28 August 1645 A.D. Hugo Grotius Dies—Arminianism, Calvinism, Government & 30-Years War

28 August 1645 A.D.  Hugo Grotius Dies—Arminianism, Calvinism, Government & 30-Years War

Graves, Dan. “Hugo Grotius.” Christianity.com. Apr 2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/hugo-grotius-11630111.html.  Accessed 19 May 2014.

Some men are not able to judge the value of their own work. Hugo Grotius was one such. On his deathbed he lamented the worthlessness of all he had done. He died on this day, August 28, 1645, convinced he was a failure.

Born Huig de Groot, he had latinized his name. He proved to be a precocious lad. At ten he won accolades for his Latin. When eleven he was called "a second Erasmus." At 14 he completely revised Martianus Capella's encyclopedia, having read all the ancient authorities for himself. He followed this with translations of Simon Stevin and Aratus. At 15 he held public disputations and was made attaché to the great John van Barneveld on a crucial peace mission. By 17 he had argued his first legal case and at 22 had written a book (not published) which embodied his legal ideas in embryonic form.

Grotius' first venture into international law was his book Mare Liberum. As its title implies, it argued for freedom of the seas. He took his stand firmly on the rights of man. Grotius' work as a whole is notable for its tendency to escape pedantry. Although he cited massive sources, he also exhibited a great deal of originality and common sense. Mare Liberum was no exception.

The Netherlands entered a period of severe theological disputation. Arminians and Calvinists were at odds. The States General issued an Edict of Pacification to cool tempers on both sides. This failed. Barneveld, Grotius and others saw Prince Maurice of Orange becoming a dictator. They supported the States General in negotiating a twelve year truce with Spain. This infuriated Maurice. When Barneveld and Grotius suggested a peace formula, he had Barneveld executed and Grotius imprisoned for life.

With the help of his faithful wife, Grotius escaped. He was lionized in other European countries. In exile he wrote his most famous book: The Law of War and Peace.

This book was badly needed. Christian Europe was in a tragic flux. Wars of great cruelty ravaged the land. No mercy was shown anyone except by a few enlightened leaders such as Adolphus Gustavus (who admired Grotius' work). To break oath with "heretical" enemies was the norm.

Although a Christian, Grotius relied far less on Biblical arguments than was common for the time. Instead, he showed from Christian and heathen history how the best men of all ages had been merciful and kept faith in international affairs. Three years after his death the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 embodied many of the principles set forth by Grotius. Two hundred years later his work was recognized as the basis of international law. Grotius' greatest efforts were aimed at establishing peace between Christians, but he also wrote an apologetic, Truth of Christianity.

Bibliography:

1.      Copleston, Frederick Charles. A History of Philosophy. London: Burns, Oates, & Washbourne, 1951.

2.      Edwards, Paul, editor. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York, Macmillan, 1967.

3.      Morris, Clarence. Great Legal Philosophers; selected readings in jurisprudence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1981, 1959.

4.      Runes, Dagobert D. A Treasury of Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1945; p.445.

5.      White, Andrew Dickson. Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason. New York: The Century Co., 1919, 1910.

6.      Vreeland, Hamilton. Hugo Grotius; the father of the modern science of international law. New York: Oxford University, 1917. Source of the image.

7.      Various Encyclopedia and internet articles.

Last updated April, 2007.

28 August 1645 A.D. Hugo Grotius Dies—Arminianism, Calvinism, Law, Government & 30-Years War

28 August 1645 A.D.  Hugo Grotius Dies—Arminianism, Calvinism, Law, Government & 30-Years War

Onuma, Yasuki.  “Hugo Grotius.”  Encyclopedia Britannica. 20 Aug 2013. http://www.britannica.com/bps/user-profile/5583/yasuaki-onuma.  Accessed 19 May 2014.

