On November 2, 1561, Roman Catholic authorities in the town of Tournai (modern-day Belgium) sent a report to their superiors that a mysterious package had been discovered just inside of the walls of their castle. It had been thrown over the walls in the middle of the night by a person with nefarious intent—at least, nefarious in the perspective of the Roman authorities.
The authorities reported: “In order to make you aware of the purity of their doctrine, we present the booklet here enclosed, containing their confession, which they say more than half of this town present to us with common accord, to which more than one hundred thousand people of these lands agree together. And [they say] that they will not change it even at the risk of losing their goods, tortures, misfortunes, death or the fire, in order not to let themselves deviate from the purity of the doctrine of God. Finally, they quote several sentences in Latin, Greek and Hebrew taken from the Scripture.”[1]
1. Quoted in Nicolaas H. Gootjes, The Belgic Confession: Its History and Sources (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 15.
So, what was this nefarious package? Both a letter addressing the authorities that stated the eagerness of these Protestant citizens to obey their Roman Catholic earthly authorities and copies of The Belgic Confession. In total, the confession is around twenty-pages in modern edition, and it has served an immeasurable role in the evangelical church for the last five hundred years. The author, a pastor named Guy de Brès, intended the confession to build up the faith of those already convinced of Reformation doctrine while also serving as an evangelistic tool.
Uniting around a robust written confession of faith serves the church in innumerable ways, many of which have been covered already in previous essays at Christ Over All. Using the Belgic Confession as a case study, this article shows three ways that confessions benefit church-state relations, Christian discipleship, and especially missions. Indeed, in a time when many are pushing for confessions that are watered down and weakened, it is this missiological benefit of confessions that merits our greater attention.
The State and Confessionalism
The Reformation was fundamentally a missions and evangelism movement recovering true gospel preaching where the church had abandoned it. It’s for that reason that Calvin, for example, emphasized the sending of church planters and missionaries back to his native France because he (and many others) considered it a non-Christian country. Protestantism birthed many great catechetical and confessional documents that served the church for hundreds of years that were written with the goal of both convincing Roman Catholics and of strengthening the faith of believers.
In the weeks prior to the mysterious booklets being thrown over the castle walls in Tournai, some Reformed believers had gathered together as a public demonstration of their faith. Despite the culture of persecution and threat of violence at the hands of the Roman officials, some Reformed Christians traveled from across the Low Countries on September 14, 1561 to meet publicly with those in Tournai. Two weeks later, about one hundred Reformed believers began walking through the city streets singing Psalms in French. By so doing, they were publicly identifying with the cause of Calvin and the other Reformers, since Psalm-singing in French was a distinctive marker of the Genevan reformer’s work. Within a few days the number of Reformed Christians demonstrating their faith publicly in this way swelled to at least three thousand.
Their goal was to make clear the sheer numbers of Reformed in the city. The officials didn’t initially respond. These Reformed believers had hoped to publicly inform the authorities of the faith, but when the authorities refused to meet with them, a printed summary was necessary to demonstrate their continuity with historic Christian belief. The Belgic Confession was penned, according to the title page, “with common accord by the believers who dwell in the Netherlands, who desire to live according to the purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
it was written with an eye to the governing authorities in Spain with the hopes that they would be convinced of the historicity of the Reformed faith and cease to persecute it, even if they themselves did not agree. As Cornelis Venema wrote of the confession, “The aim of the Confession is to persuade its readers that the Reformed faith is nothing other than the historic faith of the Christian church.”[2] De Brès hoped that his confession—with the common accord of other Reformed pastors and church members—would warmly distill historic Christian beliefs in contrast to the false faith that dominated their land.
2. Cornelis Venema, “The Belgic Confession,” 2008.
Of One Accord: Confessions and Discipleship
The Belgic Confession was intended to serve as a discipleship tool, as all confessions were. Beyond the governing authorities, De Brès also had in mind those Reformed Christians who suffered immense persecution. He and other Reformed pastors worked tirelessly to disciple and equip their flocks to do the work of ministry, and the confession was a tool in that effort. For example, it was common for pastors to meet privately in the homes of underground church members, to share a meal with them, to preach and then to catechize using the Confession as a ministerial aid.
The Confession not only served in the discipleship of laypeople but also church officers. The Synod of Tournai in 1563 and the Synod of Antwerp in 1564 required pastors and deacons to sign the confession. Furthermore, it was decided that the confession would be read before each provincial synod of pastors in the Low Countries to express their common faith as an act of unity in their labors as under-shepherds to care for their local churches. By having a shared confession of faith, based on robust adherence to it, the churches in the Netherlands gained a shared theological unity, harnessing their collective energies to pull in the same direction.
