They came before not just Moses and Eleazar the prophet and priest of the people of God but all the chiefs of the clans as well. These were the men who led God’s people, acted as judges in arguments, and made judicial decisions. This was an auspicious group of people, and these women stepped up to the challenge of speaking before this governing body. These women spoke their mind before this court, and God would bless their courage.

Have you ever heard of the five daughters of Zelophehad? Perhaps I can jog your memory: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. No? Well, it’s probably not a surprise. These women are mentioned several times in the book of Numbers—not the most popular Old Testament book—and they just aren’t as famous as Mary and Martha in the New Testament. Yet, I find their story to be one that is an example of the traits of a Christian woman: The daughters of Zelophehad are courageous and bold, they desire the things of the Lord, and they are humble. We learn of their story in Numbers 27:

Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad the son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the clans of Manasseh the son of Joseph. The names of his daughters were: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. And they stood before Moses and before Eleazar the priest and before the chiefs and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting, saying, “Our father died in the wilderness. He was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah, but died for his own sin. And he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s brothers.” (Num. 27:1-4)

The daughters of Zelophehad courageously stood before the leaders of their people for a just request—to have an inheritance among God’s people.
First, I would like to highlight the courage these women demonstrated. The text states that the daughters of Zelophehad stood before the leaders of their people: they came before not just Moses and Eleazar the prophet and priest of the people of God but all the chiefs of the clans as well. These were the men who led God’s people, acted as judges in arguments, and made judicial decisions. This was an auspicious group of people, and these women stepped up to the challenge of speaking before this governing body.
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Jesus prayed for the church on earth to be one (John 17), and those who recite the Nicene Creed affirm a commitment to “the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Such unity, however, often seems to escape us in practice. 

You had to see it to believe it. During the pope’s September 2010 visit to the United Kingdom, one protester’s sign stood out, far out, from the others. In large markered letters on the back of a pizza box, the theologically minded protester declared, “Drop the Filioque!”
Filioque: Why All the Fuss?
Assuming that protester was merely seeking to get noticed, the sign worked, landing him television coverage and a few interviews. But why did he oppose that phrase? And what does that phrase even mean?
The single Latin word on the sign means “and the son.” And this single Latin word holds the dubious honor of being one of the main factors responsible for the largest church split to date: the Great Schism in 1054 between the Roman Catholic Church in the West, with its seat of power in Rome, and the Orthodox Church in the East, with its seat of power in Constantinople. That’s a lot for a single word to bear.
Theologians in the West were drawn to filioque because it reflected their understanding of the Trinity. They believed the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In AD 598, at the Council of Toledo, the Western church officially adopted the phrase and amended the Nicene Creed (from 325/381) accordingly. Since 598, the churches in the West have said the extra Latin word when reciting the creed. Christ’s teaching in John 16:7 offers biblical warrant for the phrase. Eastern churches, however, never appreciated that argument.
The Eastern churches, while affirming the Trinity as three persons in one substance, tend to emphasize the threeness of the Trinity, the individual persons. The West, again while affirming the orthodox definition of the Trinity, tends to emphasize the unity of the Godhead.
If we fast forward from the late 500s to the middle of the 1000s, we find that this ever-contentious phrase acutely came under the spotlight. And here’s where things get complicated, as politics (both in the empire and in the church), theology, and personalities all got jumbled together. The Western and Eastern churches were headed for a showdown.
Showdown at the Hagia Sophia
One can almost wonder how the church managed to stay together until 1054. As far back as the 300s, the Eastern and Western churches had distinct cultures and languages (Greek versus Latin), distinct liturgical or worship practices and emphases, distinct theological methods, distinct seats of power and autonomy (Constantinople versus Rome), distinct emperors, and distinct ecclesiastical leaders (the patriarch versus the pope).
These differences were pronounced and would easily flare up. Such was the case in 1054. In fact, what happened in 1054 may very well be seen as making explicit what had long been implicit.
Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, had condemned the Western churches for the practice of using leavened bread for the Eucharist. Leo IX, the Roman pontiff from 1049–1054, dispatched emissaries to iron out the differences. These efforts at diplomacy failed miserably. The more the two sides talked, the more they disagreed. Neither side flinched, causing Leo IX’s legates to enter the Hagia Sophia (the most important church in Constantinople and seat of the Eastern patriarch) and place a papal bull of excommunication on the high altar.
Cerularius countered by convening a council of bishops that condemned Pope Leo IX and his church, too. Among the reasons was the filioque clause. The Western church, he argued, had overstepped its bounds when it amended the Nicene Creed. The Eastern church had remained pure and true. The addition of filioque became a convenient hook upon which to hang all the contention and disagreement between the churches.
So on July 16, 1054, the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, split. And then there were two.
After 1054
Attempts were made to heal the breach, but none succeeded. When the Western church launched the Crusades, all hopes for a reunion faded. During the Fourth Crusade, in the early years of the thirteenth century, European armies sacked Constantinople, apparently distracted from their mission of securing the Holy Land. One historian of the Crusades describes the three-day siege of the city as leaving in its wake “ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed.” The great and ancient city of Constantinople was reduced to rubble and left in shambles.
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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.

In 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]
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.
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