The doctrine of the atonement is the church’s work of exploring the meaning and significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the triune God’s chosen way of reconciling all creation to himself. This chapter unearths some of the key doctrinal commitments essential to providing a sufficiently expansive account of Jesus’s work – one equipped to do justice to the range of causes leading to, and effects flowing from, the death and resurrection of Jesus as described in Scripture and the history of doctrine. As such, it is a work of faith seeking understanding, in which we use the range of tools available to us (biblical, historical, theological …) to understand a reality greater than but utterly consequential to ourselves.

Pufendorf was a political humanist, that is, an intellectual who engaged with political and religious thought through an erudite philological and analytical scrutiny of classical and modern texts in these fields. Born into a Saxon Lutheran clerical household in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he had first-hand experience of religious and political conflict during his childhood. His mastery of Latinate humanistic erudition was formed through his rhetorical education at the Grimma grammar school and then through his studies in history, philology and politics at the University of Leipzig. Pufendorf used his humanistic erudition as a key resource in his fundamental reconstruction of the discipline of natural law in his Law of Nature and Nations of 1672. In this work he sought to provide a model of political authority suited to governing divided religious communities, in part to defend the Protestant religion against the threat of political Catholicism, but primarily to achieve peaceful co-existence among different religions under the umbrella of a secular sovereign state. His work as an historian and political adviser to the Swedish and Brandenburg courts reflects the engaged nature of his humanistic learning.

Pufendorf is mainly remembered as a natural law philosopher but he was also an influential historian and a public intellectual. Apart from an early phase where his historical interests followed a conventional antiquarian course he focused on recent or contemporary history as evidenced by his popular and much translated, adapted and imitated European History (1680), his acerbic pamphlet History of Popedom (1679), and the monumental ex officio treatments of recent history of Sweden and Brandenburg: History of Gustavus Adolphus and Christina (1686), History of Charles Gustavus (1696) and History of Frederick William (1695). Pufendorf's historical works are informed by a clear and simple vision of states as unified agents acting within a framework of real (moderate) and imaginary (unrealistic), permanent (geopolitical) and temporary (contingent) interests. He combined this vision, informed by his natural law theory, with an abiding interest in diplomacy and decision making and a corresponding disregard for the concrete political players and the action on the battlefield. As royal Swedish and later electoral Brandenburg historiographer he had privileged access to archival sources. He used this to bolster his authority but also to present a firmly streamlined and occasionally biased account in harmony with his religious and political loyalties.

The chapter analyses Pufendorf’s comprehensive account of the civil condition that arises through the institution of new civil personae that replace those of the natural condition and are governed by sui generis principles and values. The basic principles for civic life are laid down through discussions of civil law (denying Hobbes’s identification of it with natural law), punishment, social value (“esteem”), and public power over property, all of which are treated in terms of the transition from the natural to the civil condition and founded in civic purposes, not in nature. This transition is not considered as a transfer of natural morality into the civil sphere, but rather in terms of the requirements of a civil order grounded in civil sovereignty and the civil state as an imposed status or condition. The same argument applies to “the right of war which accompanies a natural state <but> is taken away from individuals in a state”. Once the right of war is considered a matter for the sovereign alone, it must be part of Pufendorf’s account of civil society, an arrangement that underlines his insistence that there is no law of nations distinct from natural law, as discussed in ch. 10.

In line with the meaning of the Greek word from which it is derived, eschatology deals with eschata: the last things. Yet because this way of speaking can easily suggest a future that is indefinitely distant (and thus less than pressing), the import of the doctrine is arguably better conveyed by the traditional Latin phrase de novissimis: literally, the newest things – the definitive revelation of God’s lordship as something that has drawn near and is already breaking in upon the world. Such language appropriately echoes Jesus Christ’s own proclamation that God’s kingdom is “at hand” (Matt. 4:17 and pars.). For although the kingdom is not included among the four “last things” – death, judgment, heaven, and hell – that are the traditional topics of eschatological treatises, the hope of the kingdom does summarize their collective content: the end of the present order of creation and the inauguration of a new order of redemption, in which God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10 and par.). Moreover, because for Christians the realization of this promise is defined by Jesus’s return in glory, the Christian hope for the kingdom is identical with hope for Jesus, who for this reason is rightly called (in the words of Origen of Alexandria) the autobasileia – God’s kingdom in person. The life of the kingdom is just the communion of creation with the Creator that has been made possible by God’s assuming a creature’s life in Jesus of Nazareth. It follows, as Karl Barth famously declared, that, “if Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relation whatever with Christ.”1

