I had a Flemish friend when I was stud­ying in Canada many years ago. I recall one occasion when she was asked by a well-meaning North American “so you’re from Belgium – now what part of the US is that?” I trust that most, if not all, of the readers of this article know that Belgium is a country in Western Europe!

If asked the question, “Can anything good come out of Belgium?” you might well answer “fine chocolate” or “tasty beer”. Yet, however flavorsome these delicacies are, of much more value are precious words which come from Belgium, with love.

A letter was written from a husband, Guido de Brès, to his wife, Catherine Ramon 447 years ago. De Brès had been raised in a part of the southern Netherlands which later became the nation of Belgium in 1830. He was writing this love letter from a prison in Valenciennes, a town in Northern France, where he had been a pastor.

Guido writes:

Catherine Ramon, my dear and beloved wife and sister in our Lord Jesus Christ: your anguish and sadness disturbs somewhat my joy and the happiness of my heart, so I am writing this for the consolation of both of us, and especial­ly for your consolation, since you have always loved me with an ardent affec­tion, and because it pleases the Lord to separate us from each other. I feel your sorrow over this separation more keenly than mine. I pray you not to be troubled too much over this, for fear of offending God. You knew when you married me that you were taking a mortal husband, who was uncertain of life, and yet it has pleased God to permit us to live together for seven years, giving us five children. If the Lord had wished us to live together longer, he would have provided the way. But it did not please him to do this and may his will be done.

Now remember that I did not fall into the hands of my enemies by mere chance, but through the providence of my God who controls and governs all things, the least as well as the greatest.

The letter continues, including the following paragraph:

Our Lord permits me on the one hand to feel my weakness and my smallness, that I am but a small vessel on the earth, very fragile, to the end that he would humble me, so that all the glory of the victory may be given to him. On the other hand, he fortifies me and consoles me in an unbelievable way. I have more comfort than the enemies of the gospel. I eat, drink and rest better than they do. I am held in a very strong prison, very bleak, obscure and dark. The prison is known by the obscure name “Brunain.” The air is poor and it stinks. On my feet and hands I have irons, big and heavy. They are a continual hell, hollowing my limbs up to my poor bones. The chief constable comes to look at my irons two or three times a day, fearing that I will escape. There are three guards of forty men before the door of the prison.

Incarcerated de Brès concludes:

Farewell, Catherine, my dearly beloved. I pray my God that he will comfort you and give you contentment in his good will. I hope that God has given me the grace to write for your benefit, in such a way that you may be consoled in this poor world. Keep my letter for a remembrance of me. It is badly written, but it is what I am able to do, and not what I wish to do. Commend me to my good mother. I hope to write some consola­tion to her, if it pleases God. Greet also my good sister. May she take her afflic­tion to God. Grace be with you. At the prison, April 12, 1567.

Belgic Confession⤒🔗

Guido de Brès was hung at the end of May in the same year. His body was then burned and the ashes scattered on the waters of the Schelde river. Why? – because he was the author of another ‘love letter’, a document we now know as the Belgic Confession.

Six years before his execution, de Brès sent his Confession to King Philip II of Spain by throwing the document over the castle wall at Tournai whilst fleeing from the authorities. De Brès died because he had refused to yield to the Spanish Inquisition, which applied the stress and pain of torture to break the will of those deemed by the Roman Catholic church to be heretics. His courage in the face of death matched the words he had written about himself, and his fellow reformers. He said that they would “offer their backs to stripes, their tongues to knives, their mouths to gags, and their whole bodies to the fire” rather than deny the truth expressed in their Confession.

The text of Guido de Brès’ written Confession was strongly influenced by Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and the creed of the French Huguenots. However, in contrast to Calvin’s individu­ally authored Institutes, the Belgic Con­fession became a corporate ecclesiastical document when it was accepted by the Reformed Church of the Netherlands in 1561, and subsequently adopted by the synods of Armentieres (1563), Antwerp (1566), Wessel (1568), Emden (1571), Dort (1574), and Middelburg (1581). De Brès’ confession was not an expression of personal or private opinion. The title in the original edition read: “Confession of Faith. Made with common consent by the believers who are scattered through­out all the Netherlands, who desire to live according to the purity of the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Some revisions were made before the ‘Great Synod of Dort’ (1618-1619), held to settle the divisive controversy brought about through the rise of Arminianism. A standardised text for the confession was then available in French, Dutch and Latin. The Belgic Confession became one of the ‘three forms of unity’ of the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Belgic Confession is an apolo­getic document; a defence of doctrine against those who opposed the Protes­tant Reformation. Guido de Brès had ‘loved not his life unto death’ when he penned the Belgic Confession in order to show that the confession of the Re­formers was the confession of the truth faith which the Bible teaches. He wrote to demonstrate that what he and others were teaching was the pure and whole­some word of God. He wrote to distin­guish Reformers from the Anabaptists; who were disturbers of the peace and disobedient to civil authority.

