Samuel Rutherford was a great man of God. Not only so, but he was a man of God who exhibited great breadth of mind. This is simply another way of saying that he was not one who could be easily pigeon-holed.
If your only acquaintance with him came through his famous Letters of Samuel Rutherford, you would naturally conclude that he was a devotional writer of great piety, authority, and force. And someone once went through those Letters and pulled out a number of devotional gems, publishing them separately as The Loveliness of Christ. So if you read only that, you would conclude that Rutherford was a devotional writer of great genius.
And then if you picked up this book with that impression fixed in place, you would be startled to discover that you were also dealing with a tough-minded theologian and political theorist of the first rank. This might make you suspicious, and so you start to research some of his other activities, expecting to find out that he was also somehow an Olympic tri-athlete, and a world-class violinist. And a Navy SEAL. You know, that kind of person . . .
That is exaggeration. But it is true that Rutherford was a practical and pastoral theologian who could soar to great heights of glorious consolation. Rutherford was the one who said that when he was in the cellar of affliction, he would look for Christ’s choicest wines. He also said that “dry wells send us to the fountain,” and “if contentment were here, heaven were not heaven,” and “there are many heads lying in Christ’s bosom, but there is room for yours among the rest.”
But Rutherford was also a bare-knuckle brawler who was clearly able to hold his own in the theological bar fight that was the seventeenth century. You are now holding in your hands the evidence of that.
Rutherford was one of the Scottish commissioners who attended the Westminster Assembly (1643-1649), and he was a major contributor to the famous Shorter Catechism. While serving as part of that Westminster Assembly, he also wrote this incendiary book. The title, as you no doubt noticed, is Lex Rex, which can be rendered as The Law of the King, or The Law and the King, or perhaps The Law Is King. Either way, the import of the book was that even the king must obey the law, because the king is also under the law. It is therefore not surprising that some who were in positions of authority took a dim view of his thesis.
After the interruption that was Cromwell, when Charles II returned to the throne in the Restoration, this book of Rutherford’s was burned by the public hangman, indicating some marked level of official disapproval. Rutherford himself was summoned to appear before Parliament on the most serious charge of treason, but Rutherford was already on his deathbed when the summons came to him. This gave him the opportunity to deliver one of the best comebacks ever, at least if it was directed at political authorities who were intent on executing you.
I have got a summons already before a superior judge and judicatory, and I behoove to answer my first summons, and ere your day come I will be where few kings and great folks come.
In the early 1980s, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book entitled The Christian Manifesto, and one of the points he made regarded the necessity of modern Christians coming to learn from the great Samuel Rutherford.
Rutherford presents several arguments to establish the right and duty of resistance to unlawful government. First, since tyranny is satanic, not to resist it is to resist God— to resist tyranny is to honor God. Second, since the ruler is granted power conditionally, it follows that the people have the power to withdraw their sanction if the proper conditions are not fulfilled. The civil magistrate is a ‘fiduciary figure’—that is, he holds his authority in trust for the people. Violation of the trust gives the people a legitimate base for resistance.[1]
1. The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, Vol. 5, A Christian Manifesto, (Wheaton: Crossway, 1981), 474.
For Schaeffer, this was no academic question. What Rutherford was confronting and what we are dealing with today are the same. It is “exactly what we are facing today.” And when we look at the issues that Schaeffer was considering the early eighties, and then consider our issues, we are brought to the point where we must say the root issues are exactly the same.
As preparations to bring this book back into print were being made, our nation was in a great deal of turmoil because of our presidential politics, because of impeachment, because of the coronavirus scare, because of the Black Lives Matter riots, and because of the feckless responses of many of our civil magistrates to all of this.
One of the most distressing things about all of it, however, was how much the political turmoil and overreach by authorities revealed about the ignorance of American Christians concerning their own political theology. Protestant Christians do have a long heritage when it comes to church/state relations (and this book is an essential part of that heritage), but we have been keeping this piece of legacy furniture in the attic for so long that it appears that most of us have forgotten completely about it.
For example, when governors and mayors ordered everyone to start wearing masks, numerous Christians simply assumed that the powers of an American governor were identical to those of an ancient Roman proconsul or worse, a Persian satrap. If someone who is in charge gives you what looks like a lawful order, then doesn’t Romans 13 require us to obey that order, and with no backchat?
The answer is no. Not only is the answer no, but it is a thoroughly biblical no. It is an obedient no, not a disobedient no. But in order to be instructed in the reasons for such a response, you have to be prepared to work through books like this one.