For Pufendorf, pacts are the means by which humanity creates the institutions that separate them from the state of nature, in keeping with the natural law command to cultivate society. By pacting people impose new obligations on themselves in addition to those that exist by the law of nature, creating strict rights and duties that enable peace and social cooperation. Analyzing explicit, tacit and implicit pacts Pufendorf considers what counts as signs expressing intention. Language is the original social institution that is logically prior to the agreements about other adventitious states. The language pact curtails the natural liberty to use the faculty of speech as one pleases and gives others the right to require that signs are used in accordance with the communicative duty. There is an analogy with the creation of property, which, similarly, is not a natural quality of things but a moral entity imposed by to overcome conflicting claims upon a world that is naturally common. The last section of the chapter deals with foundations of the price or value of things, the introduction of money, and the interpretation of pacts.

Christian doctrine focuses upon God and the way in which God grants not just life but also meaning to all other things. To turn to the doctrine of God, therefore, is to consider both a particular item of concern (namely, God or theos) and a specific way of considering all things (a theological view of all reality). Here we must remember that Christian theology should have both a contemplative and an active element. Contemplative reason considers God for his own sake, seeking to know and to intelligently perceive God as fully and faithfully as possible. This one is worthy of praise and honor and, no less, of our intellectual efforts. Active reason also looks to God, now not simply as a discrete object of study but as the horizon of all studies, casting light on our study of topics ranging from nature itself to human being in particular.

The chapter presents the two late religio-political works of Pufendorf in his role as lay theologian Pufendorf, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (1687), and The Divine Feudal Law; or, Covenants with Mankind (1695). Both tracts consider the changes in religion and politics since the revocation of the tolerance edict of Nantes in 1685 and the acceptance of Huguenots in Protestant Brandenburg-Prussia. Pufendorf’s defence of Protestant positions and severe criticism of French expansionism and Papal supremacy are explained with reference to the respective political and ecclesial theological contexts that had developed since around 1600 (1). Pufendorf’s first tract argues for political toleration of more than one Christian confession and public worship in the state. This is possible because political sovereignty, based on natural law, and religious autonomy, based on the purely religious ends of churches, can and should coexist (2). The biblical reasoning behind this is intensified in the second tract, which argues for mutual appreciation and reconciliation of the Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) confessions. Here Pufendorf integrates his concept of natural law into a new, strictly biblical covenantal theology correlating God’s promises and men’s free obedience (3).

“In the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those under the Law, that we might receive adoption as children.” So the Apostle Paul teaches his community in Galatia (Gal 4.4–5). Christology, in all its height and breadth, is caught up in these few brief rounded phrases. The Apostle joins together a particular notion of time – that is, gathers to a fullness, pleroma – with a Divine action, to send or send out. This sending comprises elements of the life of Jesus Christ, His existence as a mortal, a child of Eve, and as a Jew, one born under the Law. The Apostle gathers this whole complex into a single purpose: to redeem creatures from the structure of the cosmos, the stoicheai, and to adopt us as children, both Jew and gentile, as Divine heirs. Other crystalline verses from Holy Scripture – the Prologue to the Gospel of John; the Carmen Christi or Christ hymn, as it is often styled, in Philippians 2; or the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary or from angelic hosts to shepherds, keeping night watch – have been taken by theologians, early and modern, as touchstones for Christology. These must find their way into any full examination of the structure and telos of this doctrine. But Galatians 4 remains the keystone.

The name of Pufendorf is often associated with the phrase that appeared in his 1667 tract about the Holy Roman Empire: it was, he observed, ‘monstro simile’ (like a monster). To many generations of scholars from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the phrase seemed appropriate since they viewed the Holy Roman Empire as an anachronism that was doomed for centuries before it expired in 1806. Yet Pufendorf himself denied that he wished to condemn the empire but rather claimed he wanted to improve it and to create a better understanding of it; indeed, he removed the phrase from the second edition of his text. This chapter examines Pufendorf’s writing about the empire in the context of the political situation of his time and considers his work as a constructive and positive contribution to a wide-ranging debate. This explains why his 1667 tract was regarded so highly in the eighteenth century as one of the best short guides to the nature and politics of the empire, which scholars have only recently begun to appreciate once more.