Hugo Grotius, Dutch Huigh de Groot   (born April 10, 1583, Delft, Netherlands—died August 28, 1645, Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin), Dutch jurist and scholar whose masterpiece De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) is considered one of the greatest contributions to the development of international law. Also a statesman and diplomat, Grotius has been called the “father of international law.”

Early life

Grotius’s father, a learned man, had been burgomaster of Delft and curator of the recently founded Leiden University (courses then would be similar to high-school classes today). An extremely gifted child, Hugo Grotius wrote Latin elegies at age 8 and became a student of the arts faculty at Leiden University at age 11. He studied under the renowned humanist Joseph Scaliger, who contributed greatly to Grotius’s development as a philologist.

In 1598 he accompanied Johann van Oldenbarnevelt, the leading Dutch statesman, to France, where he met Henry IV, who called Grotius the “miracle of Holland.” This experience is reflected in Pontifex Romanus (1598), which comprises six monologues on the current political situation. In 1599 he settled in The Hague as an advocate, lodging for a time with the court preacher and theologian Johannes Uyttenbogaert.

In 1601 the States of Holland requested from Grotius an account of the United Provinces’ revolt against Spain. The resulting work, covering the period from 1559 to 1609, was written in the manner of the Roman historian Tacitus. Although it was largely finished by 1612, it was published only posthumously in 1657 as Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis (“Annals and Histories of the Revolts of the Low Countries”).

Throughout his life Grotius wrote in a variety of fields. He edited, with commentary, an encyclopaedic work on the seven liberal arts by the North African poet Martianus Capella and the Phaenomena by the Greek astronomer Aratus of Soli. He wrote a number of philological works and a drama, Adamus Exul (1601; Adam in Exile), which was greatly admired by the English poet John Milton. Grotius also published many theological and politico-theological works, including De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627; The Truth of the Christian Religion), the book that in his lifetime probably enjoyed the highest popularity among his works.

Involvement in politics

Grotius was deeply involved in Dutch politics. In the early 17th century the united kingdom of Spain and Portugal claimed a monopoly on trade with the East Indies. In 1604, after a Dutch admiral had seized the Portuguese vessel Santa Catarina, the Dutch East India Company asked Grotius to produce a work legally defending the action on the ground that, by claiming a monopoly on the right of trade, Spain-Portugal had deprived the Dutch of their natural trading rights. The work, De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty), remained unpublished during his lifetime, except for one chapter—in which Grotius defends free access to the ocean for all nations—which appeared under the famous title Mare Liberum (The Freedom of the Seas) in 1609. The work buttressed the Dutch position in the negotiations regarding the Twelve Years’ Truce concluded that year with Spain and was widely circulated and often reprinted.

In 1607 Grotius was appointed advocaat-fiscaal (attorney general) of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and West Friesland. In the following year he married Maria van Reigersberch, the daughter of the burgomaster of Veere, an intelligent and courageous woman who stood by him unwaveringly in the difficult years to come. A member of the Remonstrants (primarily upper-class “regents” siding with Jacobus Arminius’s tolerant Protestantism), Grotius was engaged in the bitter political struggle under Oldenbarnevelt against the Gomarists (orthodox Calvinists led by Franciscus Gomarus who were dominant among the ministers and the populace), who were under the leadership of Prince Maurice, for control of the country.

In 1618 Maurice, using his military powers in a coup d’état, ordered the arrest of Arminian leaders. Oldenbarnevelt was executed for high treason, and Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of Loevestein. In 1621, with the aid of his wife, Grotius made a dramatic escape from the castle by hiding in a chest of books. He fled to Antwerp and finally to Paris, where he stayed until 1631 under the patronage of Louis XIII.

Life in exile: De Jure Belli ac Pacis

While in Paris, Grotius published his legal masterpiece, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, in 1625. In writing this work, which made full use of De Jure Praedae, he was strongly influenced by the bitter, violent political struggles both in his own country and in Europe more broadly, particularly the Thirty Years’ War, which had broken out in 1618. In one famous passage of De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Grotius wrote that,

 [f]ully convinced…that there is a common law among nations, which is valid alike for war and in war, I have had many and weighty reasons for undertaking to write upon this subject. Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous nations should be ashamed of. (Prolegomena, 28.)

