Three Forms of Unity

“Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”

— Jude 1:3

The Three Forms of Unity are the three confessional documents that together formed the doctrinal standard of the Continental Reformed churches after the Synod of Dort formally adopted them in 1619: the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and the Canons of Dort, the Synod’s own verdict against the Arminian Remonstrance.¹ Among the many Reformed confessions written before the Westminster Assembly, these three “would especially define the Reformed churches.”²

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the Three Forms of Unity and never mentions any of the three by name. A. A. Hodge lists the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, alongside the Belgic Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, together under “the principal confessions of the Reformed Church.”³ But the Three Forms of Unity specifically are the doctrinal standard of the Dutch Reformed line, while the 2LBCF descends from the English Puritan line running through the Westminster Confession and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration.⁴

The clearest point of disagreement between the two lines is baptism. The Heidelberg Catechism grounds infant baptism in the covenant continuity between circumcision and baptism, while the 2LBCF confines baptism to professing believers and requires immersion, a divergence Berkhof engages directly from the paedobaptist side rather than passes over in silence.⁵

Historical Development

Guido de Brès wrote the Belgic Confession in 1561, and Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus produced the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 at the request of the Elector Palatine; each began as its own territory’s doctrinal standard rather than as part of a single, unified project.⁶ Their union into one confessional set came later, out of a controversy neither document was written to address. When Jacobus Arminius’s teaching on grace and the human will drew opposition at Leiden, his chief opponent there, Franciscus Gomarus, judged that Arminius’s theology violated both the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, a charge that helped drive the dispute toward a formal church verdict.⁷

That verdict came from the Synod of Dort, convened in Dordrecht by the authority of the States General to settle the Arminian controversy. Its sessions ran from November 13, 1618, to May 9, 1619, with pastors, elders, and theological professors from the churches of Holland joined by deputies from England, Scotland, Hesse, Bremen, the Palatinate, and Switzerland.⁴ The Synod’s own canons were received throughout the Reformed churches as an authoritative statement of Calvinistic doctrine, and the Synod joined those canons to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism as one doctrinal standard binding on the Dutch Reformed churches, the set that came to be called the Three Forms of Unity.¹ Hodge traces that standard’s continuity past the Netherlands itself: the Canons, he writes, “constitute in connection with the Heidelberg Catechism the doctrinal Confession of the Reformed Church of Holland and of its daughter the [Dutch] Reformed Church in America.”⁴

Content

The Belgic Confession. Thirty-seven articles setting out Reformed doctrine on Scripture, God, Christ, salvation, and the church, written in the confessional-statement form typical of the sixteenth-century Reformed confessions.⁸

The Heidelberg Catechism. A question-and-answer instrument of 129 questions grouped into 52 “Lord’s Days,” organized around the catechism’s own opening question into three parts: man’s misery, his deliverance from it, and his gratitude for that deliverance.⁹

The Canons of Dort. Not a confession of faith in the same form as the other two, but the Synod’s own point-by-point judicial verdict against the Five Articles of Remonstrance, addressing election and reprobation, the extent of Christ’s death, human corruption and conversion, and the perseverance of the saints.¹⁰

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), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 77-129, at 100. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87, at 82. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 94-111, at 103. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-128, at 126. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 613-14. ↩
Moore, Concupiscence, chap. 3, 77-129, at 99. ↩
Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 21-87, at 69. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 1, “That There Is One Only God,” text as reproduced by Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/Belgic_Confession. ↩
Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Lord’s Day 1, Q. 2. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Conclusion. ↩