ABSTRACT
Protestant political thought was built upon the foundations provided by the Reformers’ account of natural law. The early Reformers emphasised the divine origins of natural law, engraved upon the human mind by God himself, and they appealed to natural law to provide the conceptual and theological underpinnings for magistracy, morality, and human social life. Soon, however, this account was challenged by Christians who began to separate more clearly the laws of nature and the laws of God, a position that gained considerable momentum in the seventeenth century. The definition of natural and divine laws, and their relationship to each other, became among the most crucial and contested issues as Protestant political thought developed.
