Related to Stephen’s last post, the result of this Googlefight speaks for itself: Emil Brunner versus Karl Barth.
By the way, Wipf and Stock Publishers have reprinted the classic exchange of the Barth/Brunner debate, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth.
So, why don’t Protestants like Natural Law?
The short answer is: there isn’t a short answer.
So starting now, and continuing for who knows how long, I plan to tell the story of the Protestant struggle over natural law, from complete rejection by Karl Barth in the 1930s to the recent hint of renewed interest among Protestant intellectuals. My view is that natural law is a forgotten legacy of the Reformation — one that contemporary Protestants desperately need to rediscover. Along the way, I’ll respond to standard Protestant objections and discuss what limitations the Reformers perceived in natural law.
For much of Christian history, some type of natural-law theory has been used as a bridge to connect the Christian faith and culture, the church and the world. But in recent times, Protestant churches and theologians have rejected natural law as a way of showing their differences with the tradition of Roman Catholic moral theology.
The scope and unity of Roman Catholic social teaching is impressive, but without the recurrent appeal to natural law, it would lack a skeletal structure upon which to build its body of social teaching. Modern Protestant social ethics, by contrast, has no skeletal infrastructure of comparable strength. Unlike Roman Catholic moral theology, which is done in the context of the magisterial (or teaching) authority of the church, Protestant ethics has never had a “supreme court of appeals” to decide what’s licit and illicit. While the Bible is the principal authority in Protestant ethics, the matter of determining “authoritative” moral teaching is complex and subject to personal interpretation. To a fault, I might add.
In his opening address at the first Christian Social Congress in 1891, the Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper emphasized the catholicity of natural law in relation to Pope Leo XIII’s new encyclical Rerum Novarum. “We must admit, to our shame,” said Kuyper, “that the Roman Catholics are far ahead of us in their study of the social problem. Indeed, very far ahead. The action of the Roman Catholics should spur us to show more dynamism. The encyclical Rerum novarum of Leo XIII states the principles which are common to all Christians, and which we share with our Roman Catholic compatriots.”
At the heart of Rerum novarum and the recent encyclical Deus caritas est, by Pope Benedict XVI, is an appeal to reason and human nature, but not in a way that denigrates faith or revealed truth. “From God’s standpoint,” insists the pope, “faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly.” The Christian Church fulfills its responsibility to form consciences and to promote justice, when, as Benedict insists, social teaching is argued “on the basis of reason and natural law.”
Yesterday I looked at the worth of human life, especially as relative to that of animal life.
Today I want to refine the discussion about the value of human life, by making a fine terminological distinction. It’s become commonplace for theologians to speak of the “infinite value” of human life. Here are some examples from representatives of major traditions within Christianity. Rod Benson, director of the Centre for Christian Ethics at the Baptist-affiliated Morling College in Australia, contends that “every person is of infinite intrinsic value.”
“Animals are less valuable than human beings,” says John Martin, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at University College London (UCL). This seemingly uncontroversial statement is under fire, as Helene Guldberg at sp!ked writes, “There seems to be an emerging consensus within the scientific community that we should reject the philosophical outlook that says humans are ‘categorically superior’ to animals.”
Keith Burgess-Jackson, who blogs at The Conservative Philosopher, says he is “an egalitarian about interspecific value,” and passes along the following quote:
For many philosophers, the consideration that may loom largest here is the stubborn conviction that the lives of normal humans must be of greater value than the lives of many, if not all, nonhuman animals. Perhaps that conviction is unjustified; it has not yet been very satisfyingly defended. (David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 248)
Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer is famous for equating the moral value of animals with newborn human beings, although he claims that “the aim of my argument is to elevate the status of animals rather than to lower the status of any humans” (Practical Ethics, p. 77).
In defending the position that humans are to be valued more than animals, Martin asks the right question: “What is a human being?” He argues that the answer “requires both a biological and a philosophical analysis – in tandem,” and that “what sets us apart from all other animals… is our ability to generate creative, abstract thought – ‘and with that, poetry, music and the social networks that bind us together’.” In this, Martin is partly right. But the answer to his question needs a theological as well as biological and philosophical analysis. Read more on ‘Worth More than Many Sparrows’…
In some of my reading lately, a connection occurred to me of the sort that is so obvious once consciously realized that you feel almost idiotic for not making the linkage before. G. K. Chesterton considered logic to be a tool, an instrument of reason to be used only in service of the truth. He writes,
Entry #2 in Joe Carter’s Know Your Evangelicals Series is Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and founder of Call to Renewal.
