Susanna combined Cornelia’s twelve-page confession with nine of Cornelia’s poems in a collection entitled A Short Confession of Faith. She prefaced the book with her own seven-page biography of her sister and a short poem by Susanna’s son, statesman and author Adrian Hoffer, who heartily recommended the book – the first book in Dutch authored by a Reformed woman. The timing was right, because the Netherlands were going through another wave of attacks by Spain. But the book remained popular after the war for at least twenty more years.

Largely unknown today, Susanna and Cornelia Teelinck inspired two generations of Dutch Christians to trust God to deliver them from Spanish domination.
They were born in 1551 and 1553 respectively into a distinguished family from Zierikzee, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Their father Eewoud Teellinck (d. 1561) was a brewer who also served as an alderman and treasurer in the City Council. Judging by the statues of saints and the crucifix found among Eewoud’s belongings, the family was probably Roman Catholic. It was also a cultured family, who owned a small but rich library of French, Latin and German books. All four children, however, converted to the Reformed faith.
Eewoud died in 1561 and his wife Helena Willem Jansdr followed him four years later, leaving their oldest son Joos to act as a guardian to his siblings.
Around 1573, nineteen-year-old Cornelia, the youngest, requested admission to the Lord’s Supper from her local Reformed church. She marked the occasion by writing a confession of faith which she presented to her consistory. While not innovative (it was modeled after the approved confession of Guido de Brès), her confession was simple and to the point, inspiring many to copy it by hand and distribute it to others.
It was a heartfelt confession, which she concluded with a bold statement: “Here I have written the foundation of my belief based on the examination of Holy Scripture, and as a sign that I am not ashamed, I have also included my name.”[1]
It was a courageous stand because at that very moment Spanish troops were terrorizing Netherlandish cities in what contemporaries called the “Spanish Fury,” taking particular aim at Reformed Christians.
How to Face Violent Opposition
Although Cornelia didn’t witness the violent sack of her hometown (by then, she lived with her husband Anthonie Limmens in Antwerp), she was deeply affected by the news and became a victim of the unruly raids of unpaid and hungry Spanish mutineers who roamed the country in the aftermath.
She responded with four poems where she thundered against Spain and called God to action: “Stand up O Lord; show that you are a mighty, blessed God, who out of nothing shaped heaven, Earth, and all that lives. Will you also now complete your unfinished work by your very strong hand?”[2]
Seeing the Spanish as God’s tool to bring his people to repentance, Cornelia exhorted all believers to call on God and place their trust in him: “Stand up Jerusalem, God’s City…God will be your comfort and your help and he shall put an end to your destruction…You need not fear sword or enemy for the Lord shall take up your case himself and show all that he is a God of vengeance over those who have persecuted the pious.

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Discussing the “saccharin-like” preaching of Joel Osteen, Wells says this of the kind of God he presents: “The dominant view, even among evangelical teenagers, is that God made everything and established a moral order, but he does not intervene. Actually, for most he is not even Trinitarian, and the incarnation and resurrection of Christ play little part in church teenage thinking—even in evangelical teenage thinking. They see God as not demanding much from them because he is chiefly engaged in solving their problems and making them feel good. Religion is about experiencing happiness, contentedness, having God solve one’s problems and provide stuff like homes, the Internet, iPods, iPads, and iPhones. This is a widespread view of God within modern culture, not only among adolescents but among many adults as well.”

