ABSTRACT
Johannes Hendrickus van der Palm was a Dutch linguist, theologian, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and Professor of Oriental Literature and Antiquities at Leiden University. The Reformed Church was formally Calvinist, but Palm was one of a group of Moderates who sought reform its teaching. The excerpts below, translated from Dutch to English, are taken from his sermon on the necessity of divine grace, where he argues that the Christian requires God’s grace to enable the spiritual transformation that leads to salvation. His description of the working of grace in the life of the Christian is as a ‘pull’ on the individual that brings them to Christ, and which offers conviction in salvation that in turns enable a range of other emotions, including joy and happiness. Across the sermon, emotions are located as ‘push’ and ‘pulls’, so that Lord dissuades with fear and terror but persuades with hope and love. If such emotions figured prominently in sermons of earlier centuries, for Palm they correspond with the pleasures and pains of the utilitarian sensate body – religious emotions are interpreted through a new biological lens. The sermon itself is also a persuasive form, deploying repetition, rhythm and similar rhetorical devices. These techniques were designed to encourage listeners to remember what was said, but also to be ‘moved’ by the text, especially when read aloud in a performance. Thus this source can be read for insight into how emotions were expected to operate in spiritual contexts and as a product designed to have emotional effects on its audience.
