Samuel Rutherford And Liberty Of Conscience

By Crawford Gribben

[Crawford Gribben is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.]

In Edinburgh, on 18 January 1649, members of the Commission of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland met to consider their response to the most serious danger faced by their covenanted reformation, the “teeming freedom” and “teeming truth” of religious toleration in England.[1] Fearing that some of the English radicals were pushing back the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy, while others were actually converting to Judaism and Islam, Samuel Rutherford, James Guthrie, John Livingstone, and Patrick Sharp were among the Commission members who adopted “the Testimony against the errours and practises of Sectaries” and agreed that its contents be urgently communicated to both the English Parliament and London Presbyterian leaders.[2] Their letter to the ministers invested the Scottish program of covenanted reformation with a distinctly eschatological momentum, and implied that the longed-for millennial glory of the latter days would only come through the English administration’s returning to the obligations of the Covenant through the erection of a national Presbytery.[3] The Commission opposed the London Parliament’s growing interest in toleration because, they believed, political and religious pluralism delayed the settlement they anticipated and sowed confusion among the elect: “When in the Kirk of Christ there is not on [sic] Lord, on Faith, on Baptisme, there must arise many false Christs and false prophets.”[4] The Scots appealed to their English brethren to reject the ideology of toleration with which their Parliament was flirting. Instead of countenancing error, the English clergy and politicians should

give seasonable warning to all the Kingdome of the sad and dangerous consequences of Irreligious and Licentious Tolleration [sic] of all Religions, the Idoll of indignation in that land that provocketh the eyes of His glorie, of altering the ancient and well established Government of the Kingdome, of the horrible blasphemies, heresies, and errors now abounding in the land, of Anarchie, abolishing of Magistracie, the sacred ordinance of God, which we cannot but look on as the beginning of woes, a seminarie of all violence, unjustice, and oppressions, the continueing and increasing of the troubles of Britane, the utter dissolving of all humane societies, the ruine of that famous Nation and Kirk, and which is most fearfull, the displaying of a banner against the Lord, and the kindleing of His wrath against the land which sall burne to the bottome of Hell.[5]

In 1649 opposition to a pluralistic society was at the center of Scottish Presbyterianism’s political platform.[6] Rutherford’s codification of the Commission’s political demands, published later that summer as A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience, would challenge this “fecund and broody” evil.[7] But his arguments would be described by Owen Chadwick as “the ablest defence of persecution in the seventeenth century,” for the system of ecclesiastical and political power that Rutherford was promoting was emphatically not that of the tolerant, benevolent Presbyterianism for which he has gained posthumous fame.[8] William M. Hetherington reflected this kind of mythology in his History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1843). Noting that the Westminster Confession “has often been accused of advocating intolerant and persecuting principles,” he argued that its contents are “equally free from latitudinarian laxity . . . and intolerance.”[9] Only deliberate misrepresentation or willful ignorance, he believed, could cause any commentator to construe its contents as outlining a theology of persecution; “Certainly the conduct of those who framed it gave no ground for such an accusation.”[10] But Hetherington’s mythologizing needs to be qualified. As A Free Disputation suggests, the survival of other faith communities in the covenanted kingdoms was due less to benevolent toleration than to an inability to enforce the reformation imagined by Rutherford and his colleagues.[11] Even in the early 1650s, grappling with the reality of defeat, crippling divisions in the Kirk, and the realpolitik of the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland, the most prominent Westminster divines continued to theorize the biblical basis for an exclusively Presbyterian world.

I. The Goals Of The Westminster Project

Despite the power of its rhetoric, the success of the Commission’s broadside against toleration was impeded by the fact that the London ministers whom they addressed had already lost the influence they had earlier enjoyed. Four years earlier, the Westminster Assembly had convened in a flurry of excitement, with delegates publicly declaring their belief that the synod was strategically placed to advance God’s latter-day purpose of establishing biblical church government.[12] Rutherford had matched Parliament’s enthusiasm for the reform of established religion in his opening statement defending the foundation of the Scottish Presbyterian position: “We acknowledge the Scriptures of God contained in the Old and New Testament to containe the whole doctrine of faith and good manners”—for church and for state.[13]

Those English ministers who inclined towards Presbyterianism readily embraced Rutherford’s view of the state. In December 1647 ministers in London published A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant, cataloging the “unsound Opinions . . . abominable Errours, damnable Heresies, and Horrid Blasphemies . . . broached and maintained amongst us here in England, under the notion of New lights and New Truths.”[14] By 1647 the heresy manual was a well-established genre of theological literature.[15] What was more novel about the approach of the London ministers was the emphasis they placed upon the dangers of those who argued that “little can be done, unlesse Liberty of Conscience, be allowed for every man, and sort of men, to worship God in that way, and perform Christs Ordinances in that manner, as shall appear to them most agreeable to Gods word, and no man punished or discountenanced by Authority for the same.”[16]

In 1648, fearing that their silence would not imply their assent, ministers in Staffordshire published their conclusions that “an Universal Toleration so much pleaded for, and earnestly desired by the Sectaries is most sinful, destructive, both to truth and godliness, and in its own nature the mother of all confusion.”[17] Those sentiments were echoed by The Gloucester-Shire Ministers Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemn League and Covenant, which expressed its signatories’ concern that “the fruit of al their prayers sighes, tears, and sufferings, yea the very bloud of their friends and children shall produce nothing at last, but a cursed and monstruous Toleration.”[18] In the same year, Lancashire ministers noted the

strange and woful Apostasie of sundry from the Faith; the great opposition made against the Government and Discipline of Jesus Christ; the sad divisions and rents in this tattered and torn Church; that an universal Toleration of all, even the most execrable doctrines, that ever were hatchd in hel or broached in the world, is earnestly laboured after by many; and that the Solemn League and Covenant, sworn with hands lifted up to the most high God, is with many buried in oblivion . . . scorned, derided and most palpably violated.[19]

