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Biblical Studies Science and Religion Theology

Enns, "The Evolution of Adam": A Preliminary Thought

I received Peter Enns’ book “The Evolution of Adam:  What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins” today, and read through the Introduction and the last few chapters. I admire Pete.  His work has helped me a great deal, and though I don’t know him well, I consider him one of my “theological friends.”

There is a great deal of wisdom in Pete’s book on this important and difficult subject.  His Biblical scholarship is clear and sensible.  It seems to me obvious, as Pete describes, that Paul’s use of “Adam” in the New Testament is quite different than what the “original author(s)” of the Genesis 1-4 narratives had in mind.  It also seems to me plain, as Pete describes, that Paul thought of “Adam” as a “literal” first man, and that Paul had no notion at all of a group of early hominids or something along those lines.  A proper hermeneutical appropriation of these texts for our understanding today — a “good reading” — requires us to recognize this and not to read our science into the texts.  At the same time, we cannot in good conscience ignore or rewrite well established empirical findings of the natural sciences.

But I’m going to differ with Pete on the conclusion he draws from this:  he thinks any effort to think of “Adam” as a literal person is ad hoc and doomed, and that the better approach is to think of Paul’s use of Adam merely as an instance of accommodation.  I think that this presents, probably inadvertently, an overly static understanding of “revelation” and an overly mechanical understanding of the relationship between scripture and doctrine.

It seems to me that, although Pete begins to move beyond Reformation polemics by incorporating the New Perspective on Paul, he’s still stuck in a “flat” Reformed conception of the correspondence between scripture and doctrine and the role of “tradition” in forming scriptural interpretation and doctrine.  He employs the category of “accommodation,” but he still seems to assume that “interpretation” is a matter of understanding “what Paul thought” — with necessary adjustments for “accommodation” — and that “doctrine” is just what falls immediately out of one-to-one correspondence with “interpretation.”

But that is not really “spiritual” or “theological” interpretation.  It isn’t just about “what Paul thought,” but how the Church has employed Paul’s texts as the Church lived out its experience in the world.  And it seems to me that we should hear the Church’s strong witness to the belief, as it has reflected on Paul’s texts, that “sin” and “death” are at first rooted in our commonality in the first man, “Adam.”  (This is true of both the Eastern and Western Churches, but of course with differing perspectives on what this means, and of course there are Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars today who don’t consider a “literal” Adam important.)  This isn’t “ad hoc”; it’s a recognition that “theology” is much more than just a “plain reading” of the Bible.

It is manifestly true that the Church’s ongoing hermeneutical task — it’s hearing of the texts “ever and again” (to sound like Barth) in light of new knowledge and new experience — requires us to describe the Church’s doctrine in a way that accounts for all such truth.  Doctrine develops in that we continually seek to better understand the fullness of that which has been revealed. And so Pete is right that we today cannot merely say “there was a first man, Adam,” as Paul probably would have said if asked a question about human origins (Paul does not, we should note, ever address such questions directly).

But our job in constructing doctrine and theology is never just to restate “what Paul (or John or Mark or Luke or Peter or Moses or Q or P….) said.”  Our job is to offer the best synthetic descriptions of the mysteries of creation, sin, and redemption that we can muster, without eliding anything we believe is true.

So, I am much more comfortable with synthetic descriptions that take “Adam” as all at once “real person” and “symbol.”  If the modern natural sciences suggest that this “Adam” must have been somehow connected with a larger population of evolving hominids (as it seems strongly to do), that is curious but on reflection not terribly troubling.  The claim is not that “Genesis teaches” or “Paul teaches” or the “Bible teaches” anything about evolving hominids, but neither does Genesis or Paul or the Bible exclude anything about them, because it suggests nothing about them at all. “Hominids” were not on the ancient writers’ and redactors’ radar screens.

