scholarly journals Catholic Political Thought and Calvinist Ecclesiology in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Karie Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Human Liberty ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government

Abstract This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

Epilogue and Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Church

This chapter draws together the themes of the book and looks forward to the later-seventeenth century. It argues that for much of the sixteenth century politics was subordinate to religion; temporal authorities needed the additional sanctions provided by religious belief if they were to exert any power over the consciences of individuals. The effect was to entangle temporal power in the deepening conflicts over religious truth, and thus to reveal the brittleness of any conception of political authority which relied on the support of the Church. At the same time, older traditions of political thought did not go away and often became stronger. The circulation of classical ideas, the discovery of new peoples, the growing interest in historical change and development all suggested alternative ways of legitimizing political power, often using natural law and avoiding any reliance on specifically Christian commitments. What happened in the early-seventeenth century, and most obviously in the writing of Hugo Grotius, was a move not only to ground political society in a particular conception of human nature (conceived of juridically, as a source of rights and obligations) but also to detach Christianity from that view of human nature. It was this understanding of human beings which enabled the development of a social contract tradition through the seventeenth century and beyond, and became an important source for modern liberalism. The questions it raised would help to shape the thought of the next century.

The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Seaward
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The lives, and political thought, of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes, were closely interwoven. In many ways opposed, their views on the relationship between Church and State have often been seen as less far apart, with Clarendon sharing Hobbes’s Erastianism and concerns about clerical assertiveness in the 1660s. But Clarendon’s writings on Church-State relations during the 1670s provide little evidence of concern about clerical involvement in politics, and demonstrate his vigorous adherence to a fairly conventional view among early seventeenth-century churchmen about the proper boundaries to royal interference in the Church; his worries about attempts to push further the implications of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs are evident in his writings against Hobbes, as are his even greater anxieties, exacerbated by the conversion of his daughter, the Duchess of York, about the dangers of Roman Catholic encroachment.

Human Life as a State of Mediocrity in John Locke

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-105
Author(s):  
Giuliana Di Biase
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Perfect Knowledge ◽  
Further Development ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates the genesis and evolution of Locke’s idea of human life as a “state of mediocrity”. While this idea had ancient roots going back to the early Church fathers, it remained current in the seventeenth century where mediocrity was generally equated with a condition of partial ignorance and imperfection. Locke’s account of it is original; while life is a time of mediocrity, death opens the way to the extremes of eternal misery or eternal happiness. Initially, inspired by the Church fathers, Locke conceived of human life as a condition of intellectual mediocrity. Subsequently, and arguably prompted by his reading of the pessimistic outlooks of Nicole and Pascal, he redefined the state of mediocrity in more optimistic terms: humans are naturally suited to their mediocre state. A further development of his conception of mediocrity, again involving a partial rethinking of the human condition, can be found in the Essay, where Locke represents mediocrity as an imperfect state of insatiable desire. It is redeemed, however, by the ability of living human beings to attain perfect knowledge of morality.

scholarly journals COUNSELS OF PERFECTION AND REFORMATION POLITICAL THOUGHT

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-330
Author(s):  
SARAH MORTIMER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
The Status ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Theological Critique ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe debate over counsels of perfection was a crucial aspect of the formation of political and ethical thought in the sixteenth century. It led both Protestants and Catholics to consider the status of law and to consider how far it obliged human beings, rather than simply permitting particular actions. From Luther onwards, Protestants came to see God's standards for human beings in absolute terms, rejecting any suggestion that there were good works which were merely counselled rather than commanded, and therefore not obligatory. This view of ethics underpinned the Protestant theological critique of Catholic doctrines of merit but it also shaped the distinctively Protestant account of natural law. It enabled Luther and his allies to defend magisterial control over the church, and it also formed a crucial element of Protestant resistance theory. By examining the Lutheran position on counsels, expressed in theological and political writings, and comparing it with contemporary Catholic accounts, this article offers a new perspective on Reformation theology and political thought.

Congregationalism and the Social Order: John Goodwin's Gathered Church, 1640–60

1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen S. More
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
Total Separation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government ◽  
Established Church

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.

scholarly journals ROBERT PERSONS, POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE LATE ELIZABETHAN SUCCESSION DEBATE

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. M. INNES
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Resistance

AbstractThis article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession at all. After discussing Persons's political thought, this article examines the responses to it by such writers as John Hayward, Henry Constable, Peter Wentworth, and James VI himself. Their turn towards natural law as a basis for James's title was, it is argued, a direct consequence of the Conference’s argument. As well as shining long-overdue light on Hayward's political thought, the article thus argues that the reception of Persons's Conference was a significant influence on the development of English political thought in the early seventeenth century.

The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Positive Evidence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Time Of Troubles

This chapter mentions celebrated Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii, who complained that S. F. Platonov's Old Russian tales and stories about the time of troubles of the seventeenth-century had lacked significant aspects, such as political ideas. It analyses political ideas that could have been in Platonov's work that illustrated the awakening and development of political thought under the influence of the Troubles. It also talks about Kliuchevskii's famous Course in Russian History, where he commented extensively on new political ideas and cast them into a constitutional framework. The chapter suggests that the reason Kliuchevskii failed to produce positive evidence from Platonov's tales in support of his position is that they simply do not reflect the kind of constitutional sentiment he claimed to find in other historical sources. It describes the legal-institutional approach that Kliuchevskii brought to the problem that led him to treat Platonov's tales as a negative echo of ideas.

Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 544-546
Author(s):  
Bettina Koch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medieval Political Theory ◽  
The Church

Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace, Annabel Brett, ed. and trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. lxi, 569.Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis is one of the key texts of medieval political theory. His thought forms a cornerstone of the transition from medieval to modern political reasoning and is one of the Western classics in the history of political ideas. This early fourteenth-century thinker is not only well known for his secular political thought but also for a theory of the Church that foreshadows the Reformation. The importance of Marsilius of Padua is demonstrated by a continuing and increasing scholarly interest in his ideas. Moreover, the growing number of translations and re-translations of Marsilius's writings indicates his significance for graduate and undergraduate education as well as for scholars whose primary expertise is not in medieval political thought.

Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Government

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

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