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Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 1 1970-01-01 00:59:59 So, why don't Protestants
like Natural
Law?The short answer is: there isn't a short answer.So starting now, and continuing for who knows how long, I plan to tell the story of the Protestant struggle over natural law, from complete rejection by Karl Barth in the 1930s to the recent hint of renewed interest among Protestant intellectuals. My view is that natural law is a forgotten legacy of the Reformation — one that contemporary Protestants desperately need to rediscover. Along the way, I'll respond to standard Protestant objections and discuss what limitations the Reformers perceived in natural law.For much of Christian history, some type of natural-law theory has been used as a bridge to connect the Christian faith and culture, the church and the world. But in recent times, Protestant churches and theologians have rejected natural law as a way of showing their differences with the tradition of Roman Catholic moral theology.The scope and unity of Roman Catholic social teaching
Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 2 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Part 1, we saw that the infrastructure of Protestant social teaching is not nearly as sophisticated as Roman Catholic social teaching and that natural law has often been viewed as a bridge between the church and the world. Historically, natural law has been used as a bridge category to appeal to people of all races, classes, cultures, and religions. Its public value stems, in part, from its ability to speak beyond those who share a prior commitment to sacred Scripture or Christian creeds. As Cicero, the renowned Roman orator taught in De republica, natural law is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must for ever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its a Read more:Protestants
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Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 3 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Part 2, we saw that modern Protestant skepticism toward reason is one of the most significant factors in the rejection of natural law. Divine command ethics, particularly of the variety espoused by Karl Barth, quickly came to dominate the field of Protestant theological ethics in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Karl Barth rejected every form of natural theology and, simultaneously, pulled the rug out from under natural law. But among neoorthodox theologians of the 1930s, only Barth and his close friend Edward Thurneysen remained consistent in their repudiation of natural law. Others, such as Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and Rudolf Bultmann, opened the door to some new version of natural theology by incorporating philosophical insights into their dogmatic and exegetical work. Brunner took the lead in calling for a return to natural theology and natural law, but was angrily attacked and shot down in an exchange with Barth, his former friend and cohort. However, Read more:Protestants
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Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 4 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Part 3, we examined why many contemporary Protestants
have something of a bad conscience when it comes to natural law. But, of course, the blame for this cannot be laid fully upon Karl Barth. Even a hint of a fuller explanation has to address intellectual currents that begin to gather momentum in the so-called Enlightenment. One popular explanation within the academic mainstream for the demise of the natural-law tradition in modern Protestant theology attributes it to a form of implosion. And this is what I want to take up here.Why did the natural-law tradition fall on hard times in modern Protestant theology? Many have speculated that the reason somehow lies deeply embedded in the Reformation theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin. However, John T. McNeill, the Reformation historian and editor of Calvin's Institutes, reached a far different conclusion:There is no real discontinuity between the teaching of the Reformers and that of their predecessors with respect to natural law Read more:Natural
Lecture Mania 1970-01-01 00:59:59 There won't be much action in my blogosphere this week. I'm giving three lectures at the Acton University. Feel free to explore my lectures as well as the rest of the University.In the meantime, however, a modern-day Samaritan story appeared recently at msnbc.com. Everest climbers recall near-death experience:Team gave up climb after finding peer who had been given up for dead.I see conscience is still alive and well. Maybe we just have to leave the familiar to see it in clear relief. Read more:Mania
Deadwood's Al Swearengen and Chaos Theory 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I've often wondered what would happen if God were to simply "let go" of the universe. Would it almost immediately begin to spin out of control? Or are there built-in mechanisms for self-regulation—like a governor on a small Briggs & Stratton engine—that allow the throttle to open only so far and then no more? In the natural-law tradition, conscience has always been viewed as something of a governor of human affairs—one that keeps individuals and groups from spinning out of control. Let's call this idea natural order. It is precisely the absence of natural order that is frightening about riots. "Hey, what's wrong with these people, don't they know when enough is enough?" Dostoevsky's answer: "If there is no God, everything is permitted" There is much fodder for rumination in this quote. However, what about the idea of natural governors? Like David Milch, the producer of HBO's Deadwood, I have been obsessed for some time with the idea of natural order Read more:Theory
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What is a Common Notion, anyway? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In a nutshell, a common notion is a universal idea like goodness, justice, and the existence of God that is said to be common to all people.Widespread use of the common notions can be found in Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, the medieval Scholastics, the Protestant Reformers, Protestant Scholastics, and the natural jurisprudence tradition in law. As historian Maryanne Horowitz writes:"Reason,' "common notions,' "seeds,' and "sparks' are images that represent the sources of virtue in human nature. They are four unit-ideas which express how man is linked to God's universal law: together they form the idea-complex of natural law in man.But, if these images are so common, why name a blog after it?The problem is, the common notions are not so common anymore. They represent a forgotten, older tradition in law and ethics that Protestants, in particular, have virtually no knowledge of. Hence, the need for a forum to discuss current ideas, publications, and news items in ligh Read more:Common
