In this week’s commentary, “Protestants and Natural Law: A Forgotten Legacy,” I ask the question: “So, why don’t Protestants like Natural Law?” The short answer is: There isn’t a short answer. Tracing out the reasons that twentieth-century Protestants have given for why natural law is off limits is complicated and can take a person in many different directions.
In my judgment, the great tragedy in the Protestant rejection of natural law is not merely that Protestants (and particularly evangelicals) have had tremendous difficulty in forming an adequate public language to address moral issues but that the loss of catholicity in Protestant ethics only reinforces the “suspended animation” that many Protestants already experience in relation to the historic Christian church. The sense of being lonely, rootless, and disconnected that some Protestants have bemoaned can be relieved, I would argue, precisely by revisiting key aspects of Protestant and Christian identity from the past.
Thomas Oden can help Protestants to recover a sense of their catholicity with the Church of all ages on the topic of general revelation and natural law. My argument is that Protestants don’t have to look beyond many of their own denominational traditions to discover a once vibrant tradition of natural law. Until fairly recently, some type of natural-law theory was used as a bridge to connect the Christian faith and culture, the church and the world.
Though natural law holds great promise as a bridge to connect the Christian faith and culture, it is also no panacea for the hard work of “translating” moral ideas into a useable public vocabulary. For more on the promises and limitations associated with natural law, and for why twentieth-century Protestants have been so skeptical, read the entire commentary here.
An extended series about “Protestants and Natural Law” can be found on this blog.
