June 27, 1940: The Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands and Kinism’s Doctrine of Regeneration
Welcome to The Broadcast. Every two weeks, we invite you to tune in as we imagine a moment from the days of the Second World War: what many scholars consider the genesis of Postmodernity. From there, we will follow its story into the ideas that continue to shape our world today, exploring our culture’s renewed search for meaning and enchantment. Along the way, we will listen to J.H. Bavinck and C.S. Lewis, two men who had eyes to see what God was doing in the midst of it all, as we seek to uncover the story of our redeeming Lord throughout all of time, and to imagine, by the revelation of that God, a better story than the one the world seeks to enchant us with today.
So settle in and join us on the Porch as we look along the beam of time, seeking to see what our God is doing today by tracing what He was doing when the world went to war with itself.
J.H. Bavinck Under Nazi Occupation
Imagine it’s June, 1940. Johan Herman Bavinck, professor of Mission Studies at the Theological University of Kampen and the Free University of Amsterdam,¹ begins to put up heavy, dark curtains to cover the windows of his basement.² His pipe hangs from his teeth, and in the smoke-filled basement of his Amsterdam home, he sets his bicycle up on a bench to be stationary. Here, he thinks, reviewing his ingenuity and lighting his pipe, he will use the bottle dynamo (a bicycle generator) and his children’s peddling, to write in the dark during the imposed black-outs. Just a month before, Germany invaded The Netherlands, and by the end of May 1940, the country was under Nazi occupation.³ Bavinck’s children would go on to do much more for the resistance than peddling a bike to light their father’s penmanship. All of his children (two sons and a daughter) would be actively involved in the Dutch resistance to German occupation, leading to both boys being arrested in the same week in June 1944, “The elder of whom was held in German custody until September 1944, while the younger was deported to Germany and imprisoned in the concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Rathenau.”⁴ Bavinck’s family would make it through the war and the occupation. But they would do so resisting. By bicycle-light, Bavinck himself would resist as well, and by 1943 his lectures in Kampen and Amsterdam were suspended “by order of the German occupational authorities.”⁵
The Origins of Postmodernism
In his helpful and summarizing work, Paul Crosthwaite has argued that post-war fiction was “obsessively preoccupied with how, for millions of individuals (both ‘combatants’ and ‘civilians’), exposure to battle became, in the ‘total war’ of the 1940s, a necessary existential condition of everyday life.”⁶ Not only is that what we see here in Bavinck’s life under Nazi occupation, but for many scholars, the realities of WWII—especially that of the Holocaust and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb—were the wombed reality that gave birth to postmodernism. In the beginning was modernism; in the beginning, rational man created the war and the bomb. And from this love affair was born a world without form and void, a grand rejection of grand-narrative, and we called it postmodernism. Two realities of postmodernism come to light as we look at the impact of WWII.
1) the rejection of meaning (not just truth): Maurice Blanchot, a French philosopher of the day, has written of the Holocaust as the “utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up.”⁷ Postmodernism is a world without meaning that burns for more, and her ashes dust the world with stories we all wish were true.
2) the inability to identify an origin (so essential to meaning): Theodor Adorno, writing not long after Blanchot, makes the connection between meaning and the origin (and infinite unending) of postmodernism when he prophetically (though falsely) saw that “everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made reflection on one’s own damaged state useless.”⁸ Postmodernism is a world in vegetation: dead, dying, and all the while trying to tell us it doesn’t matter why we live. We simply ask her, “From where have you come, and from whom?” She cannot give an answer, asleep at the wheel of time and memory, and hoping we don’t bring up the idea of place—all of which require a Great Story to be told. Today, we live after the war, guided by the crumpled map of a worldview we call postmodernism. As we unfold the edges in search of meaning, the paper tears, and we slumber and drift off back to sleep. How man was made for more, but the war told us such pursuits would lead to terrible things.
