Dr. J. Glenn Friesen

Life as a Search

© J. Glenn Friesen 2003-2010

At the Golden Temple (Age 21)

Elephant Blessing Tamil Nadu (Age 49)

If Kierkegaard is right that our life makes sense only in retrospect, perhaps there is a thread that can be discerned in the following brief history of my life, which you may find hilarious, although I assure you it has had its moments of pain.

I was born on Easter Sunday 1952 in a Catholic hospital in the big city of Saskatoon because my mother did not trust the hospital in our home town of Rosthern. My mother dedicated me to God, but the attending nurses pointed out that this was something only I could do. So theological questions arose even at my birth. You might have thought that my mother would have adopted the nurses' point of view, since it was so evidently Anabaptist to insist that decisions of faith cannot be made for infants. But my mother wanted to engineer a replacement (me) for her father, I.P. Friesen, who died shortly before I was born, causing me an as yet undiagnosed intrauterine trauma. He had had a spectacular conversion in Long Beach California. He and his family had been attending revival meetings held by Aimee Semple McPherson; his conversion was certainly related to her preaching. This fundamentalist influence continued to rule my childhood.

On the other hand, my family was Mennonite, and this brought with it its own tensions, such as a mistrust of all education. There was the general attitude of “geleerder verkeerder” [the more that you learn, the crazier you are]. But my grandfather I.P. sent his children to public school, which resulted in his being shunned by the rest of the town and even by his own family, who would not even eat at the same table with him. As a merchant, his business suffered, and he appealed to the Lieutenant-Governor of Saskatchewan for “British justice and fair play.” This is the first legal influence in my history. The shunning stopped, but the tension in my family between Christ and culture did not. The family desire for education was evident in my uncle Isaac, who earned his doctorate from the University of Basel when he was 70 years old. One of his supervisors was the theologian Oscar Cullman. The thesis was entitled, “The Glory of the Ministry of Jesus Christ.” I find it fascinating that Cullman's view of eternity as extended time is the one adopted by most reformational philosophers. And yet it is in conflict with Dooyeweerd's own distinction between cosmic time, supratemporal aevum, and God's eternity.

My great-grandfather on the other side of the family had been in trouble with the Old Colony Mennonite Church for riding a bicycle. His son John C. (my other grandfather) purchased an automobile and had to join a different congregation; only a horse and buggy were permitted. My grandmother was disciplined for playing a harmonica; musical instruments were part of the worldly culture that was to be avoided.

The revivalist influence on my family was evident in how I spent my summer holidays. Every summer my mother took us on a three day train trip (coach class) to Winona Lake, Indiana, for three weeks of conferences of Youth for Christ and Moody Bible Institute. Uncle Isaac had discovered the place. My father wisely refused to go. At Winona Lake, I was subjected to two emotionally wrenching hellfire and damnation altar calls every day. I was quite happy for a change of mood when I returned to school in the fall.

In the eighth grade, I made a break from the Winona Lake routine, and I attended a cello workshop at a Catholic monastery, where one of the priests taught me how to shoot pool. There was also a swimming hole behind the monastery. This was all very liberating. When I was 16, I spent my summer on a BSA Thunderbolt motorcycle, driving across the Western United States on a budget of less than a hundred dollars. This was before the movie “Easy Rider.” My idea of hostels was to knock at the local jails along the way, where I was locked in for the night with the inmates, given my bowl of porridge in the morning and then released. I don’t recommend this to teenagers today.

I got kicked out of high school in Grade 11 for wearing my hair too long (hey, this was the 60’s!). The next year I ended up at a Quaker high school in Ackworth, Yorkshire, England, where I appreciated the inner light mysticism of George Fox. During the long school breaks I did voluntary service for Oxfam and at a Cheshire Nursing Home. Both of these experiences showed me suffering that I had not noticed before. It was almost too much for me to take.

During a rowdy game of soccer in a church hall in Bradford, (how did we avoid the stained glass windows?) an Anglican vicar told me to visit Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. So in the spring of 1970 I spent two months at l’Abri. This was my first introduction to Dooyeweerd. Schaeffer had obtained some of Dooyeweerd's ideas through his friend the art historian Hans Rookmaaker. I was impressed because here was a Christian who was not afraid to engage in intellectual thought. I resolved to study apologetics, and I read all I could of Cornelius Van Til, too (not knowing at that time the disagreement between Van Til and Dooyeweerd, and Dooyeweerd's rejection of a propositional view of revelation).

