In the autumn of 1660, copies of Samuel Rutherford's political tract Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince Footnote 1 were burned by order of the Committee of Estates at the Cross of Edinburgh and the gates of the New College in St Andrews, where Rutherford had taught.Footnote 2 Rutherford had written the book in 1644, during the tumultuous days of the Westminster Assembly and several years before the brief triumph of the radical covenanters of the Kirk party between 1648 and 1650.Footnote 3 The fortunes of Lex, Rex, like those of its author, had declined considerably with the restoration of Charles II to the throne. The restored monarchy, it seems, saw both Rutherford and his work as significant threats to the consolidation of power and the stability of the kingdom. Given the book's content, the crown's displeasure is far from surprising.
At its publication, Lex, Rex joined a century-long line of treatises justifying the violent resistance of at least some subjects to governing authorities under certain circumstances. The many conflicts around the reformation of religion which followed the Luther controversy had drawn the problem of civil obedience to the forefront of political thought.Footnote 4 Scholarly interest in resistance and (to a lesser extent) anti-resistance theories has been commensurately strong, and the contours of the various debates which have developed are too intricate to trace here.Footnote 5 One observation shared among many commentators, however, is the centrality of Romans 13:1–7 in the early modern disputes over resistance.Footnote 6 As the Pauline text most clearly related to civil government and an apparently clear-cut proof text for anti-resistance arguments, Romans 13 was unavoidable terrain even for a thinker such as George Buchanan, who based his entire resistance theory on purely secular arguments.Footnote 7 The various arguments that theorists on all sides put forward in order to interpret or frame Romans 13 were not without theological consequences. For instance, to admit, as Christopher Goodman does, that tyrannous rulers are not an ordinance of God, is implicitly to say something about the nature of God's sovereignty.Footnote 8 This particular facet of resistance theories has not often been examined.Footnote 9
This article explores the series of arguments, distinctions and theological moves regarding God's relation to and action in the world which Rutherford employs to incorporate Romans 13 as a central supporting text for his argument justifying violent resistance to authorities.Footnote 10 It is sensitive to the theological import of Rutherford's arguments and, therefore, offers an atypical perspective from which to view early modern resistance theories more generally. I have chosen Rutherford because Lex, Rex is a particularly developed and extensive ReformedFootnote 11 justification of resistance against the civil power of a monarch. While Rutherford's political thought is widely recognised as somewhat unoriginal,Footnote 12 the very fact that he incorporates a number of arguments which appear in earlier Reformed resistance theories makes his work a highly interesting example of the theological and philosophical resources that Reformed resistance theorists could marshal in support of their cause while still maintaining their fundamental theological commitments.
Lex, Rex and Resistance
Lex, Rex is not an easy work. It is not exceptionally clear in some of its myriad fine distinctions, and it has an unsystematic style, dictated in great part by the arguments of the many opponents against whom Rutherford wrote.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, Lex, Rex forcefully and vehemently advances a number of arguments inimical to the cause of the Stuarts – both Charles I, who reigned at the time of its writing, and his son, under whose authority it was burned. Chief among these is Rutherford's conclusion that there are instances in which the monarch may – and indeed must – be violently opposed. This section will outline some of the arguments Rutherford makes in support of his pro-resistance position in order to set the context for a discussion of his treatment of Romans 13.Footnote 14
How Government Is From God: Immediate Institution, Mediated Constitution
Lex, Rex begins with the question of the origin of government and the manner in which government can be said to come from God. The royalist bishop John Maxwell, whose treatise Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas (1644) had inspired Rutherford's ire and the writing of Lex, Rex, held that in the creation of a king ‘the collation of power, and investing of the person in, and with such power, is from God as the immediate Author and Donor’, the interpolation of a human act, such as election, notwithstanding. The human act serves in the making of a king as the casting of lots did in making Matthias an apostle or as the water does in baptism.Footnote 15 The consequence of the immediacy of God's action in constituting a king is that not only the king's powers, but also the execution thereof, proceed from GodFootnote 16 such that ‘all the acts done by Kings are ascribed to God’.Footnote 17 Against Maxwell, Rutherford argues that, though the institution of government is from God immediately, the constitution of governments takes place through the will of the people and is from God only mediately.Footnote 18 Government is ‘naturall, in radice, in the root, and voluntary, in modo, in the manner of coalescing’. Because the elevation of a particular person to kingship is a question of ‘the manner of coalescing’, it takes place through the will of the people. God ordains the kingly office, but the power of creating a king resides in the people.Footnote 19 To support his argument, Rutherford supplies an array of examples from the Hebrew scriptures. Saul, he points out, became king only after the endorsement of the elders of Israel at Mizpah (1 Sam 10:9–25).Footnote 20 Likewise, while God chose and anointed David through Samuel as a young boy, David did not take the throne until the people of Judah crowned him at Hebron (2 Sam 2:1–7). Since even David recognised Saul as ‘the Lord's anointed’ (1 Sam 24:6, 26:9–11) until the latter's death, it cannot be that God's election alone creates kings immediately.Footnote 21 Rather, God acts through the people in the formal constitution of a king.