However clearly he believed Scripture to teach his doctrine of “faith and good manners,” Rutherford’s vision of legal renewal sat uneasily beside the projections of some other of the theologians who had been invited to attend the Assembly. The various documents produced by the divines advanced a system of theology and church government that mediated between the various parties represented in the debates. The Westminster documents were “negotiated centres,” but the English Parliament’s war against King Charles meant that the Scottish Commissioners exercised an influence out of all proportion to their small number. The London Parliament, which had sponsored the Assembly, critically depended on the assistance of the Scottish army in England’s debilitating civil wars. Though the Assembly ultimately refused to endorse Presbyterianism as being of divine right, the system of church government propounded by the Scots was well represented in the Assembly’s literature. So too was their political vision. As part of their program of reform, the Westminster delegates proposed that the legal system of the three kingdoms should more accurately reflect the standards of justice and righteousness found in Scripture. They were painstakingly careful, giving “more detailed attention to the doctrine of the law than any previous assembly or council of the Christian church.”[20] The minutes of the Assembly, recording the process of debate and negotiation in its committees and on the floor of its chamber, evidence a refining movement towards a more nuanced and centrist understanding of the theology of the law.

In the slow and elaborate composition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the divines followed the common Reformed division of biblical law into moral, ceremonial, and judicial categories. While they agreed on the divisions, they debated the extent to which the laws within these categories should be applied in the NT age, the extent to which they had been affected by the dispensational changes that attended Christ’s being “the end of the law” (Rom 10:4). They agreed that the continuing authority of the moral law was unassailable, and an exposition of its summary in the Ten Commandments was included in both the larger and shorter catechisms as a demonstration of its application to NT believers (WCF 19.1-2; SC 39-81; LC 91-148). It seemed equally clear to the divines that the ceremonial laws had no continuing validity in the NT age: gospel worship should know nothing of OT ceremonial elaborations (WCF 19.3). But if the position of the moral and ceremonial laws seemed clear, the position of the judicial laws—those OT regulations governing the civil and social life of Israel—seemed more ambiguous.

The delegates’ difficulty was partly with the proper interpretation of Reformed tradition. Calvin’s Institutes had instructed the magistrate on his duties to the law of God, and chided those who ruled “as if God appointed rulers in his name to decide earthly controversies but overlook what was of far greater importance—that he himself should be purely worshipped according to the prescription of his law.”[21] The annotators of the various editions of the Geneva Bible, an edition of which was the only Bible to be published in Scotland before 1633, had similarly emphasized the responsibilities of the “civil magistrate,” as its note on 2 Kgs 10:23 suggested: “God wolde have his servants preserved, and idolaters destroyed: as in his Lawe he giveth expresse commandment.”[22] John Knox and other early Scottish reformers also taught the public application of divine law, and the Scottish church had received the 1566 Confession of Helvetia, which instructed the civil magistrate in his religious duties to “advance the preaching of the truth, and . . . root out lies.”[23] But in the London puritan underworld, despite a strong local tradition emphasizing the public aspects of divine law and the vigorous pro-law polemics of the Independents, the status of the judicial laws was a little less assured.[24]

This uncertainty was evidenced in the Assembly’s debates. On 9 February 1646 the divines debated the “abrogation” of both the ceremonial and judicial laws.[25] Their position had moderated by the final draft of the Confession, however, when only the ceremonial laws were described as having been “abrogated,” while the “general equity” of the “expired” judicial laws was thought to remain in force (WCF 19.3-4). Similarly, on 26 March 1646 the Assembly discussed a draft chapter on Christian liberty and liberty of conscience, concluding that “the gospel consists . . . in freedom from . . . the ceremonial and judicial law.”[26] By the final draft of the Confession, however, the status of the judicial laws had again been implicitly changed; WCF 20 contains no reference to the believer’s freedom from the judicial law, though WCF 20.1 does refer to both moral and ceremonial categories. Discussion of the public aspects of the judicial laws seems to have been deferred to WCF 20.4, which discourses on the power of the godly magistrate without explicitly referring to the biblical mandate for his rule. Westminster Confession of Faith 20.4 demands that those who publish opinions or maintain practices contrary to the “light of nature,” the “known principles of Christianity,” or the “power of godliness,” or those whose opinions or practices are “destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church,” may be called to account by the “censures of the Church, and by the power of the civil magistrate.” Although care must be exercised in arguing from the Confession’s proof texts—which were inserted by the divines with the utmost reluctance, and only after sustained pressure from Parliament—it is significant that the proof texts for this latter assertion include Deut 13:6-11.[27] Three years later the Scots would cite it again. The collective opinion of the Westminster divines in 1646 and the Commission of the Kirk in 1649 was that Deut 13 offered a paradigm for the state’s involvement in policing public expressions of religious belief. Rutherford, similarly, noted the inquiries of those who wondered “whether the Laws of England & Scotland be bloody and unjust” when they argued for the execution of Roman Catholic priests on the basis of Deut 13, but noted his own belief that “they are most just Lawes.”[28] It was on the basis of that passage that Presbyterians argued against the toleration of those who promoted heterodox opinions, and appealed to biblical standards of penology: “Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: but thou shalt surely kill him” (Deut 13:8-9).

