricted access to communion rather scrupulously.
A second controversy flared up in the 1720s, when E. F. Le Boucq, a stridently combative pastor in the Indies, challenged Batavia's policy of uniting the sacraments by appealing to the classis of Delft. The classis supported Le Boucq, setting off a firestorm in the Netherlands between Delft and its allies, on the one hand, and the classes of Amsterdam and Walcheren, on the other. In the Indies, the majority of the Batavia consistory, led by Cornelis Verbis and Hendrick Heidegger, upheld the current system, while churches in outlying areas joined Le Boucq. This episode did not really break any new theological ground, though the dispute did generate much more documentation. Conflicts between church districts, animosity among combatants, and the interminable process of appeal created a profusion of correspondence, testimony, meeting minutes, and judgments.Footnote 46 Le Boucq accused his opponents of tyranny for advocating uniform practice, of ‘papistry’ for compelling people to take communion, and of lax discipline for allowing ‘unworthy’ members to approach the Lord's Table. Returning fire, Heidegger and Verbis reproached Le Boucq for schism in challenging established practice in Batavia, for condescension in fostering a two-tiered structure of membership, and for lax discipline in standards for baptism.Footnote 47
After much wrangling and bitter recriminations, the Governor and Political Council in Batavia issued a definitive statement in 1736, which upheld the unity of the sacraments in the colony, but allowed flexibility in outlying areas. It permitted dividing the sacraments at the discretion of the pastors, but cautioned that they should not administer baptism lightly – that is, without sufficient education and without evidence of salvation.Footnote 48 With regard to children, only the offspring of non-Christians who had been adopted by Reformed parents who pledged to raise them in the faith could receive baptism.Footnote 49 Amboina, Banda, and other congregations outside Batavia persisted in dividing the sacraments.Footnote 50
Aside from the theological divisions, the conflict over dividing the sacraments reveals much about the struggles that Dutch Protestants faced in negotiating social and cultural boundaries. Contrary to traditional interpretations of Protestant missions, Dutch missionaries did make allowances for indigenous cultures and sought to figure out how Reformed tenets applied in a colonial and decidedly non-Christian milieu. Determining how to translate a Reformed theology of the sacraments within Asian societies essentially entailed deciding how to recognize a Protestant Christian among non-European peoples. Creating Reformed Christians out of ‘Moors’ and ‘heathens’, who had been enculturated in strange and exotic customs, presented challenges for Calvinist missionaries.
These questions arose in social settings that further complicated the administration of the sacraments. Membership in the Reformed Church bestowed social privileges in a colonial, slave-holding environment. Reformed deacons managed an extensive network of poor relief that attracted the attention of local people. Though deacons did offer assistance to those outside the Church, the prospect of increased access to alms for baptized Christians could only have exerted a strong pull on people in desperate circumstances.Footnote 51 The VOC stipulated that their personnel could only marry Christians, thus compelling many Asian women who had marriage prospects with European men to seek baptism. Free Asian and Eurasian converts also received protection from enslavement for debts, and authorization to marry a Christian. Enslaved converts received privileges that were not inconsequential: to marry, to avoid sale to Muslims, and to stand a better chance of manumission than non-Christians.Footnote 52
Church officers recognized the material incentives to conversion. The Batavian consistory lamented to the Governor in 1653 that the Chinese and ‘heathens’ who claim that they are Christians do so with little love or knowledge of the truth.Footnote 53 An implacable foe of dividing the sacraments, the Batavia pastor Hendrick Heidegger complained in 1730 that many ‘inlanders’ sought baptism to procure ‘worldly’ privileges from the Church. Likewise, the Colombo consistory compared Tamil and Singhalese converts to opportunists in the late Roman empire who requested baptism to gain political advantages.Footnote 54 Non-religious motivations attracted many to seek baptism, but afterwards such converts appeared less than enthusiastic about the religious commitments of Church membership. As one minister put it, they ‘show no inclination to approach the table of the Lord [and] have no love for God’.Footnote 55
The desire to marry constituted one of the most pressing social considerations that induced men and women at all social levels to seek church baptism. VOC officials urged employees to marry among local women, most of whom were not Christians, just as Eurasian men sometimes sought to marry European widows. Female slaves often served as concubines. An entry in the consistory notes from October 1625 gives an example of a common problem that elders and ministers had to address. ‘Certain Moors … appeared before the consistory seeking to be christened and thenceforth to marry certain Christian women whose husbands have died.’ Two months later, a woman named Margheta de Wilde, originally from the Malabar Coast, approached the consistory about receiving baptism so that she could marry a soldier. Because of widespread sexual relations between Dutch (Christian) men and Asian (non-Christian) women, all sorts of difficulties emerged relating to marriage and illegitimacy. What should a consistory do when a pregnant Asian woman wanted to be baptized but understood little about the Reformed faith? If baptized, should this woman, who might follow old habits and observances, be allowed to take communion with the faithful? In Margheta's case, the brothers permitted baptism because she had studied Christian ‘teaching and commandments’ in their school. But in the case of the unnamed ‘Moors’, the consistory resolved simply to inquire about their knowledge of the Christian religion.Footnote 56 Thus, the colonial context that allowed for Calvinist missionary enterprises also presented serious complications in identifying motives for conversion.
