Natural Law: Part 1
“The forces of nature pay no respect
to what we call good and evil.”
J. A. Froude, “Times of
Erasmus and Luther”
" We speak of the Volume of
Nature: and truly a Volume it is, --
whose author and writer is God. To read
it! Dost thou, does man, so much as well
know the Alphabet thereof? . . . It is a Volume written in celestial
hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred writing; of which even the prophets are happy
that they can read here a line and there a line. As for your Institutes and Academies of
Science, they strive bravely; and from the thick-crowded, inextricably
intertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick out by dextrous combination in the
vulgar Character, and therefrom put together this and the other . . .
recipe."
Ewald Flugel, Thomas
Carlyle's Moral and religious Development (p. 31)
In his excellent little volume The
Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes much of what he calls the “Tao” and its
virtually universal acceptance as evidence of objective morality and of our
knowledge of natural law.
I disagree.
By disagreeing, I do not deny objective morality or its
origin in God. I endorse it
heartily. But I do deny that Lewis’s so-called
Tao indicates authentic moral insight on our part. What he identifies as authentic moral insight
on a global scale I see as the burdensome vicissitudes and existential necessities
of life in a cursed world imposing themselves upon us, and of our yielding to
those gruesome and arduous conditions, however willingly or reluctantly. I see it as our pragmatic adjustment to
reality, not as moral insight.
The so-called Tao is not the result of the human soul rightly
grasping righteousness on the basis of nature.
Rather, the Tao is a now cursed world order having its way with us. The Tao is what arises when we are forced to fit
in with the realities of a now cursed and fallen order, groaning as it is, in
great travail. What some call natural
law is simply what we deem works most efficiently within that accursed system
(at least what works best at this point in its long history of change), rather
than us differentiating real moral right from real moral wrong without the aid
of Scripture. Utilitarian efficiency and
pragmatic preference are not morality. They
are not moral oughtness. You cannot move
from cursed-world pragmatics to authentic righteousness. On our part, the Tao is pragmatic preference
and utility in the face of hard, cursed, reality. Moving
from what is pragmatically preferable to what is morally obligatory is an
unjustifiable move, indeed an enormous leap. Pragmatic preference and our preferences for social
utility are not the same as Divine righteousness or Divine command, especially
in a Divinely cursed world as ascertained by fallen persons. We prefer the principles and actions we do because
they yield results that, within this cursed order, seem to work best to some of
us. Morality is a different issue altogether.
To identify either as “law” or as “moral” what might be
little more and little else than our pragmatic adjustment to a cursed world
order is to say too much because those preferences often look very different
from the life of Christ and from His Sermon on the Mount, where authentic
righteousness is more accurately articulated and more clearly manifest than it
is in cursed nature. If, as the natural
lawyers tell us, natural law and Divine law both come from God, then we might
expect them to teach the same thing. But
it looks like they do not, not if Christ and His sermon are the moral measure,
and not if His Beatitudes are the Divinely authorized description of righteousness
and the path to blessing. At many
points, Christ and nature appear to teach quite different things. Therefore, to label as “natural law” the
pragmatic preferences we derive from our experiences in a cursed world system
is too exalted and too self-congratulatory a rubric. We do not know to what extent the conclusions
we draw as we struggle to find convenience, practicality, safety, pleasure, utility,
self-justification, and financial profit within this cursed order actually
reflect the unsullied and righteous character of God. Judging from the Sermon on the Mount, the
resemblance seems radically imprecise.
What Christ teaches there and what we practice and preach on the basis
of nature are sometimes wildly different, both in action and in motive.
Further, even to label this a “law” is to employ loaded
language: “Law” seems to me a term too high, too lofty, and too ideologically freighted
for what it actually embodies or represents. It’s not a law; it’s our pragmatically assessment
of how to cope with currently prevailing conditions under the world curse. It’s how we deal most pragmatically with
reality as it is at the moment. To call
it a law seems to me tendentious and unwarranted, especially given the wildly
contestable content of this supposed law.
