Natural Law: An Introduction, Part 4
By Nicholas K. Meriwether
This [moral] law, after [Adam’s] fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments, and written in two tables: the first four commandments containing our duty toward God; and the other six, our duty to man.
Westminster Confession of Faith, Chap. 19, 2.
The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof….
WCF, 19, 5.
We’ve now looked briefly at the answers natural law and Christian ethics provide to our four requirements for a moral theory (see parts 1, 2, and 3). (Recall that I claim natural law and Christian ethics are not identical, but mutually supporting.)
As to content, it reflects God’s will and design for man and society, and includes both the 10 commandments and the basic design of human nature.
As to how we acquire the ability to be moral, it is the acquisition of wisdom and virtue.
As to the purpose of being moral, it is both to glorify God, and to contribute to human flourishing through fulfilling human nature and serving the common good.
As to how we know right from wrong, it is the faculties of synderesis and conscience.
Much need for clarification and exposition will no doubt occur to the careful reader. As this is only an introduction, I will limit discussion to a couple of the issues that arise in a complex area of inquiry. Perhaps the most perplexing and contentious has to do with the second requirement, how we acquire the ability to be moral, and to do the right thing, that is, the role of wisdom and virtue in moral action. Another is the relationship of natural law to society and state, the third requirement. When we seek to convince our fellow citizens of the rightness or wrongness of a policy or law, do we appeal to natural law, the Bible, or both? (I’ll deal with the latter in a later installment.)
It is arguably regarding virtue[1] and wisdom that the tensions between Christian teaching and mere natural law are the strongest. This is because the Christian doctrines of original sin and innate depravity would seem to preclude the possibility that the unregenerate can acquire either wisdom or virtue (Jer. 17:9; Rom. 3:10-18; Eph. 2:1-3). What good does natural law do if it can’t defeat sin, nor inculcate virtue and wisdom? If we depend upon Christ and his Word for wisdom and virtue anyway, why not simply cut to the chase and go directly to the source? And if we look at the history of Western civilization, don’t we see the collapse of moral standards when God and his Word are no longer seen as their basis?
Natural Law, Innate Depravity, and Theism
Let’s first recall that natural law has to do with what can be known about morality independently of divine revelation, through what has traditionally been referred to as “the light of nature,” and also through what we know of the natural functions and purposes embedded in the fundamental design of human beings, which we can shorten to “human nature.”
To reiterate, natural law is inadequate as a comprehensive moral theory without God. This is in part because, if it isn’t created by God, mere nature has no inherent authority over us. Just because it’s unnatural to produce children and destroy or abandon them to die, or to ruin one’s body and mind through drugs and pornography, doesn’t mean these things are morally wrong. If the universe were purely an accident, if such were even possible, nature alone could not confer moral approval or disapproval.[2] Certain actions are wrong because God has designed us to live otherwise, and he has forbidden them. Only a Lawgiver can make moral law.
But more than this, natural law includes the honoring and worship of God! Scripture tells us that we naturally know God’s attributes through the created order, and that we should therefore worship him. In Rom. 1:18-21, Paul says that we “clearly” perceive these attributes, and that our refusal to “honor [God] or give thanks to him” has incurred his wrath. Idolatry and societal languishing are the inevitable consequences of that refusal. Thus, we are “without excuse” (v. 20) for not knowing natural law. The Westminster Confession affirms that the first table of the Decalogue having to do with the worship of God is part of the moral law that all are under, and the Westminster Larger Catechism states that it is by the “light of nature” and his works that we know God exists (Q.2.)
Part of what discredits natural law in the minds of many Christians are secular versions that seem to presume independence from God. There may be occasions when natural law can be appealed to without reference to God, i.e., by only appealing to natural design and human flourishing, because the intuitive sense that what is natural is “good” remains in all people even after the Fall. But as we have seen, secular theories of natural law that attempt to sever God, presumably to appeal to non-religious people, eliminate natural law’s foundation.
But what of innate depravity? Is the knowledge that we are sinners available to all through the “light of nature” in the same way as the existence and nature of God? After all, modernity can be defined in part as the rejection of innate depravity. This rejection will culminate in modern attempts to explain human imperfection as due to causes external to men’s hearts, such as human inequality and societal oppression, and for some modern theorists, the debilitating, guilt-inducing influence of religion.