Even a cursory acquaintance with Scripture should tell us that blind obedience must not be the whole story. It is true that the apostle Peter told us to submit ourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king or his governors (1 Pet. 2:13-14). But this was the same man who escaped from jail with the help of an angel (Acts 12:7ff), resulting in the execution of the guards, and who disappeared from the book of Acts as a wanted man. According to church history, he was finally executed by Rome. It is true that the apostle Paul told us that God established our civic authorities (Rom. 13:1-7), and that trying to overthrow them was rebellion against God. But this was the same man who evaded being arrested by King Aretas (2 Cor. 11:32-33), and who also was executed by Rome as a threat to their established order.
There was not a man in Saul’s kingdom who had a higher view of what it meant to be the Lord’s anointed than David. When Saul came into the cave where David and his men were hiding, David was urged to take Saul’s life, which he resolutely refused to do. But he did cut off a corner of Saul’s cloak, and his conscience even struck him for having done that much. No one honored Saul more than David did (1 Sam. 24:5). And yet it has to be admitted that David spent quite a bit of time running around the countryside with an armed band (1 Sam. 23:26), resolutely not complying with Saul’s ardent wishes. Multiple examples of this sort are to be found in the scriptural narrative.
But there is yet another layer to all of this. When Rutherford was presenting his arguments, they were straight from the Bible and in his era they collided with a theology that was ostensibly Christian, but alien to the Bible—that theology being called the “divine right of kings.” We must be careful here because Rutherford certainly believed that kings were established by God, and that they were accountable to Him. Rutherford’s adversaries also believed the same, but they believed that the king was accountable to God and to no other. Rutherford believed that the accountability of the king was not just directly to God, but was also mediated by God through other instruments, and the will of the people had to be included among those instruments.
And this brings us to the additional “layer” that I mentioned above. Although the contest was hot during the course of Rutherford’s life, it has to be acknowledged that Rutherford’s view prevailed in the development of the Western democracies. His teaching was later secularized (and thereby was corrupted), but the foundation of his political theory was resolutely biblical. As Douglas Kelly and others have capably demonstrated, the political thought of Calvin (and Knox, Rutherford, et al.) was instrumental in the formation of our political heritage.[2]
2. Douglas Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992).
Rutherford held that the people were the “fountain-power” of political authority, and that they were the ones who delegated this authority to the magistrates. He also demonstrated that when such authority was abused, the people had the authority to rescind that delegation. This kind of thinking was evident in Book IV of Calvin’s Institutes, in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, which was the work of “Junius Brutus” (a 16th century French Huguenot), John Knox and the Scottish Presbyterians, Oliver Cromwell and company, the English Puritans, and, of course, Samuel Rutherford.
This thinking shows up in phrases that we are very familiar with, phrases like “We the people …” Where did that come from? Among other places, it came from Samuel Rutherford.
Consider what is contained in the Idaho State Constitution:
Political power inherent in the people. All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter, reform or abolish the same whenever they may deem it necessary; and no special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted that may not be altered, revoked, or repealed by the legislature” (Article 1, Section 2, emphasis mine).
Thanks to Rutherford, and a long line of faithful Christians with him who made this same point time and again, this conviction is an essential part of our political legacy. More than that, it is embedded in our foundational law.
And this means that when modern Christians exhort us to do “whatever the governor says,” and they do this in the name of obeying Romans 13, the irony is that they are violating Romans 13 as they do this. The duty of the people to resist unlawful encroachments of those who hold office is a duty that every citizen is a part of. To say that the people do not have the right to do this is to kick against our established constitutional authorities.
A lot of what is going on in the name of government today is actually nothing more than well-organized disobedience. This state of constitutional disarray did not happen overnight—many decades, many lies, many controversies, and many court decisions were involved in it. But one of the central reasons why this state of affairs has developed, and has gotten as bad as it has, has been the neglect of political theology by Christians.
Fortunately, we have older brothers who can encourage and teach us across the centuries. One blessing that we have been given in this generation has been the blessing of the digital revolution when it comes to publishing—and this has been a great blessing that has enabled us to reach back into the past in order to bring older encouragements back to life. If you are holding this book in hard copy, then that means that you have other resources available as well. Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, mentioned earlier, has been republished by Canon Press as part of this same series, and Calvin’s Institutes, Book IV, is also available.
It is hard to imagine anything more timely.
***
This excerpt is taken with permission from the Christian Heritage edition of Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex: The Law and the King (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2020), www.canonpress.com. First published 1644.