Once again, the Westminster documents presented an uneasy compromise between those who favored a wider liberty and others, like Rutherford, who remained committed to the ideal of a covenanted nation and its government’s recognition of its divine responsibility to uphold the law of God. Thus, while initial discussions in the Assembly committee had proposed a radical reinterpretation of the status of the judicial law and the religious obligations of the state, subsequent negotiations nuanced their proposals and reinterpreted the judicial law within the framework of the mainstream Reformed tradition. The Scots helped to pull the Assembly back towards the European Reformed consensus, but their efforts were not universally applauded. As political influence passed from the Assembly’s Independents to the sects of the puritan underground, complaints were made that the Scottish Commissioners were promoting views of church and state that opposed continuing reformation and outraged English sensibilities. Henry Burton referred to the Scots as “the vilest of men . . . underminers of Parliament and City.”[29] John Milton, champion of radical liberty, attacked Rutherford and Baillie in his sonnet “On the new forcers of conscience,” satirized George Gillespie in “A book was writ of late called Tetrachor-don,”and clinched his famous motto, damning the Scots with the antichrist: “new presbyter,” he complained, “is but old priest writ large.”[30]

II. The Failure Of The Westminster Project

But by the later 1640s, Rutherford was no stranger either to Milton or the London sectaries he represented. During the four years Rutherford had spent attending the Westminster Assembly, he had used his time to energetically research the culture of the sects while arguing vigorously for Presbyterianism in the chambers of the Assembly and in a wider public arena. In 1644, the publication of a confession of faith by seven Baptist churches in London caught the attention of some Westminster divines and highlighted their need to rapidly define the biblical basis for a national church system.[31] The ecclesiological vacuum their delay created seemed to provide ideal growth conditions for the sects. Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna (1646) listed “a Catalogue of Errours now in being, alive in these present times, all of them vented and broached within these four years last past, yea most of them within these two last years, and lesse.”[32] Rutherford believed that a further twenty sects had begun in 1645.[33] His defense of Scottish Presbyterianism therefore attempted a rigid control of the crucial cultural media: “No one may preach the word but Pastors and the sons of the Prophets, and such of their sort who aime at the holy ministry.”[34] But despite a passionate concern to appeal to the popular conscience, Rutherford’s efforts to provide a popular apology for Scottish Presbyterianism seemed only to fall on deaf ears. His efforts to create an English Presbyterian constituency were singularly unsuccessful, and he recorded his frustration at the obtuse arguments and unnecessary delays of the Assembly’s Independents. Their Apologetical Narration (1644) was no basis for any national church, he complained; it left “roome for a new light to cast a board again at the blowing of the wind of a new phancy (of which we have seene more in the Assembly of Divines, these four years, past then we desire to see in any that professe godlinesse).”[35] Despite Rutherford’s concerns, the influence of the Independents continued to grow.

In November 1647, then, when Rutherford left the Westminster Assembly to return to Scotland, all hopes of an English national presbytery seemed on the verge of collapse.[36] Within a year, Rutherford had published A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist (1648) as an intensive argument with the London sects who were tearing at the heart of covenanted uniformity. Its argument began with a “free epistle” to the “friends of pretended liberty of conscience,” and its rhetoric was couched in appeal to the “thousands of godly people” who had been “carried away” by the new sects.[37] “I have been long silent,” Rutherford confessed, but the spectacular growth of the sects was compelling him to take action.[38] The preface read like a rehearsal for the arguments he was later to develop. The sects’ views of the responsibilities of civil government loomed large in his attack, as he encouraged the state to exercise coercion in silencing their voice: “We conceive the godly Magistrate does not persecute the Saints, if he draws the sword against adulteries, murtherers, rapts, robberies, even in saints . . . now spiritual whoredome, perverting of the right wayes of the Lord, socinianism, professed and taught to others, even in Saints, to us is worse and more deserves the sword then adulteries.”[39] Invoking and appropriating the theonomic preferences of the Independents in the New World, Rutherford argued that “all the godly thinke of Antitoleration as a truth of God.”[40] But his warnings would be of no effect. By 1649 the project of the Westminster Assembly—and the prospects of an English Presbyterian establishment—had visibly failed. In 1649 Rutherford wrote of his being

stricken with amazement exceedingly, when we reape no other fruit of our expence of blood, wastation of our Kingdome, attendance on this Assembly four years, but in stead of the nearest uniformity of the Churches of God in the three Kingdomes, in Religion, Confession of faith, form of Church government, Directory for worship and catechisms, a far more capacious and wide deformity in all these than there was before our taking of the Covenant, yea or since Christian Religion came first into this Island.[41]

Presbyterianism had made little headway outside London, and, with the rising power of Cromwell’s army, its political influence had been eclipsed. As political influence passed from the Independents to the sects, Rutherford was witnessing the failure of his scheme.

By the late 1640s, throughout much of England, the progress of the civil wars had propelled the sects into political ascendancy. Rutherford noted subtle changes in the balance of Parliamentary power, and complained that the cause of the pro-toleration party was being strengthened because “the Parliament, the sword, the Army is on their side.”[42] The Assembly’s Independents, represented by the Apologetical Narration, had proposed a limited form of toleration, and had actively discouraged the fragmentation of the London puritan underground while the Assembly’s business continued. The run of victories of the New Model Army, and the sectarian complexion of its troops, meant that their influence was eclipsed as the radicals gained power. With its untrained preaching captains, the army proved to be a fertile breeding ground for the spread of unusual ideas. As the army continued to nourish the radicals, Independent leaders rapidly found themselves more conservative than the constituency whose military prowess they depended upon to continue in power. As the influence of the Independents waned, the army grandees moved into their political ascendancy; the safety of those radical sects whom the army sponsored seemed assured, while the political power of those advocating only limited toleration was finally eclipsed. English Presbyterian ministers looked on with alarm: “God hath blasted their Congregational way, with Sects, Schisms, Separations, and Subseparations, to their shame, our grief, and the woful disturbance of the whole Kingdom.”[43]

Rutherford was not intimidated by the new power of the sects. As the army grandees pushed for wider toleration, Rutherford attacked their political proposals and demanded that the rule of law—which, Lex Rex (1644) had earlier argued, should control the power of monarchy—should now control the equally tyrannical power of the militia:[44] “If the Army now on foot in England will against the Laws of God and man protect blasphemers and false teachers, and save them from the hand of Justice, and will reward, countenance, and promote Seducers of soules, our humble opinion is, that they render themselves obnoxious to the sword of the Magistrate.”[45] But the magistrates’ power had been eclipsed, and Scottish hopes of English Presbyterian hegemony—or any English puritan uniformity at its most basic—were dramatically undercut. “The Christian world is a shambles,” Rutherford lamented.[46]

