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

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塞缪尔·卢瑟福 (Samuel Rutherford) 的 Lex, Rex (1644) 中的天主教政治思想和加尔文主义教会学

本文对苏格兰（和英国）政治思想中的一个重要文本——塞缪尔·卢瑟福的莱克斯，雷克斯，通过分析其与天主教经院哲学的关系。虽然学者们已经观察到卢瑟福对天主教作家的使用，但对于卢瑟福如何战略性地将这种思想传统应用于英国内战的宗教和政治背景，并没有持续的分析。萨拉曼卡学院的天主教学者提出的关于人类自由、国际法和人民主权的思想使卢瑟福能够捍卫有限的君主制，并在 17 世纪的英国实现教会目的。他和与他同时代的大多数圣约人都相信神法长老会：圣经规定长老和主教，而不是主教，应该统治教会。为了确保长老会的解决，卢瑟福需要反驳保皇党专制主义者，他们声称长老会通过限制皇室对教会的至高无上而威胁到绝对君主制（神授的公民政府形式）。通过建立在天主教经院政治思想的基础上，卢瑟福能够论证人类可以改变公民政府的形式，并且绝对君主制不是上帝所要求的。具有讽刺意味的是，为了使长老会的公民国家安全，卢瑟福求助于天主教经院，而不是他自己的忏悔传统。