Rediscovering Natural Law: Part I 1970-01-01 00:59:59 While natural law has played an important role in Christian social ethics from the very beginning, over the centuries it has gone through periods of greater and lesser influence in the Christian church. The sixteenth century, for example, was a period of relatively greater influence, as moral theologians (Protestant and Roman Catholic alike) sought to apply the insights of the Christian moral tradition to pressing issues in foreign affairs, domestic governance, trade, and commerce. The twentieth century, however, can be classified as a period of relatively diminished influence. Philosophically, moral realism sustained vigorous assault from both existentialist and analytic philosophers who denied the existence of transtemporal and transcultural moral goods. Many twentieth-century theologians, heeding the advice of Karl Barth in the celebrated 1934 debate with Emil Brunner, rejected the natural-law tradition in favor of an ethic of divine command.Though indications of renewed and serious Read more:Natural
Others are talking about Natural Law 1970-01-01 00:59:59 It's interesting how discussions about a person's fundamental moral intuitions lead to natural law. More interesting still is how those same discussions end up raising the inevitable religious questions.Find an excellent example at The Reform Club.Natural
law is an effective way to steer a conversation to a religious turning point, but, dare I say it, natural law is ultimately ineffective in convincing people to take the next step. Read more:Others
Rediscovering the Natural Law: Part II 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The controversy between Barth and Brunner didn't settle anything. Some followed Barth in holding that Christian ethics has no use for natural law, which concerns itself with universal principles inscribed in human nature and known by reason. Barth's idea, instead, was that ethics is based directly on the command of the living God, which as he said "is always an individual command for the conduct of this man, at this moment and in this situation; a prescription for this case of his; a prescription for the choice of a definite possibility of human intention, decision, and action" Herein lies the root of Protestant situation ethics, popularized in the 1960s by Joseph Fletcher, and criticized by Paul Ramsey as a "wasteland of utility" Although Barth never provided a systematic treatment of natural law, throughout his long career he fought against every appeal to natural theology and natural law. A theological ethic that bases itself on the Word of God alone, he said, Read more:Natural
Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 5 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Part 4, we saw that post-Enlightenment philosophical currents such as Humean empiricism, utilitarianism, and legal positivism are the real culprits in the demise of natural law and not theological criticism from within Reformation theology, as many today take for granted. If this is so, why is contemporary Protestant theology so critical of natural law?The most common reason why contemporary Protestants
reject natural law is because they think it does not take sin seriously enough. And the second, which we will address in Part 6, is that natural law is thought to elevate "autonomous" human reason above divine revelation and therefore to rival God and Scripture.To many Protestants, natural law seems to suggest that the order of being in the original creation has not been sufficiently disrupted by the fall. Moreover, they think reason is viewed too optimistically because it is still able to discern a rough outline of God's will in creation. They think natural law is guilty of elevat Read more:Natural
Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 8 1970-01-01 00:59:59 To conclude this series, let's recap what is meant by natural law by parsing the term.The "nature" referred to in natural law can mean different things, but I mean by it the divinely engrafted knowledge of morality in human reason and conscience, that which all human beings share by virtue of their creation in God's image. Theologically speaking, I think this understanding of nature points back to our original creation in God's image, but it also anticipates the fall into sin, where the divine image was corrupted but not destroyed."Law," too, can vary in meaning, but we have used it here as shorthand for the universal moral law written into the human heart by God. Law as a representation of God's will can be known through a variety of means such as the Ten Commandments, the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the pangs of conscience, or the rational intuition of good and evil. When "nature" and "law" are understood in these ways, the claim that natural law is a forgo Read more:Protestants
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 3 1970-01-01 00:59:59 As I mentioned in Part 2, a common stereotype of Protestant ethics is that it is wedded to nominalism. While this may be true for some (particularly modern) Protestant ethicists, it is false for Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi, two older Reformed moral theologians. Before showing how this is so, and still by way of introduction, I want to point to four doctrines where natural law exerts some influence.First, it is important to recognize that none of the confessional documents of the magisterial Reformation
— whether Lutheran or Reformed — rejected the doctrine of natural law. In fact, those documents universally state that Gentiles — though outsiders to God's special revelation to Israel in the law and the prophets — remain accountable to the moral law by means of the natural knowledge of God's will experienced in creation, conscience, and reason. Confessional examples abound to prove this point, but I will mention only what the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) sta Read more:Natural
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 4 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post will begin a discussion of natural law in the thought of the Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), but first I want to touch on the broader issue of natural law in the context of Reformation
theology.More than any other Reformer, John Calvin is appealed to for his insight on natural law. This is probably due to the stubborn persistence among scholars to single him out as the chief early codifier of Protestant doctrine. While this approach is understandable given the force of habit, the discussion should be widened beyond Calvin to include those Reformers who either preceded him or were contemporaries of his and the later representatives of Protestant orthodoxy. Though Calvin talks a fair bit about natural law, his treatment of it is unsystematic and imprecise compared to the medievals and some of his contemporaries. Susan Schreiner, a Calvin expert and University of Chicago Divinity School professor, thinks Calvin's discussion of natural law should be seen as an exten Read more:Natural
, Catholicity
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 5 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post examines Peter Martyr Vermigli's understanding of natural law, while Part 6 will take up the natural-law thinking of Jerome Zanchi, Martyr's former student and colleague.Martyr was born in Florence in 1499, entered the Augustinian Canons, and took a doctorate in theology at the leading center of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the University of Padua. His favorite authors were Aristotle and Thomas. In Italy he enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher, preacher, and abbot. By 1540 he was already Protestant by conviction; after persuading many citizens and canons, including Zanchi, to convert, Martyr fled to Zurich in 1542 to escape the Inquisition. During the last twenty years of his life he taught at Strasbourg, Oxford, and Zurich. He died in 1562 two years before Calvin. Over half a dozen of his students became important theologians. And all together there were about 110 printings of his various writings, which consist of about twenty-five massive volumes. Within Reformed ci Read more:Natural
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 6 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post sketches out the rough outline of Jerome Zanchi's understanding of natural law. An interesting difference between Zanchi and Martyr is that Thomistic elements are far more important in Zanchi's theology than in Martyr's theology.The historian John Patrick Donnelly thinks Zanchi is the best example of "Calvinist Thomism," meaning a theologian who was Reformed in theology and Thomistic in philosophy and methodology. Zanchi was born and raised near Bergamo where he entered the Augustinian Canons and received a Thomistic training. Martyr was his prior at Lucca and was instrumental in his conversion to Protestantism. Zanchi spent ten years as a Nicodemite, or crypto-Calvinist, teaching theology before fleeing north to Geneva in 1552, where he studied for a year under Calvin. Later he served as professor of theology at Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Neustadt until his death in 1590. After his death his relatives gathered most of his writings into his Opera in eight large tome Read more:Natural
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 2 1970-01-01 00:59:59 As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, my aim is to probe the natural-law doctrines of only a few influential sixteenth-century Protestant theologians. Some, such as John Calvin, may already be familiar to you, while others, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli (known as Martyr) and Jerome Zanchi, may be entirely new. What is surprising about Martyr and Zanchi is how much their natural-law doctrines are in line with the metaphysical essentialism of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Before going any further I should forewarn you that what I just said challenges a good many Protestant and Roman Catholic stereotypes.The most common stereotype is that the Reformers and their successors were indebted to the nominalist metaphysics of William of Occam, which resulted in the Bible being treated as a law book and God being conceived as an arbitrary and irrational sovereign. In subsequent posts, this interpretation will be examined in relation to the thought of Marytr and Zanchi. So stay tuned for more Read more:Natural
, Catholicity
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Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 7 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Parts 5 and 6 we addressed the two most common Protestant objections to natural law. And now, as promised, we will see what limitations the Reformers perceived in natural law, even as they affirmed its value. (Incidentally, the treatment of the natural knowledge of God that Peter Martyr Vermigli, Jerome Zanchi, and Francis Turretin provide, to mention only a few, is completely in step with that of the early church. For more on that topic, click here.)The widespread assumption that Reformation theology allows no access to natural law—that its view of Scripture, revelation, Christ, salvation, and faith excludes every kind of natural theology —needs serious correction. Yet, in affirming natural law's value as a bridge, it is also necessary to acknowledge its limitations.The Reformers hold to the existence of a natural knowledge of morality in creation, conscience, and reason, but they think that knowledge has no saving power or merit associated with it. In fact, its primary role Read more:Protestants
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Evangelicals and the Brave New World: Why Natural Law Can No Longer Be Ignored 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In the Introduction to an important new book by J. Budziszewski that engages four distinct traditions of evangelical political thought, Michael Cromartie observes: "While appreciative of the contributions of each of these thinkers [Carl Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder], Budziszewski finds fault with each, to a greater or lesser degree, for failing to develop a systematic political theory as compelling as those offered by the secularist establishment. He suggests that evangelical political thought would be improved if it were informed by the tradition of natural law" I couldn't agree more. But I'd like to take this a step further, or, at the very least, in a slightly different direction, and one that I'm sure Budziszewski would also find complementary: evangelical bioethical thought.There are some very good people and organizations at work in this field already, but, as with Protestant natural law thinking in general, evangelicals as a group mu Read more:World