What did conversion mean to Dutch Calvinist missionaries and to indigenous peoples? Informed by a keen awareness of cultural hybridities across early modern societies, recent scholarship on Catholic missions has made it obvious that religious interaction among European missionaries and indigenous peoples was far more complex and inconclusive than traditional notions of conversion have suggested. Pierre Dumonceaux observed twenty years ago that Europeans did not hold to any fixed notion of conversion but that the term could convey a range of connotations. Despite any such flexibility, Karl Morrison has surmised that the concept of an abrupt change from one religion to another, or from unbelief to belief, is rooted primarily in Western culture.Footnote 57 Missionary sources often invoked the Augustinian ideal of a transformative psychological and epistemological event, and yet Allan Greer has argued convincingly from his work on the Iroquois that this totalizing conception of ‘a sudden rebirth that wipes out preexisting identities was impossible’.Footnote 58 Other scholars, analysing Catholic attempts at conversion in various parts of Asia, America, and Africa, have revealed that missionaries in the field tempered such idealistic expectations, appealing to commonalities in local belief and practice and accepting negotiated compromises.Footnote 59 Many thousands of indigenes did undergo baptism, partake of sacraments from Catholic priests, and adopt Christian teachings, and yet native peoples situated these new observances within customary ways of believing, praying, and performing.
Reformed Protestants in Asia and the Netherlands frequently waved the bright banner of the Indies Zion, though making converts on the ground in the mission field proved complicated and ambiguous. The quarrels about dividing the sacraments illustrate that identifying genuine converts perplexed Calvinist missionaries, and the persistence of the conflict suggests that no option satisfied ministers fully. Insisting on higher standards for communion, as the dividers advocated, effectively meant that baptized Asians and Eurasians counted as Christians in name but somehow not in substance. In their pastoral letters to the Dutch churches, leaders in Ceylon and the East Indies categorized all the natives baptized previously by Catholic priests as either common (gemeen) or nominal (genaamd) Christians. There were a huge number of such people, over 100,000 in Ceylon and over 30,000 in the Moluccas.Footnote 60 Yet these Christians and many others, baptized by either Catholics or Calvinists across Dutch territories in Asia, were neither Catholic in any meaningful sense, nor fully Reformed, but occupied a liminal religious site.
Conversion for Dutch missionaries, in these multicultural and colonial environments, functioned as an ongoing process of education and sanctification in an individual, manifested by a lifestyle in general conformity with Reformed moral expectations. Church records in Jakarta reveal extensive efforts to supervise the morals of Asian converts, and keen sensitivity to the pull of local culture on behaviour and attitudes. Consistories often exercised scepticism about Asian or Euro-Asian Christians, as two pastors in Batavia warned that ‘such people who carry the name Christian … adults who declare themselves baptized, the minister better not turn his back too quickly [on these people] or they will give themselves over to their idols and to the devil's service’.Footnote 61 Dutch ministers on both sides of the sacramental dispute framed this problem as a failure of moral discipline among overseas converts. Consequently, Calvinist efforts at conversion aimed at weakening the attraction of traditional practices and habits, with all of their imbedded religious meanings for newly converted Christians, who were vulnerable to backsliding.