What the Church has heard consistently as it has listened to scripture is that the history of “humanity” is marred at its very root, in “Adam.”  What the Church has developed as it has listened to scripture is a metaphysically thick conception of “humanity” that goes beyond yet is rooted in the text of scripture. The idea that we should think of “Adam” as the first “true human,” the first to participate in the Divine life and to enjoy all the faculties of the human “soul,” seems to me most fruitful.  True, this is not exactly what the authors and editors of Genesis 1-4, or Paul, probably had in mind, but it builds through centuries reason and experience with the voice of the Holy Spirit on what Genesis and Paul said.

That is how “theology,” as opposed to “Biblicism,” works.  Pete applies this deftly to inter-testamental hermeneutics and in particular to Paul’s creative appropriation of Genesis 1-4.  Pete is reaching for the same thing with respect to the Church’s theological hermeneutics, but it seems to me that he is always falling back into the box of older Reformed assumptions about scripture’s sufficiency and perspicuity, compounded perhaps by the divide between “Theology” and “Biblical Studies” about the shape and role of Biblical interpretation.  I suggest we need to get beyond those divides to practice “theological” interpretation.

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

The Unintended Reformation: Science

I’m enjoying Brad S. Gregory’s excellent new book The Unintended Reformation:  How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.  Gregory demonstrates how the metaphysical revolution of late scholasticism — nominalism, voluntarism, and the univocity of being — influenced the broader culture at the time of the Reformation, including through the Reformation itself.  With respect to religion and science, Gregory notes that

the alleged incompatibility of science and religion derives not from science but in the first instance from a seemingly arcane metaphysical presupposition of some medieval scholastic thinkers.  Yet it would be misleading to attribute it exclusively to the ideas of intellectual elites.  Their views reinforced what would seem to be the general influence of linguistic grammar on conceptions of God, regardless of the historical period in question.  Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality.  Despite their formal, grammatical similarity, ‘the book is on the table’ and ‘God is in heaven’ are not comparable statements in Christian metaphysics.  But beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, influential thinkers reinforced the default tendency in discourse about God and in effect made them comparable.

[T]he widespread acceptance of a new metaphysics set the stage for conceptions in modern science about the mutual exclusivity of natural causality and transcendent, divine presence.

Great stuff.

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

Dallas Willard and Bill Hurlbut on Science and Faith

Here is Part 1 of a fascinating conversation between philosopher Dallas Willard and Stanford neurobiologist William Hurlbut, sponsored by the Trinity Forum.

Categories
Science and Religion

Patterns, Mind Games, and the Supremacy of Science?

There’s an annoying book review in today’s Wall Street Journal of Michael Shermer’s latest attempt at reductionism, The Believing Brain:  From Ghosts to God and Politics.  As the review glowingly summarizes the book, people are hard-wired to find patterns in random events, and “there’s a neurological upside to pattern-finding: When we come across information that confirms what we already believe, we get a rewarding jolt of dopamine.”  Ergo, “God is simply the human explanation for pattern-making and agency on an epic scale,” along with “aliens” and other “things unseen.”

The reviewer, Ronald Bailey, who is a correspondent for “Reason” magazine, notes that

it is science itself that Mr. Shermer most heartily embraces. “The Believing Brain” ends with an engaging history of astronomy that illustrates how the scientific method developed as the only reliable way for us to discover true patterns and true agents at work. Seeing through a telescope, it seems, is believing of the best kind.

It doesn’t take much “reason” to wonder how “science” or “the scientific method” have escaped the long tendrils of the wish-fulfillment and confirmation bias Shermer and Bailey descry in every other area of human belief.  Perhaps Bailey and Shermer enjoy a “rewarding jolt of dopamine” upon observing the “patterns” of naivete among the vast unenlightened masses of human history?  Does the observed “pattern” of correlation between dopamine levels and belief confirmation really determine the truth of their theories, or are the theories underdetermined projections upon the “data?” Is belief in the “scientific method” — belief that there is even a simple and definable “scientific method” — just another instance of blind faith in “things unseen?”  (Can “the scientific method” be observed in a telescope?)

If Shermer is correct, one could never know.  We are then each trapped in prisons of epistemic reflexivity, doomed to repeat an infinite feedback loop of unknowing from which there is no escape.

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Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul, Part VI: On Free Will

Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life:  Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference.  It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Below is Part VI, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

Are Neurobiology and Theology Both Right About Free Will?

