What is Natural Law?

Natural law simply means God’s law in the nature of things.

Our focus in using this expression tends to be about morality—and usually public morality—however this “moral way that things are” is situated in the more general context of a singular universe in which God has joined the personal and impersonal, the morally significant and the merely causal. Thus the two propositions,

1. Men and women are biologically different from each other.

and

2. Men ought not want to become women, nor women want to become men.

These both belong to the realm of natural law, even though the first proposition more overtly refers to the metaphysics of sex—i.e., what is the case about men and women—whereas the second proposition strikes us more like a “moral” statement in the sense of referencing “values.” Natural law theory does not follow the modern divorce between the “ought” and the “is,” as if the category of “values” is utterly subjective and not driven by the objective way things are.

Natural Law and Reason

Now because the natural law tradition, most importantly in Aquinas, has always defined law as rational in itself and human reason as that which discerns this law,1 critics and newcomers alike tend to focus on the rational components of natural law without reflecting on the significance of this being the fabric of created reality external to finite minds. In short, to say “in the nature of things” in our definition is simply to say “the way things are.” If you believe in an objective “way things are,” then you believe in natural law at the most fundamental level. 

Such a definition strikes some as too simple. For instance, how does one distinguish between social conventions and the natural law if this is the case? Social conventions are “the ways things are,” and all the more so when they are longstanding. There can be something analogous to a genetic relationship between them, but it would not follow that they are indistinguishable.

Natural Law and Scripture

To listen long enough to the common misgivings about natural law among the Reformed, one comes to hear a common mistake. Somewhere along the line, many Calvinists in the twentieth century began to understand the fundamental quality of natural law to be its extra-biblical status. In other words, one either “does natural law” or one submits to the revealed law of God. Natural law, in this most un-historical idea, comes to mean man attempting to construct moral principles and programs on his own steam. 

But as we have seen, natural law is God’s law in the nature of things. Human reason discovers the nature of things both from general revelation and special revelation. And even where special revelation (Scripture) corrects our faulty vision of general revelation (Nature), it will be precisely “the nature of things,” or “the way things objectively are” that the correction will be about.

A helpful bridge to help such fellow believers to cross is to show them natural law reasoning in Scripture.

Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 11 about the hair of men and women is sufficient to make this point. And this is true for any view of that text except for the radical egalitarian view that would say that the whole thing was a passing custom. But if there is any root in the nature of things, as Paul suggests—“Does not nature itself teach you” (v. 14)—well, then the natural root of a moral principle may produce diverse fruits of convention, some of which may endure longer than others, but all according to their kind.

On the sharp distinction between the objective sense of natural law and the subjective way in which it might falsely be taken, Turretin is most lucid: 

“But the orthodox speak far differently. They affirm that there is a natural law, not arising from a voluntary contract or law of society, but from a divine obligation being impressed by God upon the conscience of man in his very creation, on which the difference between right and wrong is founded and which contains the practical principles of immovable truth (such as: ‘God should be worshipped,’ ‘parents honored,’ ‘we should live virtuously,’ ‘injure no one,’ ‘do to others what we would wish them to do to us’ and the like).”2

As to the reason for our present wrong conceptions of what natural law is, Matthew Levering suggests not only a Barthian culprit, but also “postmodern scepticism about our ability to discern, rather than construct, human nature.”3 No doubt that is the case in the wider cultural landscape, yet when it comes to Reformed Christians who in more recent decades subject the “nature” in natural law to soteriological critique, this is coming from the Van Tillian influence. 

Concluding Summary

Be all that as it may, let us set the record straight. Natural law is not “the law of the jungle.” It is not even equivalent to the jus gentium, the “law of the nations,” though that is certainly one chapter in its curriculum.

In short, natural law is not:

1. what the animals do,

2. what the pagans have done,

3. what sinful nature would do,

4. what reason dictates about morality.

Reason at its best does not “dictate,” unless one means by that the sort of dictation that a secretary or stenographer performs. Reason was summoned in the definition offered by Aquinas (and accepted by the Reformed Scholastics), again, because that is the knowing instrument in us. We know this law not by our minds—as opposed to Scripture. Rather we know this law by our minds—as opposed to our toes. We have no other instrument for thinking but those minds. 

With respect, the critics of the classical vision of natural law are reading their own anxieties into the place of reason in that definition. This anxiety occurs in relation to either nature or reason, or both. It is certainly easy to conceive of natural law as arising from this or that part of “nature” or from human reason, as if these were the efficient cause. On the contrary, these are better understood on the level of formal cause. We must keep in mind that in the classical view, objective natures in creation are what they are because of the objective nature of God. Levering adds,

“the Bible’s understanding of law is theocentric. Law does not first pertain to ‘nature’ or to human ‘reason’. Indeed, law’s theocentricity overcomes this apparent opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ at its root, since law flows from the divine wisdom, Creator of nature and human reason.”4

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1. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. II-I QQ. 90-91, 94

2. Turretin, Institutes, II.11.1.7.

3. Matthew Levering, Biblical Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.

4. Levering, Biblical Natural Law, 63.