A Most Elegant Book: The Natural World In Article 2 Of The Belgic Confession -- By: Gijsbert Van Den Brink

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 73:2 (Fall 2011)
Article: A Most Elegant Book: The Natural World In Article 2 Of The Belgic Confession
Author: Gijsbert Van Den Brink


A Most Elegant Book:
The Natural World In Article 2 Of The Belgic Confession

Gijsbert Van Den Brink

Gijsbert van den Brink is Professor of the History of Reformed Protestantism at Leyden University, the Netherlands, and Associate Professor of Christian Dogmatics at the Free University, Amsterdam.

In the night of 1 November to 2 November 1561 a work written by the stained-glass artist and preacher in the Southern Netherlands, Guido de Brès, was tossed over the outside wall of the city castle of Tournai, in the hope that this Confession de Foy, as the document was called, would find its way to Philip II, king of Spain and lord of the Netherlands. In all likelihood it did not reach Philip,1 but it would very quickly become one of the most authoritative documents in the history of Reformed Protestantism.2 In this contribution I will explore one famous part of this work, the second of the thirty-seven articles into which it is divided. In the edition that was established by the National Synod of Dordrecht (1618-1619)—the so-called “authentic text”—this article reads as follows:

We know him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, his eternal power and Godhead, as the Apostle Paul saith (Rom, 1:20). All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.

Secondly, he makes himself more clearly and fully known to us by his holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to his glory and our salvation.3

In what follows I will first argue that this text—and especially its use of the metaphor of the world as a book—contributed to the development of what we now call natural science, and what was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually referred to as natural philosophy. There is a lot of recent scholarship highlighting significant uses of the two-books metaphor in the pre-scientific era, but, remarkably enough, its appearance in so influential a document as the Belgic Confession is rarely mentioned, let alone analyzed.4 This paper first of all attempts to fill this lacuna (section I). Second, I will evaluate the widespread claims in twentieth-century theology that Article 2 either does not or should not consider the natural world as an indepen...

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