But if 1649 spelled the end of a national Presbyterian church of England, it found Rutherford at the height of his power in Scotland.[47] The Commission of the General Assembly was pursuing extensive social policies whose theological basis would be theorized by Rutherford later that summer. The Commission shared Rutherford’s commitment to the universal suppression of unorthodox opinion and behavior: “We have searched after the minde of Christ, and have traced the footsteps of the prophets and apostles in the Old and New Testament, and no where can we finde in the Scriptures of Truth either precept or precedent allowed of God for tolleration of any errour.”[48] The Commission’s statements argued by analogy. If, as was commonly agreed, “no libertie is to be allowed unto men in the breaches of the duties of the second Table which we owe unto our neighbours,” can there be any reason, they asked, “why it should not also be thus in regard of the duties of the first Table which we owe unto God?”[49]

But their argument also weaved the precedents of Scripture. Abraham and Jacob were among those who took responsibility for ensuring the external orthodoxy of the family groupings under their authority (Gen 18:19; 35:2), and Paul had advocated the restriction of church office to those who kept their houses “in subjection” (1 Tim 3:5, 12). Similarly, as in the public sphere, the rulers of the church were commanded to maintain its purity (2 Chr 23:19; Gal 2:5; Titus 3:10), and the rulers of the state to maintain the nation’s obligations to God. The Commission cited Deut 17; Deut 22; and Lev 24:10 among their OT proofs; but, sensing that part of their audience would be convinced only by arguments drawn from or relating to the NT age, they listed Zech 13:2; Gal 5:12; and Rom 13:4 as textual proofs which proved that the civil magistrate was responsible “not only to suppresse and punish iniquity and inrighteousnesse, but also ungodlinesse and errour, and that he beareth his sword in relation to both.”[50] In the administrative center of the Scottish church, Rutherford found sanction for his view of the state’s obligations to the law of God.

III. Rutherford’s Response In Free Disputation

The Commission’s opinions did not merely sanction the basic direction of Rutherford’s thought; their statements read like a first draft outlining the detailed arguments he would provide in A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649). With an English audience very much in view, Rutherford’s book was published in London and addressed the arguments of the sects and parties whose radical theologies and often antinomian excesses had so scandalized the Scots by seeming to make a “whirly-gigge” of faith and a “weathercock” of conscience.[51] Rutherford’s argument attempted to appropriate the language of liberty of conscience by radically redefining its meaning. A Free Disputation sets up a series of discourses in which the competing definitions of liberty, heresy, persecution, truth, godliness, and authority are discussed in detail.

As the title suggests, Rutherford’s concern was to define true liberty of conscience; but if the contents of the book are anything to go by, his interest was in defining what it was not, rather than in clearly stating what he believed it to be. His liberty of conscience was not a freedom to believe or practice whatever the individual’s conscience identified as true doctrine or proper behavior. The individual’s conscience could not be sacrosanct; it could not be unchallenged. Rutherford lamented the “cruell meeknesse, and bloody gentlenesse” of those who pretend to bear with those with “tender consciences under a colour of paying the debt of bastard love.”[52] This kind of toleration confused the boundaries of license and liberty, and, by elevating conscience above any objective standard, was not far from outright blasphemy.[53] Rutherford’s argument therefore begins with a discussion of the role of conscience and the limitations of its authority.

1. Conscience And Authority

An individual’s conscience should not merely “lie beside him as the wretches Gold, which for many yeares seeth neither sunne nor winde; but it is a Conscience walking in the streets, and in action.”[54] It should be active, Rutherford argued, but it should not always be trusted. Because conscience can be mistaken for fancy, novelty, or heresy, it must be informed: “the more of knowledge, the more of conscience, as the more of fire, the more heat.”[55] Despite its unreliability, Rutherford argued that the conscience is “something of God, a domestick little God, a keeper sent from heaven.”[56] While it should always be respected, conscience always stands under the Word.

The presuppositions of this argument seem antithetical to the assumption of many puritans that all knowledge was provisional. Throughout the 1640s the concept of progressive revelation had gained credibility within puritan circles. Popularized by millennialist writers, the concept of progressive revelation taught that knowledge (including the proper understanding of Scripture) would be increased as history neared its completion. Thus, Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) argued for toleration in publishing because each new pamphlet could offer a new glimpse into the purposes of God as history neared its consummation. Similarly, the first chairman of the Westminster Assembly, William Twisse, explained Dan 12:4 as evidencing that “the opening of the world by Navigation and Commerce, and the increase of knowledge, should meet both in one time, or age.”[57] In his Free Disputation, Rutherford identified this idea as one of the foundational presuppositions of the pro-toleration party, and set about challenging its popularity. Rutherford made ironic the position of the Independents and the sects by voicing their belief that “you must believe it today to be a truth of God, tomorrow to be a lye, the third day a truth, the fourth day a lye, and so a circle till your doomsday come, so as you must ever believe and learne, never come to a settlement and establishing in the truth; but dye trying, dye doubting, dye with a trepedation and a reserve, and dye and live like a Scepticke.”[58]

2. Authority And Scripture

This kind of epistemological uncertainty could only be tenable, Rutherford believed, if its adherents adopted a radically low view of the clarity of Scripture: “It argues the word of God, of obscurity and darknesse, as not being able to instruct us in all truths, and renders it as a nose of wax in all non-fundamentals, histories, narrations, &c.”[59] Rutherford replied to this argument by evidencing his claim that what is subjective must be replaced by what is objective.[60] Thus Rutherford argued that Scripture was sufficiently clear, though not so self-explanatory as to do away with the need for preaching.[61] Nor, for the same reason, was it so clear that the Bible alone could be adopted as a confession of faith. While “libertines” argued that confessions of faith should be composed only in Scripture language, to avoid error and simultaneously to avoid the divisions caused by interpretation, Rutherford passionately defended the theological project of the Westminster Confession of Faith: “Seeing the word of God gives us but one faith, and one truth, and one Gospel, if interpretations be left free to every man, these Libertines give us millions of faiths with millions of senses, and no faith at all.”[62] To deny that the Bible alone was a sufficient confession of faith was not to admit that the Bible was fallible; instead, Rutherford set about defining its infallibility.

