Bulletin No. 2

The undersigned solemnly swear before God and men the following:

“THAT SAID HERMAN HOEKSEMA, COMMENCING EARLY IN HIS LIFE, HAS BEEN A DOMINEERING CHARACTER WHOSE WORD IS LAW AND WHO WOULD NOT TOLERATE ANY OPPOSITION TO HIS CONCLUSIONS AND PRONOUNCEMENTS, AND THAT IN ORGANIZING THE FIRST PROTESTANT REFORMED CHURCH OF GRAND RAPIDS HE ASSUMED TO BE THE HEAD THEREOF AND TO DICTATE ITS POLICIES, AND WOULD NOT TOLERATE ANY OPPOSITION TO HIS OWN IDEAS AND WISHES, BECAME VERY INTOLERANT, AND AS TIME WENT ON, HE CREATED A FEELING OF DISSENTION (must be dissension; Mr. Linsey, the lawyer, and the Rev. De Wolf do not know how to spell the word for it appears repeatedly in this form in the cross bill, H.H.) AND OPPOSITION TO HIM IN HIS CHURCH.”

Hubert De Wolf

FREDERICK SYTSMA

HENRY KNOTT

WILLIAM STUURSMA

LAMBERT MULDER

ANDREW DYICSTRA

HENRY BASTIANSE

SIDNEY DE YOUNG

ADOLPH VERMEER

GERRIT SIKKEMA

JOHN BOUWMAN

ANDREW VOSS

By Hubert De Wolf

These same men, in 1940, signed the following:

“TO OUR BELOVED PASTOR, HERMAN HOEKSEMA, D.V.M. DO WE, ON THIS 25th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS ORDINATION TO THE MINISTRY, EXTEND OUR SINCERE CONGRATULATIONS. HIS CONSECRATED EFFORTS, FOR WHICH WE HUMBLY ACKNOWLEDGE OUR COVENANT GOD, HAVE GIVEN US A PURER AND MORE PROFOUND CONCEPTION OF THE REFORMED TRUTHS, PARTICULARLY THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY AND SOVEREIGN GRACE.”

When did they lie? Then, or now in the above cross bill?

Or: how do you explain the change?

Principally: Hymenaeus and Alexander. Practically, especially after my sickness, from which they hoped I would never recover: Absalom and David.

H.H.

Kok’s Moral Confusion

Kok, schismatic minister in Holland, Michigan, desperately tries, behind my back first, and now also in public, to make people believe that I am feeble minded and mentally confused, and, evidently, regrets that he does not succeed.

But I think that moral and ethical confusion, manifest in this that one does not realize that deliberate misquotation of someonelse’s writing is sin against the ninth commandment, lying and slander, “the very works of the devil” is much worse than mental confusion.

This is what Kok does.

And I challenge him to prove that this is not true. For this he better use space in The Standard Bearer. I seldom read the Reformed (Deformed) Guardian unless someone calls my attention to it.

Just one illustration to prove my contention.

He quotes me in such a way that it appears as if I wrote two flatly contradictory things:

1. A promise is never a prediction.
2. A promise is a prediction and a prediction is a promise.

How does Kok manage this? Simply by discontinuing,

deliberately, a certain quotation of mine in the middle of a paragraph.

Let me demonstrate this by quoting the whole paragraph as far as it is necessary to prove my contention, putting what Kok quotes in regular type, and the rest in italics.

“Attend, please, to the meaning of these words, and you will surely acknowledge that the promise is not conditional and cannot possibly be.

“What is meant, in these words, by the promise?

“Is it a prediction of what God will do in the future?

“The answer is and must be negative.

“For, first of all, it is a distortion of the term to say: a promise is a prediction. (Thus far Kok. And now I continue.) The promise, of course, (may) include a prediction and often does. Thus it is with respect to the promise of the first coming of Christ as well as with the promise of his coming the second time. But even then, the main idea is not a prediction, but a PROMISE, a pledge, and oath of God that he will surely save His people and, therefore, is vowed only to the elect. The destruction of Jerusalem is also a prediction, so is the destruction of Babylon, but this surely cannot be called a promise to those cities. A promise, therefore, though it may be predicted as to its certain fulfillment, can never be called a prediction.”

Kok, in the same article from which the above was quoted, makes more quotations in the same immoral and dishonest way, stringing together a few quotations from articles of mine that cover five or six pages.

But let this be sufficient to prove that Kok simply lies when he tries to make it appear that I contradict myself.

What I wrote is that it is a distortion of the term promise to say that the promise is a prediction because, although

it is frequently also a prediction, it is much more than that, and because a prediction is by no means always a promise.

That Kok cannot understand this is due, not to a mental, but to a moral defect, to the sin against the ninth commandment.

Deliberately he misquoted me.

For a Christian to commit the very works of the devil (Heidelberg Catechism) is very serious. It means that he is motivated by hatred of the brother.

I earnestly hope that he repents.

H.H.