Reformed Natural Law and the Christian Magistrate [1]
Simon P. Kennedy
The initial paragraph of the 1646 version of the Westminster Confession of Faith begins with the statement that “the light of nature,” along with the “works of creation and providence,” do the following: they “manifest the goodness and wisdom, and power of God.”[2] The light of nature is said to manifest these things in such a way as to “leave men inexcusable,” a clear reference to Romans 1:20 that is corroborated in the Confession’s footnotes.[3] From this, we can deduce that the Assembly divines understood “nature” had an important, instrumental, and constructive role in revealing the nature and will of God. Indeed, the Confession continues to deploy this idea of the “light of nature” in various ways, including the self-evident requirement to worship God and the fact that people can order their lives, worship, and conversation by the “light of nature.”[4]
This same Confession also states that the civil magistrate’s “duty” is to protect and promote true religion.[5] The Assembly even said that the civil magistrate had the power to call church synods, or assemblies.[6] The magistrate ought to “take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly-settled, administered, and observed.”[7] In other words, the Confession mandates what some people now call “Constantinianism.” This term, “Constantinianism,” is for many a dirty word. It implies an unhealthy, unbiblical, unwise mixing of church and state interests and activities. The Divines would probably respond to accusations of “Constantinianism” by pointing to the good the Emperor did for the church. Just as Constantine, also known as “The Great,” assisted the Christian church in her mission to attain pure doctrine and preach the gospel to the nations, so can the political authorities at other times in history.
Today, many in the Reformed community are rediscovering the utility and beauty of the Christian natural law tradition. Some of these same people also reject the possibility, and certainly the necessity, of a Christian magistrate – they prima facie reject “Constantinianism.” Some natural lawyers would join these two conclusions together, arguing that theories of natural law support the anti-Constantinian position. My argument here is that modern natural law political theory is deficient in that it rejects natural law arguments for a Christian magistrate. I will also argue that it is decidedly un-Reformed to conclude that natural law does not touch on the civic promotion of religion.
To build my case, I will briefly walk through early Reformed thought, from Calvin to the Westminster Assembly, showing the rough shape of Reformed conceptions of natural law in the early period of the Reformed tradition. Second, I will show how this tradition held to what I call “theistic political naturalism” – that is, that the early Reformed all understood politics to be according to nature, according to the order of creation, and not an impure postlapsarian imposition. And finally, I will suggest that this framework shows that what the Westminster Divines articulated in the Confession makes perfect sense – the affirmation of a natural law or “light of nature” and a Christian magistrate can go together. Indeed, Christian natural law implies Constantinian politics and a Christian magistrate.
I – Early Reformed natural law and the origins of politics
Calvin’s natural jurisprudence is laid out in Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 4, chapter 20, sections 14–16, where he affirms the existence of the natural law, differentiates between the moral, ceremonial and judicial laws, and then states that “the moral law is nothing else than a testimony of natural law and of that conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men.” The fundamental basis upon which we measure the justice and goodness of civil laws is how they compare with the equity laid out in the natural law. This has been well-covered by various scholars. The question for us is whether civil government is linked to the natural law in Calvin’s thought.
Calvin’s stance on the place of civil government in the creation order becomes clear in Institutes 4.20.4. In this section, Calvin is arguing against the Anabaptists, who took a decidedly dim view of civil government, and his goal is to establish the credibility and necessity of the civil magistrate. He says: “it has not come about by human perversity that the authority over all things on earth is in the hands of kings and other rulers, but by divine providence and holy ordinance.” In other words, the Anabaptists are wrong to say that civil government is sinful in origin as well as in its exercise. God created it and it is good.
Calvin makes a similar argument in his commentary on Romans 13:1, where he says that “[civil] powers are from God, not as a pestilence, and famine, and wars, and other visitations for sin, are said to be from him.” Here, Calvin is distancing himself from the Anabaptists, but also from the Augustinian view of the origins of politics; that is, that politics is an imposition on human affairs, instituted primarily to restrain sin. I have argued elsewhere that this implies that Calvin is also suggesting that civil authority would have existed whether the Fall had occurred or not – i.e. it is natural and a part of the creation order.
Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) is more Thomist in his natural law theory than Calvin. In The Mosaic Polity, Junius adopts the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas, though in an adumbrated form. Again, we have to infer from indirect statements his views on the origins of politics. But we can safely infer a fair amount, for two reasons. One is that, as a Thomist, Junius is Aristotelian in his method and in his understanding of the political nature of humans. Humans live in political community “by nature”. Calvin argues something similar when he says that humans are “social animals,” in his case echoing Seneca rather than Aristotle.[8]
Junius states that the natural law is the participation by humans, through the exercise of reason, in the eternal law.[9] The eternal law can be summarized as the divine mind ordering reality.[10] As a part of this (and despite the Fall and the effects of this on the exercise of our reason), humans know they are obliged to encourage and cultivate justice.[11] This fact implies that we know something about what justice is. It also means we want to enact this drive for justice through political order, an order which is governed by human laws. Junius states that these human laws are produced when humans “proceed by reason from those other preceding laws” (that is, the eternal, natural, and divine laws).[12] There is no suggestion in all of Junius’s complex discussion on law that human laws would have been unnecessary if there was no Fall.[13] For Junius (as for other Reformed Thomists like Girolamo Zanchi, and Johannes Althusius), human law proceeds from the exercise of human reason qua reason, not qua reason impaired by sin. Again, this all implies a theistic political naturalism, which advocates for a Aristotelian view of human nature insofar as humans are naturally political.
Girolamo Zanchi (1516–1590) provides a further example of Reformed thought that bends in this same direction.[14] Zanchi’s view of human nature is more pessimistic than Junius or even Calvin. Humans were, before the Fall, capable of imbibing and obeying the eternal law through participation by reason perfectly: “the natural law had been perfectly instilled in human beings.”[15] Furthermore, “reason” was “perfectly placed inside human beings.”[16] Seemingly, for Zanchi, there was no barrier between human reason and God’s reason built into the created order. Does that mean there would have been no need for civil laws and, therefore, civil government before the Fall? Zanchi is ambiguous on this point. Like any Reformed Thomist, he agrees with Thomas that human laws are derived from natural law.[17]
One could infer from this that Zanchi held that civil laws would have existed prior to the Fall, but he makes no clear statement on this point. Civil laws, he says, are mutable because they change with circumstances. However, the underlying principles of civil laws, or what Calvin calls their “equity,” is from the natural law and does not change.[18] Does this provide any insight into the question of prelapsarian political order? Not especially. However, Zanchi does seem to imply that civil laws would be necessary given different circumstances, and those circumstances could conceivably vary in a prelapsarian condition. But this is speculative. Perhaps the most we can say is that Zanchi emphasizes the way civil law mitigates the effects of sin, whilst leaving open the possibility for a civic polity before the Fall.
To finish this survey, I will deal very briefly with Johannes Althusius (1557–1638). Althusius is consistent with Zanchi and Junius on the question of natural law, and he affirms with Calvin that the order of creation bears in it a perspicuous moral order that is witnessed to in the conscience (as in Romans 2:14-15). Althusius also argues in a straightforward Aristotelian fashion about natural law and the role it plays in the ordering of a civic polity – that is, he says that civic laws ought to reflect the divinely-mandated ius natural.[19] He also says that nature is a cause of political community.[20] Why? Two reasons. One is that natural law has been implanted in all men by God, and therefore people have a natural knowledge of justice through this. Secondly, people are naturally intertwined, and by nature live a “symbiotic” life – we are made for political life because we need each other to enjoy an ordered social life where we gain the goods for a happy and just existence.[21]
II – Political Naturalism and Christian Politics
How does a belief in natural law work itself out into Constantinian political theory? Calvin, Junius, and Althusius, and some of the Westminster Divines like Samuel Rutherford and George Gillespie, bear some of the marks of Thomism in their theory of law. Indeed, the early Reformed tradition, up until the time of the Westminster Assembly, held to a view that I call “political naturalism” – that is, that politics is natural and man is a zoon politikon (political animal).[22] The “political animal” or “social animal” motif occurs across the Reformed tradition during the 16th and 17th centuries. This political naturalism is connected to natural law theories: man is, as per the order of creation, a political being who would have been in political community whether the Fall had occurred or not. Politics does not exist because of sin, which is a theory closely aligned with Augustine. Politics does help to mitigate some of the social effects of sin, just like the natural family does. But this does not mean there would have been no politics without the Fall, just as the family would necessarily have existed without the Fall.
The question remains as to why there might be a connection between natural law, political naturalism, and a conviction that a Christian commonwealth with Christian rulers is the proper order of things. In one sense, it’s quite simple, and to conclude, I will draw a connection between these themes of political thought that are rarely, if ever, connected in normative and historical discussions about politics.
Allow me to move away from the history of ideas, and into normative political theory. First, Protestants can and should affirm that grace perfects nature. But there is more to this than first meets the eye. Grace not only perfects nature, but is also the telos of nature. Nature exists to bring about and maintain natural goods, to be sure. But nature also exists to point to, and support, grace. The grace held out to people in the gospel of Jesus Christ is a matter separate to the good order of a political community. But if a political community exists by nature and according to nature, and this natural order of things has been instituted, through creation, by a God who wants to see all people come to a knowledge of Himself, it follows that the political nature of man has its telos in grace. Therefore, the magistrate, being God’s minister in the political sphere is called to order that sphere towards that grace.
