If any publications inspired the NTJ, it was (and is) the New Republic, First Things, and the Reformed Journal (not necessarily in that order). The latter has not been in print for over a decade, but it was a refreshing, provocative and often wrong-headed outlet for considerations of Reformed faith and practice.Â
The quotation below comes from an article that was part of a series on Reformed identity in American life: John J. Timmerman, “Whatever Happened to Sunday?” Feb. 1981. It may come as close to an expression of Old Life piety as you can find. It is Lord’s day-centric, logocentric, and supremely aware of the Christian life as a pilgrimage. If only more Grand Rapidians could find this part of their Kuyperian selves.Â
Sunday was church in Orange City, Iowa, in the first decades of the century. I suspect that is is so even now in the little pockets of piety that dot Northwest Iowa, though it can’t be as still in the town or in the homes as it was in my youth. There were three services, which I attended with simulated docility. The preacher delivered three sermons before his often critical sheep, dressed in a somber Prince Albert, sweating it out in August afternoons without air-conditioning before a whir of variegated hand-propelled fans. He spoke in these churches, some of them large, without the aid of electronic devices, and a voice of good timbre could be heard on the street through the open windows. There were always competitive babies in the crowd, quieted not by artful jouncing but by breast feeding. As the sermon pounded on, squirming little boys were pinched. Sometimes fractious older boys in the back seats were policed by elders. Dutch psalms were fervently sung while a lathering janitor pumped the bellows of the organ at 110 degrees. There was no choir – an irrelevant impertinence.
The heart of the service was the sermon; upon that the evaluation of the preacher and the determination of his ecclesiastical fortunes depended. Then, as it was well into the sixties, it was as rhetorically fixed as the terza rima. Apparently all texts were best analyzed and interpreted in terms of three points. I remember a preacher saying, “One more point and then we go home.” Whether the content was brilliant or mediocre, it was formulated in terms of an introduction, three divisions, and application. The three points were often chosen with care and memorably phrased. These pegs to remembrance enabled certain people to recall sermons accurately for years. A lady of eighty-eight wrote me recently saying about some sermons she had heard “I know the introduction and application he made and often talk about them.” She also gave the three points of several sermons she had remembered for fifty years. Such fixed rhetoric may seem wooden, bit its mnemonic helpfulness was striking. As a boy, of course, I had no interest in these sermons. I spent my time counting the pipes in the organ, the panes in the colored glass windows, watching the consistory up front, and daydreaming. I am glad that later I learned to appreciate the meticulous preparation, craftsmanship, and meditation that went into their making. Some of these older ministers operated on volubility, but others on a lot of mind and heart; not a few had style and some had class. . . .
Three services, three trips to church, three meals pretty well consumed the day. What time remained was to be used in a way compatible with the spiritual tone of the day. To many this all sounds like “a hard, hard, religion,” as well as something of a bore. Indeed, it took something out of one but it put something real into one also. The church was a sanctuary, a renewal of hope, a confirmation of faith. These people did not have easy, pleasure-filled lives. They had a profound sense of the mystery and misery of human existence. There were no protective barriers. I remember my mother crying over the deaths of little children. Children were sometimes marred by smallpox, weakened by scarlet fever, dead of diphtheria. Diseases now almost routinely cured carried off parents, leaving homes fatherless and motherless. Fearful accidents occurred on the farm. Hail, storm, and drought brought destruct to crops. But the death of the saints was precious in the sight of the Lord, and in the eye of the storm was the providence of God. How often these people prayed for a rainbow, how often they found a spiritual rainbow in the church where God spoke to them through his servants, and promised cure for all misery.
At that time and even into the sixties, there was a remarkable consensus as to the meaning and practices of Sunday. Although the Bible did not specify the number of services to be held on Sunday, congregations attended with notable faithfulness and did not appear to grow weary of that kind of well-doing. Even though the services in the earlier decades of the century were a surcease from loneliness on the empty prairie, a stay against loss of identity in a strange land, and the warm concourse of friends, these were not the reasons that brought them to church. What did bring them to church was a felt spiritual need and a sense of duty. They believed God wanted them to come as often as they could and that it was good for them to be here. That kind of consensus has been eroding for years, whether out of spiritual amplitude, secular diversions, boredom, or alienation. . . .
The consensus on Sunday behavior is also waning. Whereas in the early decades of the century, attendance at church three times was common, today attendance twice is lessening. The blue laws have almost vanished. If a member of my old church in Iowa had spun his Buick over to the Blackstone Cafe at Sioux City for a Sunday dinner of prime rib and cocktails, he would have been in danger of losing his membership; if one does that in Grand Rapids today he risks only losing his shirt. The old blue laws were based on the idea that the Sabbath is a “day of sacred assembly” and that “wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.” The older generation thought God made the Sabbath for man to insure rest and spiritual growth, not to do what he wanted. They were uptight and possibly self-righteous about Sunday. The present generation is relaxed and self-righteous about it. . . .
Old Life 