Most Attacked and Least Defeated: Confessionalism, Anti-Confessionalism, and Religious Controversy in the Dutch Republic

Abstract

The life and work of Balthasar Bekker, from his early conflict with the Reformed church hierarchy over the funeral oration for his first wife to the publication of The World Bewitched, stood in marked contrast to one of the most powerful intellectual forces of the seventeenth century: the great transformation of religious ideas and institutions often called confessionalism. It was Bekker’s opposition to this thought system, from his early days in Friesland, which in large part defined his own vision of the church and Scripture. Bekker’s biblical exegesis, with its rejection of literalism, undermined the intellectual structure of Dutch Reformed confessionalism and provoked heated opposition to his ideas on the part of many church leaders.