"The Reformed brotherhood of churches of course also included in its ranks the German Reformed, many of them Melanchthonian Lutherans more than Calvinists in their origins and emphases, not to mention the great forgotten Reformed church of Hungary. Indeed, the Reformed can lay some fair claim to being not the narrowest, but the broadest of the Reformation traditions. But how does such breadth square with a commitment to confessions? Reformed churches are and always have been confessional churches, with the French Reformed drafting the Gallican Confession in 1559, the Scots the Scots Confession in 1560, the Dutch the Belgic Confession in 1562 and the Canons of Dort in 1619, the German Reformed the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563, the English the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1563, the Swiss the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, and finally the British Presbyterians the Westminster Confession in 1647. Nowadays, many are prone to think of confessionalism as a straitjacket, but few who make such complaints have bothered to familiarize themselves with many of these confessions. Most of them are far more capacious than we expect to find them, never even touching on many of the arcane doctrinal minutia that card-carrying contemporary confessionalists spill much of their ink upon. Even where they do pronounce decidedly on matters debated within the broader tradition, early modern Reformed theologians often emphasized that such points of difference were secondary and no bar to communion" (Beyond Calvin: Essays on the Diversity of the Reformed Tradition).