Teaching them to Obey: Confessions as an Evangelistic and Missionary Tool
Beyond building up the church, confessions of faith were intended as a means of explaining clearly and succinctly Christian doctrine to non-Christians. Those who sought to join churches during the early church had to memorize the Apostles’ Creed and recite it prior to their baptism.
De Brès hoped that the Belgic Confession would be used by his own members to clarify the true Gospel preaching of the Reformation from the false religion of Roman Catholicism, and so provide clear and succinct instruction on this faith for the benefit of both the evangelized and evangelist. A confession that submits itself to the Bible and uses clear, digestible language helps clarify for the missionary exactly what they are calling the unreached to embrace, thus giving the unreached a vision for the biblical life and a road map of discipleship.
For those who subscribe to a confession and teach in light of it, confessions provide a great magnetic pull, serving as a reminder that there is a unity of vision, effort, and goal in missions work. If, for example, those seeking to cooperate in missions subtly disagree, or worse if some outright reject clear teachings of the confession, how can it be expected that they can cooperate to plant like-minded healthy churches, when the confession itself presents a picture of the healthy church?
Counting the Costs: Confessions and Missions
In our own era, theological confusion and false doctrine continue to be common. Could this be due in part to a lessened emphasis on confessions? For example, the Belgic Confession rightly affirms a God who is “eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty; completely wise, just, and good, and the overflowing source of all good.” Amen! In stark contrast, according to Ligonier’s 2022 “The State of Theology Survey,” 32 percent of self-confessed Evangelicals are sure that God “learns and adapts to different circumstances”—a first order blasphemy against God’s unchanging character (Mal. 3:6). Only 32 percent(!) strongly agree with the orthodox view found in many confessions.
The consequences for missions are dire if we embrace such a false view of God. Is our God a changing God, or is his character reliably the same every day? If we tell non-Christians about a god who changes, we are not offering them the Creator-King who exercises perfect dominion over all things, and who reigns and rules over all, but instead we offer them a small, village god who is little more powerful than a human being.
By charging our missionaries to teach in accord with the sound doctrine that we have mutually agreed to in a confession of faith provides accountability for the sending church as they have a trigger that can be pulled if a missionary begins to teach contrary to what the sending church has charged them to teach.
In missions, when we go forth to make disciples from every tribe, tongue, and nation, we bring with us our theology of who God is, who we are, and what he would have us do—repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, submitting ourselves to the Resurrected Lord over All: this is the call we place on those to whom we take the gospel.
Conclusion: A Confession Sealed with Blood
By 1566, most of the population of Valenciennes, where de Brès pastored after Tournai, had been won to the Reformation. They then demanded that public buildings be allowed for them to meet. The authorities refused, but the public rioted, erupting in an iconoclastic fury. Reformed Christians stormed the local Roman church buildings, claimed them as their own, and began to destroy the images in the church. De Brès had initially rejected claiming the buildings by force but did begin to preach in them. For a brief time, all was well. De Brès and his fellow pastor preached openly and visited members publicly for the first time during their ministry in the Low Countries. But soon, storm clouds would begin to settle in the city as forces of Philip II were sent in to respond to the iconoclasm. They besieged the city and eventually reclaimed it to the Roman cause. Soon after, De Brès and another pastor were publicly hanged on May 31, 1567. De Brès was the first, and perhaps the only writer of a confession to be martyred.
His confession, though, became one the most influential theological documents in the history of the church, shaping the entire Reformed church, both in Europe and farther afield, as he sought to equip Christians to do the work of the ministry.
By submitting ourselves to Scripture as it is faithfully taught in confessions of faith, missions efforts are channeled into more productive ends. Confessions of faith are never the final authority. Confessions are fallible, of course; Scripture alone is infallible. Baptists like me disagree with The Belgic Confession on baptism, for example. Nevertheless, when we subscribe to a robust confession of faith, we embrace a three-fold kindness of the Lord: first, Confessions provide clear evidence to the watching world, governing authorities included, that we stand in line with historic Christianity; second they provide for our fellow church members clear instruction in sound doctrine in keeping with godliness; and finally, they provide additional backbone to the cause of missions, in the face of the headwinds of sin, deception, and the Devil.
The Belgic Confession provides a model for vital Christian belief with the goal of building healthy churches in a non-Christian context, and De Brès sealed this document with his own blood.
