Pieterskerk, Leiden

I recently called at Pieterskerk in the beautiful Dutch city of Leiden. It enjoyed all the scale and proportion of a cathedral, with soaring arches and gigantic chandeliers. It has an association with Jacob Arminius, the theologian of Leiden who emphasised human responsibility over Calvin’s emphasis on God’s sovereignty. Buried here is John Robinson, an opponent of Arminius, and the pastor of the English separatist church who had fled Anglican England to the Netherlands’ greater measure of religious freedom. Some of his congregation joined the so-called 'Pilgrim Fathers' and went off to America’s even greater levels of toleration, but Robinson remained at Leiden.

In his day, Robinson was seen as a trouble maker, an Englishman unwelcome in England, a man who rejected state churches and monarchs claiming to head them. Seventeenth-century folk were often narrow minded, and puritans in particular were known for being obdurate, yet his farewell sermon to the Mayflower emigrees includes a note of personal humility and wider wisdom:

I charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.

This new light of which he spoke was not some nonsense from a newly invented scripture or mystical, charismatic experience, but from God’s word, the Bible. Robinson may have been considered an oddball in his day, even a seditious fellow, but this great man befits the grand tomb providence allotted him, which we now call Pieterskerk.