Since church officers suspected many native Christians of converting merely for worldly motives, it became necessary to detach them as much as possible from cultural practices that not only ran counter to but also paralleled Reformed Protestantism. In 1690, the consistory in Colombo demanded that the Governor Hendrick van Rhee destroy Buddhist pagodas (sacred sites) or turn them into schools, because their presence ‘harms many weak Christians, as most are, in their innate superstitious nature’. These ministers also cited the campaign by Roman emperors to eradicate paganism by converting temples into churches as a successful means to inculcate Christianity in heathen societies.Footnote 62 In the Tamil region of northern Ceylon, Philip Baldaeus, an effective Calvinist missionary, insisted that Christians who converted from Hinduism had to give up their vegetarian diet, and brides had to forego a symbolic necklace (thali) in marriage ceremonies.Footnote 63
While Calvinists discussed the vagaries of conversion in terms of authenticity of intent and moral discipline, baptized Asians exhibited a very different perspective on the parameters of membership in the Reformed Protestant community. Apprehending indigenous perceptions is unquestionably problematic because there are no sources with an explicit Asian voice on the matter. Yet reading cautiously between the lines of Church sources, in which ministers complained about Asian morals, suggests that many Asian converts found that a hybrid affiliation with the Reformed Church satisfied a variety of needs. As discussed previously, baptism conferred economic and social benefits and offered people a degree of status in colonial society. Ongoing consistorial complaints about persistent idolatry, superstition, and immorality imply that baptized Asians and Eurasians blended some form of Protestant faith with customary ways. Moreover, foregoing full membership as a communicant allowed them to circumvent the disciplinary oversight of a consistory. In fact, this informal partial membership is exactly what many Dutch men and women in the patria engaged in. Known as liefhebbers (sympathizers), a significant number of individuals in the Netherlands affiliated with the Church as baptized Christians but did not seek formal membership, and hence avoided the burdens of consistorial discipline. Baptized Asians, or at least some of them, did consider themselves Christians, for, as Johannes Roman observed, they ‘imagine themselves already to be good Christians … yet continue as in previous times after the desires of Heathens’.Footnote 64 From an indigenous point of view, it made sense to identify as a Protestant Christian, and yet to maintain religious customs that ministers deemed idolatrous and to pursue a lifestyle outside the bounds of Reformed moral norms. While Church leaders in the colonies held out hope that Asians would progress in the Christian faith, they fashioned a liminal space that met their needs. In so doing, Asians exerted an important influence in perpetuating religious hybridity in Calvinist churches overseas.
A global perspective: colonialism, accommodation, and orthodoxy
The theological and cultural struggles that troubled Dutch Calvinists corresponded to tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy that were intrinsic to all Christian missionary enterprises. At roughly the same time that E. F. Le Boucq was stirring up strife in the East Indies, Catholic missionaries in China and India were contending with one another over whether Christian converts could observe Confucian and Hindu rites. Although these episodes have their own specific contexts and their own unique characteristics, they point to fundamental patterns within proselytizing faiths in the early modern period. Christian missionaries of all stripes had to negotiate cultural differences as they broadcast their faiths into new lands. Local peoples interacted with these messages and often reshaped them in a variety of unpredictable ways, independent of missionary control. The challenge for all principals within any missionary-minded creed, both in the heartland and on the frontier, was to uphold the integrity of core salvific values yet to render them meaningful in divergent cultural settings. A brief sketch of these conflicting tendencies within programmes of Christianization in the early modern period helps contextualize the Dutch missionary experience in Asia from a global perspective.