To call the pragmatic adjustments we make to life in a cursed world “the
moral law,” or “the natural law,” is to overstate and to misstate the case. By calling it a “law,” we imply a lawgiver. Natural lawyers assert that the lawgiver in
this case is God even though it might be nothing more than our own adjustments
to a cursed universe, adjustments generated by us, not by Him. We, not He, might be the lawgivers in
question. I say we are.
Again, I am not saying there is no moral law. I am saying that the alleged law in view here
might just as truly come from earth as from heaven, from us as from Him. If it comes from us, then to call it a
binding moral law is unjustifiable. To
me, it looks more like a pragmatic adjustment to cursed terrestrial life than
it does the righteousness of God as manifested historically in Christ both in
the things He said and the things He did, of which nature is a distant and pathetic
imitation, occasionally even a contradiction.
To call this human pursuit of terrestrial utility
“natural law,” therefore, begs the question.
Simply because we prefer it, or simply because we think it works, does
not mean we actually have understood nature or arrived by nature’s tutelage at a
proper understanding of righteousness.
Furthermore, insofar as our actions display our real beliefs and our
real nature, and insofar as our actions are the opposite of what we profess (and
certainly of what Christ embodies and professes), then our assertions cannot be
trusted. Our actions make our moral
assertions blush. On that count,
newspaper headlines, not the alleged Tao, tell us the real laws of nature, of
which human nature is so significant a part.
Despite the tendentious and honorific name we sometimes give it, we
might be dealing with unnatural and contra-natural law, namely the law of
fallen humanity and its wicked desires trying to live more efficiently and with
less trouble.
In short, the laws of revelation, not the alleged laws
of a now-cursed universe, are the laws of God and of morality. They are found best by reading the Bible and
by looking to Christ, not by compiling moral approximations and commonalities
from among the nations, as Lewis did. It
seems to me that Lewis has overplayed those commonalities and underplayed the
differences -- (1) the differences between the various versions of alleged
natural law found around the world, and (2) the difference between how nature
itself (including human nature) actually works and what we say it teaches.
What is called “natural law” often seems to be nothing
more than subjectivism and preference let loose upon the world, a fact
evidenced by the enormous variety of things called by the name “natural law.” What we have before us looks more like a
natural law ideology than a natural law.
What we have is often simply a subjective projection imposed onto the
natural world, a projection by which we become a law unto ourselves. That the natural law theorist must keep
trying to convince his or her fellows about the truth and specific content of
this or that version of natural law might indicate the opposite point: Maybe what they call natural law is not what
they think it is. At times, what’s
called “natural law” seems both counter-natural and tendentiously selective. It seems to reflect, at best, only a small part
of nature, only a part of what this cursed world is really like and actually
teaches (if it teaches anything).
Natural law theorists seem to ignore that nature is “red in tooth and claw.”
They do not advise us to be likewise
red, and yet they claim nature is the source of their teaching. They ignore that the real way of the natural
world is to feed on others, devouring them for our own ends, a practice natural
law theorists strongly abhor among human beings while at the same time telling
those human beings to follow the natural law.
(1) Because nature is cursed and is not now what it once
was, (2) because cursed nature does not function in the way it was designed to
function, and (3) because fallen humans themselves are part of nature, and
subject to the curse, any supposed moral law drawn from nature and from human
beings ought to be advanced with the greatest possible humility and reluctance,
if at all, especially because those who advance it suffer under the same
burdens of curse and of sin as do all things, only in the case of human beings that
sin and curse are delusion inducing. As
Kant astutely observed, out of timber so crooked as that from which we are
made, nothing straight can be carved.
Understanding righteousness is a branch of
theology. That means it is a matter of supernatural
revelation, not something deduced unaided from a cursed world by unabashedly
sinful rebels. Righteousness, therefore,
must be understood and pursued on a distinctly Biblical basis, not on some
other. Just as revelation is an event, a
sovereign Divine disclosure of God to us, so also is righteousness a matter of
Divine Self-disclosure. It rests not upon
the musings and deductions of fallen human nature or on the workings of a
cursed world, but upon Divine revelation and Divine act, most specifically and
fully in Christ. Righteousness is a
Christological, not philosophical, category.