This is not to say, however, that Rutherford considers specific forms of government either to depend on popular election or to arise independently of God's will. Rutherford holds that it is the people as a community who hold the power of government.Footnote 22 Accordingly, he emphasises the role of the lesser magistrates in any resistance to the king, and he comes down on the side of ‘a limited and mixed Monarcy [sic], such as in Scotland and England’ as the best form of government.Footnote 23 Rutherford is clearly no radical democrat. Regarding the role of God in the formation of specific governments, Rutherford sticks to a staunchly providentialist position. As John Coffey notes, Rutherford subscribes to a Thomistic ‘premotionist’ account of divine action, ‘which [insists] that God [acts] upon secondary causes to produce their actual operations’. God, in this view, ‘[is] intimately involved in every event that occurs in the physical universe’.Footnote 24 The election of kings is no exception. Consistently in Lex, Rex, Rutherford maintains that, despite the people's agency in the selection of a king, God is the ultimate agent in the event; and, conversely, despite the fact that God determines the election of a king, that election takes place through the people.Footnote 25 He writes:
We grant that this is an eminent and singular act of God's speciall providence, that he moveth and boweth the wills of a great multitude to promote such a man [to the office of king], who by nature commeth no more out of the wombe a crowned King, then the poorest shepherd in the land.Footnote 26
The people are to God's selection of the king as clouds are to God's provision of rain.Footnote 27 Thus, Rutherford affirms that power does not alight on the king immediately from God, while at the same time maintaining that God orchestrates political events, for ‘the Lord and the people giveth a crown by one and the same action’, namely, the people's election as determined by God.Footnote 28
The Governmental Covenant
The result of this action is a conditional covenant of government, under God, between the people and the king – i.e. ‘an Oath betwixt the King and his people, laying on, by reciprocation of bonds, mutuall civill obligation upon the King to the people, and the people to the King’.Footnote 29 The terms of the covenant are such that the members of the community give up the power of doing violence to one another without punishment, while the king agrees ‘to governe the people in Righteousnesse and Religion with his Royall Power’.Footnote 30 The people's collective giving over of the power of life and death to the magistrates constitutes the government under the covenant:
The power of life and death is eminently and virtually in the people, collectively taken, though not formally. And though no man can take away his own life, or hath power over his own life formally; yet a man, and a body of men hath power over their own lives, radically and virtually; in respect they may render themselves to a Magistrate, and to Lawes, which if they violate, they must be in hazard of their lives.Footnote 31
Notably, in addition to this transfer of power and the king's commitment in response, the covenant includes the obligation for both king and people to maintain true religion.Footnote 32 This duty hints at Rutherford's understanding of the purpose of the foundational covenant of government.
