Martin Luther dismissed reason as the ‘devil's bride’ and a ‘petty whore’, a stance often seen as consolidating his opposition to Roman Catholic and scholastic theology. Reason is central to natural law theory, which (as expounded by Thomas Aquinas and still dominant in Roman Catholic thinking) bestows upon reason the ability to discern certain universal laws inherent in human nature, as endowed by God. Those who broke with Rome at the Reformation regarded its legal theories with suspicion; Reformers doubted the power and ability of human reason, wounded fatally by sin, to identify the purposes of God, and were concerned instead to give precedence to the written Word of God in the Bible.
While much may be objected to in this over-simplified description, on the whole Christianity and Natural Law leaves intact the image of the traditional catholic–protestant divide. What the essays contributed to this book by a distinguished range of theologians and lawyers do offer is a nuanced survey of attitudes to natural law across and within denominations (and religions) and some challenges to the popular view of natural law and where it is found.
One surprise is the extent to which key sixteenth-century Reformers remained attached to the notion of natural law. Luther, for all his polemical writings about reason in regard to faith, saw an important role for reason in guiding the lives of individuals and the community, and in working out the implications of the ‘Golden Rule’ to love God and neighbour. Even more notable is the extent to which Calvin clung to natural law categories, speaking of ‘natural law’ that was ‘engraved upon the minds of men’, and drawing heavily upon it in his Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541. These foundational realities, even if neglected in more recent times, are still reference points for protestant theologians.
Equally remarkable is the extent to which the theology of non-Roman Catholic denominations can be open to natural law categories, despite antipathy to its perceived Roman origins. For Methodists, the depravity of the human condition following the Fall is mitigated by the mercy and goodness of God which forms part of our nature. Language of ‘human rights’ current in the Baptist tradition shades into natural law, while Reformed theologians are finding valuable categories derived from natural law to address moral and political issues. Moreover, those who would privilege Scripture as rule of law must account for the fact that the Bible itself acknowledges natural law (‘I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them’; Hebrews 10:16), and Anglicanism in particular underlines the important role of reason in the interpretation of Scripture itself. In this light, as an interesting essay on ‘Natural law in the ecumenical movement’ suggests, natural law provides a promising new category for ecumenical exploration.
Nevertheless, historical survivals and foundational texts are one thing, contemporary practice another. Even in those traditions – Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed – where a strong sense of natural law remained after the Reformation, the Enlightenment downgraded natural law in favour of an individualistic account of human discernment and a ‘bottom-up’ view of how society is to be constructed, thereby favouring the rise of legal positivism. Alongside this, those emphasising Scripture as the supreme rule of faith and life find no place for a natural law alongside the written law of God – a stance mirrored in Judaic and Islamic insistence on the primacy of their sacred texts.
The picture revealed in most of the essays is of natural law facing an uphill struggle to establish itself as an active ecumenical category. For the Orthodox, the scarcity of treatment of the subject in patristic or modern texts leads to the conclusion that natural law ‘does not form part of the Orthodox tradition’. In Lutheranism, despite the attitude of Luther himself, natural law (in as much as it survives at all) has become a theoretical, rather than a practical, concept. Baptist and Reformed traditions, which originally featured natural law in their systems of church order, now prefer to reference divine law embodied in the Word of God as set forth in Scripture. Even contemporary Anglicanism, where the link to scholastic natural law remained strongest at the Reformation, rarely refers to the topic. The towering figure of Richard Hooker and his elevation of reason offered a firm connection to Aquinas’ natural law theory; together with Hooker's critical and scholarly refinements of the authority of Scripture, this ought to have ensured a privileged role for natural law within Anglicanism. Instead, there has been a diminution of its relevance, as views on the role of Scripture have ebbed and flowed. A renewed emphasis on the distinctiveness of Christianity, rather than a value system open to all thinking people, has further subdued thinking on natural law. At most, in these traditions natural law is implicit, and a useful theoretical category for modern scholarship concerned with rights and liberties.
Most tellingly, several essays in the book make clear that on vexed contemporary moral issues, such as homosexuality, theological anthropology and even the ordination of women, natural law plays a divisive issue, offering no consensus between (or within) various traditions. Attempts to ground natural law in a non-deistic and ‘self-evident’ outlook, which might have some appeal to wider civil legislature, are controversial and, rather than providing a secure basis for positive law, assume a monitoring role of exploring the reasonableness of positive laws, which significantly alters the traditional role of natural law.
Yet the outlook is not as bleak as perhaps this review has presented it. Rather than considering natural law as a mediaeval throwback, the essays in this book invite conversation and exploration. The authors boldly test the notion of natural law in the legal systems of different denominations (and Abrahamic faiths) and uncover openings and suppositions that suggest further investigation. Finally, the book calls for a creative coming-together of different disciplines of religious law, secular jurisprudence and philosophy of religion to create a coherent philosophy of law and religion. To what extent that is a realistic proposal may be open to question, but of the enduring power and value of natural law within the range of Christian traditions, and its potential in ecumenical exploration, this book makes a valuable and inspiring record.
