Hugo Grotius’ Protestant Positive Law

This article reconsiders the novelty of Hugo Grotius by shifting attention from his idea of natural law to his reformulation of the idea of divine positive law. Modern scholarship has often questioned the novelty of Grotius’ natural law, emphasizing instead his dependence on earlier traditions, chiefly Catholic scholasticism. Against this view, the article argues that Grotius’ distinctive and influential interventions lay not in natural law as such but in his reconceptualization of divine positive law and its systematic separation from natural law. The term divine positive law first gained currency among Catholic theologians and was then employed specifically in defence of the sacerdotal authority of the Church. At the hand of Grotius, however, it was identified as the entirety of divine commands in Scripture, including the Decalogue and the Gospel. Through this transition, natural law became detached from Scripture, and its obligation unprecedently minimal and permissive. Situating these innovations within the developments of Remonstrant theology and Hebraic scholarship in the Protestant Dutch Republic, this article shows how Grotius’ idea of divine positive law gave rise to a new study of natural law as well as debates on the interpretation of the Old Testament and on the nature of Christian obligation.