'Polemische Sympathie': Daniel Chantepie De La Saussaye (1818-1874) En Allard Pierson (1831-1896) in Hun Onderlinge Verhouding

Abstract

AbstractIn his Oudere Tijdgenooten (1883) the Dutch scholar Allard Pierson included a sympathetic sketch of his 'older contemporary' Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, one of the leading Dutch theologians, who had died in 1874. He depicted him as an evangelical who in his theology transcended the limitations of the evangelical revival movement (the 'Réveil'). The two men had known each other from Pierson's youth onward. Pierson himself was a son of the 'Réveil', even more so than La Saussaye, but under the influence of his Utrecht teacher C. W. Opzoomer he had become a theological modernist. In the period when they were both ministers in the Walloon church they carried on a theological controversy, in which Pierson defended the modernist, La Saussaye a more orthodox point of view. Their polemics sometimes endangered their feelings of mutual friendship, but an underlying sense of personal sympathy remained. In 1865 Pierson left the ministry of the church-partly under the influence of La Saussaye's arguments, which made him aware of the incompatibility of his ecclesiastical commitments and his radical position.