Caspar Coolhaes (c.1534/36–1615) was a Reformed “libertine,” most famous for his tumultuous time as pastor in Leiden from 1574 until 1582, during which he rejected the strict confessional limits that orthodox Reformed wanted to put on church members in the young Dutch Republic. After he was excommunicated and removed from his post, he remained a thorn in the side of champions of orthodoxy for decades. Almost immediately after his death, orthodox Reformed disparaged their Remonstrant opponents by calling the notorious Coolhaes their forerunner. In the nineteenth century, after less dogmatic forms of Reformed Protestantism had gained widespread respectability, the Remonstrant church historian H. C. Rogge warmly embraced Coolhaes. Since then, there has been no full-length monograph dedicated to this fascinating intellect. Linda Stuckrath Gottschalk aims to give Coolhaes's ideas the focus they deserve in this new study of his ecclesiology.
Gottschalk argues that Coolhaes's libertinism does not mark him a forerunner of the Remonstrants, but instead reflects the spiritualism that lay at the core of his theology. His spiritualism was influenced by—but not a carbon copy of—the ideas of Sebastian Franck, Caspar Schwenckfelt, Sebastian Castellio, and Aggaeus van Albada. To make her case, she focuses primarily on the roughly thirty-one extant Dutch-language writings by Coolhaes, considered in their historical contexts, and some printed ecclesiastical sources. The first half of her book offers Coolhaes's biography. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 offer little that is new, but experts will find more of interest in chapters 4 and 5, which discuss his later life in Leiden and Amsterdam as a distiller and publisher of emblem books, polemics, and one curious Reformed almanac. The second half of the book looks at features of Coolhaes's ecclesiology. Three chapters examine his spiritualism, his views of church-state relations, and his opinions about the clergy. The final chapter, titled “The congregation,” seems instead to be a study of his views about the balance between church concord and religious toleration.
Scholars should thank Gottschalk for taking on this project. Pleading for Diversity makes a strong case that Coolhaes's belief that the Dutch Reformed Church should be open and diverse, and should embrace the toleration of others, was rooted in his spiritualism. Other historians have been arguing for years that the pronounced anti-confessionalism in the early Dutch Republic—of which Coolhaes is sometimes treated as representative—was shaped in good part by the strong spiritualist traditions that ran through the Low Countries and northwestern Germany from the late Middle Ages. Gottschalk does not connect her argument to these discussions, or to the extensive historiography on confessionalism and toleration in the Dutch Republic, except to note that her conclusion supports the claim made two decades ago by Cornelis Augustijn that there existed a broad non-confessional branch of Christian thought in the Dutch Reformation. The author could have made better use of the rich secondary literature in other ways as well. Her heavy dependence on the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation seems rather limited. I was perhaps most surprised on page 91, when she cited a Christian children's book as a reference for Petrus Dathenus, about whom considerable scholarship has been written.
The most exciting part of Gottschalk's book is her contribution to our understanding of the relationship between concord and toleration in Coolhaes's thinking. While scholars often treat these ideas in tension—broad and inclusive ecclesiastical unity versus legal permission for religious pluralism—Coolhaes maintained a commitment both to concord and toleration without any apparent contradiction by incorporating both into his eschatology. He argued that all Christians who accept the Old and New Testaments, the Apostle's Creed, and infant baptism should be welcomed into an inclusively-defined visible church that is overseen by civic magistrates. Yet he also believed that in the last days, Jews, Muslims, and “all sects and parties”, if they had been earnestly striving for truth, “will be called, and in the evening will be found to be working in the Vineyard of the Lord” (137). Toleration of those who did not accept broad Christian principles, that is, was only a temporary condition until the End Times, when salvation would be offered to all those with a pure spirit. While Gottschalk devotes little attention to this point, the suggestion that eschatology might help us understand how libertines reconciled concord and toleration might inspire others to ask new questions. Gottschalk's book raises other questions too: Why focus on the ecclesiology of a man for whom ecclesiology was of secondary importance? Why devote half the book to change over time, when the argument is that there was no change over time? What are we to make of the fact that Coolhaes was not Dutch but German? There are good possible answers to these questions, but Gottschalk does not fully develop them.
Gottschalk has done an enormous service in providing useful English-language summaries of Coolhaes's leading ideas. Young scholars looking to choose a project that fills a gap that has long needed to be filled should not pursue a biography and/or intellectual history of Caspar Coolhaes; an accurate, readable English-language biography of Coolhaes and his most important ideas now exists, and I will be citing it for years to come. However, Pleading for Diversity does not completely satisfy its potential. There is still more to say about this figure, and others like him, within the religious landscape of the early Dutch Republic.