I went to a Missionary Alliance Bible College the next year. I was regarded with suspicion because I had been to l’Abri and was therefore too philosophical. This tension, of always being on the wrong side of the school I attended, seemed to follow me. When I transferred to the University of Saskatchewan to study philosophy, my attempts to integrate Dooyeweerd’s ideas were regarded with suspicion in the prevailing environment of logical positivism and analytical philosophy. I was the sole student to study Kant. So my class of one traveled to a beach outside of Caracas, Venezuela, and I read the Critique of Pure Reason lying in the hot sand. I think there is something rather northern about Kant's philosophy; it did not particularly fit in with a beach resort.

I did take some courses through the Catholic College St. Thomas More on campus, where the priest, who was so enthusiastic about Gabriel Marcel, also surprised us by shouting “Holy Moses!” at frequent intervals, and then rushing over to the nuns who were sitting meekly in class; he then marked large white “X’s” with chalk on their black habits. I was not sure of his meaning, but it made a strong impression. He later practiced exorcisms, but outside of class.

In another class on the Philosophy of Language (a trendy subject at the time), we discussed issues like whether a rabbit could be called a 'gavagan.' Another student, concerned about the names of things and people, made the outburst, “But what about Baby Face Nelson?” The professor did not understand the question, and neither do I even today. But again, it made a strong impression.

During this time I was baptized into the Christian Reformed Church (as an adult! this had never been done before by the pastor, and he had to consult the manual). I thought that Dooyeweerd was necessarily tied to Calvinism. This was somewhat of a courageous act, in view of Calvin's involvement in the burning at the stake of the Anabaptist Michael Servetus in 1553.

In 1972, I briefly attended the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. I bought a set of Dooyeweerd's New Critique, and the first of many underlinings and notations began at that time. Unfortunately, I was again on the wrong side. After I gave a class presentation, Henk Hart announced to the class that I was “a prime example of apostate thought,” because of the analytical philosophy I had picked up at university. His observation was probably true, but not particularly helpful to me at the time. What I had been trying to do was to relate Frege's idea of sense and reference to Dooyeweerd's distinction between central and peripheral. Perhaps there is still merit in trying to do that.

So I left for a 7 month trip to India, following the example of another ICS student, and followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo many centuries before (I actually carried a copy of his Travels with me). My idea was to go south from London, hitchhike down the coast of Yugoslavia to Greece and then to turn left at Istanbul. My naïve belief that no one could possibly harm me was based on my identification with the character Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. My first encounter with harm came when I visited the holy peninsula of Mount Athos, where no females, animal or human, had been allowed for 900 years. After reaching the peninsula by boat, my passport was taken from me and I was told to meet the rest of the passengers at the monastery on the other side of the mountain. They drove away in a Jeep. I almost died in a blizzard that was as strong as any Saskatchewan storm. I could hardly see my running shoes (I had foolishly discarded my hiking boots in London, believing that southern Europe would be warm). When I finally reached the settlement, an Orthodox monk with long white hair said I would have to leave because my hair was too long. This seemed remarkably inconsistent. I refused, and the local police me up for the night, serving me some baked beans and allowing me to warm up by the fire. The next day I left the peninsula. I regret not having seen the beautiful frescoes or mosaics that National Geographic assures me can be seen in these monasteries.

In Istanbul I caught a freak bus at the Pudding Shop (opposite the Blue Mosque), and for the next few weeks we drove slowly through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, with a collection of six 8-track tapes that were played over and over at high volume. One of them was “Concert for Bangladesh.” It was an amazing trip that could not possibly be replicated now. The group on the bus included two guys who wore bowler hats and whom we referred to as the New Jersey droogs in homage to “A Clockwork Orange.” Another fellow at the back was typing out poems that he hoped to present to the President of Ceylon (as it was then called). Other passengers were concentrating on buying as many narcotics as they could from the pharmacies we passed by. At one of the many obscure inns where we stopped for the night (this one was near Mount Ararat, where unfortunately I saw no sign of the ark), we had quite a discussion about Ezekiel's visions of the wheels within wheels. My fellow passengers took a distinctly chemical interpretation. To me it sounded more like a prophecy of Dooyeweerd's modal spheres. Along the way, there were landslides and road closures. The road itself was usually only about six feet wide. And for a week we drove through snow and ice that made it look like we were visiting the Columbia Icefields in Alberta. In Iran, the Shah was still in power and Iranian students would talk to us in whispers about their political situation.