The Purpose of Government: A Godly Church in a Godly Nation
In accord with Rutherford's vision of a theologically ordered creation in which God works for the good of the church, Lex, Rex focuses the purpose of government intensely on the good of the people, as well as its corollary in a Christian nation, the good of the church. True to his broad, humanist-inclined education,Footnote 33 Rutherford adopts a maxim of Cicero to summarise the chief end of government: ‘Salus populi, Suprema lex: The safetie of the People is the supreme and Cardinall law, to which all Lawes are to stoope’.Footnote 34 The king, then, is not the end of government, but a means to that end. The king's purpose is to promote the good, and his goodness is entirely relative to that good.Footnote 35 In defining the content of the good, however, Rutherford departs from the classical heritage and reveals his markedly Christian concerns. For the good which the king must foster is ‘that the people may lead a godly and peaceable life under him’.Footnote 36 As Coffey cogently argues, for Rutherford, ‘the godly life was the chief end of national policy’.Footnote 37 Thus, Rutherford achieves a shift towards an ecclesiocentric vision of government. While it is indeed true that God has instituted government for human beings generally, it is equally the case that God has given kings for the sake of the church. ‘God's end in giving a King to his Church’, Rutherford summarises, ‘is the feeding, safetie, preservation, the peaceable and quiet life of his Church’.Footnote 38 Here he is interpreting 1 Tim 2:1–2 as a normative vision of government, emphasising that the order of government serves to foster the conditions under which the church can flourish.Footnote 39 Numerous scholars and biographers have noted Rutherford's deep passion for piety and devotional life.Footnote 40 It would seem that here, in his political treatise, we catch a glimpse of that concern, inasmuch as the aim of government is to let the church be godly and pious in peace.
The fact that government serves an important role in the life of the church sheds light on Rutherford's insistence that the institution of government is indeed from God. Rutherford cannot allow that God leaves humanity to its own devices after the fall or that government is the product of human sociality in its sinful state. Rather, ‘because sinne is entered into the world, God devised, as a remedy of violence and injustice, a living, rationall breathing Law called a King’.Footnote 41 Government, in other words, is a product of the will of God in response to the post-lapsarian condition of humanity. It stands, therefore, in contrast to sin, which Rutherford considers providential, but not a product of God's approving will.Footnote 42 This contrast between the origin of sin and that of government provides an entrée en matière for a discussion of Rutherford's adoption of a distinction between two forms of the will of God.
Distinction within the Divine Will: voluntas beneplaciti and voluntas signi
The problem is as follows: as noted above, Rutherford's God is involved in every single event in the world; and yet, God's will as revealed in scripture clearly distinguishes between good and evil, righteousness and sin. How then can the conclusion be avoided that God's will is the source of sin, suffering and tyranny? Citing Epiphanius of Salamis, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Hilary of Poitiers as like-minded authorities, Rutherford offers a solution.Footnote 43 We are to distinguish in God's will between voluntas beneplaciti (will of good pleasure) and voluntas signi (will of approbation).Footnote 44 Rutherford glosses the former as ‘the instrumental and hidden decree of God, which ordereth both good and ill’, and the latter simply as ‘Gods will of approbation’.Footnote 45 The voluntas signi carries God's express approval, but the voluntas beneplaciti is mysterious and orders those things which carry only God's permissive allowance. For Rutherford, ‘Gods providence, as providence without precept or promise’ – i.e. apart from the voluntas signi – ‘can conclude a thing is done, or may be done, but cannot conclude a thing is lawfully, and warrantably done’. To say otherwise would be to condone the kidnapping of Joseph, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the ruining of Job, all of which fell within God's providence, but none of which accorded with God's law.Footnote 46 Returning to our point of departure, it is clear that Rutherford considers government to proceed from God's voluntas signi and sin to fall under God's voluntas beneplaciti. This subtle distinction turns out to be pivotal for Rutherford's project of grafting a defence of armed resistance into a high-Calvinist theological system with God's all-encompassing providence at its roots, for it offers a way of speaking positively about resistance while still recognising that the person or government resisted came to power through providence. Bearing in mind the distinctions between immediate institution of government and mediate constitution of governments, on the one hand, and the voluntas beneplaciti and voluntas signi, on the other, we can now turn to the distinction which drives Rutherford's support of resistance, namely, the difference between powers of governing in abstracto and those powers in concreto, i.e. between the king as a king and the man who is king.
