Rights in the Law
The Importance of God's Free Choices in the Thought of Francis Turretin
by James E. Bruce
James E. Bruce explores the relationship between morality and God’s free choices in the thought of Francis Turretin (1623-1687). The first book-length treatment of Turretin’s natural law theory, Bruce provides an important theological backdrop to Early Modern moral and political philosophy. Turretin affirms Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the natural law, calling it the common opinion of the Reformed orthodox, but he develops it, too, by introducing a threefold scheme of right (ius)-divine, natural, and positive-to explain how change within the law is possible.
James E. Bruce explores the relationship between morality and God’s free choices in the thought of Francis Turretin (1623-1687). The first book-length treatment of Turretin’s natural law theory, Bruce provides an important theological backdrop to Early Modern moral and political philosophy. Turretin affirms Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the natural law, calling it the common opinion of the Reformed orthodox, but he develops it, too, by introducing a threefold scheme of right (ius)-divine, natural, and positive-to explain how change within the law is possible. So, for example, God can change the specific day for Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday-from positive right-without changing the natural law precept that finite creatures ought to rest. Yet even with respect to the natural law God is still free: God’s free choices determine the natural law insofar as the natural law is constituted by the nature of the things God has chosen to create. God cannot make a murderable man, but he can make a world in which there is no such thing as murder-but only by choosing to create a world that contains no such a thing as man.
- By (author) James E Bruce
Other Titles in this Series
Reprobation: from Augustine to the Synod of Dort
The Historical Development of the Reformed Doctrine of Reprobation
Volume 63
Reformed Evangelicalism and the Search for a Usable Past
The Historiography of Arnold Dallimore, Pastor-Historian
Volume 61
Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres
Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research
Volume 5
Christ and the Old Covenant
Francis Turretin (1623-1687) on Christ's Suretyship under the Old Testament
Volume 51
Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae
Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research
Volume 39
Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize
The Drama of Redemption in John Bunyan's Holy War
Volume 15
Reformed Covenantal Eudaimonism
Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) on Highest Good, Virtue, and Law
Volume 87
Learning to Pray
The Heidelberg Catechism's Teaching on Prayer in its Sixteenth-Century Context
Volume 82
Reforming Good Works in Geneva
Bénédict Pictet’s Doctrine of Good Works and His Place in Late Reformed Orthodoxy
Volume 85
Johannes Cocceius and the Exegetical Roots of Federal Theology
Reformation Developments in the Interpretation of Hebrews 7-10
Volume 7
A Knot Worth Unloosing
The Interpretation of the New Heavens and Earth in Seventeenth-Century England
Volume 53
John Edwards (1637-1716) on Human Free Choice and Divine Necessity
The Debate on the Relation between Divine Necessity and Human Freedom in Late Seventeenth-Century and Early Eighteenth-Century England
Volume 22
The Jews in English Baptist Eschatology
Conversion, Restoration, and National Identity, 1649-1815
Volume 84
Union with God
An Assessment of Deification (Theosis) in the Theologies of Robert Jenson and John Calvin
Volume 69
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