The Belhar Confession
The confession drafted in 1982 and adopted in 1986 by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa. It confesses the church’s unity, reconciliation and God’s justice, and rejects any doctrine that sanctions forced separation by race in the name of the gospel.
Read the text at rca.org ↗The same translation as published by the Christian Reformed Church in North America ↗
The confession has five articles. The first confesses the triune God who gathers the church; the second, the unity of the church as gift and obligation, with true faith in Christ as the only condition of membership; the third, the message of reconciliation, and the rejection of teaching that legitimates forced separation by appeal to the gospel; the fourth, God as the one who brings justice, in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged; the fifth, the church’s duty to confess these things whatever authorities and laws may forbid.
The page’s introduction says that the church drafted it in 1982 and formally adopted it in 1986, and that it is now a standard of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa; the Reformed Church in America adopted it in 2009–2010. See the Churches and Apartheid.
Cited in
- 1982 to 1986, firm date