Natural Law--it's so hot right now

But Protestants still have a lot of work to do

A generation ago, the phrase “Protestant natural law” was all but an oxymoron. Most evangelical Protestants (if they weren’t full-on antinomians) believed the only kind of law worth talking about was biblical law. And mainline Protestants, while certainly more than open to looking beyond Scripture for their moral guidance (heh) had happily boarded the train of the postmodern rejection of nature. “Natural law” was seen as just another unbiblical Roman Catholic idea, like purgatory; and Roman Catholics themselves assumed that it was one of those bedrock tenets of the faith that Protestants had rejected at the Reformation.

Although there had been dissenting scholars lurking in the shadows all along, I date the beginning of the sea-change to Stephen Grabill’s 2007 Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. A product of Richard Muller’s oasis of Reformed ressourcement at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grabill’s work was soon taken up and amplified by a growing cadre of other scholars, including David VanDrunen and indeed myself. Almost concurrently, a similar revival was underway in Lutheran circles, as evidenced by the 2011 Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal. Publishers like Christian’s Library Press (overseen by Muller students) and The Davenant Press began putting out classic texts from the Protestant natural law tradition, like the works of Hemmingsen, Zanchi, Hooker, and Hale. Although these translation efforts only scratched the surface, they sufficed to explode the idea that natural law was some foreign undigested mass in the Protestant tradition, waiting to be purged by more thorough reformation—as Barth had claimed.

Indeed, as the influence of Barth wained in the broader theological academy, it became clear, as Jennifer Herdt wrote in the 2019 Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics,

We are now in a position to see this conception of a deeply ingrained Protestant hostility to natural law ethics as a short-lived aberration, extending from the end of World War I to the end of the century. In fact, the magisterial wing of the Protestant Reformation continued to employ the natural law tradition as a lingua franca for ethical reflection, even as that tradition was reinterpreted within new understandings of the Fall and of justification.

At the same time, as evangelicals more broadly sought to engage the public square and looked for exemplars of how to do so with wisdom and winsome, they found themselves, through the efforts of leaders such as Richard John Neuhaus, drawn into regular conversation with leading Catholic intellectuals, especially those representing the so-called “new natural law” tradition, such as John Finnis and Robbie George. Through George’s indefatigable labors of intellectual community-building, the conservative Protestant world have been seeded with ambassadors for natural law, such as Adam MacLeod in the legal academy and Andrew Walker among the Southern Baptists.

In the past year alone, two excellent new introductions to natural law for Protestants were published, David VanDrunen’s Natural Law: A Short Companion, and Andrew Walker’s Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good. I have reviews of both forthcoming in Ad Fontes. And of course, there is the forthcoming Natural Law: Five Views, in which I contributed a “Reformed Natural Law” chapter, alongside Joel Biermann’s Lutheran perspective, Michael Pakaluk’s Old Natural Law perspective, Melissa Moschella’s New Natural Law view, and Peter Leithart’s “Anti-Natural Law.”

Still, in my view all this revival has thus far mostly succeeded in simply overcoming the barrier of reflexive skepticism among most Protestant intellectuals and a growing number of pastors. It has not yet filtered out into the broader evangelical consciousness, and my Catholic colleagues are regularly nonplussed when I mention the phrase “Protestant natural law.” This revival also remains, for the most part, at a far lower level of philosophical sophistication than most Roman Catholic discussions, and has only just begun to grapple with the generation-long debate between “Old” and “New” natural law perspectives among Catholic intellectuals. Most importantly of all, it has yet to really articulate fully and persuasively what I think is the distinctive Protestant contribution to natural law discourse: that natural law, far from being an alternative mode of revelation outside of Scripture, is a necessary hermeneutic for interpreting Scripture, and is itself shaped by our reading of Scripture.

That is to say, we cannot think in terms of two distinct sources of knowledge or tracks of morality; natural revelation and special revelation are always in mutual dialogue, with each helping shape our reading of the other in order to draw out a fuller understanding of the human condition and God’s will for the world. We need to get beyond thinking of natural law as primarily a tool for engaging the unbelieving world on neutral common ground—because, as we well know now, the unbelieving world does not seem to accept the reality of nature any more than it accepts the authority of Scripture. As I argue in my chapter for Natural Law: Five Views then, “part of the enduring value of natural law is its role for moral deliberation within the Christian community.”

If you’re interested in exploring this further, I’d encourage you to sign up for my course this fall at Davenant Hall, “Natural Law and Scriptural Authority.” This is the fifth year I’ve taught this course, and it’s always an extremely rich discussion, with students coming from all kinds of different walks of life—pastors, grad students, and even home educators. Each week we move back and forth between classic texts from the Christian tradition (Aquinas, Calvin, Hooker, etc.) and key Scripture passages. Hope to see some of you there!

Newly Published

No pieces went live in the last week, but I have lots coming down the pipe:

Coming down the Pipe

• “Politics and Faithful Citizenship”: This summer, I’ve been working on putting together a mini-course for churches on how to think about politics, government, law, and citizenship through a theological lens. I’ll be teaching it at Holy Trinity Raleigh (ACNA), August 16-17; St. Andrews Anglican, Mt. Pleasant (ACNA), September 13-14; and City Church of Richmond (PCA), September 20-21. If you live near one of these churches, I’d love to see you, or, if you think your church might profit from a similar course, don’t hesitate to reach out!