A Sermon From Amsterdam
Imagine again that it is now late in the Autumn of 1940. The author of this broadcast continues to hear in the streets that Rotterdam remains in ruins, and that the Luftwaffe had brought the infant cries of relativism to bear by demolishing the medieval architecture that once defined the city. St. Lawrence stands in defiance to the Reich of death-to-meaning, but with their boots that cackle a mockery of myth down the streets of our place in time, here in Amsterdam, our hope of memory is all but drowned out. In my despair, I make my way to the church. Arriving late, I slip in and sit in the back. Although I can barely see through the sea of people, I recognize the voice of the preacher as that of Dr. J.H. Bavinck. A sermon on John’s Apocalyptic vision. “Behold!” Bavinck booms, “Something is required if we are truly to see. We must be inwardly filled with the misery of this world. Its anguish must have seized us deeply, down into the very depths of our being.”⁹ Yes, we all feel this today. How impossible to miss the anguish of occupation and war! Bavinck tells us something more we must see. Something that requires the imagination. With wet eyes we see the terrible smoke of war. But with the imagination we see more. Bavinck stretches his hands out towards the congregation,
“Behind the dark clouds of the world's riddles we see the throne before which John stood. We see the face of Him who sits upon it. We gaze upon the radiant circle, the emerald rainbow shining around Him, and we recognize in it the signs of His eternal faithfulness and fatherly love. Lightning and thunder proceed from the throne—thunders that roll all the way down to earth, like the distant rumbling of God's wrath. Yet in Him Himself, who stands at the center of all things, who bears all things and fills all things, there is rest. In Him all our fear is stilled. In Him all our longing comes to an end. In Him our anxieties and troubles melt away. In Him the darkness of our sorrow is broken.”¹⁰
Bavinck tells us of a God who works all things, even in these terrible days, from a throne we cannot see. How do we get beyond what we see? How do we get behind the riddles and clouds of despair? How do I? Bavinck steps back and rests his hands on the pulpit. He speaks softly now, “We begin to suspect that what we see on earth is only the outward surface of His holy ordering of all things, and that we, who see only fragments, can never fit them together properly. We begin to understand that we must first rise above it all, into the serene stillness of His eternal light, if we are ever fully to comprehend it.”¹¹ Here I drift off a bit, pulled by Bavinck’s existentialism, his own pull toward mysticism—“There I dare to hope again. To hope that all those things I see around me may have entirely different aspects than I first imagined.”¹² I get up to sneak back out, sensing his sermon coming to an end. As the door slowly closes behind me, I hear Dr. Bavinck close out his sermon:
“And when I have entered there once again, then I can turn my eyes back toward the world—the world with all its devastations and all its nameless misery. Then, in the midst of world history, I see the Cross of the Christ of God. Then I see the history of the world as one long, dark corridor leading onward toward the future of God. Then I can lift up my head, filled with childlike confidence. For behold, your redemption is drawing near (Luke 21:28).”¹³
Carl Trueman and Michael Horton on Enchantment
By imagination and childlike confidence, by faith and hope, we see the story behind all things. The story told by a God who is Redeemer and who is drawing near. The story of meaning. And the only way to read it is by re-enchantment. Postmodernism, reacting to a world where meaning lead to war, rejected meaning altogether; a Luftwaffe destruction of imagination. However, in this year of 2026, Postmodernity has waned in the face of ironic fatigue. As Adorno has already pointed out for us, Postmodernity is not something that can die, but rather, something that remains dying. However, a cultural shift has taken place over the last 20 years. Postmodernity’s rejection of a grand-narrative and meaning, in an attempt to live with (and explain) the tragedies of WWII, has now lead to a culture desperate for a greater story and a deeper meaning behind what we see. Modernity sought rational mastery and Postmodernity sought suspicion. But we are tired, and the slumbering away of meaning has given birth to a child, crying for breath, for community, for history. Whether one calls this “Metamodernism”¹⁴ or “Post-postmodernism,”¹⁵ the fact remains: our culture has tired of a meaningless irony and has now turned, by way of disenchantment, away from the crumpled map of worldvision to the unfolding of a worldview. Yes, it fails. Disenchantment cannot build a worldview precisely because disenchantment is a form of enchantment—just without the grounding of reason.
This cultural shift is unfortunately missed by Carl Trueman in his most recent book, and for this reason, he posits that re-enchantment is not the answer to the cultural ills. That is because, for Trueman, the cultural ill is not the slumber of an unbridled imagination, but the loss of consecration.¹⁶ What is it, however, to desecrate what was once deemed holy but an act of the disenchanted imagination? What is consecration but acting on a picture we cannot see? For this reason, Michael Horton’s yet unfinished trilogy seems to offer a better critique of our day. For Horton, the Western World is not defined by desecration or even disenchantment, but has always been marked by a “turn to transcendence” that is “more enchanted than ever.”¹⁷ Today, man is not simply desecrating what was once deemed holy. Man is, as he always has, first shifting from “traditional myths that founded rituals to new ones that inculcated natural supernature.”¹⁸ In short, as Horton points out, José Casanova is right: “the disenchantment of the world does not necessarily entail the disenchantment of consciousness, the decline of religion, or the end of magic. On the contrary, it is compatible with all forms of reenchantment.”¹⁹ It is exactly this disenchantment that has lead to the desecration of man, and it is re-enchantment that Bavinck’s sermon has called us back to. Not the enchantment of the age ungrounded by reason (disenchantment), but the one that sees the hand of God in all things, and wants nothing more than to know that story.