The infallibility of Scripture was certainly up for debate in 1649. Two years before, in 1647, London Presbyterian laypeople had noted that “the Doctrine of the Gospell is, now adayes, not onely more endangered through the increase of Popery and Arminianisme, but of most blasphemous Antiscripturismes.”[63] In 1648 the London ministers had listed a number of the heresies thought to undermine the traditional authority of Scripture. Citing references from recently published work by Lawrence Clarkson and John Goodwin, they listed as typical heresies the ideas that “the Scripture, whether true Manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English, is but Humane; so not able to discover a Divine God . . . no writing whatsoever whether Translation or Originalls, are the foundation of Christian Religion.”[64] With the collapse of censorship, and the new liberties suddenly offered to the sectarian underground, the previous decade had unleashed a spate of radical approaches to Bible interpretation. As radical spirits pointed increasingly to apparent errors in the Bible as evidence for their adherence to the spirit over the letter, conservatives like Rutherford found themselves having to defend the revelation that had been described by the Westminster Confession as “being immediately inspired by God, . . . kept pure in all ages . . . therefore authentical” (WCF 1.8). A Free Disputation anticipated the objections of those who could point to errors in the received text of Scripture, but Rutherford refused to admit that the authority of Scripture depended on an extant text free from any irregularity: “The old and new Testament in the way they come to us may be fallible, because Printers are not prophets but may miscarry and dreame; but it followeth not they are not the infallible word of life in themselves, when the Spirit witnesseth to us that God, divinitie, transforming glory are in these books.”[65] The authority of Scripture is not suspended if errors are discovered in the text:

Now in the carrying of the doctrine of the Prophets and Apostles to our knowledge, through Printers, translators, grammer, pens, and tongues of men from so many ages, all which are fallible, we are to look to an unerring and undeclinable providence, conveying the Testament of Christ, which in itself is infallible and begs no truth, no authoritie either from the Church as Papists dreame, or from Grammer, Characters, Printer, or translator, all these being adventitious, and yesterday accidents to the nature of the Word of God.[66]

Noting that the Bible’s statements on its own authority refer to documents that had already been translated and transmitted, Rutherford situates biblical authority within the texts received by the church. Noting that Jesus appealed to the texts received by the Jews, he argues that Christ

supposed the written Scriptures which came through the hands of fallible Printers and Translatours, and were copies at the second, if not at the twentieth hand from the first copy of Moses and the Prophets, and so were written by sinfull men, who might have miswritten and corrupted the Scripture, yet to be a judge and a rule of faith . . . actually preserved by a divine hand from errours, mistakes and corruptions.[67]

Rutherford expands on the notion of error: “though there be errours of number, genealogies, &c., of writing in the Scripture, as written or printed, yet we hold providence watcheth so over it, that in the body of articles of faith, and necessary truths, we are certaine with the certainty of faith, it is that same very word of God.”[68] But Rutherford is also at pains to demonstrate that the authority of Scripture should not only be ascribed to its actual contents. He appeals to Christ’s interaction with the Sadducees—who denied the OT’s implication of resurrection (Matt 22:23)—to argue that the authority of Scripture should also be given to logical consequences derived from the data of Scripture.[69] The doctrine of the resurrection was not formally treated in OT Scripture, but it too was a part of the Word of God as defined by Jesus Christ. Thus, because the Bible’s infallibility extends beyond its explicit statements, and because it invites rather than provides interpretation, the Bible alone is insufficient as a confession of faith.[70] Because of the complexities of canon, authority, and interpretation, the Westminster project had not, after all, been in vain.

In fact, Rutherford claimed, the Westminster project had demonstrated one of the most useful ways in which the Spirit expounded the Word—through lawfully constituted synods. Idealizing Presbyterian church government as an objective hermeneutical control, he aligned the system of church government defended by the Scots with the proper articulation and defense of biblical truths. The fallible church can determine infallible points, he argued.[71] A properly constituted synod can decree a secondary rule of faith, just as it did in Nehemiah’s time, when the covenant of renewal was binding “in so farre as it agreed with the Law of Moses,” and as it did in Acts 15, when “the decrees of the Synod was not formally Scripture, yet to bee observed as a secondary rule.”[72] This synodical authority is possible only because the seat of authority in the church does not lie in the congregation, as the Independents argued, but in the elders, as the Presbyterians preferred; and because synodical decisions, properly made, are not merely the sum of the individual judgments of delegates in attendance, but are “the decision of the Holy Ghost speaking in the word and declared by the Church in a ministerial way.”[73]

With the Westminster project thus defended, and its documents cited as God-authorized statements of truth, Rutherford was in a position to further his argument that all knowledge was not provisional. If, as the NT states, believers are to identify heretics and pass sanctions upon them, it follows that heresy can be known.[74] Paul, Rutherford notes, states that heresy is a mark of the flesh; heretics “drinke the blood of soules.”[75] But how is heresy to be defined? Some Independents defined a heretic as an individual who knew that what he believed was wrong. Others, like John Milton, assumed that a man who held accurate opinions merely because he was told they were correct could be “a heretick in the truth . . . if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie.”[76] Rutherford challenged these subjective definitions by proposing an objective standard to the definition of heresy; he claimed that a heretic was such because of the error of his beliefs.[77]

3. Authority In The State

Having argued the case for an objective standard of truth and error—and having implied that the composition of the Westminster Assembly’s publications was being divinely guided—Rutherford outlined the implications of his arguments for the three kingdoms united by the Solemn League and Covenant. He noted the necessity of a commonly agreed-on standard by which the state ought to be governed, and expounded his theory in the context of the “two kingdoms” doctrine.[78] This complex of ideas, a truism in early modern Reformed thought, taught that God had instituted two parallel structures of authority through which godly societies might be organized. The idea had a general reference, though the application of the “two kingdoms” theory was technically limited to Christian states; heathen governments had a different standard for judgment, not the law of God revealed in Scripture, but the law of God revealed in natural theology.[79] Nevertheless, all magistrates were required to rule in accordance with the light that they had received, and within the sphere in which they had been placed.

