Belgic Confession

Guido de Bres, a Reformed preacher working underground in the Low Countries under Spanish rule, wrote the Belgic Confession in 1561 and had copies thrown over the wall of the castle at Doornik, together with a letter addressed to Philip II, arguing that the persecuted Reformed believers of the Netherlands were loyal subjects and orderly Christians rather than the seditious sectarians the authorities took them for. He drew heavily on the French Confession of Faith that the Reformed churches of France had adopted the previous year under Calvin's influence, adapting its thirty-seven articles to the situation of the Low Countries and sharpening its language against Anabaptists as well as against Rome, since Dutch Reformed leaders were anxious to distinguish their movement from the radical reformers whose disorder had already brought reprisals on dissenters generally.

The articles move in the order a systematic confession expects, from the existence and knowable attributes of God and the authority of Scripture, including a list of the canonical books meant to settle disputes over the Apocrypha, through the Trinity, creation, providence and the fall to Christ, justification, the church, its marks and its government, and finally the sacraments and civil government. De Bres paid for the confession with his life: he was captured and executed in 1567, one of many Reformed ministers who did not survive the persecution the document had tried to answer.

The confession's plea for toleration did not stop the persecution, but the document outlived the emergency that produced it. Dutch Reformed synods revised and adopted it repeatedly in the following decades, and the Synod of Dort confirmed a settled text in 1618 and 1619, the same synod that produced the Canons of Dort and confirmed the Heidelberg Catechism, binding all three together as the Three Forms of Unity that Dutch Reformed churches still hold as their confessional standard. Ministers, elders and often professors of theology in churches descending from that tradition subscribe to the Belgic Confession alongside its two companions, and church splits within Dutch Reformed history have more than once turned on how strictly that subscription should be enforced against ministers who came to doubt a particular article.

Dutch emigration carried the confession to Reformed churches in North America, South Africa and Indonesia, where translations into English, Afrikaans and Indonesian kept it in use among congregations with no connection to the Netherlands beyond descent from these seventeenth century synods. Article thirty six, on the duty of civil government to protect true religion and suppress false worship, proved the most awkward for later generations to keep as originally worded, and most Reformed bodies that still subscribe to the confession have revised or reinterpreted it once state establishment of religion no longer matched their own convictions about liberty of conscience.