There is however significant dissent from the view that human beings are innately good, even among modern thinkers. Aristotle holds that the reason sharing property (communism) won’t produce harmony is that the cause of antagonism is not the ownership of property, but human wickedness.[3] Even during its halcyon days, one of the Enlightenment’s chief spokesmen, Immanuel Kant, broke with the movement over the question of human depravity: “…for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built.”[4] Finally, Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, observed,
Whoever listens to a child screaming with the proper understanding will know that psychic forces, fearful ones, other than those commonly assumed, lie dormant within its soul. Profound anger, pain, and craving for destruction.[5]
If we insist with Paul that all know that God exists, yet we repress that knowledge, can we also say that deep down, all of us know our own depravity, yet prefer to blame it on something, or someone, else?
Virtue, Wisdom, and the Fear of God
If then natural law includes the knowledge of the 10 commandments and that we owe God honor and gratitude, and perhaps, that we know we are sinners in need of reconciliation with him, does this mean salvation is possible merely through knowledge of natural law? The Bible resoundingly rejects this possibility (John 3:36; Rom. 3:28), as does the Reformed tradition (WCF 16.7)—because it doesn’t involve faith in Christ for the forgiveness of one’s sins (Jn 1:12; Rom. 3:22). Yet if our depravity means there is no good in us, and so incapable of doing good and “inclined to all evil” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 8), how can we expect the unregenerate to acquire sufficient virtue and wisdom to follow natural law? Won’t natural law simply fall on deaf ears?[6]
The short answer is yes; at least, it will in the long run. Because natural law requires Scripture, if a society is not permeated by Christian teaching, if it is not Christian in the cultural sense, it will eventually succumb to other corrupting ideologies that don’t support natural law, such as the radical individualism now permeating American society. The soil analogy seems most apt: Christianity provides a soil in which natural law can flourish, so that what Scripture teaches about marriage, family, property, the state, and human dignity appear to be common sense even to the unregenerate. (This is the America I grew up in, which is still going fairly strong in parts of the US, but is under serious threat.) Once Christianity is replaced by an alien ideology, that is, once Christian soil is replaced by another soil, natural law will appear irrelevant, nonsensical, or oppressive. This is not the fault of natural law per se, but of those embedded in the “new” soil.
The Bible is clear there is no wisdom without the fear of God (Prov. 9:10), and with no wisdom, God-pleasing virtue is impossible. But there may yet be a reason to encourage the unregenerate to obey natural law. According to WCF, 16, 7, good works by the unregenerate “may be of good use both to themselves and others,” though they cannot please God or even prepare one for grace. However, “their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God.” Also, Bavinck has argued that although God-pleasing virtue is impossible without saving grace, a more limited civic virtue is achievable by the unregenerate.[7] So if virtue is linked to wisdom, those achieving some measure of civic virtue could have some measure of civic wisdom (cf. Prov. 8:15-16). One sees such civic wisdom in the Stoics Cicero and Seneca, and in our own day, in various non-Christian authors and commentators.
Ultimately, it’s always good to follow God’s moral law, no matter who we are.
Notes
[1] Virtue is “good character,” or the ability to perform the morally correct action. As we saw in Part 3, if a person fails to have virtue, he may be “incontinent,” wanting to do good, but failing; or “intemperate,” unable to see what is good due to a seared conscience. Both are instances of “vice.”
[2] This is commonly known as the fact/value distinction. This only becomes a problem when nature is viewed as a closed (self-sufficient) system, as it has in what is commonly referred to as “modernity.”
[3] Politics, Bk. II, Chap. 5. In his translation, T. A. Sinclair employs the term “depravity” for “wickedness.” Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Penguin Books, 1981), 116.
[4] Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merill, 1963), Sixth Thesis: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm.
[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago, 1980), 2. I slightly modified the translation provided.
[6] Augustine considers the virtues of non-believers to be vices because they have no reference to God, and because they are “inflated with pride.” The City of God, Bk. 19, Chap. 25: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm.
[7] Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith: A Survey of Christian Doctrine, trans. Henry Zylstra (Eerdmans, 1956), 251.
— Nicholas K. Meriwether is Professor of Philosophy at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, OH. He has taught the Ethics requirement at SSU for 26 years. He received an MA in Christian Thought from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University. He has published in the areas of moral psychology, Critical Theory, Islamic militancy, and the role of ethics instruction in higher education. He and his wife, Janet, have three grown children. They are members of the Presbyterian Church in America.
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