And then we got to Afghanistan, and that remains one of the most magical of my memories. In Herat, camels proudly walked up and down the street. After seeing the open air meat market, most of us became vegetarians. We lived on spinach omelets. I had some beautiful knee-high boots made for five dollars by a cobbler who was smoking dope and who wanted to hide hashish in the heels of the boots. The boots were too small, so when we reached Kandahar, I went to the market, waving them around my head. An excited group of Afghans tried on the boots (just like a scene out of Cinderella), and eventually I traded them for two embroidered shirts that proved not to be colourfast. We stayed at the Peace Hotel in Kandahar, where for a few cents I was able to get a hot shower. One of the employees had to build a wood fire under the water tank, and I had to wait for the tank to heat up. In Kabul I shared a room with an Italian fellow who liked to meditate in front of the open window with the Kabul snow coming in. Even at this time it was dangerous to travel in these parts. Seriously, there were signs warning you to get out of the Khyber pass before nightfall because bandits would regularly shoot at the passing travelers. On the bus, I read Hesse’s Journey to the East.

The border between Pakistan and India was open only one day a week at that time because of hostilities. In Lahore, children had thrown rocks at me, and I hoped that India would be more welcoming. We had to walk across no man's land. I took a train to Amritsar, where I visited the Golden Temple, and listened to the Sikhs reciting their holy Scriptures.

India had an enormous impact on me, although like most other hippies of the day I was disappointed. I did not find a guru, although I was impressed by Aurobindo’s ashram at Pondicherry. I was told by a former ambassador in Delhi that most of the Indian population was more concerned about finding food than about spirituality. I have since learned that that is not so. Two more trips to India have shown me a great deal of its spirituality. But at the time, it was hard for me to overlook the poverty, and I experienced only disillusionment. Hesse’s book should have alerted me to the fact that, like the pilgrims he describes, the problem was in myself and not in the East. In Jung’s terms, India constellated in me a huge personal shadow that I then projected outwardly.

For three months I traveled over the subcontinent, mostly by train, third class, wooden seats. The trains were pulled by huge steam engines, and the soot came in through the open windows. A three day train ride from Delhi to Bombay cost two dollars, after the student discount. Buying the ticket could sometimes take half a day. For fifty cents extra, I could get the right to sleep on what looked like a luggage rack. I made the mistake of getting off the train to visit some place or other and found it was not so easy to get on another train, much less get a seat. I ended up spending a night with about twenty other passengers crammed into the corridor next to the toilet. While waiting for the train, I was approached by a friendly stranger whose first question to me was, “What is the historical, political and geographical significance of your country?” A question truly worthy of Dooyeweerdean analysis.

In Mysore (a city that certainly lived up to its name), I was stung by a swarm of hundreds of angry bees as I was visiting a church. It is interesting that Christianity came to India with the disciple St. Thomas, long before Christianity reached northern Europe. But these thoughts of historical significance did not really concern me as I tried to run from the swarm. This was the second time I thought I would die. I ran to a bus, but the driver saw me with the bees chasing me like the dark cloud around Charlie Brown, and he slammed the door shut. My glasses were broken, and I sat on the church steps and watched the bees sting me one by one and break their bodies off leaving their stings. When there were no more, I went into the church and told the priest, and he responded with equanimity, “Yes, my son, they are stinging me, too.” But the altar boy helped pull out the stings, and got me to a hospital where I spent the night surrounded by people who were screaming in pain. They gave me antihistamine, and only afterwards did I think that I was probably more at risk from the syringe.

I visited a leprosy clinic in Andhra Pradesh that my grandfather (the shunned one) had paid for. (How had he learned of India? He was in fact a well-traveled man for his day. He never visited India, but he had made a grand tour to the Holy Land and to Monte Carlo. I still do not see the connection). I arrived at the nearest village to the mission station on a very late train. I asked for directions and got the usual answer of “Go straight.” And as usual, several people gave this advice while pointing in different directions. Eventually someone appeared to actually know, although he mysteriously did not even look at me while he pointed in yet another direction. I walked off in pitch darkness, hardly able to see my feet. Mount Athos déja vu. But here the danger was not of blizzards, but of snakes and other things that go bump in the night. I must have walked for two miles. I suddenly heard a creaking noise in front of me, and I almost did bump into an oxcart. I hailed the driver, but both he and his passenger dived out of the cart and ran away. They must have thought I was a dacoit (bandit). I guess my huge silhouette with my frame backpack didn't help much, either.

I flew out of Delhi to Amsterdam, where I hitchhiked up to the tip of Norway. That's a long way. From Oslo to Hammerfest is the same distance as from Oslo to Rome,or so I was told. Norway was beautiful. Coming back through Lapland, though, the mosquitoes were so fierce that we rushed from the VW microbus into our tents. The guys in the other tent didn't set it up right, and the pole collapsed during the night. But they were too frightened to get out and face the bugs, so they spent the whole night under a flat canvas.

