Part One: The Bridge
Sometimes a man is born into the wrong skin, in the wrong
place, at the wrong time. Frederik Lodewijk Anthing was all three.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Batavia was a
creature of rigid divisions—as unbending as the iron bars that separated the
races, as inflexible as the law books that justified them. There were the
full-blooded Europeans, the Dutch totok who walked with their noses in
the air and their boots on native necks. There were the Indo-Europeans, caught
in that terrible nowhere-land between white and brown. And there were the Inlanders—the
natives—whose own land had become a prison with invisible walls.
Into this segregated hell emerged Frederik Lodewijk Anthing:
Meester in de Rechten, high-ranking Supreme Court official, a man who
should have been content to live out his days in colonial comfort, sipping gin
and bitters on a veranda while brown-skinned servants fanned away the heat.
But something was wrong with Anthing. Something had gotten
into him—or maybe something had gotten out of him—and it would not let him
rest.
He spent his personal fortune, every guilder and cent, to
educate peasant children as evangelists. He didn’t just teach them; he ordained
them, those brown-skinned boys with their Javanese names and their mystical
hearts. The state church called it subversive. The colonial government called
it dangerous. Anthing called it the only thing that made sense in a senseless
world.
His life became a bridge stretched across a chasm so wide
and deep that most men wouldn’t even dare to look down into it. On one side:
Western rationality, state law, stone churches in the city center. On the
other: local wisdom, the law of love, humble prayer huts in the forests of the
Ommelanden—the hinterlands beyond Batavia Castle, where the jungle grew thick
and the old gods still whispered.
The question wasn’t whether that bridge would hold.
The question was what would happen when it finally
collapsed.
Part Two: The Boy Who Lived in Two Worlds
Frederik Lodewijk Anthing came squalling into the world on
April 29, 1815, from what you might call the complex womb of colonialism—though
that’s putting it politely. His father was a Dutch Lutheran, stern and proper.
His mother was of German descent, and she brought with her the influence of
Pietism, that Protestant movement that emphasized personal piety and inner
warmth over cold doctrine and dead ritual.
From the very beginning, the boy lived in two worlds. His
body grew up in the tropical climate of Batavia, where the heat could drive a
man mad and the mosquitoes carried death in their needle-thin proboscises. But
his mind—ah, his mind was shaped in Europe, at Leiden University, where he
absorbed Roman-Dutch law like a sponge and encountered the Réveil movement, a
spiritual awakening that rejected Enlightenment rationalism in favor of living
faith and social concern.
Two worlds. Always two worlds. And Frederik Lodewijk Anthing
walked the tightrope between them, never quite belonging to either.
He began his legal career at the Landraad—the
colonial court—in Semarang in the late 1850s. The port city was a crossroads
where Chinese merchants haggled, Dutch bureaucrats shuffled papers, and
Javanese aristocrats moved like shadows through the narrow streets. As a judge,
Anthing stood apart from his colleagues, who viewed law as nothing more than an
instrument of order, a cudgel to keep the natives in line.
But Anthing saw something else. His interactions with local
communities opened his eyes to the Javanese inner world—rich in mystical
seeking, hungry for liberation, yearning for something that the cold stones of
European churches could never provide.
It was in Semarang that he met the independent evangelists, men like Kiai Ibrahim Tunggul Wulung, who understood that Christianity need not erase Javanese identity. It could, instead, fulfill its mystical yearnings. It could fill the empty spaces in the soul that the Dutch had never even known existed.
And that’s when the idea took root in Anthing’s mind—the idea that would eventually destroy him.
Part Three: The Subversive
To Anthing, the Protestant Church—the Indische Kerk—was
little more than an administrative institution, a bloodless bureaucracy serving
Europeans while ignoring millions of indigenous people. A gospel confined by
racial walls was a dead gospel, a corpse dressed up in Sunday clothes and
propped up in a pew.
This dissatisfaction didn’t just propel him into action. It possessed
him.
In 1851, together with other Pietist figures—E.W. King, J.
Esser, and a Chinese Christian named Gan Kwee—Anthing founded the Genootschap
voor In- en Uitwendige Zending, which scholars would later note as his
first “subversive” vehicle. The private organization reached the unreachable
and breached racial boundaries that the state guarded like treasure.
By 1863, Anthing’s reputation had grown large enough to
secure his appointment as Vice President of the Supreme Court in Batavia. He
had reached the pinnacle, socially speaking. He lived in elite neighborhoods
and mingled with colonial officials who thought he was one of them.
They were wrong.
West Java was a region where most of the population had
embraced Islam, their spiritual and cultural traditions rooted deeper than any
European could comprehend. For the missionaries of that era, it was a
formidable challenge—a spiritual battlefield fraught with obstacles that had
broken better men than they.
