It also served as a model for other Reformed institutions of higher learning throughout Europe. Counter-Reformation attacks from Roman Catholic writers such as Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine were written in the tradition of scholasticism and needed to be answered in kind. Reformed theologians such as Heidelberg professors Zacharias Ursinus and Girolamo Zanchi  adopted the tools of scholastic theology such as the quaestio method to rigorously exposit the Reformed confessions.

The early 17th-century Arminian controversy, in which a group known as the Remonstrants argued that predestination to salvation is based on God foreseeing a person's faith, brought about the Synod of Dort, which defined the Reformed doctrine on this matter in greater detail. The 1594 treatise by Huguenot theologian Franciscus Junius On True Theology was the first Protestant workthe Synod of Dort, which ended in 1619, the Reformed began to give greater definition and detail to their theological system by writing comprehensive systematic theologies. The period was also characterized by intense polemical writing against several groups. The Remonstrants, having been repudiated in the synod of Dort, became an independent movement with their own seminary and dogmatic textbooks, and the Reformed wrote against them with even greater intensity. Reformed polemics were also directed against the increasingly influential Socinians, who denied the Trinity and other traditional Christian doctrines. Early Socinians had already had some influence on the development of Remonstrantism during the early orthodox period. In addition, the rise of Cartesianism provided another target for Reformed scholastics such as Dutch theologian Gisbertus Voetius, who argued that Descartes's philosophical