New presbyter meets old priests: Conciliarism and conscience in Samuel Rutherford’s Free Disputation

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1649 Samuel Rutherford, the leading theorist of the Covenanter revolution, published his Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience. The situation of this celebrated anti-tolerationist argument, which famously roused the ire of Milton, in the political and ecclesiological strife of mid-seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland is well known, and has been frequently discussed in scholarship. The focus of this paper is rather on Rutherford’s connection to a broader intellectual tradition, namely the vibrant Conciliarist movement of the late medieval and early modern period. It argues that Rutherford drew on Conciliarist thought in order to articulate an account of individual rights and consent within an over-arching framework of unity and uniformity. In doing so he was able to develop a nuanced understanding of conscience and the right of resistance, while always maintaining its subordination to the law of God. The paper also compares Rutherford’s covenantal vision of politics with Locke’s contractual understanding as a way of beginning to recontextualise early modern debates concerning tolerance, its character and its scope.