More than a century ago, a preacher arose who said he could not live without a pulpit. This was Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge, who lived from 1803-1875. This man was inspired by the Spirit and driven by the Word. He had to preach the Gospel, not because he could, but because he could not do without.

Adolph Zahn, one of his friends, tells that Kohlbrugge’s sermons always welled up from the depth, and that they were as full of comfort as they were because they were born in a night of need. In Zahn’s Aus dem Leben eines Reformierten Pastors (From the life of a Reformed pastor), we read, “He went to church in the greatest weakness, often half broken, and he always experienced the power of Christ’s resurrection, which is glorified precisely in our death. Living from death—that has been the symbol of Kohlbrugge’s journey as a pilgrim, and especially of his journey as a pilgrim from the consistory room, past the congregation, to the steps of the pulpit.” By the way, that pulpit was not in the Netherlands, but in Elberfeld, an industrial city in the German Wuppertal.

This conceals no slight tragedy. Or should we rather say, leading from above? Although Kohlbrugge was a theologian by allure, highly skilled in ancient eastern languages, and promoted cum laude at the Faculty of Utrecht, the doors of the national (Dutch Reformed) church remained closed to him, when he came to join it and become Reformed, after a run-in with the consistory of the Restored Lutheran congregation in Amsterdam to which he initially belonged.

After many wanderings, and twenty years after his candidacy exam, this born preacher and pastor was ordained in 1847 as minister of the Niederländische Reformierte Gemeinde (Netherlandish Reformed Congregation), in Elberfeld. With few exceptions, he always proclaimed the Word there, Sunday after Sunday. In a certain sense he still proclaims it today, for I think that no nineteenth-century sermons as his are read as frequently and eagerly in our time.

The Word as source and as norm⤒🔗

What is the secret of those sermons? It is not in the least the peculiarly experiential content of Kohlbrugge’s sermons. Anyone who needs comfort and spiritual support, in any kind of life’s distress, should go to Kohlbrugge. He once said, “If you want to have any use for me, just start drawing (from this well).” He was not bragging, but it was the open-minded expression of a man who drew from the Well himself, who refreshed himself from it, and knew himself to be called to reach out with that water to others in their thirst and drought. Kohlbrugge’s well is the Word of God, but in the way he interprets the words of this well, it continually shows that he drank from it himself before passing it on. His preaching arises from the heart of Scripture, it has gone through the heart of the preacher, and it aims for the heart of the hearer. All that happens in a way that the listening heart admittedly gets addressed personally — with prophetic objection, priestly acquittal, and royal pretension — but never gets thrown back on itself.

Kohlbrugge’s experiential preaching is not a disguised form of subjectivism, in which the pious one gets built up with all the frames and false frames of his own experience. He had died to this sterile cult of experientiality. He expresses this in a striking manner to his friend Drost, when, after his conversion, he sends him a brief and clear witness (which has become famous), “I kept trying for a long time to reach perfection with the law in my hand…. I saw a Lamb at the right hand of glory, and there I relinquished the law, all holiness, all my knowledge of good and evil, and my being regenerated, converted, and pious.” And he adds, “What I share with you, I do not share to tell something about myself, for when I had lost my way, I experienced the eternally remaining Word of the Lord.” Well, it is this Word, which he did not just find but experienced, towards which he drives his hearers.

To Kohlbrugge, the Word is not only the source, but also the norm, for all true faith experience! That highly conceived awareness of the norm brings about something double in his preaching. On the one hand, in an undeniably intimate and moving way he knows how to witness of the experience of faith in communion with God. On the other hand, he can express himself regarding certain forms of experientiality in an openly critical manner. Indisputably, his entire body of work glows throughout with experiential fire, but at the same time all experientiality that is not fully anchored in the Word of God is under heavy attack from his exposing judgment. Remarkably, this heart-and-soul messenger of God is also a formidable troublemaker whenever he assumes that people use their piety to isolate themselves from the Word of grace. There he does not hesitate to fearlessly torch their snugly experiential conviviality.

