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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While the Christian church continued to spread its message through missionary efforts, the Neo-marxists did it through what we call “the slow march through the institutions” and herein was their genius: they were still preaching the false god of revolution, but it no longer sounded like revolution. It actually sounded like good news.

The “apostles” were essential to the spread of Christianity throughout the world and the false gospel of communism seems to have mimicked that approach. As previously considered, Marx and Lenin served as something of the equivalent of Moses and the Prophets (i.e., as they represented the root of their unholy religion), but the history of communism, not unlike that of Christianity, also involved a second or “new” chapter.
After the devastation of the Bolshevik revolution and that of WWI, a group of men in Germany developed a new theory of communism called: The Frankfort School. Rather than continuing to stir up envy and violence in factories, they believed the best way to advance the communist ideal was to engage with the academy, artists, media, and the increasingly influential film industry. They also stopped focusing exclusively upon economics, realizing that most people in the world preferred capitalism to classic communism.
The goal of the Frankfort School (like that Marx and Lenin) was to have communism spread world-wide, but they adapted the message so that it would appeal more to different cultures. You can imagine the challenge they faced, “How do we get Americans to worship the god of revolution? They will certainly not give up their private property. They might, however, give themselves over to immorality and pornography. Yes, that’s it, let’s make films for them!”
The first experiment with this new approach was conducted in Germany and it resulted in the infamously decadent Weimar Republic. As we know from history, the experiment was not a success because whenever you end up with a Weimar, people begin longing for a Reich.
The rise of Hitler’s Germany led the leaders of the Frankfort School to seek sanctuary in America and they were welcomed with open arms. New York City, Hollywood, and a host of left-wing universities had already been infected with communist theory, but now they had actual intellectuals on site to lead the re-designed revolution.
These men of the Frankfort School can be likened to apostles, because they delivered their message to the entire world. While the Christian church continued to spread its message through missionary efforts, the Neo-marxists did it through what we call “the slow march through the institutions” and herein was their genius: they were still preaching the false god of revolution, but it no longer sounded like revolution. It actually sounded like good news. We will explain the supposed “good news” of Neo-marxism in the next article.
Christian McShaffrey is a Minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and is Pastor of Five Solas Church (OPC) in Reedsburg, Wis.

Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, testified that the resurrected Christ Jesus appeared not only to the apostles but also to more than 500 other people (1 Cor. 15:6)! There were quite a few witnesses whom skeptics could examine, but instead of fading away as a conspiracy, the truth of Jesus’ resurrection was so strong that the church continued to grow and the gospel of Christ Jesus spread from Jerusalem and the Mediterranean beyond into Europe.

Is Christianity private or public? Does the truth about Christ Jesus, who is the object of my faith, depend on my own private beliefs, or is there something verifiable that can be “fact-checked”? The reason I pose these questions is because we are living in a time when the determination of truth and untruth have turned inward, making one’s own personal beliefs the measure of what is true or not.
While examining and verifying evidence and testimony may be found in courts of law, in the press and many political and personal interactions it is common to observe persons passing off as truth what are merely their own feelings, opinions, and beliefs, often without evidence or verifiable testimony.
The resurrection of Jesus was a very public miracle.
Not so with the resurrection of Christ Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus was a very public miracle witnessed by many and supported by evidence at the time it occurred and afterward. The evidence is recorded in Scripture. There are about 5,250 ancient Greek manuscripts of books and parts of the New Testament that record Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The earliest is dated to about 90 years after his death (Rylands Library Papyrus 52).
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