Conservatives, Liberals, and the Natural Law, II

The more serious controversy over natural law has been fought out on the theological level; and here, above all, there is manifesting itself a tendency toward a rapprochement that seems to me of the highest significance. The attack on the classical Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Thomist doctrine was grounded essentially in Reformation theology, although it had its antecedents in Ockham and his school. Not that Luther or Calvin ever denied the natural law; on the contrary, they both affirmed it in explicit terms. They both, however, also protested against the excessively intellectualistic form in which the doctrine came to them, which saw the natural law as a rational system deduced by the rational mind from rational first principles. Over against this rationalism, Calvin insisted that, although “the seeds of them [the laws] are innate in all mankind, without any instructor or legislator,” actual historical man is so ravaged by the egocentric corruption of sin that, in fact, his reason is too clouded to discern the natural law and his will too perverted to observe it. Luther said very much the same thing. And modern theologians in the Reformed tradition, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, repeating this basic criticism, also emphasized the inability of the rationalistic natural law doctrine to do justice to man’s radical “freedom above and beyond all structure,” or to the ambiguities of the human situation and the contingencies of history. And, in the hands of the most radical of Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, the rejection of natural law semed to culminate in a thoroughgoing “situationalism,” in which the absolute demand of God came “vertically from above” (senkrecht von oben) to man in his concrete here-and-now situation, which was unique and therefore could not be subjected to any external rules or principles. This proved a very attractive position to many Christians who were chafing under what they felt to be a traditionalistic heteronomy, and who therefore welcomed the liberation that came to them through the Barthian transcendentalism.

Herberg

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Will Herberg

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The more serious controversy over natural law has been fought out on the theological level; and here, above all, there is manifesting itself a tendency toward a rapprochement that seems to me of the highest significance. The attack on the classical Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Thomist doctrine was grounded essentially in Reformation theology, although it had its antecedents in Ockham and his school. Not that Luther or Calvin ever denied the natural law; on the contrary, they both affirmed it in explicit terms. They both, however, also protested against the excessively intellectualistic form in which the doctrine came to them, which saw the natural law as a rational system deduced by the rational mind from rational first principles. Over against this rationalism, Calvin insisted that, although “the seeds of them [the laws] are innate in all mankind, without any instructor or legislator,” actual historical man is so ravaged by the egocentric corruption of sin that, in fact, his reason is too clouded to discern the natural law and his will too perverted to observe it. Luther said very much the same thing. And modern theologians in the Reformed tradition, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, repeating this basic criticism, also emphasized the inability of the rationalistic natural law doctrine to do justice to man’s radical “freedom above and beyond all structure,” or to the ambiguities of the human situation and the contingencies of history. And, in the hands of the most radical of Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, the rejection of natural law semed to culminate in a thoroughgoing “situationalism,” in which the absolute demand of God came “vertically from above” (senkrecht von oben) to man in his concrete here-and-now situation, which was unique and therefore could not be subjected to any external rules or principles. This proved a very attractive position to many Christians who were chafing under what they felt to be a traditionalistic heteronomy, and who therefore welcomed the liberation that came to them through the Barthian transcendentalism.

Herberg