But I fell in love with the Netherlands. It was clean, beautiful, and there was something of my heritage there, although it had been more than 300 years since my family had lived in Friesland. I resolved to study at the Vrije Universiteit, where I hoped to get to the roots of Dooyeweerd’s ideas. I understood that systematic philosophy was being taught by Hendrik van Riessen. I purchased his book Wijsbegeerte, and was able to read the Dutch with the help of a dictionary, and my knowledge of the cognates from the low German we spoke at home.

A year later, I received a Netherlands Government Scholarship to study at the Vrije Universiteit. In the summer, I took courses in Dutch through Calvin College in order to prepare myself. Professor Walter Lagerwey was a remarkable man who did his best to teach us Dutch as well as to introduce us to the art and culture of the lowlands. We took a bike trip across the Afsluitdijk, and a side trip to Belgium to see Jan van Eyck's altarpiece at St. Bavo's cathedral in Ghent, “Adoration of the Lamb.” Lagerwey also showed us how to eat raw herring and smoked eels.

At the Vrije Universiteit, along with my courses in philosophy, I had to choose a minor. I chose to study the phenomenology of non-western religions, and of Hinduism in particular. I often visited the Rijksmuseum, which had on display a large Natraj (sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva, portrayed as the Lord of Creation). I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this sculpture. But I was also uneasy at the impact that this non-Christian religion was making on me. I had felt this same combination of fascination and fear during the three months I had spent in India.

But again there was something missing in my studies. Although I completed my "Kandidaats" degree there, I was not offered even one course specifically on Dooyeweerd. I was very disappointed in Van Riessen’s teachings. I did not see anything particularly Dooyeweerdean in his view of theory as the abstraction of universals. I expressed disagreement with him on a few occasions in class; this type of interaction with the professor was not encouraged. At one of my oral exams (tentamens), he told me, “You Americans do not know how to read a book.” And again there was some truth in the observation (although not in his reference to me as an American). But there was also a noticeable disconnect with the fact that I had just graduated magna cum laude in Canada, and that I was a scholarship recipient. Anyway, my oral examinations tended towards a memorized listing of the main points in a text. It was based on an intensive reading of a few texts, as opposed to the piles of textbooks that North American students are expected to read and digest. I have learned from both educational systems, although the lessons have not always been easy. But the requirement of knowing what was on a given page of an assigned textbook was a skill that would later serve me well in my practice of law.

While I was studying in Amsterdam, I was fortunate to meet Dooyeweerd, although he had retired from teaching. At a private meeting in his study at his home, he confirmed that he, too disagreed with Van Riessen’s idea of abstraction. He told me that he still maintained the view of theory as a Gegenstand relation, and that others had not understood it. Unfortunately I did not understand it at the time, either. I also met Dooyeweerd on a less formal occasion. I had met his granddaughter, and I was invited almost every Sunday to a music evening at their home where everyone present would perform on a musical instrument or sing a song. I played classical guitar (badly). One evening Dooyeweerd was present. I recall him leaning on the piano, listening to his daughter (my friend’s mother) singing Debussy’s “Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons.” There were tears in her eyes as she sang about the children who lost their homes in war. I learned that the Dooyeweerd family had sheltered some Jews during the German occupation. Then Dooyeweerd spoke to me about music. He told me that Barth had said that when the angels in Heaven are required to play before God, they play Bach. But when the angels play for themselves, it is always Mozart. I shall forever remember and appreciate this human side of Dooyeweerd.

Although I had had such great expectations of the Vrije Universiteit, my studies there were not enjoyable. After completing my Kandidaats, I returned to Canada to do my MA at Western Ontario. Again I was subjected to disdain. My study advisor sneered at the “survey texts” that we had used for philosophy in Amsterdam. I learned from this that every institution has its own standards, and each believes that its standards are the best. I realized that the academic world is not the pure ivory tower that people imagine it to be. Observing the power games and the departmental squabbling, I decided that I should enter a profession where I would at least get paid for fighting. So I studied law and then practiced as a litigation lawyer for almost twenty years (Hey, Dooyeweerd was also a lawyer!). You can look up the reported cases if you are interested. While in law school at McGill, I was confirmed in the Anglican church, and I learned to appreciate its rich traditions. I did question the vicar about that portion of the 39 Articles [the Anglican Confession of Faith that no one reads anymore] that condemns the Anabaptists. He said it was unfortunate.

Due to health reasons, I had to leave the practice of law. I took a second magical trip to India, where I attended a most amazing wedding–I stepped out of my taxi and I found myself high up on an elephant with painted eyes and trunk. The groom rode up on a white horse, accompanied by a brass band and a dozen guys carrying chandeliers on their heads, with the last fellow carrying a portable electric generator to supply the power. There was dancing in the street, and ferocious fireworks, and the marriage itself took place around the sacred fire at the auspicious time of two in the morning. And the next day the hijras came around. They are hermaphrodites who have their own society, and who come to every house where there has a birth. The men, dressed as women, danced and sang, and the more we laughed, the more we had to pay them to prevent them putting the evil eye on the child. My host, a lawyer, told me that if the child had been born with any obvious ambiguous sexuality, they would have taken it away with them.