If the theological category of “sin” appears to resonate with neurobiology, only on reflection to exist in some tension with it, the category of “responsibility” seems in conflict with neurobiological accounts of the will, only on reflection to find more commonality.

The Christian Tradition’s treatment of “freedom” and “responsibility” seems to conflict at a basic level with neurobiology.  “Responsibility” in Christian theology is not merely a human construct.  Rather, it flows out of our relationship to God as created beings.  We are “responsible” for our actions because we belong to God.  God’s law proceeds from God’s transcendent character and will, which does not depend on human social constructs. 

Christian moral theology thus emphasizes human responsibility.  As Catholic moral theologian William Mattison notes, “Moral theology is all about understanding and evaluating free actions, the things we do intentionally in our quest for happiness in life.”[1]  For Mattison, responsibility and freedom go hand-in-hand:  “when people act freely,” he says, “they are responsible for their actions, and we may praise or blame them depending on the sorts of actions they perform or the purposes they hold.”[2]  This connection between freely chosen intentionality and moral responsibility seems alien to neurobiology.  At least for neurobiological reductionists, intentionality is illusory, a ghost in the machine, and responsibility is a social construct shaped by evolutionary history. 

Yet, the Christian tradition’s efforts to grapple with the relationship between “freedom” and “responsibility” resonates in many respects with the same dynamic in neurobiology.   When we dig deeper into the Christian Tradition, we notice that our “folk” conceptions of “freedom” and “intention” do not entirely cohere with theological categories.  As political scientist Larry Arnhart notes, the notion of “‘free will’ as uncaused cause is a Gnostic idea that treats the human will as an unconditioned, self-determining, transcendental power beyond the natural world . . . .  Such a notion contradicts biblical religion, because the only uncaused cause in the Bible is God.”[3]

St. Augustine wrestled directly with how the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom impacts our understanding of the purposes of law.  In the Book V of the City of God, he summarizes the stoics’ argument against divine foreknowledge:

If there is a certain order of causes according to which everything happens which does happen, then by fate, says he, all things happen which do happen.  But if this be so, then is there nothing in our own power, and there is no such thing as freedom of will; and if we grant that, says he, the whole economy of human life is subverted.  In vain are laws enacted.  In vain are reproaches, praises, chidings, exhortations had recourse to; and there is no justice whatever in the appointment of rewards for the good, and punishments for the wicked.[4]

 Augustine responded to this critique by referring in Aristotelian fashion to the order of causality: 

it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills.[5]

 Similarly, in characteristically stark terms, the Reformer Martin Luther stated in On the Bondage of the Will that

This, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know:  that God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will.  By this thunderbolt, ‘Free-will’ is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces.[6]

 We might change Luther’s first sentence to refer to the brain instead of to God and attribute it to a modern neurobiologist.

Yet Luther also famously proclaimed that “[a] Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”[7]  How did Luther reconcile these notions of predestination and freedom?  He refers to spiritual freedom, in contrast to bodily slavery:

Man is composed of a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily.  As regards the spiritual nature, which the name the soul, he is called spiritual, inward, new man; as regards the bodily nature, which they name the flesh, outward, old man. . . .  The result of this diversity is, that in the Scriptures opposing statements are made concerning the same man; the fact being that in the same man these two men are opposed to one another; the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.[8]

 True “freedom” results only in the inward man when a person receives justification by faith in Christ.  “Freedom” is not libertarian free will, but rather the uniting of the person’s inward nature with God through faith, which produces the ability to do good works in accordance with God’s will.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it:   

“The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.  There is no true freedom except in the service of what is true and just.  The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom that leads to the ‘slavery of sin.”  (cf. Romans 6:17 ) .  . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom.”[9] 

 “Freedom,” then, is not libertarian freedom — the freedom to do anything at all — but the increasing flourishing of the human person who pursues the good.  Once again, there is consistency here with neurobiology – we are not “free” in terms of folk psychology – but there is divergence in that the Christian concept of “freedom” seems to  require a much richer metaphysic than materialism offers.