Grotius sought to achieve his practical objective to minimize bloodshed in wars by constructing a general theory of law (jurisprudentia) that would restrain and regulate war between various independent powers, including states.

Following Roman law and the work of the Stoics, Grotius placed natural law at the centre of his jurisprudentia. He argued that a law deduced from man’s inherent nature would have a degree of validity

even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him. (Prolegomena, 11.)

He made this daring argument because he believed that natural law—the most important tool to restrain and regulate wars in Europe—must be independent of religion, applying to all people regardless of their religious beliefs. He realized, however, that the goal of restraining and regulating war could not be achieved by secular law alone. He thus reintroduced various elements of Christianity into his jurisprudentia. Grotius has often been quoted to “secularize” law or natural law, but the so-called secularization of law was hypothetical rather than categorical. In order to understand this critical character of law in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, one must understand the entire structure of his argumentation.

Grotius adopts a multilayered structure of norms, including various religious ones, to restrain and regulate both the resort to war and violence in warfare. When Grotius found it difficult to persuade various kinds of rulers to refrain from resorting to war or committing cruel acts during the war by means of secular norms either by natural law or law of nations, he did not hesitate to resort to “law of God,” mainly taken from the Old Testament, or “law of love” and other similar norms taken from the New Testament. He even relied on the argument based on utility as a last resort when he found it difficult to discourage political leaders to refrain from violence by means of normative argument alone, though he wrote that consideration of utility was not his concern. This multilayered character of the argumentation was the vital means to achieve his practical goal: minimizing bloodshed.

Grotius believed that only wars with just causes should be allowed. Because there is no judge for judicial settlement between nations, war as a means to solve conflicts must be tolerated. However, causes of war should be limited to causes for litigation. For example, the defense and restitution of things are just causes of war (see also just war). He also developed a theory of crime and punishment, which he used to characterize certain wars as just punishment for crimes committed by independent powers, including states.

Later life

Prince Maurice died in 1625, and in 1631 Grotius returned to Holland. After intense debate in the States of Holland, Grotius was again threatened with arrest. In 1632 he went to Hamburg, then the centre of Franco-Swedish diplomatic relations. In 1634 the Swedish chancellor, Axel, Count Oxenstierna, offered him the position of Swedish ambassador in Paris. Grotius accepted the appointment and Swedish citizenship. He settled again in Paris, but his life as a diplomat was not as successful as his life as a scholar.

In 1636–37 he worked on the Historia Gotthorum, Vandalorum et Langobardorum (“History of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards”). He showed great interest in the reunification of the Christian church and published a number of works dealing with this subject. He also revised, again and again, De Jure Belli ac Pacis; the last edition including his own revision was published in 1646, shortly after his death. On the other hand, Grotius was not appointed to be a negotiator at the important peace conferences of Münster and Osnabrück that finally resulted in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War. In 1644 Grotius was relieved of his post of ambassador in Paris. After consultations with Queen Christina, he left Stockholm for Lübeck on Aug. 12, 1645, but was shipwrecked on the coast of eastern Pomerania. The great man, great not only in the history of international law but also in natural law, civil law, criminal law, and modern humanities, soon died of exhaustion at Rostock.

Assessment

Grotius designed his theory to apply not only to states but also to rulers and subjects of law in general. De Jure Belli ac Pacis thus proved useful in the later development of theories of both private and criminal law. It is in the area of international law, however, that Grotius’s masterpiece has been most influential. Its general normative framework provided a foundation to constitute and regulate relations between emerging sovereign states, which became the basic units of modern international society.

(Guardian): Chinese Calvinism Flourishes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/may/27/china-calvin-christianity

Chinese Calvinism flourishes

 

The churches that follow Calvin are the third largest Christian grouping in the world. In China they hope to become the religion of the elite.

