The Principle
Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) was the most systematic Protestant natural law theorist of the 17th century and one of the most widely read legal philosophers in the history of Western thought. His De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672) and its popular abridgement De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673) were taught in European and American universities for more than a century and shaped the legal education of Blackstone, Locke, and the American founders. Pufendorf's significance for the biblical tradition in law is that he grounded natural law explicitly in the will of God as creator - a Protestant alternative to Aquinas's intellectualist synthesis that kept Scripture central while opening natural law reasoning to Enlightenment rationalism.
Biblical Foundation
Pufendorf's natural law rested on two biblical premises. First, Romans 2:15 - the law written on the heart - established that natural law was universally accessible through conscience, making it the basis for obligations binding on all people regardless of revelation. Second, the imago Dei of Genesis 1:26 grounded human dignity and rational moral agency: because all humans bear God's image, all have equal rational capacity to know natural law and equal dignity deserving of legal protection. Pufendorf cited Exodus 20:1-17 (the Decalogue) not as a positive divine law superseding natural law but as a divine confirmation and clarification of what reason already knows - a Protestant version of the Thomistic synthesis that retained the Decalogue's authority without collapsing natural and revealed law. Genesis 9:6's "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" provided the biblical warrant for human equality before the law, which Pufendorf developed into a systematic theory of natural rights.
Historical Transmission
Pufendorf's influence was extraordinary. His works were translated into French, English, German, Dutch, and Swedish; his De Officio became the standard European introduction to natural law and was used in American colonial colleges from Harvard to William and Mary. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), which became the philosophical manifesto of liberal constitutional government, drew substantially on Pufendorf's framework - particularly his arguments about the state of nature, consent-based government, and natural rights. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) cited Pufendorf alongside Grotius as a foundational authority, transmitting his biblical natural law framework into the common law tradition. The American founders - Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton - all studied Pufendorf, and the Declaration of Independence's claims about self-evident truths and inalienable rights reflect Pufendorf's synthesis of biblical imago Dei theology with natural law philosophy.
Modern Application
Pufendorf's importance for modern law is primarily indirect: he is the crucial link between the medieval scholastic natural law tradition and the Enlightenment liberal tradition that produced modern constitutional government. The rights language of 18th-century constitutionalism - the US Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man - passed through Pufendorf's conceptual framework. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) draws on the same tradition of imago Dei-grounded natural rights that Pufendorf systematised. Contemporary natural law scholars, including John Finnis and Robert George, engage Pufendorf as a critical figure in the tradition they are developing, arguing that his biblical grounding of natural law provides a more coherent foundation than purely secular alternatives.
Scholarly Debate
Scholars debate whether Pufendorf represents a secularisation of natural law or its Protestant deepening. Knud Haakonssen's Natural Law and Moral Philosophy argues that Pufendorf introduced a voluntarist strand - grounding natural law in God's will rather than God's reason - that ultimately weakened the tradition and facilitated the slide toward pure positive law in the 19th century. Stephen Buckle's Natural Law and the Theory of Property presents a more positive assessment of Pufendorf's contribution to property rights theory. For biblical scholars, the most interesting question is whether Pufendorf's use of Scripture was genuinely exegetical or merely decorative - whether he was interpreting Romans 2 and Genesis 1 as a theologian or citing them as a rhetorician. The answer probably lies between these poles: Pufendorf was formed by Lutheran biblical piety and genuinely believed his natural law framework expressed biblical truth, even as he was also responding to the Enlightenment demand for universal rational foundations.