[1] William C. Mattison, III, Introducing Moral Theology:  True Happiness and the Virtues (Baker 2008).

[2] Id.

[3] Larry Arnhart, “The Darwinian Moral Sense and Biblical Religion,” in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 69.

[4] City of God, Book V.

[5] Id.  He concludes:  “[w]herefore our wills also have just so much power as God willed and foreknew that they should have; and therefore whatever power they have, they have it within most certain limits; and whatever they are to do, they are most assuredly to do, for He whose foreknowledge is infallible foreknew that they would have the power to do it, and would do it.”  Id.

[6] Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, available in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/bondage.titlepage.html?highlight=luther,bondage,of,the,will#highlight.

[7] Martin Luther, ON the Freedom of a Christian, available in the Modern History Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/luther-freedomchristian.html.

[8] Id.

[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶¶ 1733, 1740, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm (last visited March 12, 2010).

Categories
Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul, Part V: the Soul, Moral Agency, and Law

Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life:  Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference.  It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Below is Part V, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

Neurobiology, the Soul, Moral Agency, and Law

The notion of “moral agency” is precisely what many legal theorists interested in neurobiology are challenging.  Martha Farah notes with some understatement that “[t]he idea that behavior is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based.”[1] “Free will” – at least “libertarian” free will – is an illusion, they argue.  Among their most compelling bits of evidence for this claim are studies suggesting that the brain signals the body to engage in actions before we become consciously aware of the action we will take.[2]  This “precognition” suggests that our actions are automatic responses to stimuli and that our conscious “decisions” are really merely ex post determinations not to “veto” what the brain has already signaled its readiness to do.  We have, at best, “free won’t” rather than “free will.”[3]  Therefore, “according to neuroscience, no one person is more or less responsible than any other for actions.  We are all part of a deterministic system that someday, in theory, we will completely understand.”[4]  The notion of “responsibility” is only a “social construct,” law is an instrumentalist tool useful for engineering of the society we are constructing, and the society we are constructing ultimately is reducible to the evolutionary history embedded in our brains.

Sin:  Parallel or Orthogonal to Neurobiology?

The neurobiological account of personhood and responsibility implies some obvious dissonances with theology, but we might focus for a moment on a possible area of congruence.  In one sense, neurobiology confirms St. Paul’s cri de coeur:  our wills are not our own.  Human beings are bent towards conduct that we label “violent,” “selfish,” “antisocial” or “sinful.” 

Evolutionary sociobiology also trades in cooperation and altruism, or at least the appearance of “altruism” through “group selection.”[5]  The game theoretic coordination of group activity is a lynchpin of sociobiological theory.  For sociobiology, like St. Paul, we often find that we are at war with ourselves, and like St. Augustine, we can discern self-serving motives even behind our most seemingly benevolent actions.  In a practical sense, whether we say that positive law is an expression of selection for social traits that promote group survival, or that positive law is necessary to curb the influence of sin, we appear to be saying much of the same thing.  The ultimate “good,” whether it is a biological imperative or a Divinely appointed eschatological goal, is human flourishing.

But of course, in some ways the similarity is only superficial.  The Christian account of sin is that it is alien, an invader introduced into creation by cosmic evil forces, human will, or both.[6]  The Biblical story of the temptation of Adam and Eve must be an imaginative literary portrait if the scientific account of human origins is even close to true, but nevertheless, for Christian theology to have coherence, the story must be ontologically true at some basic level.  From the perspective of Christian theology, our essential created nature is “very good” (Gen. 1:31).  Humans are God’s image-bearers, created for wholesome relationships with God, each other, and the rest of creation.  If the inclinations and brain-mind mechanisms we have inherited from our evolutionary past are called “sin,” is the image of God itself sinful, and is God then the author of sin?[7] 

The Christian account of how sin disrupts human “flourishing” also offers a different horizon than that of sociobiology.  From the perspective of sociobiology, “flourishing” is simply and only the survival of genes, and the survival of genes is simply and only a material and historical drive.  Sociobiology can speak of what “works,” but it cannot speak of what is “good.” 