I met privately with the Hindu priest who had performed the wedding. He asked me the name of a flower, a colour, and a river. He then told me some most amazing personal details of my life, including my recent departure from work. Now I am not saying that this type of psychic ability counts as a mystical experience. But it was certainly outside of my ordinary experience, and it made me question my previous way of looking at the world.

I decided to return to university to get my doctorate in Religious Studies, and to explore the issue of Hindu-Christian relations. As a grad student, I was able to teach courses in Eastern Religions, The Nature of Religion, and Comparative Mysticism. I added some basic Sanskrit to the other languages I already had–English, French, Dutch, German, Greek. I loved my students; their desire to integrate spirituality into their life was so evident. However, this was not encouraged by the Department. The analytic philosophy of the 1960’s had been replaced with constructivism and postmodernism. Religious experience was regarded as the result of the concepts that we bring to our experience, and these concepts were analyzed in terms of their sociological factors. There was much talk of politically correct ideology, and which religion was oppressing whom, but there was very little interest in comparing the truth of different religious experiences or in actually experiencing them. One member of the faculty was proud of the fact that when his students asked him what his own beliefs were, he would reply that it was none of their business. I knew from the courses I taught how eager the undergraduates were to discuss precisely these issues, and I thought how sad it was that these topics were being ignored in the name of academic objectivity. It was also philosophically inconsistent, since to speak of the scholar’s objectivity depends on the very modernist assumptions that were being criticized in the name of postmodernism. So I found myself too consciously religious for Religious Studies.

I then had the good fortune to enroll at the University of South Africa, where my supervisors fully supported my spiritual quest within an academic framework. My doctoral thesis explores the experience of the French Benedictine monk Henri Le Saux (known by his Indian name Abhishiktananda), who spent most of his life trying to reconcile his Christian beliefs with his nondual (advaitic) experience in India. Abhishiktananda experienced tremendous personal anguish, keeping his beliefs in tension while he lived out his experiences. His life is an example of genuine religious dialogue. I believe that his experience, and his understanding of nondualism, can help us to interpret Dooyeweerd’s mysticism. And, as I indicate in my thesis, I believe that Dooyeweerd’s ideas can help us to relate theoretical thought to mystical experience. I made a third trip to India to investigate the Abhishiktananda archives in Delhi, and to visit several of the ashrams in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, including the beautiful Christian ashram Saccidananda [Being, Consciousness, Bliss] that he founded, also known as Shantivanam. Still another name is the ashram of the Holy Trinity. This ashram was later directed by Fr. Bede Griffiths. Since writing that disseration, I have done extensive research on the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi, whom Abhishiktananda had tried to emulate. I discovered that Ramana had been influenced by many traditions, including some western ones, and that the story of his enlightenment is not as simple as Abhishiktananda (and many others) have supposed. I also did extensive research on Paul Brunton, who really made Ramana known to the Western world. Again, Brunton's story is very different than his followers have assumed. Brunton admitted using Ramana as a "peg" on which to hang his own ideas that he had formulated prior to going to India. Some devotees of Ramana and of Brunton have not been happy with the results of my research, but I have never been afraid of probing into original sources. I received a similar disapproving reaction from reformational philosophers when I probed the sources of Dooyeweerd's philosophy.

For after completing my doctorate, I turned again to Dooyeweerd. From 1970 I had never really stopped thinking about his philosophy, or reading the writings of those who claimed to be his adherents. My studies in nondualism had shown me what attracted me to Dooyeweerd, and why my previous studies of him were unsatisfying. I wanted in particular to examine Dooyeweerd’s idea of time. When looking at the meaning of cosmic time, I discovered the writings of Franz von Baader. I was astonished at the similarities between Dooyeweerd and Baader, not only with respect to time, but for many other issues. I spent the next six months reading everything I could of both Baader and Dooyeweerd. The remarkable convergence between Dooyeweerd and Baader confirmed for me that my mystical reading of Dooyeweerd was correct. Dooyeweerd’s ideas, like Baader’s, form a complex interconnecting system. They are both difficult philosophers to read, because one idea cannot be understood in isolation from the others. But once we see the centrality of Dooyeweerd’s mysticism, many of his ideas can be understood, perhaps for the first time.