The movement of Catholic Christianity from its core region in the Latin West into a mission periphery shares important similarities with but also contains key differences from Calvinist ventures. Aspirations to spread the gospel emerged as a central component of the Iberian empires, which had made extensive contacts with African, Asian, and American societies by the end of the fifteenth century. Thousands of missionary priests and nuns accompanied Portuguese, Spanish, and later French empire builders across the Americas, along the coastal regions of Africa and South Asia, into Ming China and Tokugawa Japan, and throughout maritime Southeast Asia. Most of these priests and nuns belonged to religious orders that either arose (Jesuits, Capuchins, and Ursulines) or experienced renewal (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians) in the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As they preached, set up churches, schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and learned local languages, they made Catholic Christianity the first genuinely global religion.
Dutch Reformed clergy, in the pay of Dutch commercial companies or as part of migration streams to North America, pushed out into the global periphery considerably later than their Catholic rivals. And they did so in far lower numbers. Fewer than 800 Calvinist ministers served overseas during the era of the VOC and WIC, compared to exponentially more Catholics.Footnote 65 Over 3,000 priests, for instance, laboured in the Andes in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 66 Since Dutch missions functioned on a much smaller scale, and did not get on track until more than a century after Catholic ones, Reformed evangelism faced clear disadvantages. In Asia, almost all societies encountered by Calvinists had already experienced Catholic activity, sometimes heavily so. In Southeast Asia, the Dutch arrival also came on the heels of the expansion of Islam, adding yet another layer of competition.Footnote 67 Only in Formosa did Dutch missionaries have the opportunity to proselytize among peoples who had no prior contact with Catholic or Muslim activity.
As a result, in a number of areas, especially in the East Indies and South Asia, natives baptized into Catholicism comprised the primary mission field for Dutch missionaries. Since these people were already nominal Christians, this situation created a different type of mission field from that faced by Catholic missionaries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Dutch missionary sources do not provide much insight into how previously baptized peoples understood Christianity, except that Calvinists considered them to be utterly contaminated by idolatry. Calvinist pastors complained persistently that the antecedence of Catholic missionaries greatly thwarted efforts at turning locals into Protestant Christians. The Batavia consistory declared, for example, ‘that there was almost no chance of dislodging superstition from the minds’ of pagans in places where Roman Catholics had already dangled ‘alluring idols before their eyes’.Footnote 68 Many Calvinists pressed the point that Catholic idolatry played well with pagan idolatry, inoculating adherents from true Christianity.Footnote 69 Thus, since Reformed theologians and pastors drew connections between ‘heathen’ and ‘papist’ idolatry, they did not consider attempts to Christianize previously baptized peoples as categorically different from the mission to convert many non-Christian peoples.Footnote 70
What constituted idolatry for Calvinists, however, formed a bridge for Catholic missionaries to convey Christianity in somewhat familiar terms, and to link its functions to those of native religions and philosophies. Catholic teaching on the role of the sacraments in transmitting salvation allowed for more of an opening for priests to make room for local religious practices than for Calvinists. According to Catholic dogma, baptism was necessary for salvation. In contrast, for Calvinists, baptism (and communion) were signs of God's grace to strengthen Christians spiritually, but neither remitted sins nor regenerated sinners. When Catholics baptized someone, they conferred saving grace to a convert to keep him or her from eternal damnation. Consequently, Christianizing the behaviour and belief systems of indigenes remained a separate issue from saving their souls. Moreover, since Catholics recognized the presence of the sacred in the natural world and in consecrated objects, their missionaries were more likely to find some affinity with non-Christian rituals than were Calvinists, who rejected them all as idolatry.Footnote 71