This “two kingdoms” theory denied that the authority of church and state should in any way overlap, but it demanded that the law of God was the ultimate definition of morality for both. Rutherford defended his theory against those who argued that theonomic government—government controlled by God’s law—intruded into the responsibilities of the church, or that the civil magistrate’s punishing of false worship confused the sanctions of the church. Godly princes should not hesitate to punish false worship, “for example sacrificing of a childe to God, for feare he domineere over the conscience of a Christian, and so transgresse his sphere.”[80] Instead, Rutherford taught that the godly prince ought to take full responsibility for ensuring that the laws of the realm correspond as closely as possible to the laws of God, as taught by the church.[81] This godly rule theory argued that “every duty of the Christian Magistrate, hath warrant in the Old or New Testament, which exactly teacheth the duty of Ruler and subject.”[82] Kings “should have the booke of the law with him on the throne, to be his rule, Deut. 17.18. Josh. 1.8.”[83] Among the texts that were most frequently cited to prove this assertion was Isaiah’s description of kings being “nursing fathers” to the church, rulers who devote all of their temporal power for the advancement of the kingdom of God (Isa 49:23). Much of its exegetical power was derived from Rom 13:3-4, where Paul stated:

Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

Not only did the civil magistrate have a duty to promote and reward the doers of good, it was also his duty to punish those who refused, and for this, Reformed tradition argued, the Bible was his guide: “the word of God is as perfect in teaching for what sinnes the Ruler should not punish, as for what he should punish.”[84]

Rutherford was clear, however, that his view of the theonomic magistrate did not imply that conversion was to be replaced by coercion as the means of entry into the visible church. “The question is not whether Religion can be inforced upon men by the Magistrate by the dint and violence of the sword,” he claimed. “Religion cannot be compelled.”[85] Thus “Christians ought not with force of sword, compell Jews, nor Jews or Pagans compell Christians to be of their Religion, because Religion is not begotten in any, by perswasion of the minde, nor by forcing of the man.”[86] The power of the sword has not been given to the magistrate to positively compel toward external worship, but negatively, he claimed, to punish acts of false worship.[87] The puritan revolution could not be exported.

Nor did his view of godly rule propose a system of “thought police.” Ruther-ford’s proposed theonomy required only external obedience.[88] Laudian courts could condemn individuals on the basis of what they privately believed, but the Westminster divines anticipated condemning individuals only when they took their private unorthodoxy into the public arena.[89] They were not proposing to punish heresy as it was believed, but heresy as it was expounded. Thus “the magistrate or his sword hath nothing to do with . . . internal acts of the mind, of understanding, knowing, judging or believing, but only with the external acts of speaking, teaching, publishing dangerous and pernicious doctrines to the hurt and destruction of the souls of others.”[90] Private conscience, in this sense, was still free.

Thus Scripture clearly indicated the boundaries of theonomic rule. It still defined crimes and still provided for crime’s proper penalty. Rutherford was especially interested in those capital crimes specified in the OT. He was prepared to admit that a stricter severity existed in the dispensation of the law, but argued that this was only the case for ceremonial laws; moral transgressions are every bit as destructive now as they were then, and should meet the same kinds of punishment.[91] The penalty for blasphemy was clearly death, since that remained an aspect of the “law of nature.”[92] Patricide and sodomy also remained as capital crimes.[93] But Rutherford was prepared to moderate other specified punishments: “Though it be true, some moral transgressions Moses punished with death, as Sabbath-breaking, it followeth not therefore the godly Prince may now punish it with death, but it followes not therefore, such transgressions are made free, through Christ of all bodily punishment.”[94] Similarly, though entire cities were put to the sword in the OT, “we may not do the like in the like degree of punishment . . . yet that some punishment by the sword, be inflicted upon a City, is of perpetual obligation.”[95]

The explanation of OT penalties had particular resonance among the covenanted kingdoms. While England and Scotland had a long history of posturing as “elect nations,” their newly acquired covenanted status seemed to make existing parallels with Israel all the more obvious.[96] Rutherford denied that the three kingdoms in covenant were equivalent to OT Israel—the analogy could go too far.[97] But the analogy could also not go far enough. The Covenant had propelled the three kingdoms into a unique position before God, and the advent of toleration could entirely undercut that status. Toleration was a breaking of the Covenant;[98] it was preventing the union of Scotland and England,[99] butitwas also a harbinger of judgment to come.[100] No toleration was possible between competing ecclesiastical structures.[101]

It is this sense of impending crisis that gives A Free Disputation its focus. Written after the failure of the Westminster Assembly became evident, and outlining a system of legal reform that highlighted the links between Israel and the covenanted kingdoms, Rutherford discovered an unparalleled opportunity to shape the future of Scotland. Working in the Kirk’s Commission, Rutherford’s colleagues attempted to fashion in Scotland the kind of godly rule the English sects had frustrated in England. In 1649 they appointed John Smith to draw up a table of the “forbidden and unlawfull degrees of consanguinity and affinitie for marriage.” The Scottish Parliament had thought such a definition necessary in order for it to pass an act “for punishing of incest with death, according to the law of God.”[102] But this effort at wider reform was debilitated by the invasion of Cromwell’s soldiers.

