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The point is perhaps best understood when the history of the Reformed confessional documents is distinguished from the history of theological controversy in the Reformed churches—the former historical discussion serving to identify how the Reformed churches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries defined their own identity as Reformed and serving, also, to identify the boundaries of controversy between the Reformed and other confessions, whether Lutheran, Roman, Remonstrant, or Socinian; the latter history having both extraconfessional and intraconfessional dimensions, with the extraconfessional dimensions manifesting the differences between the Reformed and various other theological or confessional traditions and the intraconfessional dimensions evidencing the debates that occurred among the Reformed.