Canons of Dordt

“For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”

— Romans 9:15-16

The Canons of Dordt are the confessional judgment issued by the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619) against the Remonstrants, followers of Jacobus Arminius who set out their objections to Reformed soteriology in the Five Articles of Remonstrance.¹ The Canons answer with four “Heads of Doctrine,” traditionally numbered as five points since the third and fourth are combined into one, addressing election and reprobation, the extent of Christ’s death, human corruption and conversion, and the perseverance of the saints.² Together with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, they form the Three Forms of Unity in the Continental Reformed churches.³

Structure and Contents

Each Head of Doctrine states the Synod’s own position in a series of numbered articles, then closes with a “Rejection of Errors” that names and refutes specific Remonstrant claims one by one.²

First Head: Divine Election and Reprobation. Election is defined as “the unchangeable purpose of God, whereby, before the foundation of the world, he hath out of mere grace, according to the sovereign good pleasure of his own will, chosen, from the whole human race… a certain number of persons to redemption in Christ.”⁴ The elect are “by nature neither better nor more deserving than the others,” so the Canons locate the “profound, and merciful, and at the same time the righteous discrimination between men” in God’s decree rather than in any foreseen difference among sinners.⁵

Second Head: The Death of Christ and the Redemption of Men Thereby. Christ’s death is described as a sacrifice “of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world,” while its saving efficacy is applied only to those given to Christ by the Father: it was God’s will “that Christ by the blood of the cross… should effectually redeem out of every people, tribe, nation, and language, all those, and those only, who were from eternity chosen to salvation.”⁶ This sufficient-for-all, efficient-for-the-elect formula is the Canons’ own answer to the Remonstrant claim that Christ died equally to save every individual person.⁷

Third and Fourth Heads: The Corruption of Man, His Conversion to God, and the Manner Thereof. Fallen human beings are “conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, incapable of saving good, prone to evil, dead in sin,” unable even to “dispose themselves to reformation” apart from regenerating grace.⁸ Regeneration itself is described as God’s own act on the will, not a cooperative one: he “opens the closed, and softens the hardened heart… infuses new qualities into the will, which though heretofore dead, he quickens,” a work the Canons call “a resurrection from the dead… which God works in us without our aid.”⁹

Fifth Head: The Perseverance of the Saints. Those effectually called and regenerated are delivered “from the dominion and slavery of sin in this life,” though not yet “altogether from the body of sin and from the infirmities of the flesh” before glory.¹⁰

Conclusion. The Synod calls its own work “the perspicuous, simple, and ingenious declaration of the orthodox doctrine respecting the five articles which have been controverted,” and spends much of the Conclusion denying that this doctrine makes God “the author of sin,” breeds moral license among the elect, or damns infants “tyrannically” apart from their sin. These are charges the Reformed churches, in the Synod’s own words, “not only do not acknowledge, but even detest with their whole soul.”²

Historical Development

The Canons answer a controversy that began in 1610, when the followers of Arminius codified his objections to total depravity, unconditional predestination, and the substitutionary character of Christ’s death into the Five Articles of Remonstrance.¹ The resulting dispute divided the Dutch churches badly enough that Maurice of Orange called a national synod at Dordrecht to settle it, with delegates from Germany, Switzerland, and England joining the Dutch assembly.¹ The Synod’s own convening, membership, and political aftermath belong to the Synod of Dordt’s own article; the Canons are that Synod’s formal, article-by-article verdict on the Remonstrance.

Confessional Status

The Canons joined the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism as the Three Forms of Unity still used confessionally in the Continental Reformed churches.³ The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession is not one of the Three Forms of Unity and has no chapter that is the Canons of Dordt, but its own chapters on God’s decree and the perseverance of the saints state substantially the same position the Canons defend: election as unconditional, resting on “the secret counsel and good pleasure of [God’s] will… without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto,”¹¹ and perseverance as certain because it depends “not upon [the saints’] own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election.”¹²

The Canons’ own Conclusion speaks of “the five articles” it answers,² not of “five points”; the now-common mnemonic TULIP is a later popularization, attested at least as early as Loraine Boettner’s 1932 The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination.¹³

Related Doctrines

References

Jared Heath Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 114. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Conclusion. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Moore, “Concupiscence,” 100. ↩ ↩²
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), First Head of Doctrine, art. 7. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), First Head of Doctrine, art. 6. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Second Head of Doctrine, art. 2. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Second Head of Doctrine, art. 7. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 3. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 11. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Fifth Head of Doctrine, art. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 5. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 17, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints,” para. 2. ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 42-43. ↩