Thus, Catholic religious orders around the world sought as much as possible to graft their teachings and practices onto the customs and belief systems of indigenous societies. The Society of Jesus attracted fame and notoriety for their syncretistic methods, as Matteo Ricci and his early converts famously attempted to harmonize Christianity with Confucianism, while Robert Nobili stressed the compatibility of Catholicism with Hinduism. Yet a large body of scholarship on Catholic missions in the Americas has made it abundantly clear that Jesuits were not the only missionaries to try to adapt their faith to local ways. Franciscans in central Mexico in the early 1500s, for example, constructed churches in the manner of native open-air porticos and used local people in worship services ‘to sing and dance for Christ and the saints as much as they had for the traditional gods’. Friars in the same area replaced indigenous concepts of holiness and diabolism with Christian ones in Nahuatl texts.Footnote 72 Across Mexico, a number of cults devoted to the Virgin blurred the lines between Marian piety and zeal for local goddesses such as Tonantzin and Xochiquetzal.Footnote 73 In South America, Jesuits partly attracted Guaraní peoples to reducciones by music, dance, and claims of potent magic.Footnote 74
Likewise, when missionaries entered Kongo at the end of the fifteenth century they utilized Kikongo terms central to Kongo cosmology to denote Christian conceptions of God, the holy, and the spirit. Kongolese converts played a primary role in inflecting Christianity to their own traditional religious outlook, especially when Portuguese priests abandoned the area for Angola later in the sixteenth century.Footnote 75 The Philippines provides a similar parallel of the blending of Christian and native religious cultures in China, Spanish America, and Africa.Footnote 76 Missionaries touted the medical benefits of baptism and holy water, while converts interwove death rituals with Christian prayers, invoked local spirits, and reported the miraculous intercession of saints. Vicente Rafael's study of conversion in Tagalog society has shown that local people viewed Christianity through the cultural lens of ritual debt appeasement, in which conversion enabled them to mollify maleficent ancestral spirits.Footnote 77
The syncretistic connections to native religious mentalities by Catholic missionaries were not, for the most part, cynical strategies crafted to hoodwink benighted peoples. Furthermore, indigenous peoples certainly appropriated Christian concepts for their own cultural outlook, blending elements of Christianity with traditional beliefs and practices. Local appropriations of Christian teachings often lay beyond the control of missionaries, so it is important to distinguish between the syncretistic aims of missionaries and the syncretistic effects of their enterprise. The evidence from both Calvinists and Catholics in this study indicates that pioneer missionaries intentionally used syncretistic approaches to relate their message to people who dwelled in divergent theoretical and cultural domains. In his effort to relate Christianity to Confucianism, Ricci was stung by criticism from other missionaries, Jesuits as well as Dominican rivals, that he had concocted a hybrid religious system more closely reminiscent of Judaism, or even Islam, than anything else. As Jonathan Spence has explained, ‘Ricci struggled to decide how to solve this problem of simplifying the presentation of a doctrine, without losing control of its central and definable core …. How are we to present ourselves in another culture?’Footnote 78 The abundant sources available to us on Catholic experiences indicate that disagreements frequently took place during most of the early encounters, over where to draw the line between cultural accommodation and religious orthodoxy. No doubt a number of factors, such as rivalry between religious orders similar to the fracas among Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits in China, contributed to these disputes.
But rivalry and church politics did not obscure the authentic disagreements about where culture ends and religion begins. In New France, for example, Augustinian Recollects determined that missionaries first had to ‘humanize … this barbarity, to render it susceptible to laws’ before they could convert Iroquois ‘savages’ to Catholicism.Footnote 79 Jesuit fathers rejected the need to ‘Frenchify’ the natives, yet many of Ricci's contemporaries and successors in the East expressed strong reservations that his answer to the cultural question violated the boundaries of orthodoxy.Footnote 80 Nicolo Longobardi, Ricci's successor as head of the Jesuit mission in China, distanced himself from his predecessor's insistence that classical Confucian tradition recognized a supreme being akin to the Christian conception of God. Longobardi demurred, writing ‘For me, with the permission of this good Father [Ricci] and those who follow our Fathers [Jesuits], I take a contrary view and I believe the ancient philosophers were as Atheists.’Footnote 81 Even in areas marked by conquest and formal forced conversions, such as Mexico and Peru, missionaries still had to appeal to aspects of indigenous religious culture to bring subaltern peoples along in the new faith.
