In the previous election, the victorious party campaigned on a message of “common sense.” The opposing party used similar language. Political observers can judge whether the program on offer was either common or sense, but the use of this term has become increasingly common in the public square, whether it comes to immigration policy, transgender men in women’s sports, or economic policy. I want to suggest these appeals, whatever the motivation, reflect a call to a broadly and perhaps unconsciously accepted sense of fairness and norms. I doubt any of the political practitioners consider themselves natural lawyers but this cultural moment should cause Christians to consider the usefulness of natural law.
What is natural law? It’s the law of God, embedded in creation and written on the human heart. Andrew Walker, author of Faithful Reason defines natural law this way:
The natural law tradition posits that a God-given, self-evident universal moral order exists that human reason can grasp. The natural law defines and identifies which actions are reasonable and worth pursuing—even apart from an immediate appeal to divine revelation.
The authors of Hopeful Realism define it similarly:
In the Christian intellectual tradition, the natural law has for centuries described a set of stable, morally obliging norms for human action, grounded in a common human nature. The basic idea is that we have a nature oriented to the particular ends that are proper to us as human beings such that we are obliged to pursue those ends and avoid what works against them. If we want to live well as human beings, there are certain things we should do and certain things we should not do. Not only is the moral guidance provided by natural law obligatory for all humans, it is also to some degree accessible to all humans.
Natural law doesn’t say that all aspects of God’s law are available to all people all the time, of course. This is why the qualifier above, “to some degree” matters. Romans 1, perhaps the most articulate defense of natural law in Scripture, concedes that humans often suppress the conscience. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that even spiritually regenerated Christians “see through a glass darkly,” which is why the phrase “common sense isn’t very common” is often true.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at The Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy)
Daniel Darling is the director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of several books including Agents of Grace, The Dignity Revolution, and his forthcoming, In Defense of Christian Patriotism. He is a fellow at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a columnist for WORLD Magazine.
