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Subsections
Man’s Original State
Reformed Natural Law vs. Aquinas
Contra Medieval Theology
Reformed vs. Aquinas
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Order of Contents
Book 1
Quote 1
Historical 1
In Romanism 1
Latin 1
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Book
1500’s
Prime, John – A Fruitful & Brief Discourse in Two Books: the One of Nature, the Other of Grace, with Convenient Answer to the Enemies of Grace, upon Incident Occasions Offered by the Late Rhemish Notes in their New Translation of the New Testament, & Others (London, 1583)
Prime (c.1549-1596) was a reformed Anglican clergyman and Oxford scholar.
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Quote
1600’s
Samuel Rutherford
Lex Rex... (1644; Edinburgh: Ogle, 1843), p. 30
“It is true that people, through corruption of nature, are averse to submit to governors ‘for conscience sake, as unto the Lord,’ because the natural man, remaining in the state of nature, can do nothing that is truly good, but it is false that men have no active moral power to submit to superiors, but only a passive capacity to be governed.
He [John Maxwell] quite contradicts himself; for he said before (ch. 4, p. 49) that there is an ‘innate fear and reverence in the hearts of all men naturally, even in heathens, toward their sovereign;’ yea, as we have a natural moral active power to love our parents and superiors (though it be not evangelically, or legally in God’s court, good) and so to obey their commandments, only we are averse to penal laws of superiors. But this proves no way that we have only by nature a passive capacity to government; for heathens have, by instinct of nature, both made laws morally good, submitted to them, and set kings and judges over them, which clearly proves that men have an active power of government by nature.
Yea, what difference makes the Prelate betwixt men and beasts? for beasts have a capacity to be governed, even lions and tigers; but here is the matter, if men have any natural power of government, the Popish Prelate would have it, with his brethren the Jesuits and Arminians, to be not natural, but done by the help of universal grace; for so do they confound nature and grace. But it is certain our power to submit to rulers and kings, as to rectors, and guides, and fathers, is natural;”
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Historical
On the Post-Reformation
Book
Seung Joo Lee, The Orders of Nature & Grace: Thomistic Concepts in the Moral Thought of Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) Ph.D. diss. (Vrije Universiteit, 2021)
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On Nature & Grace in Romanism
Article
1600’s
Pascal, Blaise – Letter 1 in Pensees – The Provincial Letters in The Modern Library (d. 1662; NY: Modern Library, 1941), pp. 325-35
Pascal, a Romanist, relates a humorous, though sad and sick account of Parisian Jesuit Molinists who conspired with Dominicans (Thomists), through sophistry (through affirming the same term ‘proximate’, yet in different senses, while refusing to acknowledge or expalin the difference), to condemn a (Romanist) Jansenist theologian (who would not affirm the term ‘proximate’ without it being explained to him) over a doctrinal/philosophical point relating to the ability of man to keep God’s commandments proximately, though the end shows all were agreed that man could not keep the commandments without the merciful efficacious will of God.
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Latin Articles
Voet, Gisbert – Select Theological Disputations (1669), vol. 5
On Subsequent Grace, pt. 1 716
. pt. 2 726
. pt. 3 733
. pt. 4 741
. pt. 5 749-63
See espeically the first paragraph of pt. 1 for a definition of grace as distinguished from nature. Subsequent Grace was a category used by Romanism in distinction from prevenient grace.
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