The Word seeks the whole person←⤒🔗

One abuses Kohlbrugge when he releases this tension by plucking some quotes here and there from Kohlbrugge’s works to annex him for his own justification—whether ultra-experiential or anti-experiential. Kohlbrugge is simultaneously through-and-through experiential, and equally through-and-through critical (of faith). To illustrate this dual character, I provide a small anthology of Kohlbrugge’s statements.

Kohlbrugge is concerned with life, to live in tune with and out of the Word: “For,” it is one thing to know the entire Catechism off by heart and to believe all the main matters of the Truth with the mind, and quite another to have such values in life.” The Word that comes from the outside must go inside, it must go from the heart of God into the heart of man: “True faith has depth of soil, it has been plowed through worry and sadness of soul, through strife and struggle. It is not left hanging in the preaching but also goes in truth through the Word to the Lord; it longs for him and unites itself with him.”

From such sentences, it is clear what Kohlbrugge is getting at: the Word of God is not just an announcement that people take note of, but is the Word of the Spirit that connects, establishes communion, and creates community. It is a heart-to-heart event! It is the Voice of the Spirit which declares God’s heart to a sinner and attaches the sinner’s heart to his own. Through this, all true faith is qualified as experienced, encountered faith. Faith cannot be absorbed in introspection, passing by life, for the simple reason that the Word of God does not only seek the intellect, nor only the emotions, but the whole person, even in the vital centre of his existence — the heart. That is where God allows himself to be known, knowing in the original biblical sense of the word. “It is a living knowledge that is grounded in experience, a knowledge that knows how merciful God is and how gracious our Lord Jesus Christ is.” To Kohlbrugge, believing never proceeds like a detached calculation, but always in the manner of the Holy Spirit who, by the Word, bridges the infinite distance between God and man. Without a doubt, this is the inalienable secret of faith: that man with his entire existence even in its inner self is “dispossessed,” to belong to his faithful Saviour. That happens where the Spirit stretches (like a tent) the reality of the Word over the heart.

But this is the remarkable aspect, which also shows us the flipside: Kohlbrugge does not want us to forget for a single moment that all these inner sensations are fruit of the Word! Not all experience is faith-experience! The Word goes first and is decisive. It wants to be heard first. That is where experiential faith comes from: “The person must have heard it first, how the matter stands before God, and then he will have its experience. The Word must be accepted first.” In this Word we were given the collateral of the spiritual life: “That is what really matters, that we value this Word above all.”

And here it comes! When the Word of God has been evaluated for what it is worth and inwardly found to be true, then it is precisely this experienced Word that turns our inward self inside out, so to speak! To Kohlbrugge, it is exactly the uniqueness of the unadulterated inwardness of faith that it knows that all salvation and assurance lies completely outside of one’s own inward self. Just like Abraham once had to step out of his tent, God does not weary to lead us outside of ourselves, outside of our dark inner room, where we see nothing of his glorious grace. It is this outward-looking view that carries with it an altogether peculiar experience. Then we experience his peace.

Without human glory←⤒🔗

Kohlbrugge’s critical concern is now that we confuse our experiences with what and whom we experience, causing us to seek life in the experience, rather than in the Word of him who alone is the Life. The Word must be the standard for us, and not what goes around in our heart. Guarding the word is experiencing the faith! One who learns to find the Word sufficient will also enjoy it experientially, no matter how much this limited faith may get harassed and attacked. Kohlbrugge speaks of an experientiality that can not demonstrate or posit itself, as if experience was a status symbol of a higher class of the privileged. Man, also the pious man, remains carnal and sold under sin. It is precisely the one who is filled with God’s Spirit who confesses and experiences this. He has nothing in his own hand of which he can boast.

