From a Preacher's Petition to a Reformed Standard

The confession's plea for toleration did not stop the persecution, but the document outlived the emergency that produced it. Dutch Reformed synods revised and adopted it repeatedly in the following decades, and the Synod of Dort confirmed a settled text in 1618 and 1619, the same synod that produced the Canons of Dort and confirmed the Heidelberg Catechism, binding all three together as the Three Forms of Unity that Dutch Reformed churches still hold as their confessional standard. Ministers, elders and often professors of theology in churches descending from that tradition subscribe to the Belgic Confession alongside its two companions, and church splits within Dutch Reformed history have more than once turned on how strictly that subscription should be enforced against ministers who came to doubt a particular article.

Dutch emigration carried the confession to Reformed churches in North America, South Africa and Indonesia, where translations into English, Afrikaans and Indonesian kept it in use among congregations with no connection to the Netherlands beyond descent from these seventeenth century synods. Article thirty six, on the duty of civil government to protect true religion and suppress false worship, proved the most awkward for later generations to keep as originally worded, and most Reformed bodies that still subscribe to the confession have revised or reinterpreted it once state establishment of religion no longer matched their own convictions about liberty of conscience.