Unlike many mystics, Dooyeweerd values theoretical thought. But he also insists on the experience of the supratemporal heart. He said that his ideas on time and the supratemporal heart are key to his philosophy. But many of his followers rejected these ideas very early on. His Philosophy of the Law-Idea does not make sense without these ideas. But I am confident that when we recover this spiritual experiential dimension in Dooyeweerd, his ideas will again have tremendous appeal for today’s students. I know, because I have taught them. Constructivism, deconstruction and postmodernism will not satisfy their spiritual longings. But a mysticism that affirms both God and world, connection with others and an experiential knowledge of our true self–that is what they are looking for, and that is what Dooyeweerd can give them, if we read his philsophy, as opposed to the misinterpretations by many of his followers.

Addendum February 22/10

I wrote most of the above account of my life in early 2003, at the invitation of a philosophy student, Gregory Baus, and as a way of introducing myself to “Thinknet,” an online discussion group devoted to reformational philosophy. My article “The Mystical Dooyeweerd: The relation of his thought to Franz von Baader” had just been published, and Gregory was curious about my background. I later met Gregory at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and I was impressed with his abilities, and his understanding of the importance of the idea of the supratemporal selfhood for interpreting the philosophy of Dooyeweerd.

I met many other people on Thinknet who have since become close friends, and who have provided comments and feedback for articles I have written. These friends include:

Michael Morbey (Winnipeg), who in his 1988 article, “Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, and the Reformational Vision: Theosophy reformed,” was perhaps the first to see theosophical connections to Dooyeweerd’s work.

Janet Danielson (Vancouver), a brilliant music composer who has also shown–in an unpublished article–how some of Dooyeweerd’s ideas from a student article on Wagner carried through to his adult philosophical work. I attended the premiere in Vancouver of one of Janet’s compositions, “The Marvelous History of Mariken of Nimmigen,” based on a Dutch miracle play. It concerns a female Faust figure. Both Jung and Dooyeweerd cite Goethe’s version of Faust, and it was most interesting to see this story, which has many of the same themes, but which pre-dates not only Goethe's Faust, but even the Faust story.

Bill Gordon (Birmingham), a health professional and personal coach. Bill has a wide-ranging knowledge of philosophy and theology. Bill has referred me to historical sources and philosophical comparisons, such as Jakob Boehme, in whose work he has a great interest.

Ian Ridgway (Australia), a psychologist who is attempting to bring ideas of Christian non-dualism into his practice.

Theo Plantinga, a former philosophy professor at Redeemer University College. Theo passed away on July 4, 2008. In his last article, “Understanding Dooyeweerd better than he understood himself,” (Philosophia Reformata 74 (2009) 105-114), Theo supported my research, and criticized those who attempt to improve on Dooyeweerd’s philosophy before they have understood it properly. He submitted this article for publication two weeks before his death, at a time when he knew that he was very ill. I am honoured by his friendship, and how he took the time to write this article.

Through Thinknet, I have met many other interesting people, who did not always agree with me, but who were courteous and professional in their consideration of my ideas. But the online discussions tended to be dominated by those who were less courteous, and who often made bullying ad hominem attacks on those with whom they disagreed. For a site that is supposed to be devoted to discussions of Christian philosophy and scholarship, the tone was frequently neither Christian nor scholarly. I left Thinknet at the end of 2003, and started this website in the hope that it would lead to more fruitful philosophical discussions.

My website has been far more successful than I anticipated or hoped. It has allowed me to set out a coherent and consistent interpretation of Dooyeweerd, by making hypertext links to inter-relate the meaning of his philosophical terms. And it has allowed me to make available translations of philosophical texts that I have discovered in the archives, and new translations of many existing texts. According to Google, more than 100 people visit my website every day; my articles are viewed over 50,000 times every year. Last year, these visitors came from 164 different countries. Many visitors spend up to a half hour on each article, and then download it in .pdf format for further study. This degree of interest is far more than I could expect if I merely published these articles in print, although many articles have also been published in journals. And the Google rankings of my web pages indicate that these ideas are being consulted and linked to by an ever-increasing number of people.