The one-sentence summary? “While Wallis appears to be a genuine and passionate Christian he would do well to base his political views a bit more on the Bible and a bit less on leftist ideology.”
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, writes at NRO this week about the use of biblical texts in support of immigration liberalization by liberals, “Borders & the Bible: It’s not the gospel according to Hillary.”
I find this essay problematic on a number of levels. Klinghoffer first reprimands Hillary Clinton, among others, for quoting the Bible: “While the Left typically resists applying Biblical insights to modern political problems, liberals have seemed to make an exception for the immigrant issue.” But then, it isn’t really so much a problem that liberals have quoted the Bible, but they have done so in a way that Klinghoffer doesn’t like.
He says, “There is a problem, of course, with selective cherry-picking of Biblical verses to support the political cause of your choice. This, in fact, has become a favored tactic among advocates of ‘spiritual activism’ (as they’re called on the Left).” Now while I agree that “selective cherry-picking” is a problem, Klinghoffer can’t have it both ways. Either liberals don’t typically refer to Scripture and thus the use of the Bible in the immigration debate is an oddity, or they do typically quote Scripture as “a favored tactic” and do it in a selective and problematic way.
Klinghoffer continues, “If we want to take the Bible as a guide to crafting wise policies, that means trying our best to see Scripture as an organic whole with a unitary message.” Again, it appears that the problem with Hillary and others isn’t so much that they are using Scripture, but they are doing so in a bad way. We seem to have that cleared up.
Klinghoffer proceeds to show us how Scripture might actually be used as a guide to “crafting wise policies” with respect to immigration. He goes on to emphasize the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses) as “a highly political text, very much concerned with worldly questions of law and policy, including the treatment of citizens and non-citizens by a sovereign government comprising an executive branch (the king and his officers) and a judicial one (a council of elders).”
From this foundation, Klinghoffer draws two important conclusions. First, citing Rabbi Meir Soloveichik’s understanding of kosher laws, “we must always bear in mind that God created peoples and animals separate, with their differences, for reasons of His own.” Thus, “The colors of the rainbow create a beautiful visual array. When the same colors are mixed together haphazardly, on the other hand, their beauty is marred and muddied.” I’m not sure exactly what this means, but it has disturbing overtones. Read more on Hello, Pot? This is the Kettle……
In his fragmentary and incomplete Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer examines the reality of the will of God, which he contends come to us from Scripture in the form of four mandates: work, marriage, government, and church. Here’s a great summary of Bonhoeffer’s view of the mandate of the government or state, from his essay, “Christ, Reality, and Good,” pages 72-73:
ABC columnist and Temple professor John Allen Paulos has an interesting piece this week on a new paper outlining an economic theory of prostitution. Basically, the authors outline the incentives and patterns involved in the “world’s oldest profession” (a moniker I think is misleading, for the title truly belongs to gardening). I will let you read both the paper and the article yourself, because it is only Mr. Paulos’s conclusion I would like to discuss here:
Over at OrthodoxyToday.org, Fr. Theodore Stylianpoulos demolishes the media driven speculation that the so-called Gospel of Judas might somehow turn traditional Christianity on its head.
The Gospel of Judas is but another small window to Gnosticism, a hodgepodge of religious speculations that exploded on the scene during the second century. At that time, individual intellectuals or small and elitist groups around them, bothered by the basic story of the Bible, especially the violent God of the Old Testament and the scandalous death and resurrection of Jesus, generated their own religious philosophy. They combined Jewish, Christian and pagan elements to construct literally fantastic systems of speculation including astrology and magic. The core theme, found in the Gospel of Judas, is secret knowledge (gnosis) that leads to salvation.
This is Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Daily observances mark Christ’s passion and culminate in Great and Holy Friday and Saturday and, the Feast of Feasts, Pascha (Easter Sunday). In these services, one is struck by the unequivocal condemnation — both in the Gospel readings and in the hymns — of Judas’ deceit and betrayal and greed. Not a lot of nuance or reinterpretation of the Gnostic view here. This would only surprise someone completely unfamiliar with Church history and, in particular, the Ecumenical Councils. Fr. Stylianopoulos, the Archbishop Iakovos Professor of Orthodox Theology and Professor of New Testament at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, exposes the logical flaw behind a Gnostic interpretation of Judas’ suicide:
