Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: Natural Law and the Judicial Laws of Moses (2012)
Early modern Europeans strained to find, in scripture and nature, those especially important laws that rested on a divine foundation, obligated all of Christendom and remained valid eternally. This difficult work involved distinguishing legal provisions that were binding across different societies and time periods from those that were local and transitory. From the late sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century, Protestant natural lawyers and a group of mainly puritan and Presbyterian theologians that I shall term the `Mosaic legalists' devoted sustained attention to the problem. The Mosaic legalists, a minority current within Reformed Protestantism, sifted through Old Testament `judicial' law in order to separate the superseded ordinances particular to the ancient Jewish commonwealth from the eternally valid precepts that bound contemporary Christians. Natural lawyers likewise laboured to separate everlasting from temporary ordinances. Whether one held that God impressed natural law upon the world or that people deduced natural law from divinely installed inclinations towards self-preservation and sociability, one faced the problem of distinguishing immutable natural precepts from rules that arose only to address passing issues in a specific territory. It was no easy matter to extract natural laws and still-valid Old Testament judicial precepts from a wide class of ordinances including superseded judicial precepts, divine positive law, human civil regulations and tenets of the law of nations (ius gentium).
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