Kinism in the ARP, the PCA, and Ogden
An example of this tension between consecration and re-enchantment can be seen in the rise of Nazism during Bavinck’s day and the influence of white supremacy in our day amongst a small movement of Reformed-minded believers. Was Nazism, and the pull many felt towards it, due to a desire for desecration? Again, here is where I think Trueman misses the mark a bit: the why of desecration. Yes, of course, the Third Reich was defined by the desecration of man and the consecration of the unholy. But this was due to a false-enchantment with the power of Hitler himself. In his 1936 speech, “Our Führer,” for instance, Joseph Goebbels spoke of Hitler’s visit to Cologne and described it as “religion in the deepest and most mysterious sense. A nation affirmed God through its advocate, and put its fate and life confidently in his hands.”²⁰ You see, it was the distortion of enchantment (what we call disenchantment) along the lines of faith in man (not desecration of man) that lead to the appalling and demonic acts of Hitler’s Third Reich. In short, Hitler’s Nazism was not merely a political or cultural movement, but a world-and-life-view.²¹ The same year that Bavinck would preach the above sermon, he would also publish a revised version of his famous The Riddle of Life, in which he would set out the need for a Christian world-and-life-view to combat the riddles of war and oppression throughout Europe. Was the Third Reich an event of desecration? According to Bavinck, it was far more complex than that,
“Anyone who listens perceptively in time of war to the arguments for or against this country or that immediately realizes that as far as countless matters are concerned our intellect is little more than the humble servant of our heart. Our intellect thinks what our heart wants it to think . . . Knowledge of the truth is in the first place a moral value granted only to the pure of heart. Living in sensual desire, in hatred, and in ambition deprives us of a view into the most profound realities on which the universe has been grounded.”²²
The point is clear: the problem of Nazism is not the desecration of man, but the disenchantment of man; the ruin of his imagination. And so, contrary to Trueman, and more in line with Horton, re-enchantment is enough: because it alone gets through the gate of the heart. We don’t need to merely hammer away at demands for consecration. More than that, yet along with it, we need to pierce the world with a view of the most profound realities of the universe. A view we can only see by faith; by the childlike courage to imagine more than we can see.
Earlier this month (June 2026), The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP) condemned what has been called “Kinism” at their General Synod.²³ According to that report, Kinism is “The belief that God has ordained the existence of distinct ethnic and racial groups and that these groups should be preserved and protected.” They also condemned Race Realism, which posits that “certain boundaries ought not to be crossed, including mixed-race marriages, mixed-race schools, and mixed-race churches. It also means racial slavery, racial segregation, and intentionally exclusive white leadership can be biblical and good.” According to the Report, these ideas are propagated by a loosely connected group of bloggers and websites. Particularly interesting is the Report’s mention of “The main web organs” of this movement which, according to them, include “Faith and Heritage (now preserved on Antelope Hill.” This is an interesting note because just a week after this resolution was passed, a conference was held in Ogden, UT by New Christendom Press (founded by Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé), at which Antelope Hill not only sponsored the conference, but hosted a book table that sold their publications of the speeches of Hitler and a memoir of an SS Officer.²⁴
In the Lord’s timing, it would also seem that later this month the PCAGA will meet. There, the Partial Report of the Ad-Interim Committee on Christian Nationalism will be presented in which the committee will “warn the members and officers of the Presbyterian Church in America of some expressions of what is called Christian Nationalism that embrace forms of antisemitism, race realism, and Kinism.”²⁵ Sounding the alarm, not on Kinism’s desecration of man, but on its illusionary ideas, the committee notes that “The PCA has repeatedly and unequivocally declared its repudiation of these views as incompatible with biblical Christianity.”
Why is it so troubling for Christians to be meddling with Kinism or hosting a book table selling Nazi propaganda? Not because it simply shares in the same desecration of man that Hitler’s Third Reich did. It does that, yes. But it also shares the very same world-and-life-view; the same enchantment with race, power, superiority, and the like. A world-and-life-view that is built not on the baptized imagination of Christianity, but on the disenchanted imagination of the secular self. This is a key idea not only behind this broadcast but behind all of birdhouse. Christianity is a world-and-life-view. It is a biblical way of viewing all things by picturing what cannot be seen. The argument of this broadcast, and all of birdhouse, is that for Christians to build a worldview takes the imagination. Grounded by reason, redeemed by union with Christ, and held by the hand of faith, imagination is the organ by which we build a worldview. And it is the organ by which the world attempts to build their own. Theirs is not grounded by reason, not redeemed in Christ, and it is held by the hand of postmodern cynicism—all the while ignoring the post-postmodernist pull to hope-filled narratives of meaning. And so, the conversation around Nazism for J.H. Bavinck and the conversation around it today for us is a conversation not merely about worldview. But even deeper: it is a conversation about salvation. Nazism arose in the garden of myth, watered by a doctrine of salvation: Hitler had come to save and they would see that salvation by faith in him. To combat this worldview, Bavinck (and this broadcast’s other conversation partner, C.S. Lewis) sought to present a view of the world that finds its telos in the glorious revelation of the Sons of God, and a view of life that finds its great meaning in the redemption found in Christ alone. To see the world and life this way requires the imagination. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
The Kinism and even Nazism that continues to seep into the Reformed community is not merely a moral wrong. It is a disenchanted worldview that sings songs to God which attempt to rhyme with the echo of a Reich the world once wiped off the face of the earth. Because the desecration of man that was reputed by the ARP and the PCA and that was hosted in Ogden is built on the same disenchanted world-and-life-view that J.H. Bavinck saw in the Nazis that bombed Rotterdam. It is not a Christian worldview, and so, it is a view of the world and of life that is contrary and opposed to the gospel of our salvation.