This chapter discusses the polemical works that Pufendorf wrote in response to the violent criticisms directed against his main natural law work, the Law of Nature and Nations. Pufendorf collected these controversial writings under the title Eris Scandica (Scandinavian dispute) in 1686. Despite being indispensable for the reconstruction of Pufendorf’s thought, and notwithstanding its great success among his contemporaries, this work is one of the least known and used works by scholars of natural law. In beginning to make good this deficit the present chapter offers insights not only into the philosophical arguments of our author, but also into his formidable satirical style, at once strongly contentious and imaginative. Much of the ferocity of the disputes is explained by the fact that Pufendorf’s enemies were actually accusing him of heresy, which helps to clarify the centrality of the work’s philosophical-theological themes and the violence of Pufendorf’s reaction. In presenting the variety of philosophical issues covered in Eris Scandica, the chapter covers not only the classic themes of natural law—state of nature, moral entities, obligation—but also elucidates Pufendorf’s views of the relation between philosophical reason and Christian philosophy, thence philosophy and theology, and his stance towards Cartesianism.

To describe the Bible as “Holy Scripture” is to identify it as set apart by a holy God for the purpose of generating and governing a “holy nation,” a description applied first to Israel (Exod. 19:6) and later to the church (1 Pet. 2:9). The word of God and the people of God exist in a symbiotic relationship, though there is some dispute over which has priority: Does the word of God proceed from the people of God or vice versa? Either way, a doctrine of Scripture must have recourse to more than history or sociology, for its main task is to say how both the word of God (the Bible) and the people of God (the Church) are of God. The present essay reflects theologically on the nature, attributes, purpose, and interpretation of the Christian Bible, examining each of these aspects in relation to God and God’s acts. Viewed theologically, Scripture is a human constituent in the communicative activity of the triune God: the voice, word, and breath that speaks forth the light, life, and love of God himself.

In its most basic sense, “Reformed catholicity” involves approaching Reformed theology, in its historic and contemporary forms, as one who belongs to the larger Christian tradition, the “holy, catholic church” confessed by the Apostles’ Creed. While this approach operates from within the Reformed theological tradition, it does so with an attentive ear to the catholic Christian voices from all eras; for those who embrace Reformed catholicity do not approach the Reformed tradition as an end in itself but rather as a way to fruitfully inhabit the larger catholic tradition. In its recent instantiation as a contemporary “sensibility,” “Reformed catholicity” generally means combining a theocentric focus upon theology as knowledge of the Triune God and creation in relation to God. It also involves a commitment to recovering the core catholic trinitarian and christological convictions that provide a framework for a theological journey of faith seeking understanding. Within this context, the task of biblical exegesis is embraced as fundamental to the renewal of a modern theological imagination. These catholic and Reformed convictions can help frame a way for the reception of the Word by the Spirit that moves God’s people away from self-serving and truncated ends and toward the fullness of maturity in Christ in life, worship, and witness.

Pufendorf’s reception and impact are not without paradox. Together with Grotius his name became a byword for natural law in his lifetime and has remained so. He was the key figure in the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic subject with wide-ranging extra-academic effect. Yet, his views were so widely and deeply contested from their publication that their original meaning and function mostly were lost sight of. Consequently, he has been subjected to a range of teleological interpretations that have persisted into contemporary scholarship, the most prominent being to see him as a proto-Enlightenment theorist of sociability and stadial history. His broad basis in erudite humanist scholarship was lost sight of, his ideas on constitutional law, ecclesiology and theology, and historiography being parcelled up along disciplinary lines. The effect was a narrowing of his legacy and with it the discipline of natural law in both moral philosophy and jurisprudence. This was despite his main commentator, Barbeyrac, himself being one of the last humanist scholars in natural law. The chapter discusses a range of the contestations about Pufendorf, including the remarkable contribution of Samuel Cocceji.

‘What is the human being’, the Psalmist asks God, ‘that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you attend to him’? (Ps. 8:5, LXX) How, indeed, can we define what it is to be human? Reviewing the diverse ways in which human beings have thought of themselves across the centuries, Charles Taylor concludes: ‘I suspect that no satisfactory general formula can be found to characterize the ubiquitous underlying nature of a self-interpreting animal.’1 Given that we exist in time and, individually and collectively, grow in time, to find a universal definition would perhaps be as impossible as trying to step twice into Heraclitus’s river. And yet, that the human being is indeed something particular, worthy of God’s mindfulness and attention is presupposed by the Psalmist.