Judicial Laws Against Idolatry and Blasphemy Remain Binding – John Cotton

For the sourcebook I am compiling on Puritan political views, I am having to read through John Cotton’s reply to the tolerationist Roger Williams The Bloody Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb; pay careful attention to this Theonomic quote:

It is an evasion as groundless as the former, that Elijah’s stirring up of Ahab to kill all the Priests and Prophets of Baal, was figurative. For all figures in the Old Testament have their accomplishment in the New. Nor evident it is, Ahab (an apostate idolater) was no type of Christ: nor was Israel (after their apostasy) a type of the true Church of Christ. A Tabernacle it was, but not a Tabernacle of Christ…To make this act in Israel a type of Christ’s act in the Christian State, or Church, is to make darkness a type of light. Ceremonial Laws were generally typical: not to Moses [and] his Judicials, especially those which had in them moral equity.

It is moral equity, that blasphemers, and apostate idolaters, seducing others to idolatry, should be put to death, Lev. 24:15, Deut. 13:5. Ahab forfeited his own life because he did not put Benhadad to death for his blasphemy, 1 Kings 20:23, 28 and verse 42, yet Benhadad was no Israelite, not was his blasphemy belched out in the land of Israel: but the external equity of that Judicial Law of Moses was of moral force, and binds Princes to express that zeal, and indignation, both against blasphemy, in such as fall under their just power, which Ahab neglected; and again seduction on to idolatry, which Ahab executed, or else Elijah, or some others, by his consent.

John Cotton, The Bloody Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, pp 54-55

Evidently, John Cotton did not believe that the Biblical penal sanctions against idolatry, blasphemy and other crimes against the moral law were part of the “sundry judicial laws” given to Israel which have “expired” (WCF 19:4), but were moral laws (not merely judicial laws) which “forever bind all” (WCF 19:5); hence they are cited as such in the Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism.

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