The Office and the Occupant
Corresponding to the immediate institution of government by God is the king in abstracto, i.e. ‘the Royall office of the King’. The mediated constitution of governments by God through the people, on the other hand, always yields a king in concreto, i.e. a ‘Man who is King’.Footnote 47 This is the famous distinction between the office and the occupant which features prominently in most of the resistance theories of the early modern period. Since it has received extensive discussion in the literature, I can treat Rutherford's use of it briefly.Footnote 48
Rutherford repeatedly distinguishes between what a king can do as king (namely, fulfil the law) and what the man who is king does outside of his kingship. This effective bifurcation of the king into a man, who (like all men) acts sinfully, and a king, who (by definition) fulfils and enacts the law, powers Rutherford's pro-resistance argument. It is always unlawful to resist a king as a king, but to resist a man who happens to fill the office of king when he acts as a tyrant is not to resist the kingly office ordained by God.Footnote 49 As Rutherford puts it: ‘An unjust King, as unjust, is not that genuine ordinance of God, appointed to remove unjustice, but accidentall to a King. So we may resist the unjustice of the King, and not resist the King.’Footnote 50 Insofar as the king acts contrary to the law, he is no king, and to resist him is not to resist the divinely ordained office of government. But the question then arises, what sort of transgression must the king commit in order to warrant violent resistance?
The Grounds for Resistance
The short answer is that the king can be resisted in any act contrary to the law.Footnote 51 On multiple occasions, Rutherford references the scenario of a king who attempts to force a sexual act with one of his subjects.Footnote 52 The woman or man in question (Rutherford explicitly mentions both) should physically resist the king, who is acting not as king, but as a lustful tyrant. But the situation is much more complicated for a whole nation – especially a nation that, just four years prior to the writing of Lex, Rex had pre-emptively raised armies and invaded England before Charles made a move to attack Scotland.Footnote 53 What could warrant a nation's insurrection? Surely the people could not respond lawfully to a minor foray into the territory of tyranny by taking up arms. Especially given his strong commitment to the normative status of the Hebrew scriptures for the Christian nation, Rutherford could not draw such a stringent line. After all, Solomon married foreign women contrary to the law (1 Kings 11:1–6) and David committed two acts of tyranny in seducing Bathsheba and arranging for her husband Uriah to be killed (2 Sam 11), and yet neither of them lost the throne as a result. Clearly, then, it cannot be ‘that any one act contrary to the Royall Office, yea that any one or two acts of Tyranny doth denude a man of the Royal dignity that God and the people gave him’.Footnote 54 Rutherford does not lay out a strict criterion for determining when a nation can resist its monarch and when it cannot. He does, however, return to the case of self-preservation on numerous occasions, and he identifies it as the proper manner of construing the struggle of the Scots with Charles.
Recall that the covenant sealed at the constitution of a government involves the transfer of the power of governing from the people to the monarch. Maxwell, taking the staunch royalist position, argues that the monarch has absolute power immediately from God and the people could not have any power to transfer.Footnote 55 Rutherford, who locates the immediate source of the power of governing in the people, denies that an absolute transfer of power is even possible, based on three arguments. First, because the power of governing that the people bestow on the king is from God, it cannot include the evil power to destroy the people. Rutherford presupposes that God cannot give a ‘morall power to do ill’.Footnote 56 The power of governing, because it is instituted by God's voluntas signi, is a moral power. Therefore, the power to do ill cannot be part of the power of governing. As Rutherford puts it:
Tyranny being a worke of Sathan, is not from God, because sinne either habituall or actuall, is not from God; the power that is, must be from God; the Magistrate as Magistrate, is good, in nature of office, and the intrinsecall end of his office . . . and therefore a power ethicall, politick, or morall, to oppresse, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power, and is no more from God, but from sinfull nature, and the old serpent, then [sic] a license to sinne.Footnote 57
Here, the voluntas beneplaciti/voluntas signi distinction serves Rutherford well. He can maintain, as Calvin did, that even tyrannous rulers fall within the bounds of providence, but he can also argue that they must be resisted nevertheless because their actions clearly contradict the divine voluntas signi.Footnote 58 In the case of violent action against the people, then, the king breaches the terms of the covenant, ceases to be king, and becomes a tyrant who must be resisted, in accordance with God's moral law.
Rutherford's second argument against absolute royal power is that the very structure of the power of self-defence makes it non-transferable. The absolute transfer of the power of the sword to the king would yield in effect the power to destroy the people. But ‘the people hath not an absolute power in themselves to destroy themselves’.Footnote 59 Since the people cannot give to someone else what they do not have, they cannot give the king the power to destroy them. Therefore, they cannot give up their power to defend themselves.Footnote 60 Rutherford's third argument is quite straightforward: absolute power is God's and God's alone, so to give it to the king would be idolatry.Footnote 61
But what had Charles done to justify the Scots’ invocation of their power of self-preservation? The king had made no violent move during the political upheavals of 1637 and 1638. Indeed, the Covenanters began military preparations before Charles launched his effort to raise an army in the north of England prior to the First Bishops’ War.Footnote 62 Even more radically, a Scottish army pre-emptively crossed the Tweed to launch the brief Second Bishops’ War of 1640.Footnote 63 At first glance, it does not appear that Charles had threatened sufficient harm for the Covenanters to have acted out of their power of self-preservation. Here, Rutherford's intense focus on the theological and religious aspect of social life comes into play. The people remain under the supreme law of self-preservation, which is a product of divinely ordained nature.Footnote 64 This law governs not only the body, but also the soul. Hence, if the king
defend not religion for the salvation of the soules of all in His publick and royall way, it is presumed as undeniable, that the people of God, who by the law of nature are to care for their own soule, are to defend in their way, true Religion, which so nearly concerneth them and their eternal happinesse.Footnote 65
Charles’ offence was not so much to threaten the bodily well-being of the Scottish people, but to introduce damning changes in religion, highlighted by the Service Book of 1637, to which Rutherford makes explicit reference: ‘The Service-booke commanded in the Kings absolute authority all Scotland to commit grosser Idolatry . . . then [sic] was in Babylon’.Footnote 66 In attempting to force the godly Kirk into ungodly forms of worship, Charles acted not as a king, but as a tyrant who threatened the souls of the people. The king had broken the covenant in such a manner as to justify the people's revocation of their power of governing and active resistance to Charles’ policies.
Restrictions on Resistance
As the discussion of the criteria he sets for resistance suggests, Rutherford devised a theory which justified resistance in only a limited set of cases. Broadly speaking, the limitations which Rutherford places on resistance fall into three categories: (1) those dealing with the ruler's offence, (2) those concerning the status of the potential resister, and (3) those relating to the appropriate steps to take before violent resistance. In terms of offences which warrant resistance, Rutherford is clear that excessive taxation is not sufficiently tyrannous to merit a violent response.Footnote 67 In fact, in matters concerning property, and even physical beatings which do not result in maiming or death, Rutherford precludes ‘any act of re-offending’ in response.Footnote 68 In such cases, the issue revolves around something over which a person has some limited dominion. She is free to a certain extent to dispose of it as she will. It is not so with her life or soul, and thus threats to these demand resistance.Footnote 69
The second limitation Rutherford sets for resistance regards the person who resists. One of the most widely noted features of Rutherford's theory is that (like Beza's, Knox's, and the Vindiciae's before it) it places heavy emphasis on the duty of lesser magistrates to resist the monarch in cases of tyranny.Footnote 70 Rutherford bases this claim on the argument that those whom he calls ‘inferiour Iudges’ derive their power just as much from God as does a king.Footnote 71 Consequently, he views these magistrates as beholden to the king in no special way and answerable to the law only. When advocating resistance, Rutherford tends to assign the responsibility to resist to lower magistrates rather than the populace in general. Nevertheless, Rutherford does hold open the possibility that, in certain extreme cases, private persons could justifiably take up arms against the ruling powers.Footnote 72 Specifically, he envisions a situation in which not only the king, but also Parliament, transgressed the law, leaving the people with no responsible magistrates to uphold it.Footnote 73 Rutherford appears to recognise that the logical outcome of his theory of resistance is that someone always has the duty to resist, even if all those in higher social positions support unlawfulness.
