ABSTRACT
David Pareus (1548–1622) began teaching at the University of Heidelberg, the foremost Reformed university in Europe before the Thirty Years’ War, from the 1580s to the 1610s. In his commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, first published in 1608 and based on his lectures on the New Testament at Heidelberg, Pareus advanced a classic Reformed resistance theory. We excerpt from that commentary here. Pareus held that inferior magistrates (such as imperial electors) had been charged by God to defend the well-being of subjects no less than superior magistrates (such as emperors); therefore, inferior magistrates might wage war against superior but tyrannous magistrates, including the Catholic emperor. Moreover, God did not forbid even private individuals from resisting tyranny in extreme circumstances. Finally Christian princes were obliged to resist the tyranny of the pope by force, because the Book of Revelation had instructed them to do this. Pareus’s openness to resistance against the Catholic emperor, and to divinely commanded war, should be seen as part of the political atmosphere in the Palatinate before the outbreak of war in 1618. In other parts of Europe these arguments could seem extreme and unwelcome: it was because of Pareus’s argument that inferior magistrates might be duty-bound to resist superior magistrates in some situations that his book was burned in London, Oxford, and Cambridge in 1622.
