Belgic Confession of Faith

“Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”

— Jude 1:3

The Belgic Confession is a confession of faith for the Reformed churches of the Low Countries, written in 1561 by Guido de Brès, a preacher who had already once fled Roman Catholic persecution, from the Netherlands to England.¹ Its thirty-seven articles set out Reformed doctrine on Scripture, God, Christ, salvation, and the church.² The confession was later adopted, together with the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, as one of the “Three Forms of Unity” binding on the Dutch Reformed churches, at the Synod of Dort in 1619.³

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the Belgic Confession and never mentions it by name; the two documents belong to different branches of the Reformed confessional family. The Belgic Confession is one of the Three Forms of Unity, the doctrinal standard of the Dutch Reformed churches, alongside the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort.³ The 2LBCF instead descends from the English Puritan line running through the Westminster Confession and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration. A. A. Hodge lists the Belgic Confession, alongside the Westminster Confession and catechisms, among “the principal confessions of the Reformed Church.”⁴

Despite that separate lineage, the two confessions agree on how Scripture’s authority is finally known. The Belgic Confession grounds it not in the church’s say-so but in the Holy Spirit: the canonical books are received “because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God.”⁵ The 2LBCF states the same principle in its own words: though “the testimony of the church” may move a reader toward Scripture, “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth” of Scripture rests only “from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”⁶

Historical Development

Guido de Brès (1522-1567) was converted to the Protestant faith through reading the Bible in 1547 and began preaching in the Netherlands, earning the name “the Reformer of the Netherlands.”¹ The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation forced him to flee to England, where he came under the influence of John à Lasco and Martin Bucer, before he returned to Belgium in 1552 and resumed preaching the Reformed faith.¹ In 1561 he wrote the confession that takes its name from the Latin designation for the Low Countries, “Confessio Belgica.”¹

The confession became a doctrinal boundary line in the very controversy that produced the Canons of Dort. When Jacob Arminius’s teaching on grace and the human will drew opposition at the University of Leiden, his chief opponent there, Franciscus Gomarus, judged that Arminius’s theology agreed with the Jesuits and the Pelagians and, on that basis, “declared that Arminius violated the Belgic Confession (1561) and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563).”⁷ The synod that met at Dort from 1618 to 1619 to settle that controversy also formally adopted the Belgic Confession, together with the Heidelberg Catechism and its own Canons, as one of the Three Forms of Unity binding on the Dutch Reformed churches.³

Content

Scripture and the knowledge of God. Article 1 opens the confession’s doctrine of God: “We all believe with the heart, and confess with the mouth, that there is one only simple and spiritual Being, which we call God.”² Article 2 names two means by which God is known, nature and Scripture, without treating nature as an independent source of saving truth alongside Scripture.⁸ Article 5 grounds the authority of the canonical books in the Spirit’s own testimony together with the books’ internal character, rather than in the church’s declaration that they are canonical.⁵ Bavinck reads this as the common Reformed position: “All Christian churches are united in the confession that Holy Scripture is the foundation of theology, as the Belgic Confession states in its fifth article.”⁸

Sin and salvation. Article 15 defines original sin as “a corruption of the whole nature and a hereditary disease, wherewith even infants in their mother’s womb are infected,” a corruption “not altogether abolished or wholly eradicated even by baptism,” though “not imputed to the children of God unto condemnation.”³ Article 24, cited alongside the Heidelberg Catechism as evidence of the confession’s monergistic doctrine of regeneration, ties saving faith to a prior, Spirit-worked new birth rather than to an act of the unaided human will.⁹

Church and sacraments. Article 29 distinguishes the true church from the false by three marks: “the pure doctrine of the gospel,” “the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ,” and the exercise of church discipline “in punishing of sin.”¹⁰ Article 34 grounds infant baptism in its replacement of circumcision, since Christ, “having abolished circumcision, which was done with blood, hath instituted the sacrament of baptism instead thereof,” while insisting baptism is administered only once.¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 77-129. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 1, “That There Is One Only God,” text as reproduced by Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/Belgic_Confession. ↩ ↩²
Moore, Concupiscence, chap. 3, 100. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 94-111, at 103. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 5, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87, at 69. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩²
Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 21-87, citing Belgic Confession art. 24 alongside Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 25. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 29, “Of the Marks of the True Church, and Wherein She Differs from the False Church,” text as reproduced by Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/Belgic_Confession. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 34, “Of Holy Baptism,” text as reproduced by Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/Belgic_Confession. ↩