Finally, while Rutherford is forthright and ardent in reserving the right to violent resistance against a magistrate for the purposes of self-defence, he maintains that violence lies at the end of a sequence of measures for self-defence. The first step is always supplication. If pleading for justice will not work, the individual person should flee from the threatening ruler. Since an entire nation cannot very well flee, peoples as a whole skip from supplication to the last resort: violent resistance.Footnote 74 Clearly, in spite of his fiery partisanship and unabashed support for the military campaigns against Charles, Rutherford wants to set a number of strictures on those who would contemplate resistance.
Summary
Several factors and arguments contribute to Rutherford's justification of violent resistance to a ruler in certain situations. (1) The mediated constitution of a monarchy through the people grounds the king's power in a conditional covenant with the people. (2) Because it is the divinely instituted means to the end of creating the necessary conditions for a peaceful and godly life for the church, the power of government is a moral ordinance of God and, therefore, cannot include any power to do ill. (3) Distinguishing between the voluntas beneplaciti and the voluntas signi of God affords Rutherford a way to synthesise a strict providentialist theology with a call for opposition to the status quo. (4) The sharp delineation of the office of the king (the power in abstracto) from the man who is king (the power in concreto) does the bulk of the work of justifying resistance to a person who appears to play a divinely ordained role. And (5) Rutherford's account of the non-transferable and inviolable right of self-defence or self-preservation serves as a rough criterion for determining if a situation meets the requirements for lawful resistance. With this understanding of Rutherford's position in hand, we can now proceed to examine how Romans 13 fits into Lex, Rex.
Lex, Rex and Romans 13
At first glance it would appear that Romans 13 should be a scriptural obstacle to Rutherford's theory of resistance. The first two verses of the chapter do, after all, serve as the epigraph for Maxwell's Sacro-sancta Regum Majesta. And yet, references to Romans 13 in support of his position abound throughout Lex, Rex. Rutherford appears to be completely at ease with peppering a pro-resistance tract with Paul's command to be subject. What makes him so confident? The discussion above reveals that Rutherford has constructed a conceptual apparatus which is able, to a great extent, to appropriate Paul's exhortation to obedience in the service of a justification of war against a man who had been legitimately crowned king. For the sake of clarity, I will address how Rutherford treats the first two verses, which are central to the issue of resistance, separately from the rest of the passage.
The Higher Powers
Rutherford repeatedly employs two of the distinctions discussed above to render the opening verses of Romans 13 agreeable to his argument for resistance; abstracto/concreto receives explicit recognition in numerous instances, and voluntas beneplaciti/voluntas signi is implicit in many of Rutherford's arguments. In many cases, his claims regarding Romans 13:1–2 appear strikingly uncontroversial. For example, he uses Romans 13 as proof that government is of divine institution and justifies the creation of a king.Footnote 75 He states that all magistrates, both kings and ‘inferiour Iudges’, are ‘powers ordained by God’.Footnote 76 And he acknowledges that to resist them is to resist God's ordinance.Footnote 77 But whenever Rutherford makes such claims, in the background is the distinction between the power in abstracto which God ordains and the power in concreto which can stray from God's commands.Footnote 78 For Rutherford affirms ‘that Paul, Rom. 13. speaketh of the office and duty of good Magistrates, and that the text speaketh nothing of an absolute King, nothing of a Tyrant’.Footnote 79 According to Rutherford, in Romans 13:1–2, Paul expressly forbids resisting the powers in abstracto, but he does not command unconditional obedience to powers in concreto.Footnote 80 In one of the most remarkable passages in Lex, Rex, Rutherford declares that the text commands subjection to the emperor Nero (presumed in Rutherford's day to have ruled when Paul wrote Romans), ‘but to Nero as such an one as he is obliged, de jure, to be’, and not ‘as he was such a man, de facto’.Footnote 81
