6 - Resisting the Devil

Summary

Resistance, we have seen, was the practical corollary of early modern Protestant thinking on the nature of authority, law, and covenantal accountability. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, Reformed political thinkers and agents assumed the capacity for, and the legitimacy of, certain acts of resistance in response to the violation of covenantal fellowship. In fact, the consociated political body may even be divinely obligated to resist severe instances of unjust rule. For these Protestant figures, this was a modern addendum to the traditional maxim lex iniusta non est lex. The terms of the covenant entailed nothing less. In previous chapters, I focused on the sorts of acts or states of affairs that provide justification for lawful resistance, and the way that failure to render justice to fellow members of the covenant was also considered failure to render justice to God. As we saw in the writings of Johannes Althusius, these social obligations are ordered to various common goods of consociational life that have their origin in God’s covenantal love for his people.