The Westminster Assembly had been convened with high hopes of national and international reformation, and yet the events of 1649 and 1650 were being drawn towards a tragic conclusion to the dreams of national church unity. The series of publications that the Assembly produced addressed themselves to the shape of the nation state in covenant with God. But the project failed as the unity of the puritan political elite crumbled and the sects fragmented. “Have we . . . put down Tyrannie and set up Anarchie?” the Scottish Commission inquired.[103] But it was the unwillingness of their church to tolerate any group outside a national Presbyterian hegemony that dissolved the high aspirations of this effort at cross-border cooperation.[104]

IV. Conclusion

This reading of Rutherford’s Free Disputation, set in the context of its times, challenges any idea that the modern, politically passive Presbyterian mainstream can be identified either with the theology of the Westminster Confession or that of its most influential divines.[105] Rutherford’s commitment to shaping an entirely Presbyterian world, where public deviations from orthodox faith or practice should be met with the most severe of legal consequences, is a world away from the political complacency of modern evangelicalism and the self-justifying myth it sponsors of the pluralistic benevolence of the Scottish Covenanting movement. Rutherford did believe in “liberty of conscience,” but, as the Confession argued, this was a liberty that provided no license to sin (WCF 20.3-4).[106] It is certainly true that we cannot simply read the Confession as a summary statement retaining the unqualified approval of all those who participated in its negotiation. The final text of the Confession was “a consensus statement, broad enough to be agreed with by Divines who held somewhat different views of the contemporary applications of the Mosaic judicial laws.”[107] Rutherford seems to stand at one extreme of the Assembly’s range of opinions, arguing, with the apparent approval of the Commission of the Kirk’s General Assembly, that the OT judicial laws ought indeed to be the basis of the Presbyterian state for which they were working. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that Rutherford’s theonomic opinions were shared by many puritans who could not have endorsed his narrow ecclesiastical ambitions. Even those who favored a broader toleration of those orthodox Calvinists outside the Presbyterian system looked to the OT judicial laws as their program of action. Cromwell’s Rump Parliament established the death penalty for incest, adultery, and blasphemy.[108] John Owen was prepared to argue that some of the judicial laws were “everlastingly binding.”[109] The Fifth Monarchist radicals were famous exponents of a Hebraic legal renaissance. However we understand the text and context of the Westminster Confession, therefore, we must recognize that the Confession is not committed to the separation of church and state in any modern understanding of that idea. The doctrine of the “two kingdoms,” where church and state operated independently but with mutual reliance on the law of God, did not at all favor a religiously neutral state. Thus the Confession charged the state with the highest of responsibilities: “The Civil Magistrate . . . hath Authority, and it is his duty, to take order, that Unity and Peace be preserved in the Church, that the Truth of God be kept pure, and intire; 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” (WCF 23.3).

But all was not well in the citadel of Presbyterian Scotland. By the early 1650s, with Cromwellian forces in power, the Kirk was faced with the prospect of the imposition of toleration on Scotland’s soil.[110] They did not easily give in. Written in Leith on 31 January 1651, “A News-Letter from Scotland” addressed an English Cromwellian audience to report that Rutherford, Warriston, and other “rigid Presbyterian Gentlemen” who called themselves the “Godly partie” wanted to

bring all kinde of Government into their owne handes in ordine ad spiritualia, to vilifie the proceedings of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, and scandalize the practice of the officers of the Army in their most religious performances, and to perswade both to lett them have a liberty to tyrannize both over the bodies and soules of the poore people under pretence of giving them liberty of conscience, which cannot stand with the principles of any who are lovers of true freedome either to their outward or inward man.[111]

“True freedom” had again been redefined; but this would be the definition that would loom large in the imaginations of future generations of Presbyterians, and the definition that future generations of denominational historians would employ to refute any notion that the Westminster settlement, to which the newsletter referred, imagined anything but unqualified freedom of conscience.

In 1651 Rutherford was again moving towards the margins, leaving behind the heady influence he had exercised in the 1640s. The political situation of the three kingdoms was also changing. “Wo is me for England!” he expostulated in a letter of that year. “That pleasant land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness; that pleasant land shall be a wilderness, and the dust of their land pitch.”[112] His allusion was to Jer 12:10: “Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.” It was a subtle reference to the theologians whose works had shattered the Westminster settlement. As the Scottish church polarized and the English army turned towards its invasion of Scotland, Samuel Rutherford could only imagine what other dangers could come from pretended liberty of conscience.