And so, with Bavinck, we join the call to imagine a view of the world and of life that only faith can see; one that Christ came to bring; and one the Church is called to uphold, whether in the dissident publishing of sermons against the Nazi occupation or in the vocal protest of elders in a conference hall of the PCA. As odd as it may seem, what is needed now more than ever is not merely resistance to the disenchantment of the world (whether seen in racism, secular spiritualism, pastoral abuses, or many of the other forms it takes today). Rather, what is needed today is a resistance to that disenchantment that is soteric in nature: one that answers racism with the evangelical doctrine of regeneration that makes a new man out of the old, and that new man one with all other new men; one that answers secular spiritualism with the Biblical view of conversion that entails not simply feelings, but faith and repentance and all the affectional dimensions those entail. What is needed today is a resistance along the lines of a Reformed and experiential conception of the ordo salutis that proclaims to see the hand of God reconciling to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Conclusion
Finally, imagine that you’re sitting on a stationary bike in the blacked-out basement of Amsterdam. Your father, J.H. Bavinck has paused his writing, and asked you to pause your peddling, to listen to the noise on the streets above. But this night there is none. Your father strikes a match in the corner to somberly light his pipe. When he notices you watching him in the dark, you ask, “What will you and uncle tell them tomorrow at church?” As the quiet crackle of fresh-lit tobacco fills the corner with smoke, your father responds, “We will tell them there is still a God, and He is not in the power they see up and down the streets.” “And if they ask,” you press, “Where is the power of that God, then?” Your father, without a word, points to the empty cross hanging on the wall. A better story, you think to yourself. And the only answer we Christians have in the face of dying modernity.
¹ Paul Visser, Heart for the Gospel, Heart for the World: The Life and Thought of a Reformed Pioneer Missiologist (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 45.
² M.L. Daneel, "Personal Memories of Three Dutch “Saints: Hendrik Kraemer, J.H. Bavinck, and G.C. Berkouwer," Center for Global Christianity and Missions, Boston University, Accessed August 4, 2025, https://www.bu.edu/cgcm/files/2010/04/Three-Dutch-Saints.pdf.
³ Werner Warmbrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 11.
⁴ Paul Visser, Heart for the Gospel, Heart for the World: The Life and Thought of a Reformed Pioneer Missiologist (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 58.
⁵ Ibid, 57.
⁶ Paul Crosthwaite, Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13.
⁷ Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 47; italics in original.
⁸ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ (1961), in Notes to Literature, 2 vols, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992), II (1991), pp. 241–275 (p. 244).
⁹ J. H. Bavinck and C. B. Bavinck, Inkeer en Uitzicht: Een Woord voor Dezen Tijd (Kampen: J. H. Kok N.V., 1940), 93.
¹⁰ Ibid., 94.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Ibid., 95
¹⁴ Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, eds., Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017)
¹⁵ Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012)
¹⁶ Carl R. Trueman, The Desecration of Man (New York, NY: Sentinel, 2026), xvi.
¹⁷ Michael S. Horton, Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity, vol. 1 of The Divine Self (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024), 32.
¹⁸ Ibid.
¹⁹ José Casanova, “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s ‘Theory of Religious Evolution,’” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 215.
²⁰ Joseph Goebbels, “Our Hitler, 1936” (birthday speeches) Calvin College German Propaganda Archive.
²¹ See J. H. Bavinck, De strijd op het derde front (Zeist: Studenten-Zendingscommissie, 1937).
²² J. H. Bavinck, The Riddle of Life, trans. Bert Hielema (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 36–37.
²³ See the Report here: https://app.box.com/s/8xttgbn6z2cli57bn58g4w7ukebl4g01
²⁴ See NCP’s response to the backlash here: The King's Hall, "The Elephant in the (Conference) Room," YouTube video, 01:01:22, posted June 15, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ctSoZVqzLs
²⁵ Presbyterian Church in America, Partial Report of the Ad Interim Committee on Christian Nationalism to the Fifty-Third General Assembly (Lawrenceville, GA: Presbyterian Church in America, 2026), 2706.
²⁶ J.H. Bavinck, The Riddle of Life, 7-12.