But Anthing understood something the others didn’t. He
understood that to touch indigenous hearts, you had to speak the language of
their cosmology. You couldn’t present Christianity as a Western institution,
all cold doctrine and harder rules. You had to make it local, make it theirs.
You had to express it through ngélmu—that Javanese term for traditional
spiritual knowledge—even if it meant employing spells and mantras that would
make the bishops back home clutch their prayer books in horror.
Take the case of Semain Empi, a Betawi strongman—a jawara—who
lived in Pondok Melati on the outskirts of Batavia. This man collected various
forms of ngélmu like some men collect stamps, each one a key to power
and authority. When Anthing’s disciples entered his domain, Semain challenged
this new knowledge, this foreign magic that dared to compete with his own.
Through intense interaction—and you can bet there was more
to it than polite conversation—his defenses collapsed. He acknowledged that his
own ngélmu was merely a shadow, while what Anthing’s disciples carried
was the True Knowledge, the Ngelmu Sejati, from the Source of All Power.
Anthing reformulated the Gospel in ways that would have
given orthodox missionaries nightmares. Jesus wasn’t merely a redeemer of sin;
He was the True Teacher, the Guru Sejati, or the Just King—the Ratu
Adil—with authority over all spirits, all demons, all the things that went
bump in the tropical night. The Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed became
new mantras, more powerful than the spells of shamans. The Bible was a sacred
heirloom, a book of power that could move mountains and cast out devils.
The academics called it syncretism, and maybe it was. But
Anthing saw it differently. The voids within Javanese ngélmu were
vessels ready to be filled by the Holy Spirit. He didn’t demand his followers
become “Black Dutchmen”—Zwarte Hollanders—wearing European suits and
speaking Dutch in their sleep. He wanted them to remain Javanese, with renewed
inner substance.
His method of evangelization was different too. Anthing and
his disciples didn’t preach from pulpits, standing safe and separate from the
congregation. They engaged in open debate. They visited hermitages, challenged
shamans’ worldviews, posed unanswerable philosophical questions, and concluded
with demonstrations of prayer power—healing the sick, casting out demons,
performing the kind of miracles that made men believe.
His activities spread around Bogor and Karawang, regions
that became the first laboratories for Anthing’s innovative—some said
heretical—methodology. He regarded every Sundanese person as an individual of
equal worth, with the same right to know Christ as any European or colonial
elite.
And that, more than anything else, was what made him
dangerous.
Part Four: The House
In 1870, Anthing did something that shocked everyone who
knew him. He chose early retirement from the Supreme Court. Instead of enjoying
a generous pension in Europe, sipping tea in Amsterdam while servants brought
him the newspapers, he remained in Batavia and devoted his life entirely to
mission work.
His large home in Meester Cornelis—today’s Jatinegara—was
transformed into an evangelist training center. He filled it with dozens of
young men: Javanese, Sundanese, Bugis. All their needs were covered from
Anthing’s personal funds, a sacrifice that gradually consumed his wealth the
way termites consume a house, from the inside out, until nothing remains but a
hollow shell.
The education in that house didn’t emphasize Greek or Hebrew
like the Dutch seminaries did. The curriculum was pragmatic and field-oriented:
basic biblical understanding focused on the power of Jesus and His parables,
contextual apologetics that could stand up to ngélmu, and spiritual
self-reliance.
Among his students, one stood out: Radin Abas, who would
later become known as Kiai Sadrach Surapranata. He was introduced by Ibrahim
Tunggul Wulung, who also had two sons studying at Anthing’s house.
Radin Abas remained in Anthing’s household initially as a
servant—because that’s how these things worked in colonial society—but was
later adopted as a “son” by Anthing. Not legally, perhaps, but in all the ways
that mattered.
Sadrach went on to establish the independent congregation Golongane
Wong Kristen Kang Mardika—the Fellowship of Free Christians—rejecting Dutch
pastoral dominance while preserving Javanese cultural symbols. Orthodox
missionaries like Lion Cachet called it heresy. Anthing called Sadrach his
greatest success.
Their relationship reflected a shift of power, from
benevolent European patronage to bold indigenous emancipation. Sadrach stood as
living proof that Anthing’s pedagogical experiment had worked—that you could
teach a man to fish for souls without making him pretend to be Dutch.
Part Five: The Campaign
With his cadre of indigenous evangelists trained and ready,
Anthing launched a systematic campaign into the Ommelanden and West
Java—regions long considered closed to the Gospel due to strong Islamic
influence. His disciples established mission posts around Jakarta: Gunung
Puteri, Pondok Melati, Kampung Sawah, Cigelam, Pasirkaliki, Tanah Tinggi,
Ciater, Cikuya, Cakung. Each one a small light in the darkness, or a small
infection spreading through the body of Islam, depending on your perspective.
The establishment of a more permanent seminary in Depok
demonstrated Anthing’s commitment to long-term educational infrastructure.
