Law is king — not the king, law. That single inversion of the royalist formula is the animating thesis of Lex Rex: The Law and the King, Samuel Rutherford’s 1644 treatise that dismantled the doctrine of absolute monarchy and laid philosophical groundwork still visible in American constitutional thought. The book is a 601-page systematic argument, organized across forty-four questions, that earthly rulers derive authority from God through the consent of the governed, that this authority is bounded by divine and natural law, and that when rulers become tyrants the people retain a lawful right of resistance.
Historical Context
Rutherford published Lex Rex during the English Civil War as a direct refutation of royalist arguments — specifically John Maxwell’s Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas (1644), which defended the absolutist doctrine that monarchs hold divinely ordained power unchecked by any earthly authority. Maxwell’s treatise built on the earlier framework of James I’s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and provided the immediate provocation for Rutherford’s reply. Rutherford, a Westminster Assembly pastor and Scottish Presbyterian commissioner, answered with a rigorous case grounded in Scripture, natural law, and historical precedent that sovereignty resides in the law itself, not in the person of the king. His arguments gave intellectual backbone to Parliamentary forces and contributed directly to the philosophical justification for the trial and execution of Charles I.
The book caused a sensation upon publication. Older royalist treatises were largely set aside as inadequate responses to Rutherford’s reasoning. Following the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Charles II recognized the danger Lex Rex posed: the government condemned it as seditious, ordered it burned by the common hangman, and made possession punishable as an act of enmity against the state. Rutherford himself was summoned to answer charges of treason but died before he could be tried. The book’s suppression only cemented its influence — copies survived, circulated, and were read widely by subsequent generations wrestling with the same questions of authority and liberty. For more on Rutherford’s life and the persecution he endured, see Samuel Rutherford: Life, Persecution, and Scholarly Influence.
Core Arguments
The Source of Royal Power
Rutherford argues that God ordains the institution of government but that the designation of specific rulers proceeds through the people. A king is not made by private divine appointment but by the active consent of the governed community. This makes the ruler a fiduciary — a steward of delegated authority, not a proprietor of absolute power. The people retain a residual sovereignty that never fully transfers to the crown. This argument directly feeds the broader tradition of popular sovereignty and consent of the governed that runs through Reformed political theology and into American founding documents.
Law Above the King
The central proposition — lex rex, “the law is king” — holds that the ruler is bound by the same law he enforces. Law has a divine origin and rational character that no human authority can override. The king who acts outside the law acts not as king but as tyrant. This is not a modern secularist argument; Rutherford grounds it in the conviction that God’s moral law stands above all human institutions, and that civil law rightly ordered reflects that divine standard. The king is under the law of Christ and subject to ecclesiastical discipline through the church’s appointed ministers, whom Rutherford describes as ambassadors of Christ holding “the keys of the kingdom.” This Presbyterian ecclesiology — that even believing princes can be disciplined by the church when they rebel against Christ — places a concrete institutional check on civil authority. For the broader theological framework, see Ecclesiastical Authority and Church-State Relations.
The Right of Defensive Resistance
Perhaps the most consequential section of Lex Rex addresses the lawfulness of defensive wars against tyrannical government. Rutherford systematically works through biblical, historical, and natural-law arguments to conclude that when a king wages war against his own people he forfeits the protections of his office. Subjects are not merely permitted but obligated to resist tyranny as a matter of preserving the divine order that government was instituted to serve. This is not revolution for revolution’s sake — Rutherford is careful to distinguish lawful defensive resistance from anarchic rebellion. The right of resistance is structured, proceeding through lesser magistrates and representative institutions before reaching the general populace. This argument parallels and reinforces Calvin’s doctrine of lesser magistrates and the reasoning found in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. The biblical case study Rutherford repeatedly invokes — David’s defensive flight from Saul — is treated at length in David’s Defensive Actions Against King Saul.
Limits on Civil Government
Rutherford articulates what amounts to a theory of limited government centuries before the American Bill of Rights. Government exists to serve the community’s good; it possesses only those powers delegated to it; it may not exceed its commission without becoming illegitimate. Individual rights — life, liberty, property — are not grants from the crown but natural endowments recognized and protected by rightly ordered law. The intersection of these ideas with constitutional structure is explored further in Limited Government, Constitutional Authority, and Magistrate Accountability.
Influence on American Founding
Lex Rex survived its burning and became one of the intellectual tributaries feeding the American Revolution. Colonial pastors, many of them Presbyterian, drew directly on Rutherford’s framework when arguing that resistance to British overreach was not only lawful but morally required. The logical chain from Rutherford’s forty-four questions to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is traceable: government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed; when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. The Declaration of Independence reads, in many respects, like a compressed application of Rutherford’s principles to a specific political crisis. The broader role of Presbyterian theology in shaping the founding is examined in John Witherspoon and Presbyterian Theological Influence on American Founding and Presbyterian Church and American Revolutionary Resistance to Tyranny.
Relevance to the Prepared Citizen
Lex Rex matters today because the questions it addresses — the source and limits of government authority, the rights retained by the people, the conditions under which resistance becomes a duty — are permanent questions. The armed citizen who carries a weapon and trains to defend life is operating within a tradition that Lex Rex helped articulate. The Sixth Commandment and the Second Amendment argument — that the duty to preserve life entails the right and obligation to possess the means of doing so — sits squarely in Rutherford’s framework. He would have recognized the modern prepared citizen’s commitment to training, readiness, and lawful resistance as an expression of the very principles he risked his life to publish.
The book also grounds the political dimension of firearms ownership. Understanding why the right to bear arms exists — not as a recreational privilege but as a structural check on tyranny — requires the kind of political theology Rutherford provides. This connects directly to the broader body of Reformation political theology and to the practical realities of Second Amendment jurisprudence in the modern era.
The edition published and sold by T.REX Arms includes an introduction by Douglas Wilson, making the 17th-century text more accessible to modern readers. It sits alongside Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and The Path of Liberty as part of a curated library equipping citizens to understand the philosophical and theological roots of their rights and responsibilities.
Products mentioned
- Lex Rex: The Law and the King by Samuel Rutherford — 601-page paperback edition of Rutherford’s 1644 treatise on law, government, and resistance