 

John Calvin was a Frenchman, but he is being remembered in Geneva this week because it was here that he built Calvinism. Invited to reform the city in 1541, almost as what would now be called a management consultant, he formed an alliance with the city fathers. Over the next 20 years of preaching and pastoring they turned this tiny city, with a population then of only 10,000, into a model of church government and theology which has changed the world.

His followers now form the third-largest Christian grouping in the world. The world alliance of reformed churches claims 75 million members, and while this is a lower headline figure than the Anglican Communion's 80 million, it is not inflated by 25 million nominal Anglicans in Britain.


Although Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America, it is experiencing an extraordinary success in China. I spent some time on Monday talking to the Rev May Tan, from Singapore, where the overseas Chinese community has close links with mainland China. The story she told of the spread of Calvinist religion as an elite religion in China was quite extraordinary. There may be some parallels with the growth of Calvinism in South Korea, where the biggest presbyterian churches in the world are to be found, but it's absolutely unlike the pattern in Africa and Latin America. There, the fastest growing forms of Christianity are pentecostal, and they are spreading among the poor.

But in China neither of those things are to be true.

Calvinists despise pentecostalists. They shudder at unbridled emotion. If they are slain in the spirit, it is with a single, decorous thump: there's to be no rolling afterwards. And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation. Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

All of this is happening outside the control of the official body which is supposed to monitor and supervise the churches in China. Instead, it is the philosophy departments at the universities, or the language departments and the departments of literature and western civilisation that are the channel.

"The [officially recognised] churches are not happy with universities, because it is not within their control. And their seminaries are not at the intellectual level of the universities," says Dr Tan. "Chinese Christianity using Chinese to do Christian thinking has become a very interesting movement."

Many of the missionaries who tried to bring Christianity to China before the communists took over where presbyterians, and other sorts of Calvinist. But that does not explain why Calvinism should be the preferred theology of the house churches and the intellectuals now. Dr Tan suggests that this is because it is Protestant: that is to say it can be made much more convincingly native than Roman Catholicism, since presbyterian congregations choose their own pastors. This is, I suspect, enormously important at a time when China is recovering from a century and a half of being the victim of western powers; the pope's insistence on appointing Catholic bishops is unacceptable to the government and perhaps to the people too.

If she goes to preach at an official church, she says, "There will be perhaps 1000 people and 95% of them are over 65. So it's a sunset church. But if I went to house church – there would be 1000 people; perhaps 20 of them in their 50s, and all the rest are youngsters. The older ones will all be professors at the universities. So these are the future of the churches. They have registered pastors, and no access to seminaries: But they have youth, and future, and money."

Calvinism isn't a religion of subservience to any government. The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors: the Dutch against the Spanish, the Scots against the English; the Americans against the British. So when the Chinese house churches first emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution in the 80s and 90s "They began to search what theology will support and inform [them]. They read Luther and said, 'not him'. So they read Calvin, and they said 'him, because he has a theology of resistance.' Luther can't teach them or inform them how to deal with a government that is opposition."

And, though the communists stigmatised Christianity as a foreign religion, they also and still more thoroughly smashed up the traditional religions of China: "The communist, socialist critique of traditional religion, and of Confucianism has been effective", she says: "The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity."

The most conservative estimates of the new converts to Christianity is 500,000; there is a new church built every month. Calvinist Christianity has a culture of phenomenal industry. Calvin himself, in his time in Geneva, preached every day and twice on Sundays: shorthand writers at the foot of his pulpit took down 108 volumes of his sermons, though most of these have been lost and his reputation rests on the books and pamphlets that he wrote himself. In China now, this kind of Christianity is seen as forward-looking, rational, intellectually serious, and favourable to making money.


"Very soon", said Dr Tan, "Christians will become the majority of university students … that could happen."

It would be astonishing if China were to become a great power in the Christian world, as well as in the economic one. But things just as strange have happened in the past. Who could have foreseen, when Augustine was writing those huge books now translated into Chinese, that barbarous Europe would become the centre of Christian civilisation, and his homeland in North Africa would become entirely Muslim?

