Eric Enlow’s thoughtful comments on my “anti-Catholicism” post got me thinking about Evangelical / Protestant perspectives on natural law theory. An excellent 1992 First Things article helps put the question in perspective. I think I tend towards the author’s conclusion that the reformers didn’t dramatically break with Catholic thinking on natural law. The core of natural law theory — that there exists a natural law, rooted in the moral structure of creation, that can be apprehended through reason — remained intact, but with qualifications arising from the reformed view of original sin and the sufficiency of scripture.
As an Evangelical, I am uncomfortable with an overly optimistic natural law theory, precisely because of my understanding of total depravity. Yet, I’m equally uncomfortable with a natural law theory that is largely limited to principles expressly stated in the specific revelation of scripture. What do I do, for example, with modern property and intellectual property law, which is deeply rooted in economic theory and utilitarianism? It seems a distant level of abstraction to claim that some particular principle in scripture relates to the extent and duration of copyright in digital works. If scripture doesn’t speak directly to a legal concept, am I then left only with positivism? And if the answer to that question is “no,” doesn’t the gap have to be filled with something resembling classical natural law theory? I don’t have the answers, but these are questions I hope to be able to pursue.