To Kohlbrugge, this strict absence of human glory is one of the decisive marks of faith. No matter how persistently Kohlbrugge insists on self-examination and how repeatedly he uses the touchstone of distinguishing “true” from “false,” he never gives anyone opportunity to hand himself a diploma based on the experiential marks and to display and advertise himself to God and fellow man. In one single sentence Kohlbrugge formulates his intention, when he answers the question for the mark of regeneration with, “That I fear my God, honour and love my neighbour, and also do not comfort myself with my regeneration, but only with the eternal faithfulness and compassion of God” (De leer des heils (The doctrine of salvation), Amsterdam, 1938, question 320). Stability does not come from the fact that there is faith experience, but from what it experiences.

Although Kohlbrugge knows like few others how to interpret the delights and no less the temptations that are experienced in the faith, he never exchanges the experience of faith with its source and foundation. No matter how lifelike he manages to characterize the forms of experiential life, all forms find their legitimacy purely and solely in that one Form: Jesus, the Christ. That faith only is true which attaches itself to Jesus! Kohlbrugge’s finger points to him! His preaching drives one towards him. Kohlbrugge is a preacher who allows for a liberating self-forgetfulness, in which the tempted person leaves all spasmodic self-assessment behind and lets everything come down to Christ. No matter how shy and guilty he is, he may lose himself to him. And this loss of self is profit, pure profit.

To Kohlbrugge, that is wisdom from heaven, when one abandons one’s own self, one’s own comings and goings, one’s virtue and vice, one’s uprightness and insincerity, and that he does not allow his great and burdensome sin stop him from going directly to the heart of God in Christ. Without concern, Kohlbrugge knows how to approach the heart that is burdened with the fearful question, “Is salvation for me, too?” by responding with a disarming directness, “Leave that question alone for now. Rather, ask why it would not be for you? Ask, O my soul, did your Judge above… receive payment, yes or no? ….The foundation for the forgiveness of your sins is that the Surety has paid on Golgotha.”

The “nevertheless” of the Word←⤒🔗

Finally, we address the climate in which the life of faith occurs with Kohlbrugge, especially that of temptation. To Kohlbrugge it is rarely windless around faith. There are gusts rushing over it. These are the torments of sin, the devil and death. Faith faces the force- majeure (the irresistible force) of the visible and tangible suffering that surrounds us and lives in us, and which can contrast painfully with God’s promises. What can be seen of those promises, what really comes true? Does one not often experience the opposite of what was promised?

Kohlbrugge is never more in his element than when he can meet such threatened and plundered faith. In our time of crisis and demolition, of estrangement from God and darkening of God, it might well be that his words get renewed relevance. There, in the place of barrenness, emptiness and confusion, he calls out to us with the “nevertheless” of the Word, the validity of the gospel, which offers the only guarantee for survival and revival, despite all appearance of the opposite.

Of this nevertheless-Word, the nevertheless-faith constitutes the resonance and the reflection. It is faith that is born, raised, and steeled in a deep valley-narrows. It assumes nothing in man, other than perhaps his misery. That is where the power of God’s promises is freed up. It is pre-eminently there, in the barren, scary reality where all ability of faith and experiential triumph are burned down. In desolate regions the Word of God’s compassion is most fiercely combatted, but also most deeply experienced. What does it come down to in the end? To this, Kohlbrugge preaches, “That you would not ask at all about what you perceive of what is contrary, but that you cling to Christ and his mercy, just the way you are. Whether you see it or not, hold on to it as true that you are righteous and holy in him, and an heir to salvation.”

Well, it is especially in this poverty of experience — I do not say, in the experientially cherished poverty, but in the true impoverishment of the heart — that the Word of the Lord is found to be true and working. Here, one has nothing. Here, one must have nothing. Here, one purely lets the gospel count, even more than all buts and objections. Not because one is able to believe, but because the Word lets itself be found and experienced as true and certain. One no longer says “no” or “yes, but….” The heart is simply too poor for that, and the Word too trustworthy. One says “yes” and “amen.” In this amen to the Word the heart of experientiality beats. In this one word, this amen of faith, all experientiality is characterized.