Expect to hear a lot about natural law on this blog in the coming days. There is a lot to say, and a lot of misconceptions to challenge, and hopefully shatter. Stay tuned. Until then…
From J. Daryl Charles, “Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things”:
“Our point of contact with nonbelievers, as J. Budziszewski well reminds us, is established by God himself. That reference point, that place of entry into the thinking of nonbelievers, is general revelation, which, despite humanity’s rebellion against the Creator, nevertheless penetrates the conscience of the unbeliever, so that all people are, in Pauline terms, “without excuse.” Natural law is the moral aspect of the penetrating arrow of general revelation. Without the natural law, there is no common ground, no point of connection, no meaningful engagement between Christians and nonbelievers.”
2 Comments
July 24, 2008 at 2:05 am
Since we’re only in the preliminary stages of your discussion, I’ll add a word of warning/context/etc.:
Natural law, as a purely [i]jurisprudential[/i] (as opposed to philosophical, moral, or doctrinal) matter is dead in the United States.
Chief Justice John Marshall in [i]The Antelope[/i] case—23 U.S. 66 (1825)—had to come up with a pre-Civil War answer to what the United States would do with slaves belonging to foreign owners. Were Spanish and Portuguese slaveowners, whose slaves were captured in the United States, allowed to keep those slaves? At the bottom of the case was this question: would natural law, which would demand the crushing of slavery in any form, trump positive law (that is, law passed by a national legislature or found in a constitution or handed down by a court)? The positive law in this case would be the laws of Spain and Portugal that condoned slaveowning.
Marshall chose positive law and killed natural law in American jurisprudence. Marshall, in his enduring pursuit to aggrandize and protect the Federal Government, needed to return these slaves to their owners so as not to anger any European powers.
All that to say this: one who would argue natural law in a courtroom would be laughed out of that chamber.
I think that leads down this path: natural law, as a socio-legal force, may only be [re]introduced into American life through recourse to the national and state legislatures rather than through the courts. And winning legislative seats is precisely what the “Christian Right” exhausted itself on.
July 24, 2008 at 2:06 am
EDIT: forgive my italics mistakes
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