VRIJE GEMEENTE (1878-1967). Free Congregation. Most of its members had become frustrated with the orthodoxy of the Dutch Reformed Church in the late 1800s. For guidance, these people looked to three Hugenholtz brothers, all Dutch Reformed ministers in the Amsterdam area.

Philip Reinhard Hugenholtz (1821-1889) preached his last Dutch Reformed sermon in 1878 at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk (ca. 1500). (Yes, there is an old church nearby, and it is indeed older.) He became theologian of the Vrije Gemeente, and his brother, Petrus Hermannus Hugenholtz (1834-1911), became its minister or leader. The Vrije Gemeente engaged G.B. Salm, a noted Amsterdam architect, to design their new church. They did not give it a church’s facade, and they avoided the terms minister and church. They respected the fact that the Dutch Reformed Church was the nationally-sanctioned church.


Amsterdam: Nieuwe Kerk, Vrije Gemeente (with Rijksmuseum behind McDonald’s sign)

In 1880, the Vrije Gemeente was nicely housed near the present Rijksmuseum. Actually, the Rijksmuseum was constructed as the entrance to the 1883 World’s Fair. The Fair was called the Colonial Exposition and covered a large area in Amsterdam. Imagine the Vrije Gemeente, in their new building, viewing construction of the Rijksmuseum and Exposition across the canal. Colossal villas were rising up all around them. The Rijksmuseum was designed by Pierre Cuypers, who also designed Centraal Station. This was another religious controversy: Cuypers was Catholic, yet he received the government’s two best architectural commissions.

There was construction all across Amsterdam in preparation for the 1883 World’s Fair. G.B. Salm, architect for the Vrije Gemeente, also designed much of Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky including its wonderful Wintertuin (Winter Garden), which appears today much as it did during the World’s Fair. Salm had already built the Artis Bibliotheek and many other outstanding structures.

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Today, the Vrije Gemeente’s building is the Paradiso, a concert hall for popular music. The stained glass windows survive, and a recent renovation has restored much of the original splendor to the lobby. The building had marvelous library and study areas.

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Recent articles probably misrepresent the Vrije Gemeente. First, it was not one of many minor splinter groups. It was a major movement of the time. Its building was large, and its membership numbered in the thousands. Under a third brother, Frederik Willem Nicolaas Hugenholtz (1839-1900), it established ties with Ralph Waldo Emerson and spread to America, where it eventually merged with the Unitarian Church. With the latter, they organized the World’s Congress of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. This brother was editor of De Stemmen (Voices) for the Vrije Gemeente and of De Hervorming (Reform) for a broader Protestant association. On his reputation as both an editor and a minister, he was recommended to the American congregation by a Leiden professor, Abraham Kuenen (1828-1891), one of the great Old Testament scholars of all time. Prof. Kuenen was recognized for his scientific method of biblical research, published in 1880 as Kritische Methode.

Second, the intent of the Vrije Gemeente was not to foster agnosticism. Instead, they sought truth and analyzed doctrines propagated for centuries by the Roman Catholic Church and more recently by the Dutch Reformed Church. The Vrije Gemeente was allied with the Dutch Radical Critics, whose theological position was documented from a German perspective by Albert Schweitzer in 1906 in The Quest for the Historical Jesus.

The Radical Critics were German and Dutch theologians who analyzed the authorship of parts of the New Testament. The movement began in the 1800s in Germany with F.C. Baur and Bruno Bauer. Both were influenced by Hegel, the great German philosopher. Edward Gibbon had published The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by 1788, so it was well known that the New Testament was assembled and edited by committee efforts, in the midst of rancor and politics, during the 5th Century. Hegel analyzed every issue in the context of historical and political struggles, but his methods were not scientific. In the Netherlands, Loman and van Manen continued the effort and, with Kuenen, developed the scientific techniques of historical biblical research used today.

“On the premises of the Vrije Gemeente...on December 13, 1881, an event of historic dimensions for modern theology took place. A mixed audience of liberal and orthodox theologians and others...were listening to a lecture delivered by A.D. Loman of the Faculty of Divinity at Amsterdam University. His speech was entitled ‘Earliest Christianity’. He therein stated that Jesus was not a figure of history and that all we know about him was fiction, written down in the 2nd Century...His audience was quite unprepared and deeply shocked.” [A Forgotten Chapter: the Radicals, by A.J. Allan]