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    The Belgic Confession
    The Belgic Confession
    The Belgic Confession
    Ebook183 pages2 hours

    The Belgic Confession

    By Edwin Walhout

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    About this ebook

    A pastoral and theological critique of an important document from the Reformation era. Reformed theology, valuable as it has been, needs some revision and updating.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdwin Walhout
    Release dateJun 20, 2011
    ISBN9781458097965
    The Belgic Confession
    Author

    Edwin Walhout

    I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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      Book preview

      The Belgic Confession - Edwin Walhout

      THE BELGIC CONFESSION OF FAITH

      A Theological and Pastoral Critique

      by Edwin Walhout

      Published by Edwin Walhout

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout

      Cover design by Amy Cole (amy.cole@comcast.net)

      See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author,

      including critiques of five ancient Christian creeds

      and two additional Reformation creeds

      (Heidelberg Catechism and Canons of Dort)

      (type Walhout in the search box).

      Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Preface

      Article 1 There is Only One God

      Article 2 By What Means God is Made Known Unto Us

      Article 3 The Written Word of God

      Article 4 Canonical Books of the Holy Scripture

      Article 5 Whence the Holy Scriptures Derive Their Dignity and Authority

      Article 6 The Difference Between the Canonical and Apocryphal Books

      Article 7 The Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures to be the Only Rule of Faith

      Article 8 God is One in Essence, Yet Distinguished in Three Persons

      Article 9 The Proof of the Foregoing Article of the Trinity of Persons in One God

      Article 10 Jesus Christ is True and Eternal God

      Article 11 The Holy Spirit is True and Eternal God

      Article 12 The Creation of All Things, Especially the Angels

      Article 13 The Providence of God and the Government of All Things

      Article 14 The Creation And Fall of Man, and his Incapacity to Perform What is Truly Good

      Article 15 Original Sin

      Article 16 Eternal Election

      Article 17 The Recovery of Fallen Man

      Article 18 The Incarnation of Jesus Christ

      Article 19 The Union and Distinction of the Two Natures in the Person of Christ

      Article 20 God Has Manifested his Justice and Mercy in Christ

      Article 21 The Satisfaction of Christ, Our Only High Priest, For Us

      Article 22 Our Justification Through Faith in Jesus Christ

      Article 23 Wherein Our Justification Before God Consists

      Article 24 Man’s Sanctification and Good Works

      Article 25 The Abolishing of the Ceremonial Law

      Article 26 Christ’s Intercession

      Article 27 The Catholic Christian Church

      Article 28 Everyone is Bound to Join Himself to the True Church

      Article 29 The Marks of the True Church and Wherein It Differs from the False Church

      Article 30 The Government of the Church and Its Offices

      Article 31 The Ministers, Elders, and Deacons

      Article 32 The Order and Discipline of the Church

      Article 33 The Sacraments

      Article 34 Holy Baptism

      Article 35 The Holy Supper of Our Lord Jesus Christ

      Article 36 The Magistracy (Civil Government)

      Article 37 The Last Judgment

      AN EXCURSUS ON THE HOLY SPIRIT

      AN EXCURSUS ON ISLAM

      Preface

      The term Belgic refers to the area of the Lowlands which later became the country of Belgium, the northern area retaining the name of The Netherlands. Since the author, Guido de Bres, lived in this area, then a territory of the King of Spain, the Confession that he wrote is known popularly as the Belgic Confession. De Bres wrote this document in 1561 and died a martyr in 1567.

      The text of the Confession is taken from the blue edition of the Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church (1976).

      This is the second of three Critiques of certain Reformation creeds, the others being the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dordt. We will do our best to understand the mindset of the author in the confusing circumstances of preserving the gains of the Protestant Reformation. What Guido de Bres writes here in this document is recognizably necessary, given the difficult times in which he lived and worked for the gospel.

      Nonetheless, it will become apparent that not everything he wrote and defined in this Confession can stand the test of the original Hebrew-Christian mindset demonstrated in the holy scriptures. We will discover that too many remnants of unacceptable medieval theology have insinuated themselves into classic Reformed theology, here in the Belgic Confession but also in the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort.

      ARTICLE I There is only one 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; and that He is eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, good, and the overflowing fountain of all good.

      The very first article of this Reformation creed defines the term God and lists his attributes. The term God means one only simple and spiritual Being. His attributes are: eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, good, and the overflowing fountain of all good.

      God

      It is highly commendable that the creed begins with God. This suggests that the creed is basically theocentric rather than, say, soteriocentric or Christocentric, or heaven forbid, ecclesiocentric. The Bible begins with God, and so should our theology. Our understanding of the Christian faith needs to revolve around God and what he is doing in the world he created. One would like to think that the rest of this creed is essentially an analysis of God’s word and work in the world.

      This being said, however, it is not so commendable that the creed begins with God in the abstract, that is, with God in himself, rather than with God in his action. Genesis 1 shows God at work creating the universe and populating it with humans and providing humans with a divine guideline for the civilization they are creating. Likewise the Apostles’ Creed begins with God and immediately describes him as the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Article 1 of the Belgic Confession does not mention explicitly this connection.