Prominent scholars like Professor Hendrik Kraemer explicitly praised his role
in spreading Christianity among indigenous communities. Kraemer viewed Anthing’s
work not as ordinary evangelism, but as a revolution in Christian mission
methodology—one that respected local autonomy and capability.
Pondok Melati became the initial milestone in forming the
Betawi Christian community. Kampung Sawah developed into a stronghold of
Christian culture that endures to this day—a living monument to one man’s
vision. Cigelam opened access to the West Javanese interior, while Tanah Tinggi
demonstrated ethnic diversity within the congregation.
In Sukabumi, one of his disciples named Petrus taught
farmers in Cikembar, which displeased a landowner named Simon van Eendenburg.
Due to intimidation and restrictions—the kind that involved threats and maybe
worse—Petrus and 65 followers left Cikembar for Rawaselang, Cianjur. This
exodus gave rise to Kabudalan, an annual tradition commemorated every
June 13 by the Apostolic Heirloom Church in Rawaselang.
Nevertheless, compared to other regions, the spread of
Christianity in West Java was considered unsatisfactory by mission standards.
By 1917, there were only about 3,000 Christians in West Java, while other
mission fields with fewer resources had achieved far greater conversions.
Kraemer himself stated that West Java was barren ground for Christianity.
But maybe Anthing had never been playing the numbers game.
Maybe he’d been playing the long game, planting seeds that would take
generations to sprout.
Or maybe—and this is the darker thought—he’d already sensed
his own end coming, and was racing against time.
Part Six: The Apostle
By the late 1870s, Anthing had become impoverished. He’d
exhausted his wealth supporting dozens of evangelists and mission posts,
pouring his fortune into the ground like water into sand. In 1879, he returned
to the Netherlands seeking financial support.
Instead, the journey became a spiritual pilgrimage that
transformed him—or broke him, depending on how you look at it.
In Holland, he found the mainstream Protestant churches cold
and rationalistic, far removed from the spiritual fire he longed for. In his
search—and by now it had become a desperate search, the kind where a man looks
everywhere for something he’s already lost—he encountered the Apostolic Church,
an Irvingite movement from Scotland that offered renewed fervor.
On October 12, 1879, he was sealed as a member. A year
later, he was ordained an Apostle for Java and the Dutch East Indies. The title
granted him divine legitimacy beyond colonial authority—or so he believed.
When he returned to Batavia in mid-1881, Anthing traveled
from one mission post to another, ordaining new ministers and attempting to
instill Apostolic liturgical structures into simple congregations. But his body
was failing. He was already 63—an advanced age in the disease-ridden tropics,
where fever and dysentery could kill a man in days.
Still, he kept moving. Still, he kept working. As if he
knew—as if he sensed—that his time was running out.
Part Seven: The Steam Tram
In early 1880s Batavia, steam trams had replaced horse-drawn
ones. They were heavy, noisy, and often unsafe—iron monsters that cut through
dusty roads shared with pedestrians, carriages, and street vendors. The public
had been repeatedly warned not to board or disembark until the tram came to a
full stop. Even a minor stumble risked falling between the cars.
And if you fell between the cars, well—the wheels didn’t
care who you were or what God you served.
October 12, 1883, became the dark day.
That afternoon, Anthing was traveling on ministry business
near Meester Cornelis. As he attempted to step off the tram—whether due to a
sudden jolt or his no-longer-agile footing, no one would ever know—he fell
toward the tracks.
For one moment—one crystalline, terrible moment—he must have
known what was coming. Must have seen the iron wheels bearing down on him,
steam-driven and merciless. Must have understood that all his work, all his
sacrifice, all his bridges between worlds were about to end here, on a dusty
street in Batavia, crushed beneath a machine that represented everything he’d
spent his life fighting against: cold, mechanical, European efficiency.
The wheels crushed his leg, shattering bone and flesh. His
screams were swallowed by the hiss of machinery and public panic. Blood pooled
on the tracks, dark and thick in the afternoon heat.
“But Mr. Anthing disembarked from the tram too early and
stumbled between two cars, with the unfortunate result that his leg was broken,”
the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad would report on October 18, 1883, in that
flat, emotionless way that newspapers have of describing horror. “He was
immediately taken to the nearest hospital, but all assistance proved futile.”
Surrounded by the prayers of his disciples—those Javanese
and Sundanese boys he’d trained, those men he’d made into apostles—Frederik
Lodewijk Anthing breathed his last.
The bridge had finally collapsed.
But the men who’d walked across it—they remained on the
other side, carrying the fire he’d given them into the darkness beyond.
And maybe that was the point all along.
---
Sometimes a man’s life is measured not in years but in
bridges built. And sometimes those bridges are built from a man’s own bones,
crushed beneath the wheels of progress, bleeding out on the tracks of history.
Frederik Lodewijk Anthing understood this, even at the
end.
Especially at the end.
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