The Evolution of Erastianism: Hugo Grotius’s Engagement with Thomas Erastus

Abstract

This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy of 1568 to the works of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), a Swiss-Reformed Physician and lay theologian working in the Electoral Palatinate, developed a theory of church-state relations which privileged the magistrate and denied independent disciplinary power to the church consistory. His program served as a counter-ideology to the prevailing disciplining urges of International Calvinism. Such Erastian ideas, whether from Erastus or other Swiss theorists such as Rudolf Gwalther, resonated with Dutch Libertines and Arminians before Grotius wrote his strongly Erastian Ordinum Pietas in 1613. While the Ordinum Pietas reveals only limited dependence on Erastus, other works of Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.