Covenant to constitutionalism: Rule of law as a theological ideal in Reformed Scotland

Far from being a synonym for governmental excess, theocracy, if understood as the rule of God and man's search for a godly political order rather than the rule of clerics, may require a rule of law or constitutionalist political doctrine. The Reformed penchant for subjecting all human activities to the rule of a sovereign God implied limits on the powers of human powerholders in both church and state, which were institutionalized in both ecclesiastical confession and the public law ideal which the Reformed promulgated. Recent study of the role of early modern Reformed theology in shaping modern constitutionalism, federalism, and political compact stresses the importance of the covenant concept in establishing stable constitutional government in Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, and other places under Reformed influence. Study of George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, and James Dalrymple, First Viscount Stair suggests that in Scotland's revolt against royal absolutism---and, by extension, Britain's wider political revolution and the shadows it cast---covenantalism did indeed inform the defense of resistance to royal absolutism and advocacy of law and political compact. However, the Reformed argument for rule of law, political compact, and right of resistance also appealed to a number of other theological doctrines, including divine sovereignty, biblicism, human depravity, justification by faith, and ecclesiastical government by councils. In short, the necessary historic roots of Western constitutionalism lie embedded in the West's theistic culture, and that the "secularization" of constitutionalism obscures these roots.