My suggestion is that natural law and the Christian magistrate are theoretically connected, and that one necessitates the other. Politics has a higher end than mere social order, as fine as social order is. This is because politics was made by a God who created us to know and worship him. Althusius notes that consociatio, which is the word he uses to explain the purpose of politics, is a symbiotic sharing of goods, and one of the goods shared in a political community is spiritual.[23] God, Althusius argues, made us to live in symbiotic relationship with one another in political community; we are political animals.[24] This community is ultimately to be directed to the highest goods that can be shared – meaning that the magistrates who have authority and power over said community have a responsibility, indeed a duty, to rule in favour of Christian truth and Christian institutions.[25]
In summary, then, the Westminster Divines were perfectly consistent to hold to a natural jurisprudence and a Constantinian political theology. Divine origins implies divine ends – a divine creation implies a divine telos. A theistic natural law implies a theistic origin for politics, which in turn implies a divine purpose to political life. A key break in the Reformed tradition occurred when people began arguing that natural jurists were only entitled to theorise about the second table of the Decalogue as part of the natural law. But this is, in the end, an entirely arbitrary limitation on natural law theory. No one in the Reformed tradition seriously argued this until civic reality pushed theorists to re-shape their legal theory according to the needs of a pluralistic confessional state.[26] No one believed the first four commandments were juridically off-limits until it was politically expedient to do so. Confessional tensions in England, the Holy Roman Empire, and France, all led to a de-theologising and desacralising of the natural law. The end point of this process was a secularization of politics due to a secularization of natural law.[27] Given our secular liberal politics across the West, it is little wonder that we find it difficult to see Constantinian political theory as anything more than the mere assertion of raw Christian political power.
However, as this historical survey shows, Constantinian political theory is deeper and more robust than that. Calvin was not pro-Christian politics because he wanted more power. Neither was Junius, nor Althusius. Obviously, the same goes for the Westminster Divines. They were for Christian politics because they knew that the origin of politics was divine and the highest end of politics is communion with the Triune God. None of these thinkers believed that this communion could be achieved through a Christian state or by the rule of a Christian magistrate. The Church is the primary vehicle for the ministry of the gospel. But what role for the State? There is nothing in the early Reformed tradition that precludes a Christian magistrate. Indeed, according to Calvin, the vocation of the civil magistrate is the highest of all callings, and we can certainly see why. If you were a natural law thinker in the early Reformed tradition, you were necessarily a Constantinian. Perhaps the same should go for today.
Simon P. Kennedy is a Senior Research Fellow at the T. C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland, and a Non-resident Fellow at the Danube Institute.
[1] Author’s note: This paper was prepared for verbal presentation and will be expanded with further argumentation and references in the future. My thanks to the participants at the Hale Institute Symposium for their feedback.
[2] Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 1.1. Quotes from the Confession are from the Westminster Confession of Faith (Free Presbyterian Publications, 1985).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 21.1, 10.4, and 20.4. An excellent study on natural law and the confession is topic is Benjamin B. Saunders, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Natural Law and the Westminster Confession of Faith,” Westminster Theological Journal 82, (no. 2, 2022): 177–202.
[5] Westminster Confession, 23.3.
[6] Ibid, 23.3 and 31.2.
[7] Ibid, 23.3.
[8] John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, 2:18; Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.13.
[9] Franciscus Junius, The Mosaic Polity, trans Todd M. Rester (CLP Academic, 2015), Thesis 4.
[10] Ibid, Thesis 2.
[11] Ibid, Thesis 4.
[12] Ibid, Thesis 7.
[13] The only possible qualification is in Thesis 4, where Junius notes that the Fall altered mode of human participation in the eternal law through the natural law. Junius argues that the natural law was a more direct communication of the eternal law in the prelapsarian state. Sin has altered this and marred our participation in the eternal law through the natural law. It is, therefore, possible that Junius held that civil law would not have been necessary in the prelapsarian state. But this seems unlikely, given his proceeding argument.
[14] Citations will be from Girolamo Zanchi, On the Law in General, trans. Jeffrey J. Veenstra (CLP Academic, 2012).
[15] Ibid, Chapter 2, Thesis 7.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid, 3:2.
[18] Ibid, 3:6.
[19] Johannes Althusius, Politica, trans. Frederick Carney (Liberty Fund, 1995), chapter 9, section 21.
[20] Ibid, 1:32–34.
[21] Ibid, 1:1–4.
[22] Cf. more generally Simon P. Kennedy, Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularisation of Political Thought, 1532–1689 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
[23] Althusius, Politica, 1:1.
[24] Ibid, 1:26 & 1:33.
[25] Ibid, 9:28–45.
[26] See, for example, Ian Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and
[27] Cf. Kennedy, Reforming the Law of Nature.
