The Synod of Dordrecht after Four Hundred Years

Abstract

As we make our way through the twenty-first century, the Reformation anniversaries continue to crop up. At a remove of four or five hundred years, the religious tumults that afflicted early modern Europe can seem very far away indeed from our own more secularized era. Germany’s official commemoration in 2017 of the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s protest, the Lutherjahr, sometimes presented the Wittenberg monk more as a martyr to freedom of conscience than the deeply passionate and partisan Christian believer and thinker that he in fact was.1 Indeed much of the Reformation year commemorations of 2017 were at pains to explain to twenty-first century audiences why so many sixteenth-century Europeans were so stirred up about abstract questions of theological speculation. From the perspective of five hundred years, the past can be a foreign country indeed. Still, many of us working in Reformation studies had opportunities in 2017 to share our expertise with popular audiences, and in this respect the public commemorations, as problematic as they could sometimes be, were good certainly for the field. Among the Reformation anniversaries observed this past year, 2019, is that of the National Synod of Dordrecht, which took place from November 1618 to May 1619, a milestone event in the history of early modern Reformed Protestantism. The Synod of Dordrecht (sometimes called “Dordt”) was a gathering of delegates from the provincial synods of the Reformed Church of the Dutch Republic, its theological faculties, and the States General, as well as a number of foreign representatives from Protestant Europe, that attempted to settle once and for all the precise theological identity of the church. The meeting was a watershed development in the evolution of the Reformed Church, which had only been legally and freely established less than fifty years earlier in 1572, when the provinces of Holland and Zeeland won their independence from Spanish suzerainty during the Revolt of the Netherlands. It was also an important moment in the history of international Calvinism, and the spiritual heirs of Dordt across the globe have been among the most active in celebrating the Synod’s quadricentennial.