ABSTRACT
Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666) had been a student of Voetius’s at Utrecht and taught both there and at the University of Leiden in the 1640s and 1650s. Hoornbeeck’s writings on war, printed in his Theologiae practicae (Utrecht, 1689) after his death demonstrate considerable engagement with the scholasticism of Catholic Europe, and especially with Jesuit views on the evangelization of the non-Catholic world. Hoornbeeck’s account of the rights and wrongs of warfare provides a useful example of just war theory as practiced by Reformed theologians at the end of the seventeenth century. He deplored war in general, and recommended resort to it only as a last resort. He carefully separated the divinely commanded wars of the Old Testament from wars fought in modern Europe, but also drew on Old Testament example to advocate moderation in waging war; in this his approach was similar to that of John Calvin. He borrowed what seemed to him to be useful in the Catholic scholastic tradition, in this case Francisco de Vitoria’s condemnation of wars fought to advance religion. Hoornbeeck took Christian pacificism very seriously, reaching back to the Fathers of the Church and Erasmus of Rotterdam to treat the subject in the round. And finally, in a distinctively Reformed manner, Hoornbeeck analysed the duties established in Scripture that were to be fulfilled by those who hoped to be victorious in war.
