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The oldest of the doctrinal standards of Reformed
Church of Nepal is the Confession of Faith, popularly known as the
Belgic Confession, following the seventeenth-century Latin designation
"Confessio Belgica." "Belgica" referred to the
whole of the Netherlands, both north and south, which today is divided
into the Netherlands and Belgium. The confession's chief author
was Guido de Bres, a preacher of the Reformed churches of the Netherlands,
who died a martyr to the faith in the year 1567. During the sixteenth
century the churches in this country were exposed to the most terrible
persecution by the Roman Catholic government. To protest against
this cruel oppression, and to prove to the persecutors that the
adherents of the Reformed faith were not rebels, as was laid to
their charge, but law-abiding citizens who professed the true Christian
doctrine according to the Holy Scriptures, de Bres prepared this
confession in the year 1561. In the following year a copy was sent
to King Philip II, together with an address in which the petitioners
declared that they were ready to obey the government in all lawful
things, but 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 this
confession.
Although the immediate purpose
of securing freedom from persecution was not attained, and de Bres
himself fell as one of the many thousands who sealed their faith
with their lives, his work has endured and will continue to endure.
In its composition the author availed himself to some extent of
a confession of the Reformed churches in France, written chiefly
by John Calvin, published two years earlier. The work of de Bres,
however, is not a mere revision of Calvin's work, but an independent
composition. In 1566 the text of this confession was revised at
a synod held at Antwerp. In the Netherlands it was at once gladly
received by the churches, and it was adopted by national synods
held during the last three decades of the sixteenth century. The
text, not the contents, was revised again at the Synod of Dort in
1618-19 and adopted as one of the doctrinal standards to which all
officebearers in the Reformed churches were required to subscribe.
The confession stands as one of the best symbolical statements of
Reformed doctrine. The translation presented here is based on the
French text of 1619 and was adopted by the Reformed Church of Nepal
in 2007.
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