Natural Law

Until recently, most Christians accepted the idea of a basic moral obligation. The Apostles who took the Gospel into the Greco-Roman world met the concept of a “Natural Law” and identified it with the biblical creation order. The ten commandments are the revealed codification of the Natural Law.

This concept today is often hotly rejected. Modern atheist ethical relativism thinks that all morality is different depending on place and time. It is sociologically conditioned and by no means the outcome of some eternal world order. But an eternal moral order is also disapproved by people inside Christendom. Karl Barth and his school believe that all ethics worth the name must be rooted in the one revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It becomes uncertain whether the Church then still can make a plausible contribution to public morality. Indeed, some people take this failure to be a virtue, declaring that the Church has nothing to do with public morals and is not the guardian of society.

Perhaps Barth has influenced the visible alienation from the Natural Law idea in much of Roman Catholic theology. Rome’s moral theologians used to lean heavily on Natural Law and claimed to deduce the most astonishing details from it. Nowadays they wish to apply it only in a most general, formal sense.

When the Natural Law idea was being attacked by many kinds of relativist secular philosophies, its traditional defenders in Christendom publicly or secretly withdrew their support from it.

Strangely enough, though, while Roman Catholics move away, at least some Protestant ethicists (who traditionally don’t make much of Natural Law) have begun to raise doubts about its outright abandonment. In the thirties Emil Brunner, turning away from the early existentialist extremes of dialectical theology, tried to link Protestant ethics again to the Natural Law idea. His influence, though, was curbed by the further ascendance of Barth and, then, Bultmann. Bonhoeffer’s farsightedness made him call the Decalogue “the law of life”: “The commission to guard life in itself leads to the second tablet” (of the ten commandments).

Now we should be clear in our minds that the waving aside of the Natural Law concept cannot be taken lightly. With it would go the idea of a common moral ground without which any culture will soon fall into disintegration and destruction. Certainly, as Brunner and Macquarrie observe, Natural Law has been a useful obstacle to any dictatorship and the moral arbitrariness that goes with it. Its counterpart, legal positivism, has the doubtful distinction of having served as the philosophy of autocratic monarchs as well as of National Socialism.

People used to accept the idea that man had a set of built-in moral obligations. That view seems now to have been discarded, not only in the secular world but also in Christendom. Why?

Christians must grasp the task of conveying to humanity a sense of God’s righteousness. If we were to drop this as being none of our business we would soon find out that we have also done away with the prerequisite for the message central to Christianity, namely the forgiveness of sins. Where there is no accusation, proclamation of acquittal becomes obsolete.

We need to reexamine the idea of Natural Law and its range of validity. Is there any connection—material or formal—between this concept and the New Testament? Non-Christian philosophers have argued that some Natural Law was obvious in the desire of most normal people to secure their own survival. Knut Logstrup, the Danish moralist, has shown that man feels a basic obligation to guard the life of his fellow man, beginning with the “natural” compulsion of care for the new-born and for the family. A wide range of moral demands is being set up, demands pertaining to the benefit of man’s physical and spiritual existence. Theologically speaking, they are the requirements of the sustaining of creation with which God has charged man.

It is worth noting that in Christ’s own moral perspective “doing good” goes together with “saving life.” We find this expounded in the six “corporeal works of mercy” that Christ specifies as his standards for the Last Judgment: to feed, to give to drink, to house, to clothe, to care for the sick, and to give fellowship to those in solitary confinement (Matt. 25:31–46). This describes some basic needs of man, and in a sense represents a New Testament version of the “Natural Law.”

There are other Scriptural reasons, too, for that early identification of Natural Law and Decalogue. In the context of the second announcement of the ten commandments one reads: “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Deut. 4:6). The Decalogue is assessed as something that all men will understand. For they all yearn for justice, and this is an appropriate definition of it.

Paul has indicated the substantial consonance of “natural” and “revealed” law in a well-known passage. “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature (or ‘natural law’) what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, their consciences also bear witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse” (Rom. 2:14, 15). This significant passage has always been the scriptural basis for the inclusion of the Natural Law concept into the body of Christian doctrine. We should heed it afresh and understand it as it speaks of the challenge every man finds in his heart. This world remains the theater of the war between good and evil, between the sustaining and destruction of God’s creation, and of the great drama of God’s redeeming work in history. Disparaging or disposing of the Natural Law would only help to mute the call that comes with life itself: the call to discover and to honor God’s sovereignty.

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