Gisbertus Voetius, the Dutch Revolt, and religious toleration in the United Provinces

Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) taught at the University of Utrecht from the 1630s to his death, and was the most authoritative theologian of the Dutch Golden Age. We excerpt a disputation circulated by Voetius in advance of the Great Assembly convened in The Hague in 1651, in which Voetius sought to see off calls for increased toleration of Catholics and other groups outside his own definition of Reformed orthodoxy. Some of these groups identified the Dutch Revolt as a purely political, rather than religious war, emphasizing the numbers of Dutch Catholics who fought against the Spanish. But Voetius insisted that it was a religious war fought in defence of the Reformed Church and that Catholics were always the enemy, whether external or internal.