One of the articles that receives the most visits–about 20 every day–is my article on Dooyeweerd's philosophy of aesthetics.Why is this article so popular? One reason must be that it includes images of two works of art that Dooyeweerd discusses. Ever since my undergraduate days, I have wondered how philosophers can talk so much about art without ever looking at it, or even including an image in their texts. A second reason must be that people are surprised to find a theory of art that defends a view of universally valid norms for beauty and aesthetics. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, and aesthetics does not come down to just a matter of subjectivistic taste. My article also rescues Dooyeweerd from ideas of artistic truth that derive from Heidegger, a critique that I have expanded in my article “Standing in the Truth: A Response to Lambert Zuidervaart.” Another (book-length) article that generates a lot of interest is “Imagination, Image of God and Wisdom of God: Theosophical Themes in Dooyeweerd's Philosophy.” Again, I have included some images to illustrate my article, and in that article, I have attempted to show in an integral way how Dooyeweerd's views on imagination are central not only to his ideas on art and aesthetics, but also to his ideas of perception, history, scientific theory, as well as all our other acts. The comparison to theosophical themes shows how different Dooyeweerd's philosophy is from the way it is often presented–as a Christianizing of Aristotle's view of abstraction. Although Dooyeweerd's brother-in-law Dirk Vollenhoven did speak of theory in terms of abstraction, Dooyeweerd rejected this view. Reformational philosophy has failed to appreciate the differences on almost every point between Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. See “Dooyeweerd versus Vollenhoven: The religious dialectic in reformational philosophy.”

But it will take many years to turn around the prevailing ideas in reformational philosophy. A new reformation is required if reformational philosophy is to recover Dooyeweerd's spiritual vision. This is why I wrote my “95 Theses on Herman Dooyeweerd.” Almost every one of these theses has been disputed or rejected by those who claim to follow Dooyeweerd. I really fail to understand why reformational philosophers want to claim to follow Dooyeweerd's philosophy when in fact they deny what he himself said was essential for understanding his philosophy.

I can understand how those who have devoted their entire careers to teaching reformational philosophy may be dismayed to now find that what they have been teaching about Dooyeweerd is incorrect. But I expected that professional philosophers would be interested in looking at the original textual sources and the historical connections that I have discovered. Instead, some of these reformational philosphers continue to defend their previous interpretations, regardless of what the actual text says. They have tried to evade the plain meaning of the text by alleging contradictions in Dooyeweerd (even though their own reasoning is fallacious), or by alleging that Dooyeweerd changed his ideas (although the text relied on does not show this at all), or by trying to divide Dooyeweerd's work into different periods (despite the fact that Dooyeweerd himself criticized those who tried to divide up his work in this way), or by a postmodern argument that the reader constructs his/her own text, and that there is therefore no original text to which we can appeal. But such a postmodern approach signals the end of real philosophical discussion. It involves a performative contradiction–those who put forward such a postmodernist opinion want their own view to be accepted, while denying that we can or need to consider the intentions of other writers. The unwillingness or inability of certain reformational philosophers to read Dooyeweerd's text has really surprised me. It seems to support what Dooyeweerd said about philosophical debates not being resolvable by rational argument; philosophical differences are governed by religious ground-motives. Dooyeweerd insisted that his philosophy could not be understood apart from his idea that our selfhood is supratemporal. Those who reject this idea of the supratemporal selfhood are necessarily involved in what Dooyeweerd called ‘immanence philosophy’—they seek their starting point within, or immanent to temporal reality. In giving up the supratemporal selfhood, reformational philosophy has become immanence philosophy, and has ended up advocating the kind of philosophy against which Dooyeweerd directed his philosophy!

Some of the barriers that prevent reformational philosophers from appreciating Dooyeweerd's philosophy seem to be theological in nature. These restrictive views are based on a kind of Biblical exegesis that regards man as purely temporal, or on a propositional view of revelation that is in fact rationalistic, or on a narrow kind of Calvinism. All of thse viewpoints were rejected by Dooyeweerd. He specifically rejected the kind of Biblicism that seems to be the basis for many reformational philosophers. He distinguished neo-Calvinism from Calvinism, and he wanted to speak of ‘Christian philosophy’ instead of ‘Calvinistic philosophy.’ He insisted that philosophy did not receive its direction from theology. And he said that the idea of the supratemporal selfhood, and even the Christian ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption could not be decided by theological exegesis.

Reformational philosophers are probably surprised to learn that Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, two of the founders of reformational philosophy, were influenced by non-Calvinistic sources, such as the Catholic Christian theosophist Franz von Baader. But my research has been confirmed by the work of Lieuwe Mietus, who has shown Kuyper’s intense interest in Baader. I have also written about Baader's influence on Kuyper. This research can no longer be ignored. Even the idea that Christians should oppose the autonomy of thought is not original to reformational philosophy. It derives from Baader. Kuyper expressly refers to Baader for this idea! Kuyper learned of Baader from J.H. Gunning, Jr., the theologian who introduced Baader to Dutch reformed thought. Baader also influenced many Catholic theologians in the 20th century, which is why in 1964, the year before his retirement, Dooyeweerd's Talk to the Association for Calvinistic Philosophy shows more agreement with modern Catholic theology than with the ideas of his brother-in-law Vollenhoven. This affinity of Dooyeweerd's philosophy to modern Catholicism should be seen as a great opportunity for ecumenical dialogue. Instead, reformational philosophy has tended to defensively restrict itself to a Calvinistic theology that Dooyeweerd himself did not support.