Notes

1. John Warr, The Corruption and Deficiency of the Laws of England (1649), quoted in Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 67; John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (ed. D. M. Wolfe; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–), 2:224. On early modern theories of toleration and persecution see, most recently, John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 41-77.
2. Samuel Rutherford, A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London: Andrew Crook, 1649), 202; The Records of the Commissions of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland Holden in Edinburgh in the years 1648 and 1649 (ed. Alexander F. Mitchell and James Christie; Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1896), 172.
3. For a consideration of the eschatology of Scottish Presbyterians in the mid-seventeenth century, see S. A. Burrell, “The Apocalyptic Vision of the Early Covenanters,” Scottish Historical Review 43 (1964): 1-24; and Crawford Gribben, “The Church of Scotland and the English Apocalyptic Imagination, 1630-1650,” Scottish Historical Review 88 (2009): 34-56.
4. Records of the Commissions, 174.
5. Ibid., 174-75.
6. For the theological context of the political theory of Scottish Presbyterians, see William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969); Richard Flinn, “Samuel Rutherford and Puritan Political Theory,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction 5 (1978-1979): 49-74; Sinclair B. Ferguson, “An Assembly of Theonomists? The Teaching of the Westminster Divines on the Law of God,” in Theonomy: A Reformed Critique (ed. William S. Barker and W. Robert Godfrey; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 315-49; John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146-87; David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590-1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 244-84; John R. Young, “The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament, 1639-1651: The Rule of the Godly and the ‘Second Scottish Reformation,”‘ in Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (ed. Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben; St Andrews Studies in Reformation History; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 131-58; and Scott Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650-1660 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), 39-71.
7. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 15. The copy of Free Disputation in the George Thomason Collection, British Library, bears the date 6 August 1649.
8. Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 403. For a discussion of Rutherford and posterity, see Martin A. Foulner, “Goat Hunting with Samuel Rutherford: A Response to ‘Liberty of Conscience: A Problem for Theonomy’ by Harold G. Cunningham,” Christianity & Society 8 (1998): 14.
9. William M. Hetherington, History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (3d ed.; Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1856), 355-56.
10. Ibid., 357.
11. R. Buick Knox, “A Scottish Chapter in the History of Toleration,” SJT 41 (1988): 51.
12. Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550-1682 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 99-119.
13. Samuel Rutherford, A Peaceable and Temperate Plea for Paul’s Presbytery in Scotland (London, 1642), 308.
14. A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant (London, 1647), 4.
15. See, for examples, Ann Hughes, “‘Popular’ Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s: The Cases of Thomas Edwards and Thomas Hall,” in England’s Long Reformation, 1500-1800 (ed. Nicholas Tyacke; London: University College London Press, 1998), 235-59; Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104-23; Sammy Basu, “‘We are in strange hands, and things are come to a strange passe’: Argument and Rhetoric Against Heresy in Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646),” in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration (ed. John Christian Laursen; New York: Palgrave, 2002), 11-32; and Ann Hughes, “Gangraena” and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
16. A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1647), 22.
17. A Testimony of the Ministers in the County of Stafford to the Trueth of Jesus Christ, and to the Solemn League and Covenant (1648), 5.
18. The Gloucester-Shire Ministers Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemn League and Covenant (1648), 5.
19. The Harmonious Consent of the Ministers of the Province within the County Palatine of Lancaster (1648), 5.
20. Ferguson, “An Assembly of Theonomists?,” 318.
21. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:1495 (4.20.9).
22. David F. Wright, “‘The Commoun Buke of the Kirke’: The Bible in the Scottish Reformation,” in The Bible in Scottish Life and Literature (ed. David F. Wright, John Gibson, and Ian Campbell; Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1988), 155-56.
23. Peter Hall, ed., Harmony of the Protestant Confessions (London: John F. Shaw, 1842), 473; Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 95-99.
24. For the English tradition, see Ernest F. Kevan, The Grace of Law: A Study in Puritan Theology (London: Carey, 1964).
25. Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (ed. A. F. Mitchell and J. Struthers; Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1874), 185; Foulner, “Goat Hunting with Samuel Rutherford,” 15.
26. Minutes of the Sessions, 211; Foulner, “Goat Hunting with Samuel Rutherford,”15.
27. Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the “Grand Debate” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 518.
28. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 70-71.
29. Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist (London, 1648), sig. A2v.
30. See Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 127.
31. S. W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society of America and the Presbyterian Historical Society of England, 1943), 103.
32. Thomas Edwards, Gangræna (3 vols.; London, 1646), 1:1.
33. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 254.
34. Rutherford, Peaceable and Temperate Plea (1642), 325.
35. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 77.
36. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 54.
37. Rutherford, A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist (1648), sig. A2r.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., preface (n.p.).
40. Ibid., preface (n.p.).
41. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 266.
42. Ibid., 144.
43. A Testimony of the Ministers in the County of Stafford, 6.
44. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 195.
45. Ibid., 206.
46. Ibid., 383.
47. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 55.
48. Records of the Commissions, 156.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 157.
51. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 77, 263.
52. Ibid., sig. A4v.
53. Ibid., 20, 24.
54. Ibid., 1.
55. Ibid., 5.
56. Ibid., 9.
57. Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation (London, 1643), sig. A3r.
58. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 79.
59. Ibid., 83.
60. Ibid., 120.
61. Ibid., 29.
62. Ibid., 28.
63. An Apologeticall Declaration of the Conscientious Presbyterians of the Province of London (1648), 4.
64. A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1648), 5; John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in 17th-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 144-45.
65. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 35.
66. Ibid., 363.
67. Ibid., 365-66.
68. Ibid., 366.
69. Ibid., 60.
70. Ibid., 31.
71. Ibid., 24.
72. Ibid., 25.
73. Ibid., 27-28.
74. Ibid., 105.
75. Ibid., 101.
76. John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644), 26.
77. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 115, 122.
78. Alan R. MacDonald, “Ecclesiastical Representation in Parliament in Post-Reformation Scotland: The Two Kingdoms Theory in Practice,” JEH 50 (1999): 38-61.
79. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 222.
80. Ibid., 128.
81. Ibid., 48.
82. Ibid., 145.
83. Ibid., 225.
84. Ibid., 145.
85. Ibid., 50.
86. Ibid., 51.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 296.
89. Foulner, “Goat Hunting with Samuel Rutherford,” 16.
90. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 62.
91. Ibid., 189.
92. Ibid., 183.
93. Ibid., 295.
94. Ibid., 190.
95. Ibid., 298.
96. Crawford Gribben, “‘Passionate desires, and confident hopes’: Puritan Millenarianism and Anglo-Scottish Union, 1560-1644,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 4 (2002): 241-58.
97. Rutherford, Free Disputation, 387.
98. Ibid., 251, 253.
99. Ibid., 275.
100. Ibid., 279.
101. Ibid., 99.
102. Records of the Commissions, 178.
103. Ibid., 163.
104. Foulner, “Goat Hunting with Samuel Rutherford,” 14.
105. Ibid., 16.
106. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 34.
107. Ferguson, “An Assembly of Theonomists?,” 320.
108. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 167-68.
109. The Works of John Owen (ed. W. H. Goold; 24 vols.; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1855), 8:394.
110. Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland, 50-54.
111. “A News-Letter from Scotland,” in Scotland and the Commonwealth: Letters and Papers (ed. C. H. Firth; Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1895), 33.
112. Letters of Samuel Rutherford (ed. Andrew Bonar; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1984), 660.