Late last year, Robert Van Kampen and his wife, Judy, moved from their home near Wheaton to a new house they had built in western Michigan on top of a sand dune overlooking Lake Michigan. Two of their three daughters and their husbands, who work with Van Kampen, made the move with them, settling into temporary quarters while their own lakefront homes are being built.
Also packing up their suitcases and joining the Van Kampen entourage were five other families, all associated with Van Kampen in his business and religious endeavors. Three other families are in the process of moving.
Not exactly your ordinary, everyday move.
But then Robert Van Kampen is not your ordinary person. He is very rich and very religious. He has the money to start his own church, which he did in DuPage County and again in Michigan, and he has the religious tenacity to spend eight years writing a 522-page book analyzing biblical prophecies. Called “The Sign” (Crossway Books, 1992), the book states his belief that Adolf Hitler is most likely the person who will be resurrected as the Antichrist, signaling the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.
So instead of a quiet move from one side of the lake to the other, Van Kampen’s change of address triggered a spate of increasingly sensationalistic publicity, speculating that he and his “followers” were actually “an apocalyptic cult.” A 7,200-square-foot vault that he’s building under a concrete tennis court to house his collection of rare biblical manuscripts was described as a bunker. Requests started arriving from national networks for interviews.
Van Kampen says a “whole spin” has been put on his book and beliefs.
“It’s crazy,” he says in an interview at his home. “A bunker-that’s stupid. My book says to be aware, be alert, be sober and to be sure you’re found worthy. A bunker isn’t going to help anyone.”
He leans forward, jabbing at the air with the index and little fingers of both hands to emphasize his words.
“I want to negate all this nonsense.”
Even stripped of the hype and rumor, Van Kampen looms as a powerful person, driven by fierce beliefs that he says are the ultimate source of his vast financial success.
In 1967, when he was 28, he started a municipal bond firm called Van Kampen Merritt (Merritt was partner Jack Merritt of Philadelphia). Sixteen years later, in late 1983, he sold the company to Xerox for $185 million. Today he heads Van Kampen Assets Management Co., which oversees several businesses in which he has a controlling interest.
In 1989, Forbes magazine listed him as one of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals, with an estimated net worth of $290 million.
“I’m nothing but a conduit,” he says. “My life is not a picture of my success, it’s a picture of the unmerited favor of God.”
In response to a question as to whether he’s still one of the 400 wealthiest, he laughs and says: “Forbes doesn’t know what I’m worth and they’ll never know. Most of my assets . . . are technically not my property. Bob Van Kampen himself is not wealthy because I’ve given it away. I still have things. I have the ability to control, and I like that.”
Van Kampen is sitting in front of a soaring glass window that looks down on Lake Michigan. His wife, Judy, whom he married 34 years ago, two weeks after he graduated from Wheaton College, is there also. Daughter Kristin, 28, has dropped by, and Karla, 24, his youngest daughter, is up and down from her seat, chasing her toddler.
(The oldest Van Kampen daughter, Kim, 31, continues to live in DuPage County, where her husband is with Van Kampen Merritt, but the couple also owns a Michigan home where they plan to spend the summer.)
Bible a part of their lives
His conversation is constantly punctuated with biblical quotes and references. Even their homes have biblical names. The Michigan house is called Masada, after the mountaintop fortress near the Dead Sea in Israel that was the site of a mass suicide by Jews in 72 A.D. to prevent their capture by Romans.
The constant referral to the Bible is not something that comes and goes, he and his wife say.
“Probably 60 to 70 percent of all the talk that goes on in this house is discussing things from a biblical perspective,” Judy said.
Karla agrees. “My parents talked about doctrine all the time, driving in the car, sitting at meals. I grew up thinking everyone was like this. When you’re young, sometimes you idolize your teachers, but we always knew that anything a teacher said was right only if it was consistent with Scripture. Scripture is the absolute.”
After living all their lives in the Wheaton area, the Van Kampens decided a couple of years ago to move to Michigan.
“It was a combination of a lot of things,” Van Kampen said. “I love the water here, I love the weather. Right now, there’s a high religious consciousness in this area (Michigan) that’s nice to be in. The western suburbs are going through problems. Increasingly there’s an environment that’s basically hostile to our values.”
And there was the land in Michigan.
“I like land. I made a lot of money on land. I bought land 25 years ago (in West Chicago) for $2,500, $3,000 an acre. People told me the city (commuting) would never get that far. Well, it did, and I sold it (110 acres) for $50,000 an acre.
“The same thing is going to happen here. Land value here is fabulous. We have 135 acres of beachfront property and land holdings in and around Grand Rapids of better than 1,000 acres of beautiful land. And all I’ve done is (reinvest) what I got in West Chicago. In 10 years, I’ll wish I had 10,000 acres here.”
Making a church happen
When they decided to leave the Chicago area, the Van Kampens also decided they needed to bring their church. Or, more accurately, copy the church they started in DuPage County about 10 years ago.
“To just move us into a church here would be chaotic,” he said. “Here comes this guy with his buddies, and he’s come to take over. That’s what they would think. So I said, when we move, it’s best to duplicate what we have (in DuPage). We already have the constitution for the church, which I wrote.”
Van Kampen started Grace Church of DuPage, near Warrenville, so family members could practice their faith exactly as they believed it, they say.
