· Natural Law holds that mankind, by reason, can discover concepts of goodness, righteousness, justice and morality.
o
There is truth to this in terms of the “law of
God” being on the heart of each man. An
illustration might be found in the United Nations “universal declaration of
human rights” drafted in 1948. It spoke
of “a universal consciousness of law” that demands justice, and of “a response
of the general human consciousness of right and justice” (p188).
o
Roman Catholic teaching sees two realms of
eternal law: Natural Law, the source of which is reason, and Divine
Law, the source of which is revelation.
As before, the problem for Rome is this: it is founded on the reasonable
nature of man, which simply cannot but strive for the good (acc. to RCC). Is there such a conscious “demand” for
justice? It is possible to make a “program
of principle” which will show all people what ought to be? It is really true that these ideals directly
link up with universal opinion, because man is fundamentally an “idealist?” Can there be Law without God, and without special
revelation?
o
The Reformation answer was this. Calvin affirmed the possibility of natural
Law. “The predominant aspect … is not the goodness of human nature, but the
goodness of God’s law and ordinances.”
Man, who naturally cannot subject himself to the law of God (Rom.
8:7; 1 Cor. 2:14) still stands for right and justice, for punishing that which
is evil and rewarding that which is good (Rom. 13:3-4). This is indeed remarkable. So every society agrees that murder and
thievery and taking another man’s wife is unjust. But for Calvin, the problem is that man “isolates
laws and norms from the Lawgiver and in his apostasy uses them as though they
were his material and property. He does
not do so in obedience but still in his actions, in his conscience, in his
judging others and in his protest against complete anarchy, he manifests the
superior power of God’s work and law.” (As we write this, it is against the
historical backdrop of the Palestinian group Hamas ruthlessly killing over a
thousand Jews and the resulting argument about who was at fault, Hamas or
Israel. Of course, the Holocaust had the
same ‘confusion’.)
o In
the end, the problem is that man cannot accurately understand his conscience
nor naturally subject himself to God’s law (Ro. 8:7; 1 Cor. 2:14). Here is a concluding summary from Everett Harrison
in Bakers Dict. of Theology:
The biblical
ground for this notion is found in Romans 2:13-14. This indicates that man
knows by creation what is right and wrong and stands under the guidance and
correction of conscience. From this it has been deduced that non-Christian
ethics, e.g., as summarized in the cardinal virtues, may be used as a basis for
the ethics of revelation, or that the two may be regarded as identical, or even
(by Rationalists and Humanists) that the natural law is preferable to the biblical
and makes the Christian revelation ethically unnecessary. The argument of Romans,
however, is that the natural law, though it is a fact and may find partial fulfillments,
is primarily an instrument to condemn the sinner who does not truly perceive or
keep it, driving him to Christ as the end of the law for righteousness (Rom.
10:4) and therefore the beginning of real knowledge and observance of the
divine will. It cannot, then, be made an
independent basis, alternative or substitute for the law of Christ.
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