ABSTRACT
Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) taught at the academies at Herborn, Siegen, and Gyulafehérvár (now Alba Iulia) in Transylvania from the 1600s to the 1630s. Alsted had once been a student of David Pareus’s at Heidelberg, and Alsted’s preaching at Herborn also served to raise religious tensions in the Palatinate before 1618. We excerpt from Alsted’s Theologia casuum, printed at Hanau in 1630. Alsted’s views on the relationship between faith and force were complex, ambivalent, and perhaps inconsistent. On the basis of Deuteronomy 12–13, Alsted believed that a prince might declare war on blasphemers, or because of apostasy, and he thought that pagans might be compelled to listen to the Gospel. Nevertheless, like his Jesuit contemporaries, Alsted did not think that non-Christians could be directly compelled to accept Christianity, nor that non-Christians should be expelled from the territory of Christian princes. But while he thought that pagans might be compelled by Christian princes to obey natural law, he also denied that idolatry by itself was grounds for just war.
