THE RULER BOUND:

Enter David Henreckson's The Immortal Commonwealth: Covenant, Community, and Political Resistance in Early Reformed Thought. Henreckson's book is not the first holistic treatment integrating Reformed (covenant) theology and political thought, though he suggests that it is. Nevertheless, given the paucity of books on Reformed political theology, the honor is not reserved to the first or most recent, but to any book that can help rescue an entire subfield of political science from its own ignorance. Henreckson not only summarizes essential ingredients of Reformed Protestant political theory, he engages and refutes much of what has claimed to marginalize it.

The Character of God

Henreckson prudently focuses on the period between 1574 and 1614. The St. Bartholomew Day Massacre of 1572 launched important political works by Theodore Beza (Calvin's successor in Geneva) and Philippe de Mornay; Johannes Althusius published the final edition of his Politica in 1614, a high water mark for Calvinism before the apocalypse of the Thirty Years War. In situating the project, Henreckson identifies interpretive strains with which he disagrees. Though he loses track of these initial categories and never circles back to refute some of them, he does convincingly show that Reformed theology did not advance a voluntarist theology of a tyrannical, arbitrary, or severe God. Henreckson also demonstrates that Reformed political thought was neither secularist nor overcome by secularism. Theology remained central to its project.

Concerning the charge of a voluntarist God in Reformed theology, Henreckson replies with example after example demonstrating that Reformed theologians were deeply concerned with demonstrating the character of God to be neither capricious nor tyrannical, but rather merciful and obliged by His loving character. After all, God condescends to covenant with sinful persons and makes promises to them. Though Henreckson has relatively little to say about Calvin, he notes that Calvin condemned absolutist depictions of God and laid the blame for them on the scholastics of the Sorbonne.

God's willingness to covenant, and his faithfulness to His covenant, were central to Reformed theology and anthropology. Henreckson's main argument begins by tracing the development of the covenant device--the idea of a salvific agreement made by God with persons--mainly as a theological idea, from Zurich through the Palatinate from 1520 through 1585. He agrees with the more recent scholarship of David Steinmetz or Richard Muller, for example, that the development of covenant theology among the Reformed was not discontinuous with medieval precedents or Protestantism more generally. (Luther used it, for example.) Terms such as pactum, promissio, testamentum, and foedus were used widely in Western discourse concerning both God and politics before the Reformation. And though late medieval voluntarist theologians used these terms, there is no evidence that voluntarist theology influenced Reformed theology.

Henreckson demonstrates how covenant theology relied on both a divinely created order and natural law. This integration of reason and revelation is important to contend against those who insist on separating the two, as well as against those pushing the "secularization" narrative in early modern political thought. Henreckson also marshals many examples to challenge the disciplinarian thesis of Calvinism as social control or state power and instead demonstrates how Reformed theologians emphasized human flourishing (inhibited by expansive civil power) as the telos of moral order. Jerome Zanchi, composed a "Protestant Summa," for example. Both Matthias Martinius and Johann Heinrich Alsted (contemporaries of Althusius) had very high views of politics. Alsted said, for example, "The republic is an example and image of eternal life" an idea that Henreckson calls "a prism of early covenantal thought." Though paralleling the political kingdom and the eschatological kingdom would not encourage liberal toleration (except perhaps as prudence dictated) the parallel did emphasize how God placed a high value on political goods.

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