• “Is Porn the New Normal?”: My upcoming column at WORLD Opinions, which should publish tomorrow, reflects on the scandal created by porn star Amber Rose taking the stage at the RNC last week, and why we shouldn’t be at all surprised by it. Unless conservatives re-assess their priorities in a hurry, we can expect digital prostitution to become about as quotidian and unremarkable as cable news.

• “How to Be Pro-Life in a Pro-Choice World”: Following this, my next WORLD Opinions column considers how pro-life conservatives should respond to the new political reality: lacking national party commitment to their cause. “Depressing as this moment may seem,” I write, “we can at least be grateful for the clarity it provides: you cannot have a pro-life politics without a pro-life culture.”

• Last week, I recorded an interview with NC Family Radio that expanded upon the themes in my WORLD column a few weeks ago, “Let’s Get Back to Governing.” Radio isn’t my preferred medium, but for those who prefer listening to reading, the 16-minute interview sketches out some ideas for conservatives who want to try to build consensus for practical problem-solving in their states and communities.

• As I mentioned last week, Virginia is currently soliciting public comment on how to best adopt policies for phone-free schools. I’ve written an op-ed which I hope to place in a major VA newspaper in support of this cause, “Let’s Strike a Blow for Phone Freedom in Virginia,” in which I take on the strongest argument against such a policy—that it bypasses the freedom of parents to make their own decisions on phone use. I’ve never done an op-ed like this, so we’ll see if it gets picked up; if not, I might just publish it here.

• As mentioned above, I’m honored to be a contributor to the forthcoming Natural Law: Five Views book, co-edited by my colleagues Andrew Walker and Ryan Anderson. I was asked to represent the “Reformed Natural Law” view, although I interpreted this remit to include the Anglican tradition. The book isn’t quite available for pre-order yet, but it is on Amazon, so you can bookmark it!

  

On the Bookshelf

• Patrick Deneen, Regime Change (2023): So I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of this, and enjoying it much more than I expected. I was particularly surprised that Deneen opens up by calling to account the sins and vices of both the elites and the populists, refusing the simplistic anti-elite rhetoric and romanticization of the “common man” that has become common on the New Right. On the other hand, he quickly loses this balance and focuses all of his attention on denouncing the elites so…I’ll have to wait to the end to see if he ever pivots back. His typology of “progressive liberalism,” “conservative liberalism,” and Marxism in terms of a shared commitment to progressivism, but with different understandings of the role of the masses vis-a-vis the elites, is very insightful I think, if, of course, a vast oversimplification of the last 300 years of Western political theory and practice.

• Yuval Levin, American Covenant (2024): Finished this up last week; it was well worth the time. I’m currently typing up notes on it and preparing to write a review. The final chapter was worth the price of the book and deeply moving in its stubborn commitment to hope amidst a profoundly dysfunctional social and political landscape. He offers this bracing warning to the current catastrophists on both Left and Right:

  “We now all too easily persuade ourselves that this moment, unlike past ones in our politics, is an emergency—that we are on the edge of an abyss so that the normal rules must be put aside, and the imperative to compromise and bargain must be suspended. We cannot stomach another round of incremental adjustments. We want this to be the moment of the decisive showdown. But that desire is misgueded, and we have not reckoned with its stakes. We still can’t quite grasp the danger of genuine disunity—of a fundamental and violent breakdown of our political order. All those who call for breaking the boundaries of our constitutional framework and for throwing away the restraints on majority power are minorities themselves, and yet they act as if they do not see that.”

Recommended Reads

Unsurprisingly given my current interests, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on tech stuff. Here’s two particularly interesting articles I’d commend to you.

• “Christendom After Comcast”: Magnificent essay by John Ehrett at Ad Fontes/Commonwealth a few months ago, which argues that nearly all debates over retrieval, Christendom, political theology, etc. on the Christian Right are in some measure LARPing, simply because all fail to reckon with the dramatically changed communication landscape of the modern world. “Christians obviously do not communicate among themselves in the same way they did in the Middle Ages, or even early modernity. Basically nobody does. And this is a politically consequential change. The residents of past “Christendom”—Catholic or Protestant—did not inhabit a world saturated by difference. One might be born and live and die within a few miles of one’s family home. This was an age before telegraphs, before televisions, before an internet constantly bringing news of the foreign or allowing the foreign to present itself….The net effect of new communications technology has been a steadily increasing deluge of exposure to diverse beliefs and ideas, which inevitably challenge one’s own….There is no going back to the isolation of village and parish—at least not digitally.” These short excerpts do not do justice to what is really an extraordinarily incisive analysis. At the end, Ehrett gestures toward the idea that Christians might voluntarily re-establish structures of digital accountability within their local churches in order to mitigate against the worst effects of this shift. This suggestion resonates with a paper I presented at the SCE a few years ago, “‘You Discern My Thoughts from Afar’: Secrecy, Transparency, and Moral Agency in a Digital Age,” in which I reflected on the replacement of accountability with surveillance in the digital age. I’ll probably share this essay on this Substack in the coming weeks.

• “Why We Need Amistics for AI”: Excellent piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis by Brian Boyd. My son recently was asking what I thought about AI; was I optimistic or pessimistic? I told him that although I thought that AI held immense promise to be used for good, it had arrived at a bad moment in history, appearing in the midst of a vacuum of moral reasoning and communal agency that rendered it very unlikely that we would use AI well. Boyd agrees: “In America today, we are bad at conscious decisionmaking about technology….Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an ‘ethics of’ this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow.” We must learn from the Amish—not in the sense of necessarily being technological minimalists, but of being self-conscious and proactive in terms of the technologies we adopt and how we use them.

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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.