Righteousness is an unnatural
category. By Christ, not by our own contemplation
of humanity in the abstract, or humanity in nature, or nature without humanity,
do we know what righteousness is, what righteousness does, and what righteousness
looks like. We learn it from Christ, not
from cursed nature as decoded by sinful and rebellious minds. When we do learn righteousness from Christ,
we learn that righteousness means apparently counter-natural things like loving
your enemies, which means dying for them, just as you would do for your
friends. Righteousness looks like Christ
on the cross, the just dying for the unjust, the innocent pleading for the
forgiveness and benefit of the guilty. It
does not look like the survival of the fittest.
It looks like the self-chosen and self-sacrificial death of the highest
and the best on behalf of the most unworthy at the moment of their greatest
unworthiness. This revelation of
righteousness comes to us not in nature but in Christ and is suffused with
grace and redemption. Righteousness is
not a humanly-deduced system drawn by sinners from a selective and tendentious reading
of cursed nature.
In other words, just as righteousness is a part of
Biblical theology, natural law is a part of natural theology. The same problems that obtain in natural theology
obtain in natural law, namely, fallen human creatures themselves. What the natural theologian is to natural
theology the natural lawyer is to natural law -- its deformer. Cursed nature does not now teach the
righteousness taught by the kenotic Christ and, even if it did, the natural
lawyers would foul it up. Nature does
not teach what Christ teaches, and what it does teach they get wrong. They follow their self-induced delusions into
greater and denser obscurity, not light.
To do natural law well, they’d have to free themselves from themselves. But unless God frees them, that freedom
remains impossible. It is impossible
because, like us all, natural lawyers wallow in superbia, the region of spiritual pride and, therefore, of
delusion. It might be, after all, that
nature does not teach morality at all.
Do not confuse what nature does or does no teach with what the natural
lawyers teach. They want to speak for
nature, but they seem to do a bad job of it.
Closely related to natural law is conscience, a thing
now as fallen and immersed in sin as everything else about us. Conscience requires grace and redemption,
without which it can never be fully trusted because it is not now what it once was
and will be again. Given its currently defective
condition, given its radical fallenness, it cannot be trusted. More often than we know, it lies. I am willing to admit that the presence of
conscience is universal if others are willing to admit that its universality is
characterized by moral ignorance and shameless rebellion.
To purge the mind of its debilitating sin is not as easy
as the natural law theorists seem to imagine.
They underplay the fact that humanists, modernists, postmodernists, and
others sometimes also believe in natural law but read it and apply it quite
differently. If the are Catholics, then
they do not realize that the interpretive pluralism they descry in
Protestantism they welcome and endorse in natural law. The competing and alternately prevailing
views of nature and of human nature are sometimes profoundly varied, whether we
mean those of Nietzsche, Freud, Rousseau, Marx, Sartre, Jaspers, Sade, or
Aristotle. In their uniquely bent ways,
all are doing natural theology and natural law, the resultant content and moral
requirements of which seem impenetrably murky, even chaotic.
That chaos raises one final and related
point, this one from a long-standing hermeneutical debate within
jurisprudence: In order to adjudicate
cases well, judges need a hermeneutic by which to interpret and to apply
positive law. Jurisprudential thinkers
debate over what hermeneutic that ought to be.
Natural lawyers and natural judges face the same challenge. They too require a hermeneutic by which to discern
the content and moral demands of the alleged natural law. They need to tell us precisely what that
hermeneutic is and how (and from where) it is gotten. Without that, there seems little safeguard,
if any, against the self-seeking, morally-demented, natural lawyers and natural
judges who impose themselves upon the “text” of natural law, being themselves
in this field of thought exactly what they abhor elsewhere, namely judicial
activists who make the law a vehicle for their own agenda. Without a clearly articulated hermeneutic for
reading and applying natural law, ambiguity reigns. This elusive and shape-shifting natural law
cannot be the basis for state action, something for which natural law advocates
frequently advance it. Following nature
more closely will not cure the state of its evils. Justice is Christological at the root, not
anthropological or political. Justice is
rooted in Christ, not in us or in our cursed world. Anthropocentric law and government are no
better than anthropocentric theology. Both
are upside down. Until we are told
explicitly how the self-appointed natural law judges move from (1) an
observation of nature to (2) a determination of what nature teaches, and then
to (3) a determination of how it ought to be most prudently applied in the
political arena, I remain implacably skeptical.