I have therefore been profoundly disappointed by reformational philosophy's lack of interest in historical research and textual analysis of Dooyeweerd. Hardly any research has been done on the materials available in the archives in Amsterdam. Why has no graduate student researched these manuscripts? Why has there been no critical edition of the New Critique, based on Dooyeweerd's draft manuscripts? Why has there been no search for the historical influences in his work, when he himself disclaimed any originality to his philosophy?

Our present Christian educational institutions are in need of renewal; they seem to have lost their vision. This is really sad, especially when so many Christians have made such great financial sacrifices to support them. Students there are being given the impression that Dooyeweerd is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Institute has embraced postmodern ideas; recent articles by professors and students have [incorrectly] compared Dooyeweerd to Heidegger, or have argued for the autonomy of thought. And a recent President of the Institute, John Suk, lectured across Canada on the difficulties in speaking of a personal relationship with Jesus.  He said we need to come to terms with experiencing the absence of God.  You can listen to his lecture, "Speaking of a "Personal Relationship with Jesus" here. After the lecture, I asked him whether his views were not inconsistent with Kuyper’s, as expressed in Kuyper's To be Near Unto God. He responded that Kuyper made mistakes, too. But it is that mystical and devotional side of Kuyper that is carried on in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy.

The Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam has also lost its vision. Its website speaks of the importance of “values” in education. But the whole idea of “values” is contrary to Dooyeweerd's integral philosophy. When I visited the Vrije Universiteit a few years ago, I had a borreltje with the philosophy students in their common room. A large portrait of Nietzsche–surely one of the most anti-Christian philosophers–was prominently displayed. The students seemed to know little about Dooyeweerd or even Kuyper, the founder of their university. I was told, “You Americans [!] seem to still be interested in ideas we have long ago given up.” And the university bookstore did not contain a single book by either Dooyeweerd or Vollenhoven!

There are nevertheless some very good scholars associated with the Vrije Universiteit. The following have been particularly helpful to me:

Dr. A. P. Bos, recently retired from the faculty of philosophy, has supported my research, and has helped me to publish many articles in Philosophia Reformata. Bram has also helped me to edit Dooyeweerd’s early romantic poetry, as well as Dooyeweerd's 1964 Talk to the Association, both of which I located in the archives.

Dr. K.A. Bril has devoted as much time to the study of Vollenhoven as I have to Dooyeweerd. Kor’s work is of a genuinely scholarly nature. He agrees with me that the philosophies of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven differ radically from each other, although he has chosen to champion Vollenhoven instead of Dooyeweerd. Kor and I met together with the theologian Lieuwe Mietus at his home in Vollendam. Mietus has written about the influence of Baader on J.H. Gunning, Jr. and on Kuyper.

Dr. Peter Koslowski, professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit, has written extensively about Baader. He was unaware of the connections between Baader and Kuyper or Dooyeweerd. I have been able to meet briefly with him, and I hope that his work on Baader, and his presence at the Vrije Universiteit, will be used to further explore the historical sources of reformational philosophy.

I have come to recognize that my “life as a search” is itself an expression of the restlessness of creation and of my own selfhood, which dynamically reaches out to the Origin. It is good not to become fixed in static or petrified ways of thinking. Dooyeweerd says that the supratemporal selfhood gives us a standpoint that relativizes the entire temporal world, including our thinking. And yet this is a secure standpoint, given to us by God. We experience the nondual relation of our supratemporal selfhood, in its relation to God, others, and to the temporal cosmos. Perhaps every generation needs to discover this again for itself. In a sense, true Christian spirituality is esoteric–not in the sense of secret teachings, but in the sense that it is experiential. Only those who seek to experience their fullness in Christ will ever understand it. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Those who have eyes to read, let them read. There is a spiritual journey to be made, both within and outside of us, above time and within time. We must remember Kuyper's views–that the miracles of Christ are not intended as a demonstration of his divinity, but as an example of who we may be and what we may do. Does reformational philosophy still believe that? Change will not come primarily through institutions—whether universities (secular or Christian), or churches or political institutions. Change comes through each of us individually, as we realize our true selfhood, as redeemed in Christ, and as we relate this to our temporal world. There is certainly an individual and sometimes lonely side to this spiritual quest. But we also need to find a group who will encourage us in our spiritual journey, who will support our imagination (given to us as image-bearers of God), and who will keep us from a false spirituality that seeks to avoid the world instead of affirming and transforming it.

Blessings,

Glenn

Revised Jul 6/10