      The point is that the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed require us, when we think of God, to think immediately of creation; and vice-versa by implication, also that when we think of the universe we must think immediately of God its creator. While not confusing them, both these earlier documents suggest a kind of correlativity between creator and creation, such that you cannot have one without the other. There cannot be a creator without a creation, and there cannot be a creation without a creator. This correlativity is not to suggest that the existence of God depends on the existence of the creation. That relation is, as we all know, the opposite. The creation depends on God for its existence. Still, in terms of our theology and our practice of that faith both the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed begin with the picture of God as the creator, and we should always do that.

      Attributes

      We may notice also that here in Article 1 there is a list of divine attributes. Whether the author, Guido De Bres, intended the list to be complete we do not know. Very likely he included everything he could think of at the time he was writing, not necessarily meaning the list to be exhaustive. Looking at the list as a whole, one gets the impression that most of the individual attributes are abstract also, thus following the lead of the first half of the Article. This is what God is like in himself. The last one listed, however, is one that defines at least one part of the way God relates himself to the universe he created: he is the overflowing fountain of all good.

      We should, however, define the attributes of God explicitly in terms of how he relates to the world he created. Theologians sometimes divide God’s attributes into two kinds: communicable and incommunicable. This distinction is beside the point, of little use. We need to understand God, not so much as we imagine him to be in himself but as he manifests himself in the course of universal history. The Old Testament is full of this kind of imagery of God, testifying over and over again to the grandeur and providence of God displayed in the universe and in nature and in history.

      Even theologians who are regarded as thoroughly conservative and Biblical tend to describe God in abstract terminology in their treatment of Theology Proper. We tend first to think of God in the abstract, God in himself so to speak, and then try to figure out how he gets involved in our world. This is backward; it is an embracing of modern enlightenment philosophy, thinking of God as an abstract noumenal Being out there in the no-man’s land of unknowability. We need to see first and foremost how God continues to be involved in his world from the beginning of creation. Then we need to see ourselves in that light.

      ARTICLE II By What Means God is Made Known Unto Us

      We know Him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God, even his everlasting power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says (Rom. 1:20). All which things are sufficient to convince men and leave them without excuse. Second, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to His glory and our salvation.

      If we begin with an abstract definition of God, that is, of God in himself irrespective of his relation to the world he created, then we create the problem of how it is possible to know such a God, if in fact he is knowable at all. But this is not the way the Bible begins in the early chapters of Genesis. God is immediately presented as the creator of the heavens and the earth, including the human race. Then Genesis moves on to describe the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve, with its consequences.

      Note well that the problem which Genesis presents is not the problem of how to know God but of sin, that is, how God can get a human race to obey him, to image him in its work of dominating the earth. This is a major point because a great deal of modern theology revolves around the problem of how to know a noumenal God in a phenomenal setting; how does God break out of his world into ours? That modern problem is at the basis of several types of current theology, from the feeling-oriented theology of Schleiermacher, to the will-oriented work of Ritschl, to the Biblicism of fundamentalism, to the Christocentrism of neo-orthodoxy.

      Modern Enlightenment theology, of course, did not emerge all on its own. It has deep roots in medieval and ancient philosophy. What we see here in the Belgic Confession is remnants of medieval rationalism which in turn can be traced back partially to the philosophy of Plato.

      Plato distinguished between Matter and Idea, such that to attain to the truth of any given subject one must penetrate to the unchanging Idea that is incarcerated in the Matter of it. Dispense with ephemeral Matter; retain the eternal Idea. This is the heart of most forms of rationalism – seeking truth in the abstract. Get rid of everything material, that is, everything one can attain via the senses, and define the permanent Idea which is left.

      What this necessarily produces in theology is a definition of God that is devoid of any and all reference to the world of matter, the created world, the world of nature. In this view God is what he is regardless of what may or may not be said of him as a creator of the material world. So to know God must be to know him as distinct from the material world, an abstract God. We see in the variety of attempts to define God in terms of his innate attributes one of the results of that kind of rationalistic Ideational philosophy.

      The Belgic Confession is not, of course, an Enlightenment document, having been written long before the Enlightenment philosophy became ubiquitous. But it does seem that the BC has some rootage in the rationalist tradition.

      One might argue, contra the above, that Article 2, by describing the creation as a most elegant book, does define God in terms of his work in creation. This description of creation is perfectly valid, even indispensable. Nonetheless, the language in which the article is written implies that the problem addressed is the problem of how to know God, which is not the problem that the Bible presents to us. The problem presented in the Bible is the human problem, the moral problem of sin, not the philosophical question of how we can know God.

      If the Greek way of knowing involved abstracting Idea from Matter, the Hebrew way of knowing meant seeing God operative precisely within the world of matter. This is the implicate of the doctrine of creation, namely, how to see God functioning in the world he made, seeing God in action, knowing God in terms of what he is doing. The Old Testament is full of this kind of language, and its importance must not escape us when we do our Christian theology.

      Article 2 quotes Paul in Romans 1:20, Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. To know God in his creation is to know him in his power, not in abstraction from the world of nature but precisely within that world. Paul assumes, rightly, that God has created us humans capable of seeing his divine handiwork within the world about us – not just Christian people but everyone. God’s handiwork is there whether or not we see it.

      Article 2 goes on to say God makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us

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