Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'reason'

September 25, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 1

This post will introduce what I intend to be an extended series concerned with recovering and reviving the catholicity of Protestant ethics. Protestant catholicity? Isn’t this an oxymoron? It may come as a surprise in light of a common stereotype of Protestant theology, but the older Protestant understanding of reason, the divine will, and natural law actually provided a bulwark against the notion of a capricious God, unbounded by truth and goodness, as Pope Benedict recently pointed out in relation to Islam’s understanding of God. Continue Reading...
August 03, 2006

Protestants and Natural Law, Part 8

To conclude this series, let’s recap what is meant by natural law by parsing the term. The “nature” referred to in natural law can mean different things, but I mean by it the divinely engrafted knowledge of morality in human reason and conscience, that which all human beings share by virtue of their creation in God’s image. Continue Reading...
July 10, 2006

Protestants and Natural Law, Part 3

In Part 2, we saw that modern Protestant skepticism toward reason is one of the most significant factors in the rejection of natural law. Divine command ethics, particularly of the variety espoused by Karl Barth, quickly came to dominate the field of Protestant theological ethics in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Continue Reading...
June 29, 2006

Protestants and Natural Law, Part 2

In Part 1, we saw that the infrastructure of Protestant social teaching is not nearly as sophisticated as Roman Catholic social teaching and that natural law has often been viewed as a bridge between the church and the world. Continue Reading...
June 14, 2006

Follies of the Wise

Here’s a link to the introduction to Frederick Crews’ new book, Follies of the Wise, which includes the following statement: Having made a large intellectual misstep in younger days, I am aware that rationality isn’t an endowment but an achievement that can come undone at any moment. Continue Reading...