THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERS - The Works of F. N. Lee

Dutch churches at the Synod of Dordt in 1618 -- and 33 years thereafter exported to South Africa.During the same period, it was also exported to New York State (under Pieter Stuyvesant) throughthe oldest denomination in North America (the Dutch Reformed Church).Together with that German Calvinism of the Heidelberg Catechism, there were also the legaldoctrines of protosphere-sovereignty developed by the great German jurist Johann Althusius, andthe tremendous encyclopaedic knowledge of Johann Heinrich Alsted. Indeed, the haziness of theborder between Holland or "Duitsland" and Germany or "Deutschland" at that time -- meant thatmany people who were really Germans and not Dutchmen were enrolled into the Dutch East IndiaCompany.That company wanted to trade with and extract wealth from what is today Indonesia in the East.Similarly and simultaneously, the Spanish and the Portuguese wanted to extract wealth from SouthAmerica, and the British West Indies Company wanted to extract wealth from the Caribbean andcertain parts of the North American east coast.The third root of South African Calvinism, is Dutch Calvinism. That is the Calvinism of theBelgian Confession of southern Holland in 1562; the five-point Calvinism of the InternationalSynod of Dordt in Holland in 1618; and the Calvinism of Gisbert Voetius, the father of Roman-Dutch Law. He took the Old and the New Testaments very seriously, and designed thejurisprudential outline for the ruling of society in 1636. It is also the Calvinism of the Dordt DutchBible and its postmillenial and theonomic footnotes (of 1637) -- the Calvinism that was exported toSouth Africa just fifteen years after that.So then, the important dates are:1562 The completion of the Heidelberg Catechism & the Belgian Confession.1564 The death of John Calvin.1618 The juristic views of Johann Althusius.1619 The Five-point Calvinism of the International Synod of Dordt.1620 The "Americans" on the Mayflower, who went not south to South Africa but westbound(yet and for the same reason) to what is now North America.1636 The jurisprudence of Voetius.1637 The Dordt Dutch Bible and its footnotes.1643f The production of the Westminster Standards in Britain.1650 The decision to colonise South Africa.1688 The fleeing to South Africa of French Calvinists, the cream and middle class backboneof French society who now had to leave their homeland of account of religious persecution, andwho found a refuge in the African wilderness.Christopher Columbus, as you know, set sail westbound to try to find a western passage to India in1492. While he was doing this, the Portuguese were sailing southbound round the southern tip ofAfrica -- to try and find an eastern waterway to India. In 1496, Prince Henry the Navigator ofPortugal sent out ships -- which rounded the southern tip of Africa. They got off on the beach anderected crosses of the coast of what is now South Africa.They scratched Portuguese inscriptions on these crosses. Portuguese place names are still found inSouth Africa, with South African towns named after them to this day. There are thus place nameslike Saldanha Bay, Agulhas, and the Province or State of Natal -- where I used to be a Preacher.Natal, you would be interested to know, means Christmas. None of the Portuguese navigatorssettled in South Africa. They moved on to India.At a later stage, just one or two Portuguese families, the Vercueil's and the Ferreira's, came and