John Robinson and the Dutch Reformed Church

Abstract

Whilst the English Separatists and Non-Separating Independents, the forerunners of the congregationalists as delineated by Dexter, Arber, Powicke, Burrage, and more lately by Miller and Stearns, were conducting their internecine warfare in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church was also going through difficult times. John Robinson, who came to the Netherlands in 1606, and whose ‘broadly tolerant mind’ and ‘undying spirit’ ‘dominate the consciences of a mighty nation in the land beyond the seas,’ as is stated on the plaque to his memory inside the mighty Pieterskerk in Leiden, was truly ecumenical. For not only did he deplore the disputes of the Congregationalists among themselves, but also their hostility to the Dutch Reformed Church and its English branches, such as that at Amsterdam.