Behind Rutherford's consistent distinction between the divinely ordained power to which Romans 13 commands obedience and the fallible human whom the people can oppose when he transgresses the boundaries of that office is the distinction between the two modes of God's will. The following passage is indicative of the importance of this idea in relation to Romans 13:
It is evident from Rom. 13. That all subjection and obedience to higher powers commanded there is subjection to the power and office of the magistrate in abstracto, or (which is all one) to the person using the power lawfully, and that no subjection is due by that text, or any Word of God, to the abused and Tyrannicall power of the King . . . Because the Text saith, Let every soule be subject to the higher powers. But no powers commanding things unlawfull, and killing the innocent people of God, can be . . . higher powers, but in that lower powers.Footnote 82
It would seem that a theologian with a strong sense of God's all-controlling will would have trouble distinguishing those powers which are of God and those which are not. But the distinction here between higher and lower powers seems to follow the division between those things that God ordains with an approving will (voluntas signi) and those, such as Pilate's condemnation of Jesus, which God only permits (voluntas beneplaciti) for inscrutable reasons.Footnote 83 When rulers act in a manner which does not conform to the voluntas signi of God, their power cannot be said to be a higher power and they act outside of the boundaries of their office. They may, therefore, be opposed.
Also significant for Rutherford's theory as a whole is his insistence that the plural ‘powers’ in Romans 13:1 indicates that lesser magistrates are from God in the same way as kings. In nearly every case in which he references the passage, Rutherford groups together judges and kings. This reading of the text serves to support Rutherford's argument of equal immediacy for kings and lesser magistrates, which undergirds his emphasis on the right and duty of the latter to resist the former should they fall into tyranny.Footnote 84
A Terror to the Evil, Ministers for Your Good
In vv. 3–4 of Romans 13, Rutherford finds material particularly suited to his reading of the text. Paul's description of the higher powers seems to be painfully naïve if taken as a description of how rulers actually act (i.e. of the powers in concreto), but Rutherford reads these verses, instead, as a description of the office of the ruler (the powers in abstracto).Footnote 85 Only those who truly are ‘a terror to evill works’ and ‘ministers of God for Good’ are truly powers ordained by God.Footnote 86 Thus, according to Rutherford, Paul is outlining just what rulers must do in order to command obedience.Footnote 87 Rutherford relies significantly less on the final three verses of Paul's teaching on political authority than he does on the rest of the passages. He interprets vv. 5–6, like vv. 3–4, as a description of what a true ruler does, and suggests that the verses allude to the conditions of the covenant between people and king. The tribute that Christians are to pay is the king's ‘wages’, while the king's continually ministering is his ‘worke’.Footnote 88 Thus, with the conceptual tools he develops over the course of Lex, Rex, Rutherford is able to integrate Romans 13 into his argument in support of his theory of resistance.
Conclusion
It is clear from this analysis of Rutherford's Lex, Rex that by the mid-seventeenth century, at least one Reformed theologian had developed a sophisticated, multifaceted resistance theory which could incorporate a reading of Romans 13 in support of resistance. Instead of abandoning or marginalising the text, Rutherford redefined its terms in such a manner as to bring it within his perspective. Of course the Christian must obey the higher powers! Rutherford argues. But those powers are good and from God, so when the person who occupies the throne acts outside of the law, he ceases to act as a higher power and becomes a tyrant who, if such behaviour persists or grows in severity, must be met with resistance. Rutherford's treatment of Romans 13 is an instance of reading Paul (in true Calvinian fashion) for what he must have really meant. For, as Rutherford writes, ‘the text in words distinguisheth not obedience active in things wicked, and lawfull: yet we are to distinguish’ – presumably on the basis of the many logical and scriptural arguments Rutherford has presented in Lex, Rex.Footnote 89
