Rutherford, Samuel definition of Rutherford, Samuel in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Rutherford, Samuel, 1600–1661, Scottish clergyman. His Exercitationes apologeticae pro divina gratia (1636), urging a Calvinist view of grace against Arminianism (see under Arminius, Jacobus Arminianism, was not yet fully developed, but he asserted the compatibility of divine sovereignty with human freedom, denied John Calvin's doctrine of irresistible grace , and thus modified the strict conception of predestination.
..... Click the link for more information. ), caused his suspension from his living at Anwoth on the charge of nonconformity to the Acts of Episcopacy. Banished to Aberdeen until the National Covenant was drawn up in 1638, he then was made professor of divinity at St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, and rector of the university in 1651. In 1643 he was chosen a commissioner from Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, and was attacked by name in John Milton's sonnet "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament." His Lex Rex (1644) brought him wide attention as a political theorist; it was burned by the public hangman after the Restoration, and Rutherford was removed from his official positions and summoned (1661) by Parliament on a charge of treason. He died before he could be tried. Rutherford's letters, first published as Joshua Redivivus (1664), edited by A. A. Bonar with a life (2 vol., 1863), have passed through a number of editions.