Reformed Dogmatika Classics | Theodore Beza

The Christian Faith

A Confession of the Christian Faith, and Its Comparison with the Errors of the Papacy

Theodore Beza (1519-1605)

A new English translation from the Latin (Confessio Christianae Fidei; London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1575; first published in French, 1558)

The history of the Swiss Reformation would not be complete without an account of Calvin’s faithful friend and successor, Theodore Beza, who carried on his work in Geneva and France to the beginning of the seventeenth century…From being the poet of the Renaissance, bright, witty, free, Beza, from the hour he joined the Reformed Church, became a leader in all its affairs and one of the chiefs of Protestantism.

Philip SchaffHistory of the Christian Church, Vol. VIII: The Swiss Reformation, §167

Theodore Beza set out the whole of the Christian faith in this confession, following the order of the Apostles’ Creed: the Trinity and God’s eternal providence; God the Father and creation; the person and work of Jesus Christ; the Holy Spirit and salvation; the Church; the Last Judgment; and a closing point-by-point comparison of the Reformed faith with the errors of the papacy. It is presented here in seven chapters. Beza’s dedicatory epistle and his separately appended Brief Confession lie outside the scope of this edition.

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A note on this translation. This English text was prepared for Reformed Dogmatika directly from Beza’s Latin (Confessio Christianae Fidei, London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1575; first published in French, 1558) with the help of AI (Anthropic’s Claude); no copyrighted English translation was consulted, and in particular nothing is drawn from James Clark’s 1992 version. The Fathers, councils, and liturgy that Beza quotes are translated from his own sixteenth-century Latin and identified as his citations; Scripture is given in the ESV; and difficulties in the Latin are flagged in the footnotes rather than smoothed over. Corrections from readers of the Latin are warmly welcomed.

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