As we have seen, many Calvinist missionaries in Asia also adopted an accommodative outlook as they encountered possible converts. Johannes Roman described how the Batavia consistory had traditionally made concessions for the weaknesses of Asians seeking baptism. He explained:
it happens sometimes that some [people] with a little spiritual insight have already ascribed overmuch importance to the sacrament [of baptism], mistakenly thinking that not experiencing it will absolutely rob them of salvation; and because they should not be refused the water of Holy Baptism, they learn in a short time (though with little understanding) the Lord's Prayer, the 12 articles of faith, and answers to a few questions … and thereupon they receive Holy Baptism.Footnote 82
Church authorities baptized people with minimal preconditions because ‘they should not be refused the water of Holy Baptism’, while recognizing that converts understood little about the faith and misunderstood the sacrament. Perhaps these concessions appear mild compared with Catholic acceptance of Confucian rites. Yet for Calvinists, dividing the sacraments set aside an important canon from the Synod of Dort, broke with practices in the Netherlands, and represented the most syncretistic policy within the theological framework of Reformed Protestantism. As a result it produced intractable conflicts between core and periphery, and among overseas ministers, off and on for a hundred years.
Though various parties within Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism opposed accommodation, nevertheless in each faith an adaptive strategy prevailed in the first phases of missionary outreach. The dominant trend in all subsequent programmes of Christianization placed emphasis on orthodoxy, as partisans from the core took up the longstanding criticisms that religious accommodation constituted heretical compromise. Calvinist leaders in the Netherlands pressed the Batavian consistory to abandon dividing the sacraments in the mid 1600s, and then later Batavia and Dutch districts pressed ministers in outlying areas to do the same. A growing stress on orthodoxy also emerged in Catholic missionary practice.
Powerful parties within the Catholic Church struck out against compromises with non-Christian religious conventions. In both the Calvinist and Catholic cases, criticism of accommodation had existed since the beginnings of the missionary thrusts, though emphasis on right belief and behaviour gained the upper hand after the first wave of successful proselytizing. In New Spain, one of the most heavily missionized regions in the global spread of Catholicism, the initial enthusiasm to convert large numbers of Indians gave way to fully fledged campaigns to Christianize them completely by the mid sixteenth century.Footnote 83 Shortly after the conquests of Hernán Cortés and other conquistadors, Franciscan missionaries followed and baptized natives en masse in the early 1500s. By 1524, the friars counted one million baptized Indians, a number that quadrupled by 1540. Toribio de Benevente claimed to have baptized 300,000 himself.Footnote 84 In colonial territories, Spanish authorities worked as hard to Christianize public space as the Dutch did in theirs, by removing native images, eliminating sacred sites, outlawing all non-Christian religious practices, and issuing ordinances to uphold Christian norms of morality. Nevertheless, missionaries conflated indigenous symbols with Christian ones and often overlooked the persistence of traditional forms of worship.
By the middle of the sixteenth century Catholic authorities started to take a dimmer view of syncretistic elements in native Christianity. In the Yucatán, the discovery of a cache of images and human skulls in a cave provoked the Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa to prosecute a relentless inquisition against idolatry and paganism. As many as 4,500 natives were flogged and tortured, with over 100 executed. From this point, missionaries took a strict stance against Indian practices, both real and imagined, even refusing to baptize natives for a time because of their ‘pertinacious idolatry’.Footnote 85 In Mexico, the arrival of inquisitions, secular clergy parochial institutions, and churchmen steeped in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation signified a departure from accommodation and a move to an emphasis on orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Alan Knight encapsulates the new trend: ‘as a harsh post-Tridentine authoritarianism came to prevail … Europe's paranoid fear of diabolism began to infiltrate the colony’.Footnote 86 In Peru as well, the archbishop initiated cycles of idolatry inspections in the seventeenth century to combat the vestiges of ‘indigenous superstitions’.Footnote 87 Recent scholarship has emphasized that Catholic authorities in Spanish America were far from successful in undermining syncretism, even if their perceptions of it had shifted enormously since the initial missionary contacts. In the Philippines, Spanish colonial authorities pursued the same policy of Christianizing society by destroying native religious objects and imposing new guidelines for marriage and sexual relations. As in New Spain, however, it was only after a generation of steady and intensive educational activity, from the 1560s to the 1610s, that Filipino folk beliefs began to lose their pagan character and acquire a Christian veneer.Footnote 88