For Christian theology, human “flourishing” derives ultimately from God’s goodness.  The telos of creation is peace, the harmony of right relationships and the full flowering of all the gifts God has bestowed on the creation.  This teleology of creation derives from  the perichoretic relationality of the Triune God Himself.  The creation, Christian theology asserts, is “contingent,” in that it depends on God’s creative, sustaining will for its existence.  However, the creation is not arbitrary.  It had to be and it will be consistent with God’s own loving character because God is love.  The telos of creation, including that of human beings, therefore is ultimately eternal and eschatological.   The material and historical nature of humanity, although corrupted, is not elided, but is transformed proleptically by the eternal and eschatological. 

A Christian account of law and neurobiology in relation to the problem of sin and human flourishing, then, can incorporate the findings of the neurosciences but can never permit human ontology to be reduced to those findings.  Whether a nonreductive physicalist Christian anthropology is in this sense truly “nonreductive” remains an open, indeed difficult, question.


[1]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at  http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function

[2] Garland, Neuroscience and the Law, supra Note 48, at 56.

[3] Id.

[4] Id. at 68.

[5] For an overview of  the concept of group selection, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Darwinian Evolutionary Ethics:  Between Patriotism and Sympathy, in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 1.  Richerson and Boyd summarize their perspective through the following propositions:

(1) that group selection is the basic mechanism explaining human moral impulses; (2) that an immense gap exists between the moral faculties of humans and other animals; (3) that the moral faculties evolved in the common ancestors of all living humans; and (4) that moral progress arises when humans create social institutions that enlarge sympathy and control patriotism.”  Id. at 62.

[6] For a good discussion of sin and the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side:  Putting the Power of Evil in its Place (InterVarsity Press 2003).

[7] In some respects, this question mirrors the debated in Reformed theology between “infralapsarians” and “surpalapsarians.”  There also remains the vexing question of the “origin” of evil and the presence of the “serpent” in the Garden (Gen. 3:1).  Some contemporary theologians are seeking to recapture the Patristic reflection on a “cosmic fall” that implicates the creation in evil “before” the fall of Adam.  See, e.g., John Behr, The Mystery of Christ:  Life in Death (SVS Press 2006).  The quotation marks around the notion of something “before” the fall of Adam here reflect the idea that our Western, linear ideas about time do not map neatly onto the Biblical picture of creation, evil, sin and death. 

Categories
Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul, Part IV: Neurobiology and the Reported Death of the Soul

Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life:  Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference.  It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Below is Part IV, and here are links to Part I, Part II and Part III.

Neurobiology and the Reported Death of the Soul

Neuroscience suggests that “the brain is a physical entity governed by the principles and rules of the physical world”,” and that “brain determines mind.”[1] Contemporary neuroscience thereby claims to elide the soul and the mind – what many neuroscientists call “the ghost in the machine.”[2] All of the faculties attributed in Scholastic Christian theology to the “sensitive soul” (“locomotion, appetite, sensation, and emotion”), as well as the intellectual faculties attributed to the human “rational soul,” can or will be accounted for by brain functions.[3] As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience & Society puts it, “as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms of personality, character, and even sense of spirituality dualism becomes strained. If these are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all? By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge to religion than evolutionary biology.”[4]

Some contemporary Christian theologians have responded to this challenge by doing away with the soul.  Protestant theologian Nancey Murphy, for example, argues for “nonreductive physicalism” over against traditional notions of the soul.[5] Her colleague at Fuller Seminary, Joel Green, agrees with Murphy, and argues that the Biblical witness tends towards anthropological monism rather than dualism.[6]

For Murphy, Green, and other nonreductive physicalists, “mind” emerges from “brain” in a way that allows “mind” to exercise “downward causality” – the traditional category of the “will.”[7] Thus, the human person is dependent upon, but not wholly determined by, the brain.  Murphy acknowledges that she attempts this non-reductionist move for “theological reasons” having to do with the importance of free will.[8] She notes the concern that reductionists in the neurosciences threaten to “overthrow cherished elements of our self-conceptions,” including notions of “rationality, free will, and moral accountability.”[9] As to the persistence of the person after death, nonreductive physicalists such as Murphy and Green tend to reject any notion of an “intermediate state” of disembodied “soulish” existence.  There is only, to the extent the Christian eschatological hope allows for it, a final resurrection, albeit not one that necessarily involves any continuity with the pre-resurrection body.[10]