Nothing I’ve seen to date convinces me to be anything else.
Natural Law: Part 2
Before natural lawyers start
pontificating about natural law and its alleged lessons, they’d better consider
all the ways that nature is now unnatural.
They’d better know the difference between nature as created and nature
as cursed. They must understand the
difference between what nature is now and what nature ought to be, once was,
and will be again.
All any natural law advocate has ever
seen is unnatural, or sub-natural, nature.
Further, the natural lawyers need to understand that they themselves are
unnatural, that they universally are fallen, wicked, sinful, and
rebellious. They are unnatural and
wicked creatures reasoning on the basis of unnatural nature in order to tell us
about real natural law, as if, despite all their incapacities and habitual
immoralities, natural lawyers were objective, disinterested, and reliable on
the point.
I’m not convinced.
The natural law crowd does not know and
therefore cannot articulate the difference between natural nature and unnatural
nature, whether in themselves or in the world at large. Those differences are perhaps
unimaginable. Those differences are
something akin to the difference between ancient Eden and the Arabian
desert. Such differences are depicted in
the eschatological image of the lion lying down with the lamb. Shockingly, and to us quite unnaturally, the
lamb will not be inside the lion when
it happens. That eschatological nature of peace and ours seem to operate on a
quite different basis. The details of
that difference we do not know. Natural
lawyers have never seen nature not under a curse, nature unburdened, nature
natural. They have never seen themselves
not under that debilitating and burdensome curse or without the noetic effects
of sin. Apart from God telling them,
they cannot know and do not know what real lessons real nature might teach, if
any, and how those lessons differ from those supposedly taught now by a cursed
nature and interpreted by the unnatural lawyers who fancy themselves able to
speak for it.
When unnatural lawyers explain the
“laws” of unnatural nature, they do so in a tendentious and highly selective
manner. They do not tell you for your
instruction and imitation that nature is vicious, that it is “red in tooth and
claw,” that its law is normally to kill in order to live. They do not tell you that nature is doomed,
that it is winding down to a cold, motionless, amorphous mass at a low
temperature, that in the end all natural stories reduce to precisely
nothing. That is, they do not tell you
that natural law is murderous and nihilistic.
Rather, they want to use nature to teach the things that they want it to
teach, not what it actually does teach, if it teaches anything all.
In nature as it is, the law is either
to kill or be killed, even though the natural lawyers will not teach you to live
in that brutal fashion, and would be appalled if you seriously undertook to do
so. But the nature they trumpet
functions that way.
Indeed, even if living things in nature
escape being killed, they still die. In
other words, selfish predation and both individual and cosmic nihilism are the
order of the day in nature, even if the unnatural lawyers don’t recommend that
you live accordingly while they crow about natural law. Unnatural lawyers publically trumpet natural
law while ignoring much of it, maybe most of it. They often alter it to fit their own
agenda. With regard to the real laws of
contemporary nature they are what they despise others being with regard to
positive law: They are legal and
judicial activists. They push their own
truncated agenda onto the law and subjugate the agenda of nature’s current
constitution. The so-called natural law
advocates are unnatural, indeed anti-natural.
If you want to know real right and real
wrong -- and you should -- then you need to go to God’s Word, not to the
current workings of a cursed and therefore unnatural natural order or to the
self-aggrandizing and twisted mental gymnastics of unnatural lawyers.
Natural Law: Part 3
I adduce here two stanzas from Charles
Kingsley. The first depicts natural law;
the second supernatural law.
This
is the natural law:
“The heath eats up the green grass and delicate herbs;
The pines eat up the heath. The grub the pine;
The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;
And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,
Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak”
This
is the supernatural law:
“Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,
Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice
All to Himself?
Nay, but Himself to all;
Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,
What ‘tis to be a man – to give, not take;
To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.”