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, Evangelicals
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 1 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post will introduce what I intend to be an extended series concerned with recovering and reviving the catholicity of Protestant ethics.Protestant catholicity? Isn't this an oxymoron? It may come as a surprise in light of a common stereotype of Protestant theology, but the older Protestant understanding of reason, the divine will, and natural law actually provided a bulwark against the notion of a capricious God, unbounded by truth and goodness, as Pope Benedict recently pointed out in relation to Islam's understanding of God. "In all honesty," he states,one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's "voluntas ordinata." Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have Read more:Natural
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"Designer Babies" 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Just because markets can efficiently allocate goods and services, doesn't mean that markets should function without limitations in every area of life, particularly in the areas of embryo sex selection and the sale of ova. In a recent commentary, Kevin Schmiesing addresses the role of markets in embryo sex selection. He shows how the rush to commodify every human good is pressing into ever more fragile and sacred domains. Today people may wish to have a girl over a boy, but what kind of wishes will people have for their offspring in the future: blonde, blue-eyed, high IQ children, that have a disposition to speak certain languages? Hasn't this been tried before? Read more:Designer
, Babies
Why Protestants Don't Like Natural Law, Part 6 1970-01-01 00:59:59 If the most common Protestant objection to natural law revolves around sin, as we saw in Part 5, we should now address the second most common objection that natural law is a rival to God and Scripture.Contemporary evangelical critics, such as Carl Henry, object that natural law elevates autonomous human reason above divine revelation. Henry thinks the Thomist doctrine of natural law teaches a universally shared body of moral beliefs that exist independently of divine revelation. This contrasts, he thinks, with John Calvin's view, which is said to ground the law of nature in divine revelation, thus cutting off the possibility of a so-called independent foundation for morality. The real issue for Henry is his perception that natural law makes God's existence and the authority of the Bible irrelevant to ethics. For him and many evangelicals following him, it is believed that the very content of morality originates in divine revelation and the Bible. That there is no standard of right Read more:Protestants
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The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 7 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post concludes my series on the largely forgotten catholicity of Protestant ethics, with a few brief remarks and reflections.My goal for this series, as stated in Part 1, was to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as Pope Benedict XVI referred to it in his now famous Regensburg address), and that evangelicals need to revisit their wariness on the capacity of reason to discern moral truth. Much more could be written on each of these topics, and likely will be on this blog and some others, but the fundamental point should not be missed that two significant sixteenth-century Reformed theologians break the modern mold for Protestant ethics. Among the thinkers and writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I can assure you there are numerous others who also break the mold.For almost one hundred years now, Pro Read more:Natural
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The Latest in Revisionist Economic History 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Duncan Foley's new book, Adam's Fallacy, is the latest installment among the critics of free-market economics to spin economic history according to the received wisdom of today's Center-Left intelligentsia. Lest this statement be too harsh, let it be shown that Foley himself reports that his intention in writing the book is not to get bogged down in historical and textual analysis of the key economic texts of the last three-hundred years but to tell his own "imaginatively reconstructed" account of the broad sweep of modern economic history.If you tend to be a "splitter" as opposed to a "lumper" where historical figures and key texts are concerned, you should heed Foley's admonition and be warned that Adam's Fallacy is his "own take on economics and exploits the great figures in the history of political economy shamelessly for [his] own ends" If your ends don't happen to match Foley's ends, then you may find yourself disgruntled like me. But, at the very l Read more:Economic
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Natural Law: The Only Valid Bulwark Against Arbitrary Power and Ideological Manipulation 2007-03-12 16:50:00 Now, finally, after laboring under "the tyranny of the urgent" for far too long, I reenter the blogosphere with some short, topically arranged excerpts from Pope Benedict XVI's recent "Address to the Participants in the International Congress on Natural
Moral Law." For the full text of the speech, click here.HUMAN FREEDOM IS A FUNDAMENTAL APPLICATION OF NATURAL LAW"Another fundamental application of the subject is freedom. Yet taking into account the fact that human freedom is always a freedom shared with others, it is clear that the harmony of freedom can be found only in what is common to all: the truth of the human being, the fundamental message of being itself, exactly the lex naturalis."And how can we not mention, on one hand, the demand of justice that manifests itself in giving unicuique suum and, on the other, the expectation of solidarity that nourishes in everyone, especially if they are poor, the hope of the help of the more fortunate?"In these values are expressed unbreak Read more:Ideological
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