Confessional conflict in the early modern period has been the fodder for enormous amounts of research. In addition to this inter-confessional conflict, however, there is the reality of intra-confessional conflict. It is now widely accepted among scholars of the Reformations is that the binary separation of these types of conflicts is arbitrary and belies the blurred lines surrounding religious confessions. The Low Countries is a particularly apt example, though certainly not the only example, since Protestant groups there were notably diverse. Indeed, defining “Protestant” and, later, “Reformed” was a contested process. The most obvious example of this wrangling over confessional definitions in the Low Countries is the conflict between the Remonstrants and the Contra-Remonstrants as they struggled to define Dutch Reformed. The decades-long conflict between the Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants was indubitably a definitive struggle within in the Dutch Reformed Church, so much so that seeking to address this “intra-confessional” debate—though the Contra-Remonstrants certainly saw the Remonstrants as outside of the true Dutch Reformed confession—is beyond what can be addressed in this chapter. Other scholars, moreover, have already paid close attention to the “Arminian controversy” that culminated in the Synod of Dort.

The Dutch Reformed Church had other internal conflicts besides the controversy between the Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants. As Benjamin Kaplan has meticulously demonstrated, the much earlier conflict between the Calvinists and Libertines “differed greatly from the well-known religious wars of early modern Europe” because “it was not between Catholics and Protestants nor between any two defined, rival denominations.”