In the old days, most people knew they were sinful beings in need of salvation and rescue. Today they see themselves as gods who need affirmation and self-realisation. We have moved from a view of the good life through self-denial and rejection of self to one of self-actualisation and self-affirmation.
This is a massive shift in the way we see ourselves, how we understand our troubles, and how we view the way out – the way of salvation. Instead of lost sinners needing saving, we are good people simply needing some therapy and affirmation.
Awareness of this major shift in thinking about who we are, what our condition is, and what is the way forward, have long been with us. Criticism of theological liberalism from a century and more ago can be mentioned, including the critique of J. Gresham Machen that I just again discussed in a new piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/04/03/the-gentle-regrets-of-roger-scruton/
Secular voices also noted this and wrote extensively about it. Most notable was the 1966 volume The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff (Harper & Row). In it the American sociologist said this: “Christian man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe!,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic.”
Another crucial discussion of this appeared in the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press) by another American sociologist, Christian Smith. In it he made use of the term “moralistic therapeutic deism.”
Deism is the view that God made the world but has no real direct involvement in it. So in his study of US teens, by MTD he meant that most of them feel that God wants us to be good and nice, and the main goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself. When we get in a jam we call upon God, but otherwise he has no real role in our lives. Sadly, it is not just non-Christian youth that think this way, but Christian youth as well.
A number of important Christian thinkers and cultural observers have made much use of the insights provided by Rieff and Smith. For example, in his 2008 book Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Baker), Michael Horton referred to this in various places. It is Christianity Lite, not biblical Christianity:
It was secular psychologist Karl Menninger who pointed out (in a book titled Whatever Became of Sin?) that the growing suppression of the reality of guilt in churches was actually contributing to neuroses rather than avoiding them….

If we feel guilty, maybe it is because we really are guilty. To change the subject or downplay the seriousness of this condition actually keeps people from the liberating news that the gospel brings. If our real problem is bad feelings, then the solution is good feelings. The cure can only be as radical as the disease. Like any recreational drug, Christianity Lite can make people feel better for the moment, but it does not reconcile sinners to God. Ironically, secular psychologists like Menninger are writing books about sin, while many Christian leaders are converting sin – a condition from which we cannot liberate ourselves – into dysfunction and salvation into recovery. pp. 35-36
David Wells
But one evangelical intellectual and theologian who wrote copiously about such matters is David Wells. He has taught theology for many years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. (If I can add a personal note here, some students thought him to be a hard grader, so sought to avoid his classes. I quite enjoyed his classes, and only got As in them.)
A number of his many books have dealt with this shift in thinking about the human person and what he needs. Let me only feature four of them, with a quote or two from each:
No Place for Truth (Eerdmans, 1993)
We are therefore accomplishing in our culture what only such dystopian writers as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell ever imagined. We are replacing the categories of good and evil with the pale absolutes that arise from the media world —
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Foolish people have corrupted themselves and they do vile, rotten things.  The fool says in his heart that there is no God.  The psalmist observes that there are no good works among such people.  This serves to emphasize how this practical atheism isn’t an intellectual problem, but a moral one.  Humanity’s problem isn’t a lack of information, but a twisted, degenerate heart that results in reprehensible behaviour. 

You and I are atheists.  It’s true.  Let me explain.  We often think of atheism in terms of people who deny the existence of God, usually with their words and usually with some kind of intellectual reason to support their denial.  So how can I say I’m an atheist and so are you?  I mean, surely we believe he exists. I know I do and since you’re reading a Christian blog, it’s likely you do too. 
Here’s the thing:  atheism is more than a denial of God with our words.  It can also be a denial of God with our lives – with our thoughts, deeds, and words.  Atheism can also be a denial of God with what we do and what we leave undone.  Each time we sin, we actually deny God and his claims over our lives – effectively denying his existence.  All of us still have the remnants of the old nature, and we have to admit that those remnants stink with the rot of atheism. 
What we see in our lives is what we call practical atheism.  It’s not the intellectual atheism that has all sorts of arguments to refute Christian claims.  It’s a practical atheism which makes all sorts of rationalizations to excuse a life which fails to meet God’s standards.  This sort of atheism infects even Christians and it’s this sort of atheism that’s revealed by God as foolishness in Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
The word ‘fool’ in this passage isn’t an insult.  It’s an objective description of a certain kind of person.  In the Old Testament, a fool is someone who acts foolishly in a moral sense.  The foolish are those who reproach the righteous and blaspheme God.  Strikingly, the foolish are also usually part of God’s covenant people.  They know better.
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