Calvin University: Faith, Dutch Roots, and a Michigan Reformation
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
Just east of here sits Calvin University, one of the most intellectually serious Christian colleges in the United States, and its story begins in a rented upper room with seven students and a congregation that refused to be absorbed.
In eighteen seventy-six, the Christian Reformed Church, a community of Dutch immigrants who had broken away from the Reformed Church in America over questions of doctrine and theological compromise, established a school on Spring Street in Grand Rapids. They called it De Theologische School. The name was practical: they needed pastors, and they needed them trained in their own tradition rather than borrowed from seminaries they did not fully trust. The language of instruction was Dutch. The theology was Calvinist to its core, drawing on the legacy of the French reformer John Calvin, for whom the school would eventually be named.
The school grew carefully and deliberately. By eighteen ninety-two it had moved to a new site near Madison and Franklin Avenues. Literary studies were added alongside theology. The name became Calvin College, and over the following decades it attracted a faculty committed to the idea that rigorous intellectual inquiry and Reformed faith were not enemies but partners, that loving God included loving truth in every discipline.
By the mid-twentieth century, Calvin had become something unusual: a genuinely scholarly liberal-arts college that took theology seriously without retreating from the sciences or the arts. The physicist and philosopher of science Alvin Plantinga did foundational work rooted in ideas incubated here. The screenwriter Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese, graduated from Calvin, his stark moral sensibility shaped by Calvinist aesthetics. Betsy DeVos and Jay Van Andel, the co-founder of Amway, are also alumni, the school's reach into West Michigan's economic and political life runs deep.
In nineteen fifty-six the college acquired a farm called Knollcrest on the eastern edge of Grand Rapids, and that became the campus you see reflected in the skyline east of the highway. In twenty nineteen, Calvin College became Calvin University, reflecting graduate programs that had grown beyond the original college model. But the founding impulse has never entirely left: a community of immigrants who believed serious thought and sincere faith belonged together, planting something durable on the Michigan frontier.