Other Christian theologians and philosophers continue to hold to more traditional forms of dualism.  For some, such as philosophers J.P. Moreland, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Landesman, this involves old-fashioned Cartesian substance dualism.[11] In a recent book, Keith Ward draws on philosophical idealism and process philosophy to offer an alternate version of Cartesian dualism.[12] For others, including John Cooper, as well as for many Catholic theologians, it is reflected in a softer “holistic dualism.”[13] Holistic dualism is the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:  “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body:   i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”[14] Still others prefer a notion of “dual aspect monism” to suggest that humans are of one substance (the physical) with two different “aspects,” one of which corresponds to the concept of the “soul.”[15] In holistic dualist or dual aspect monist views, the “soul” is intimately involved with the body, and the intermediate state after death and before resurrection is something less than complete.[16]

As this brief survey suggests, Christian theologians and philosophers seeking to grapple with neuroscience must account for a variety of sources in addition to the scientific, including scripture, tradition, and experience.  They disagree on whether scripture and the Christian tradition, including the important question of disembodied existence after death and prior to resurrection, require dualism of some sort.  They seem to agree, however, that Christian theology requires at least that human beings be understood as possessing some degree of moral agency.


[1] Brent Garland, ed., Neuroscience and the Law:  Brain, Mind and the Scales of  Justice (Dana Press 2004).

[2] See id.

[3] See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006), at 55-69.

[4] University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroscience & Society website, available at http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/section-blog/28-articles/72-science-and-the-soul (last visited March 10, 2010).

[5] Murphy, supra Note 50.

[6] Joel B. Green, Body, Soul and Human Life:  The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic 2008).

[7] Murphy, supra Note 50, at 71-109.  Murphy summarizes here thesis as follows:  “I shall argue that bottom-up causal factors often provide only a partial account of how things work.  One also needs to consider holistic properties of  the entity, as well as the interaction between the entity and its environment.  Thus, I shall argue for top-down or downward causation; this is the thesis that factors at a higher level of complexity have causal influences on the entity’s constituents.”  Id. at 73.

[8] Id. at 72.

[9] Nancey Murphy, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It:  Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford Univ. Press 2009), at p. 2.

[10] See id. at 140-45.  Murphy’s proposal sounds much like a form of eschatological reincarnation:

[A]ll of the personal characteristics as we know them in this life are supported by bodily characteristics and capacities and these bodily capacities happen to belong to a spatio-temporally continuous material object, but there is no reason in principle why a body that is numerically distinct but similar in all relevant respects could not support the same personal characteristics. . . .  My proposal regarding the construal of the ‘same body’ also allows for the possibility of a temporal interval between decay of the earthly body and what is then essentially the recreation of a new body out of different ‘stuff.’

Id. at 141-42.  Green seems to head more in the direction of the Eastern Christian notion of theosis by construing the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection as a kind of direct participation in Christ’s being:

How, then is personal identity sustained from this world to the world-to-come?  On the one hand, Paul locates the answer to this problem under the category of ‘mystery’ (1 Cor 15:51-57).  On the other hand, he hints at a relational ontology — that is, the preservation of our personhood, ‘you’ and ‘me,’ in relational terms:  with Christ, in Christ.  This suggests that the relationality and narrativity that contitute who I am are able to exist apart from neural correlates and embodiment only insofar as they are preserved in God’s own being, in anticipation of new creation.

Green, supra Note 53, at 180.

[11] See J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind:  The role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (NavPress 1997); Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Eerdmans 2008); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford Univ. Press 1986); Charles Landesman, Leibniz’s Mill:  A Challenge to Materialism (Univ. of Notre Dame Press 2011).

[12] Keith Ward, More than Matter:  What Humans Really Are (Lion Hudson 2010).