Dr. Richard Muller: "Calvin and the Reformed Tradition"

http://heidelblog.net/2012/11/its-here-muller-on-calvin-and-the-reformed-tradition/

It’s Here: Muller on Calvin and the Reformed Tradition

This is going to be fun. Anyone who is interested in the history of Reformed theology, in finding out what the classical Reformed authors (of which Calvin was one) actually said, must get to grips with the work of Richard Muller. By the way, before I continue, by “get to grips” I don’t mean, “copy the footnote data from WorldCat into a footnote or bibliography and go on to write as if Muller hadn’t written.” It’s remarkable how often one sees this. No, by “get to grips” I mean that one must actually get the book, open it, read it, and take account of the claims made and the evidence presented. Here’s his big argument in this volume.

…the essays in the book pose the argument that developing Reformed approaches to the work of Christ and the order of salvation do not fit easily into a set of standard and sadly current caricatures and misrepresentations both of Calvin and of later Reformed thought on such issues as limited atonement, hypothetical universalism, union with Christ, and the order of salvation. (pages 10–11)

To get to grips with Muller is not always to agree with him. He doesn’t always agree with himself! There is an earlier and a later Muller on certain issues:

There are…several places in the present volume where the differences between my early work in Christ and the Decree and my present understanding of the place of Calvin in the development of Reformed thought and in relation to later orthodoxy are evident—notably in the discussion of Christ’s work and its limitation and the discussion of the practical syllogism. In both instances, I recognize that my earlier analysis allowed more cogency to the neo-orthodox line of argumentation about the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources than was warranted.

What happened? He reports that, 30 years ago, he allowed “aspects of the faulty” 19th- and 20th-century “master narratives” about Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy to “deflect” his attention from the “original contexts and implications of Calvin’s thought and of the thought of various Reformed writers.”

History is telling the truth about the past as best we can. There is truth to tell about the past. To deny that is to fall into skepticism and to reduce history to politics. That’s folly. Nevertheless, no one, not even Muller, gets it right all the time. A good historian necessarily revises. He is always learning, always going back to sources (ad fontes) in their original context, always seeking to overcome anachronism (reading the later back into the earlier), and to clear away the dust of (i.e., to criticize) received narratives in light of further study. In this way Muller is following his teacher David Steinmetz, who likewise was not content to settle on received narratives once he found them to be false.

Agree or not you will always learn from Richard. I’ve been learning from his work since 1993 when my tutor, John Platt, said that Richard’s work had caused him to reconsider his well-received (and still helpful) work in Reformed Thought and Scholasticism: Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology, 1575–1650. He told me to “follow Muller.” Carl Trueman (and I) tried to help communicate some of the new approach to the history of the Reformed and Lutheran traditions in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (1998) but even that volume has been succeeded in certain ways by Willem van Asselt’s marvelous Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism. I’ve replaced Protestant Scholasticism with Van Asselt’s book in our Medieval-Reformation course.


If you teach or write about the history of Reformed theology I hope that you’re accepting Richard’s invitation to reconsider historiographical methods. In a sense his program is less about conclusions, as the preface illustrates, than it is about methods. The study of the history of Reformed theology has been victimized by poor methodology for far too long. Why it persists after 1978 (when Muller began publishing) or after 1998 when the new consensus was summarized, is hard to say. One possibility is that some folk have a good bit at stake in the old story built on poor methods. Barthians were able to set him against the evil, rationalist Reformed orthodox, to make Calvin a proto-Barth and Beza the “bad boy of Reformed theology” (Paul Schaefer’s summary of this argument). Other’s have done the same in the service of their own heroes.

If you’re interested in learning more about Muller’s project and work here’s the Office Hours episode with him and the lectures he gave last year on campus and a fairly complete Muller bibliography.

Here are more posts (and even more) like this one.

Have fun.