Conclusion

Whereas, however, De imperio was not only Grotius's most reflected, integral, and historically coherent attempt at an Erastian solution to the confessional­political conflicts in the Dutch Republic, but also the work in which Grotius would most extensively rely on support not only from biblical and Patristic, but also from Hebrew (and Hebraist) sources,5¹ the result of Grotius's engage­ment with Erastianism would be a virtually completely inverted account of what had been the basic reference of â€?first', humanist-Hebraist Erastianism.

With De imperio, Grotius would shift the debate on ius circa sacra from the civilian interpretation of Old Testament Law (and early Christian synodal history) to a debate on the common principles of political and ecclesiastical authority in (divine) natural law. This was, at once, to initiate the substitution of earlier Erastianism's hermeneutic methods - the parallel, or typological reading of Old and New Testament law - by a much more linearly, progres­sively structured narrative - and one in which there was a strong tendency to sideline the political history of the Jews.

The decisive biblical-hermeneutical step that enabled, and accompanied, these conceptual and hermeneutical shifts was to reposition the �constitutional act' of positive divine lawgiving at the pre-state sacerdotal reign of the biblical patriarchs, from where, then, could be derived - with support both from the Roman concept of the paterfamilias and from the Pauline-Augustine tradition of natural faith - at once the concepts of political and religious authority, and their interrelationship, in the way of an externalisation of a functional (i.e.

The more immediate references, and implications, of Grotius's specific �functional', natural law-based account of ius circa sacra are certainly to be searched for in the specific features of Dutch confessional and church history.

Grotius's corresponding reading of Sacred history in terms of natural law, however, would prove effective far beyond its immediate political context, and also beyond merely providing an influential pattern for the further con­ceptualisation of the church-state-relationship, in particular, in England and Germany.^[652] It was, to the same extent at least, also a highly important contri­bution, both to paving the way for rational biblical criticism, and for the his­tory of conjectural �natural law-anthropologies' in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.