As a well-written systematic statement of faith, the Belgic Confession enabled Christians, at the time of the Reformation, to defend the truth of God’s Word and to protect the faithful church from the threat of error. The Confession specifically addresses Sadducees, Manichees, Epicureans, Pelagians, and Anabaptists. As a ‘pattern of sound words’ the Confession has now served the church for over 450 years, assisting in the gospel goals of growing God’s people “in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”¹ and in “presenting everyone complete in Christ.”²

Some of the theological truths on which we can be challenged as believers today are the same as those of which de Brès wrote e.g. the election of the saints and the perdition of the wicked (Article 16), and the Presbyterian form of church government (Article 30).

However, some of the issues facing the church today in the 21^st century are clearly different to those of the 16^th century. Yet the Belgic Confession is still of great value to us in helping us to “give an account for the hope that is in us, yet with gentleness and reverence.”³ For example, whilst de Brès knew nothing of the challenges of evolutionary theory to the doctrine of Biblical creation, his confession clearly includes creation ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’) in Article 12 and the formation of man from the dust of the earth in Article 14.

Whilst the Belgic Confession does not directly address some of the issues which affect the church today (e.g. same-gender unions, the role of women in leadership, modern day cults, worship of the physical environment), de Brès’ words do help us to be very clear about what biblical truths we are striving to defend and proclaim in the strength of our Lord.

At the time of the Reformation, the dominance of Roman Catholicism had led to many false ideas about the nature of the church; and these are addressed in the Belgic Confession (Articles 27-32). Whilst the historical context then is dif­ferent to the situation today, de Brès’ confession is still effective in summariz­ing the biblical doctrine of the church.

An Age of Reduction←⤒🔗

We live in an age where, in much of the western world, many lack a con­viction of the call to commitment to a local congregation, and some drift from church to church. The Belgic Confession is a useful tool to help guide all God’s pilgrim children back to what the Bible teaches about being a loyal and integral member of Christ’s body, the church.

We live at a stage in history when many desire to reduce doctrine to an unholy ‘lowest common denominator’, with the misguided aim of bringing peace by attempting to unite truth with error. The Belgic Confession continues to be helpful in guarding against this ‘reduc­tionist’, all-inclusive view of doctrine which would deny that the Scriptures have much more to teach us than the central truth of Christ and Him crucified.

We live in times where many in local churches no longer clearly know what they believe. Their ‘creed’ is often in­fluenced by the latest book they have read or the opinion of the last dynamic speaker they have heard. By being an­chored to our ‘forms of unity’⁴ our Re­formed Churches of New Zealand are grounded on the truths of God’s Word, expressed through carefully formulated patterns of sound words. Our creeds and confessions guard us against being swayed by the latest fad or popular trend as they guide us back to the foundational truth of the Scriptures.

Belgium is almost as far away from New Zealand as it is possible to travel on this spherical planet called earth. However, Guido de Brès’ ‘love letter’ to the church, the Belgic Confession, has not only reached our Reformed Churches here, it has become one of the four uni­fying documents which all office-bearers subscribe to as fully agreeing with the Word of God.⁵

If you have not already done so, I would encourage you to read the complete last letter sent by Guido de Brès to the wife he loved.⁶ Furthermore, I would also commend to you the 37 articles of the Belgic Confession written by de Brès for the church he loved. You could consider reading one or two articles at a time and meditating on the truths they contain whilst you have some chocolate. In your comfortable chair, remember that these words were written with “the blood, sweat and tears” of a martyr of the Protestant Reformation and have now come to us in the year of our Lord 2014 as ‘a letter of love from Belgium’. Enjoy!, and give glory to God as you do so!