Though Jesuits in China had taken criticism for their willingness to please the literati since the days of Matteo Ricci, the tide began to turn against accommodation at the end of the seventeenth century. Charles Maigrot, the vicar apostolic for Fujian province, issued a directive in 1693 condemning Chinese Christians participating in rites that venerated ancestors or Confucius. He based the mandate on longstanding objections raised by Dominicans, Franciscans, and even some Jesuits that the observances were religious, since participants offered petitionary prayers, witnessed sacrifices, read ceremonial texts, and prostrated themselves.Footnote 89 Furthermore, Maigrot contended that Ricci's claim that the Chinese worshipped the God of the Christians was patently false, repeating Longobardi's claim that all Confucians were atheists.Footnote 90 The order set off an appeal process to Rome against the rites and against all the Church pronouncements that had sanctioned them to that point. The issue worked its way glacially through the labyrinthine papal bureaucracy, bogged down by jurisdictional disputes and political rancour among the religious orders, prelates in Asia, and members of the College of Cardinals in Rome. In 1704, Pope Clement XI upheld the validity of Maigrot's 1693 prohibitions, with subsequent papal decrees in 1710, 1715, and 1742. In response, the Qing imperial court officially expelled all Christian missionaries in 1732.Footnote 91 Thus, the triumph of orthodoxy over syncretism in the Chinese mission came at a high price, choking off Western and Christian influence until the nineteenth century.Footnote 92
Conclusion
The conventional narrative that historians have constructed of early modern missionary enterprises has until recently functioned within the narrow confines of success and failure. Current scholarship on Catholic missions has broadened the perspective to give attention to indigenous influences in creating local and hybrid religious cultures from these missionary encounters. Ultimately, these syncretistic beliefs and practices survived the recurrent orthodox campaigns to root out idolatry and superstition. Since scholars have only just begun to analyse Protestant missions from a multidimensional perspective, Calvinists have customarily been dismissed as failures, either because they were allegedly indifferent to the wider world or because they were hamstrung by texts and exclusivist doctrines.
A global perspective, combined with an awareness of cultural hybridities, shows that Calvinist and Catholic missionaries exhibited similar characteristics in their efforts to Christianize new lands. Spatially, missionary movements operated within a core–periphery structure that facilitated interaction between the heartland and the religious frontier. Religious authorities in Europe insisted on an allegiance to right belief and practice, while Calvinists and Catholics in the field saw their first duty as bridging cultural disparities. Missionaries were embedded within imperial programmes and commercial ventures that complicated and compromised the message of salvation. Whenever possible, however, colonial authorities used their social, economic, and political leverage to Christianize, along either Catholic or Protestant lines. Most significantly for this study, a tension between accommodation and orthodoxy existed within Christianity, one of the two great proselytizing faiths (alongside Islam) of the early modern period.
Of course, different missionaries and religious authorities came down on different sides of the issue at different times. Nevertheless, the general tendency in Catholic and Reformed Protestant Christianity was for the initial missionary wave to privilege accommodation in order to gain a toehold in new societies. Calvinists divided sacraments, Jesuits endorsed Confucian rites, and Franciscans blended goddesses with Marian devotion. Later, a second missionary strain, emanating from the core, sought to bring practice in the periphery in line with universal, orthodox standards. Calvinists tried to unite sacraments, the papacy rejected Chinese rites, and inquisitors looked for idolatry. Despite these campaigns, syncretistic observances and conceptions survived across the world, since today we recognize differences between the practice of Catholicism in Mexico and in Europe, and the exercise of Reformed Protestantism in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Christianity, in both Catholic and Protestant guises, took as the Great Commission the call to convert others, and both forms placed great emphasis on right belief and practice. These drives produced momentous struggles between accommodation and orthodoxy in early modern mission fields, and help to account for the unique blend of religious universalism and diversity in modern times.
Charles Parker is Professor of History and the Eugene A. Hotfelder Professor of Humanities at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Global interactions in the early modern age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2010), Faith on the margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch golden age (Cambridge, MA, 2008), and The reformation of community: Calvinist charity and social welfare in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge, 1998).
