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Vision, Conflict, and Controversy

The Dutch American theologian Rev. Hendrik P. Scholte (1805鈥�1868) was a leader of the Dutch Secession of 1834 (the exodus of a group of orthodox Reformed believers from the Dutch Reformed Church) and an emigration organizer who, in 1847, led a group of Dutch settlers to Iowa and founded the town of Pella.

Scholte was soon forgotten in the Netherlands, and the Dutch community of Pella dwelled quietly at the edge of the consciousness of the Dutch back home. Only after World War II, when a new wave of migration to North America started, did interest in Scholte鈥檚 life and community grow, mostly among migration and church historians. There was a kind of admiration in both the United States and the Netherlands for Scholte鈥檚 leadership and what had been accomplished on the prairies of Iowa.

But the prevailing view of Scholte among Reformed scholars has been negative. He has been accused of being a Labadist, a Congregationalist and a pre-Millennialist 鈥� a soloist in all of his religious deviations. Unlike A.C. Van Raalte, founder of Holland, Michigan (1847), Scholte was not recognized as an organizer or a community builder or unifier. This volume refutes that view of Scholte, so effectively imprinted over time, and aims to spur scholarly interest in pursuing a broader and more thorough, cohesive and critical study of his life and work.

Herein contained are the building blocks for such a study: the historiography of this Dutch leader, his family tree, his relationships as a young man in the Netherlands, his role in the authorship of the Act of Secession of 1834, and his significance for the free church of the Seceders in the Netherlands.

Also included are Scholte鈥檚 views on the relationship of church and state in both the Netherlands and United States, the complicated journey from the American ports to the grasslands of Iowa, his political action and relationship with Abraham Lincoln, the biblical reason for the name 鈥淧ella,鈥� the immigrants鈥� perception of the Civil War and his competitive relationship with Van Raalte, all concluding with a one-act play dramatizing the days of Scholte in Pella.