“We were able to do this because we had the funds to make that church happen,” he says. “So many churches, in my opinion, need to compromise what they believe in order to get money to pay for their staff. They need to softpedal what the Scripture says, so not to offend anyone. Our position is that God’s word is true.
“We’re not trying to bring in the unsaved Harry and then beat him in the head with the Bible. We’re trying to build churches with people who have a profound love of the word of God.”
While the new $1.5-million 30,000-square foot Grace Church is being built not far from Van Kampen’s Michigan home, services are held at a local elementary school. Sunday attendance at the original Grace Church is usually between 800 and 1,000 people. The new church is drawing about 125, of whom about 30 are Van Kampen family and associates.
“A lot of people assume Bob is a preacher,” Judy says. “He’s not. We’re just lay elders, and our church is similiar to a typical Baptist church.”
His collection
Van Kampen’s voice changes when he talks about his large collection of rare Bibles and biblical manuscripts, including scrolls and tablets. It becomes excited, almost breathless, as he handles the ancient volumes.
He runs his fingers over the pages, feels the bindings, moves quickly through the bookshelves, talking almost to himself as he looks for specific ones.
“Where is that King James hiding? Here we are-ta da! Here are two King James, printed 1611. They made an error on Ruth 3:15, one (Bible) says he went into the city, the other says she went into the city. I have both of them, a `he’ and a `she’ Bible.
“Look at this, this is one of the martyrs’ Bibles, see, its pages are covered with blood. Bloody Mary (Queen Mary I of England, who persecuted Protestants) went after all the pastors who owned these Bibles, destroyed them and dipped their Bibles in their blood. And here, this is the only complete Bible with Renaissance style of printing in the world. Total, the world. The museum in Florence (Italy) has only the Book of Psalms; we have the whole Bible.”
Van Kampen has hundreds of these Bibles and manuscripts, which he has gotten through auctions, from museums, from private collectors, wherever. The collection will eventually be the backbone of the Grace Foundation, an organization separate from his church whose function, he says, will be “authenticating the Scriptures. People who work for the foundation think the way I think, people with a high view of the Scripture.”
The collection will be housed in the underground vault-the vault that has been the source of so much rumor.
“It is an incredibly valuable collection,” says Alan Johnson, professor of biblical studies at Wheaton College. “It is perfectly sensible to have it housed in a structure where it could not be destroyed.”
Understanding `The Sign’
Johnson also comments on the other source of so many rumors that have recently surrounded Van Kampen: his book, “The Sign,” in which he interprets biblical prophecies into an end-of-the-world scenario.
“We’re not talking about a bizarre doctrine here. There’s nothing cultic about the book,” Johnson says. “It fits squarely into the context of conservative evangelical thought shared by 13 to 15 million Christians. . . . He represents a departure in that he holds the church will not be raptured (delivered to God) before the tribulation starts, but there are issues that good Christians differ on.”
As far as Hitler being the Antichrist, Johnson says, “that’s very idiosyncratic. I know of no other modern interpreters of Revelation who has come up with that type of scenario.”
Van Kampen doesn’t necessarily agree that there’s room for differences of opinion on what the Bible says.
“I didn’t like some of the conclusions (of the prophecies), but I know what the Bible teaches. It’s right. It might not be popular, but it’s right.”
He started working on his book, he says, shortly after he sold Van Kampen Merritt to Xerox.
“The only thing that still baffled me (about the Bible) were the issues concerning the last days. There are so many nuts running around, crazies predicting when the end of the world will be, and I decided the Bible had to have an understandable view.
“I got a corkboard that I put up in front of the fireplace, 8 by 4 feet, and divided it into sections, into biblical frameworks. Then I took all the prophetic bases in the Bible and started putting them together. There cannot be contradictions (among the prophecies). If there is, you haven’t found the truth.
“When it was done, I had the common denominator. I tell people, `You read the logic of this book, and if you think I’m out to left field, then don’t have anything to do with my investments.’ “
About 65,000 copies of the book have been sold, according to Crossway publisher Dennis Lane, who is also a longtime acquaintance of Van Kampen’s.
“Ten thousand is usually break-even point, and anything over 50,000 is very strong,” Lane said. “Van Kampen has a brilliant and very precise mind.”
A busy life
The house on the sand dune has 15,000 square feet, including balconies, garage and stairwells. The top was designed to accommodate a helicopter, but, Van Kampen says, because of the neighbors he has decided not to use it. Grand Haven Township Assessor Carl Dahlman has pegged taxes on a $3.3 million market value.
“We live in a beautiful home. I’ve never built a home from scratch in my whole life, and I thought, `I don’t have that many years to go, why not have a beautiful home to enjoy,’ ” Van Kampen says. “It’s not meant to be a monument.”
Van Kampen says he gets up every day around 4 a.m., makes himself a cup of coffee and studies the Bible or biblical papers for a couple of hours. “I wait for Judy to get up, and then I walk to the beach house, my office. I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I eat, sleep and drink work.
“I’ve made mistakes, I know that. I’m a sinner saved by grace. The Bible says, `Don’t do anything that has mastery over you. Don’t do anything that causes another person to stumble. Don’t do anything you can’t glorify God with.’
“Those are the biblical guidelines. They are the guidelines I’ve always tried to follow.”
