Dordrecht, in the St. Jorisdoelen · 3 to 18 June 1578 · the first national synod of the Dutch Reformed churches ever held on Dutch soil.

This synod produced no confession and settled no controversy that anyone now remembers. It is on this site because of something less dramatic and more durable: it is where the Reformed churches of the Netherlands worked out how a church without bishops actually governs itself.

The answer they reached — congregations governed by elected elders, gathered into classes, gathered into provincial synods, gathered into a national synod, with no church lording it over another — became the constitution of Reformed and Presbyterian churches across the world. Every consistory and classis meeting in the Dutch tradition today is working from an order this synod drafted.

The Road to a National Synod

The Dutch Reformed churches were organised before they were legal, and largely by refugees. That fact shapes everything about their polity.

What made 1578 possible was the Pacification of Ghent of 1576, which gave the Reformed breathing room across the southern Netherlands and into Brabant, Gelderland, Utrecht, Overijssel, and Friesland. New congregations were appearing everywhere, many of them with no settled order at all. Somebody had to say how they were to be governed, and by whom.

The first article the synod adopted shows what the crisis actually was. It required that no one be called to the ministry of the divine Word who had not been sufficiently proven pure in doctrine and upright in life, gifted to teach, and of good testimony inside and outside the congregation — and that novices who had come out of the papacy or any sect not be admitted until the congregation was assured of their steadfastness.¹ A church expanding this fast, in a country changing religion under military occupation, was about to be filled with men nobody had examined.

Three to Eighteen June

The synod met in the St. Jorisdoelen, a hall in the Steegoversloot, a short walk from the courtyard where the Dutch provinces had declared their independence from Spain seven years earlier. Petrus Dathenus presided — the same man who had put the Heidelberg Catechism and the Genevan Psalter into Dutch, and so had done as much as anyone to give these congregations something to say and sing.

Delegates came from the classes of Holland and Zeeland, from East and West Flanders, from Brabant and Gelderland, and from the refugee congregations still living abroad — the Palatinate, Cleves, and England. Both the Dutch-speaking and the Walloon churches were represented, though only five delegates spoke French.

Its work was almost entirely practical: the calling and examination of ministers, the offices of elder and deacon, the ordering of classes and synods, discipline, marriage, baptism, catechising, and the schools.

The Church Order

The church order adopted here is the direct ancestor of the one the great Synod of Dort would ratify forty-one years later. Middelburg in 1581 rearranged its articles under the four main headings that have organised Reformed church order ever since; The Hague in 1586 refined it further; Dort in 1619 gave it its settled form. But the substance was set at Dordrecht in 1578.

Its governing conviction is worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of how most institutions are built. Authority does not descend from a national body to the congregations. It rises: the local consistory of ministers and elders governs the congregation, and delegates from those consistories constitute the classis, and delegates from the classes constitute the provincial synod, and delegates from those constitute the national synod. No assembly has standing except as the churches send it, and no church may lord it over another.

This is the same instinct that runs through the civic legacy of the Reformation. Men who governed their churches this way found representative civil government entirely natural, because they had been practising it every month of their lives.

Christ's Crown Rights and the Magistrate's Hand

The question that actually dominated the synod was the one the Dutch churches would fight over for the next two and a half centuries: what authority does the civil magistrate have in the church?

The synod's answer came in two halves, and they sit uneasily together.

It took the position that Christ has given to the church alone power in things ecclesiastical. That is the crown rights of the Redeemer, stated by a young church with no legal standing and no protector but the States that were tolerating it.

And then it conceded that a congregation's call to a minister must also have the approval of the magistrates.²

Both halves are understandable. The Reformed churches owed their survival to the Revolt, and the States that had driven out the Spaniards were not going to accept a church that appointed its own officers without reference to them. But the concession planted something. Middelburg in 1581 could not settle it either. The States General eventually refused to permit any further national synod at all after 1586 — for thirty-two years, until Oldenbarnevelt's fall made Dort possible in 1618. When that synod finally met, it was convened by the States General, sat under lay commissioners, and was followed four days after its close by a political execution.

The question Dordrecht left half-answered in 1578 is the same one that runs under the Zurich Disputations and the Diet of Augsburg. Who governs the church, and by what right? The Reformed churches of the Netherlands answered it more clearly than most, and still could not make the answer stick.

Two Languages, One Church

One decision deserves more notice than it gets. The Netherlands had two languages, and the synod had to decide whether that meant two churches.

Its ruling was that the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking congregations should keep their own consistories, classes, and provincial synods, but that neither language group could alter a decision of the national synod concerning ceremonies, church government, or other grave matters. Any change of that kind had to be made in a national synod of both tongues.³

That is a serious attempt at a principle churches have generally handled badly: real latitude for a congregation to worship and be governed in its own language and culture, with a common confession and order that neither group may alter alone. It held. The Walloon churches remained a distinct body within the same communion for centuries.

The Organs

A smaller item, and a revealing one. The provincial synod of 1574 had ruled that organ playing in the churches should be completely abolished, citing Paul in 1 Corinthians 14. In 1578 the synod gave instructions that the organs be removed. Middelburg in 1581 repeated the decision and told the ministers to take it up with the magistrates — because the buildings and their furniture belonged to the cities, not the churches.

They lost that one. The organs stayed, and the Dutch churches eventually made peace with them. But the episode shows both the seriousness with which these men applied the regulative principle to worship, and the practical limit of a church that did not own its own buildings. See Impact on Culture for the wider argument about music that the Reformation never fully settled.

Why It Matters

It is the birth of Dutch Reformed polity. The church order of 1578, revised at Middelburg and The Hague and settled at Dort, is the constitution under which Reformed churches in the Netherlands, South Africa, and North America still operate.

It shows how a persecuted church builds. Wezel in secret, Emden in exile, Dordrecht in a country still at war. These men were organising a national church before they had a nation, and they did it from the bottom up because that was the only direction available to them.

It confirmed the confessional standards. The Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, adopted at Emden and reaffirmed through these synods, were on their way to becoming the Three Forms of Unity, which Dort completed in 1619 by adding the Canons.

It framed the church-state question for the Dutch Republic. Everything that happened between 1578 and 1619 — including the suspension of national synods for a generation — follows from the compromise struck here.

Resources for Study

Councils and Synods