Thomas Watson’s Understanding of the 5th Commandment
In 1651, Thomas Watson was imprisoned for his part in a plot to restore Charles II to the throne of England. Watson was a renowned preacher and minister who was eventually ejected from his pulpit in 1662 for nonconformity. He is mostly remembered today for his A Body of Divinity, a rich and detailed exposition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
What few people realise is that Watson was a royalist. He was a Puritan royalist, if you will. He was a Presbyterian and a Cavalier, remaining loyal to the King even when many of his theological allies were turning against the Crown. His imprisonment was connected to a plot led by a fellow Presbyterian, Christopher Love, who was eventually tried and executed for his role in plotting the overthrow of the Republic.
Watson preached a sermon on the fifth commandment, which was eventually published in A Body of Divinity after his death in the 1690s. (It can be found in the Banner of Truth book The Ten Commandments.) In introducing the commandment to “Honour thy father and thy mother,” Watson says the following: “Father is of different kinds; as the political, the ancient, the spiritual, the domestic, and the natural.”
Watson goes on to outline the different kinds of fathers that fall under the commandment, starting with the political father. “The political father, the magistrate. He is the father of his country, he is to be an encourager of virtue, a punisher of vice, and a father to the widow and the orphan.”1 As Robert James Bast shows in his excellent book Honor Your Fathers, this style of interpretation and application of the fifth commandment is evident as far back as the high medieval period.
But is Watson idiosyncratic for his time? Far from it. As I show in an article in the Journal of Religious History (paywalled), the early Protestant tradition embraced the synecdoche that earlier interpreters, including Thomas Aquinas, saw. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and William Tyndale are representative of this tradition, taking the commandment to honour one’s parents as meaning far more than filial piety. Rather, the commandment was understood to embrace a wider ethical imperative of submission and honour to authorities in various spheres of life, whether the church, the commonwealth, the school, or elsewhere.
Is Watson’s prioritisation of the “political father” unusual, then? Wouldn’t you expect a Presbyterian-leaning preacher to emphasise and prioritise submission to ecclesial authority? Elders, yes, but not kings, prime ministers, or presidents.
Watson was, in fact, in very good company. Further research, which can be freely read here, shows conclusively that the fifth commandment was a standard and dominant justification for political obligation in seventeenth century English political thought. Dozens of sermons, tracts, treatises, whether preached or written by Roundheads or Cavaliers, independents or Presbyterians, conformists or non-conformists, all use the same form of argument: the fifth commandment requires us to submit to the civil magistrate.
As I argue in my recent article, this fact challenges some assumptions for scholars and laymen interested in the seventeenth century. In the first place, it affects our understanding of a central point of contention in the debate between John Locke and Robert Filmer. Locke was sparring with Filmer in his famous Two Treatises of Government, and he mockingly sets aside Filmer’s assertion that the fifth commandment has anything to do with politics. We would typically read Filmer and agree with Locke, because Locke’s assumptions on this point are ours as well.
However, Filmer was swimming in the mainstream, and Locke was the radical, perhaps even more radical than many have realised. In refuting Filmer’s interpretation of the fifth commandment, Locke does away with an entire tradition of Protestant ethics. He is not alone in his rejection of a de-politicised fifth commandment, but there are a very small number of thinkers in the seventeenth century who are with him on this question.
The dominant strand of interpretation of the fifth commandment was, in fact, political. Obedience to, reverence for, and submission to the civil magistrate were justified over and over by appeals to “honour your father and mother.” You can click through and see that I have, in fact, done the reading. George Estye, Robert Pricke, John Dod, John Downame, William Twisse, Samuel Rutherford, James Ussher, Robert Grosse, are only a sampling. Edmund Hall, in the delightfully titled Lazarus’ Sores Licked (1650), is another. Richard Eedes, Laurence Womock, John Humfrey, and Richard Baxter also join the list. There are many, many others.
The majority report was that the fifth commandment is political as much as filial. This implies that there is a connection between the filial and the political in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant mind. This is a connection that is, for better or worse, absent from the modern Protestant mind. One interesting question is – why? Regardless of the answer, the fact is that historians of political and legal thought, whether Christian or not, have usually ignored or missed some very important data.
The Bible was a crucial piece of the puzzle for Protestant theories, and English theories more broadly, of political obedience during the seventeenth century. Romans 13 certainly played a role in the theological framing of political obligation over this period, as it continues to today. And, yes, there are interesting and important discussions of republicanism, popular sovereignty, and allusions to liberal democracy across the tumult of the seventeenth century in England.
However, the role of the command to “Honour your father and mother” has been almost completely overlooked. Most people during the seventeenth century would have gone to this as their staple justification for obeying the civil magistrate. The Decalogue was, and remains, an authoritative summary statement of Christian ethics, a statement that applies more widely than we often allow for. To paraphrase the feminists, the filial is political.
