In this paper, I argue that John Calvin's problematic grant of magisterial authority to enforce proper religious worship contradicts much of his own political theology and in fact depends upon an ambiguity in his natural law theory. I demonstrate this ambiguity by examining the differing claims in the Institutes regarding which of the tables of the Decalogue are accessible through natural law reasoning. I also consider the significance of this ambiguity for Calvin's political theology. I then suggest a partial retrieval of Calvin's political theology which is both more compelling to many contemporary Christians and in a better alignment with much of Calvin's own political theory.

Amanda Perreau-Saussine de Ezcurra saw positive law as a resource for uncovering natural law. She also saw our natural inclinations, especially our natural sociability and our natural tendency toward benevolence, as crucial to a proper understanding of natural law. Drawing on these two foundational ideas of hers, this article will look at the Decalogue, the pre-eminent example of divine positive law, and then our concrete experience of desire, as revelatory of what she called ‘a law-like ordering of the world prior to human thought and action, a natural ordering that constrains practical reasoning’. To her characteristic concerns, it will add attention to God's silence.

This essay examines and compares the treatment of the Decalogue in the theological ethics of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It argues that while both theologians orient their exposition of the Decalogue by attending to its primary character as divine self-revelation, approach it with a view to a Christian ethics of divine command, and frame their understandings in decisively christological terms, they differ markedly on the extent to which the commandments themselves can and ought to be understood as representing concrete divine commands.