[13] See, e.g., John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting:  Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Deabate (Eerdmans 2nd ed. 2000); Sherlock, supra Note 47.   Many of these holistic dualists echo, if not explicitly refer to, the Thomistic concept of the soul as the “form of the body.”  Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meileander summarizes this perspective as follows:

The human person — neither beast nor god — is a real union of body (that ties us to the beasts) and soul (that directs us toward God).  When, however, we try to atriculate what this means (especially in religious terms), we may picture the human person as a composite of two things that are in principle separable, that are temporarily glued together in this life, that will (by God’s grace) be separated in such a way that the person continues to live even after the body has died, and that will one day be reunited (in a resurrected life).  That picture, as appealing as it has been at different times and places, is more dualism than duality.  It does not fully capture our in-betweenness, which is not simply a composite of two essentially different things (such as a horse and rider). . . . Instead of a horse and rider, think of a centaur.

Meileander, Neither Beast Nor God (New Atlantis Books 2009), at 24-25.

[14] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, ¶ 365.

[15] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope:  Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne 2008) , at 28, 199 (stating “[w]e are not saved as souls but as wholes”); John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth:  Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science and Belief (Westminster John Knox 2009), at 74-77 (stating that “the soul is something logically distinct from our physical bodies, but not a separable physical entity”); Polkinhorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (Yale Univ. Press 2002), at 103-107.

[16] See, e.g., Wright, supra Note 61; Polkinghorne, The God of Hope, supra Note 61, at 107 (proposing that “a human being could e held in the divine memory after that person’s death.”).

Categories
Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul, Part III: The Enlightenment and Modern Christian Conceptions of Law

Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life:  Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference.  It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Below is Part III, and here are links to Part I and Part II.

The Enlightenment and Modern Christian Conceptions of Law

Scholastic Catholic and Magesterial Reformed views of law were often challenged, and sometimes coopted, by the revolutionary fervor of the Enlightenment.  John Witte notes that Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Jefferson “offered a new theology of individualism, rationalism, and nationalism to supplement, if not supplant, traditional Christian teachings.”[1] These impulses led to the legal realist school that attempted to divorce law from broad normative concerns and understand it instead as primarily an instrument of political policy objectives.[2]

Although legal realism, and subsequently the critical schools, came to dominate American legal discourse, the Catholic legal tradition continued to develop into a rich tapestry of social teachings, beginning with Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century and particularly blossoming under the historic leadership of Pope John Paul II.[3] Catholic social theory began to focus less on the penal and purgative aspects of the law, but it continued to emphasize the relation between law and metaphysics, including between law and the “soul.”

Thus, for example, Catholic legal philosopher Jacques Maritain considered materialist-reductionist views of the person, such as those held by Bertrand Russell, to be “nonsense.”[4] Maritain described “natural law” as that which is essential to the normality of any thing’s functioning, “the proper way in which, by reason of its specific structure and specific ends, it ‘should’ achieve its fullness of being either in its growth or in its behavior.”[5] Similarly, John Courtney Murray emphasized the differing purposes of law with respect to persons as individuals and as citizens.[6] The purpose of positive law for Murray is not to discipline individual souls for salvation, but rather to ensure that society moves towards its proper moral end of civic virtue.[7] The foundation of society is the person, and the person functions within various institutions, such as the family, religious organizations, professional groups, and voluntary associations.[8] The principle of subsidiarity holds that the state must respect the boundaries of these institutions, and thereby respect the integrity of the person.[9] Positive law, then, takes on a more minimalist function of maintaining public order and ensuring the integrity of these institutions.[10] The philosophical underpinnings of this view remain committed to a thick metaphysical and theological account of personhood.

Protestant legal thought during this period developed in more piecemeal fashion, with divergent strands including Abraham Kuyper’s notions of “common grace” and “sphere sovereignty,” Karl Barth’s almost fideistic rejection of natural theology, Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” and the potent mixture of revivalism, reconstructionism, and confrontationalism that comprised the fundamentalist-evangelical “religious right.”[11]

Niebuhr’s Christian realism in particular served as a bracing tonic against liberal nineteenth-century Protestant anthropology, which owed its progressively optimistic outlook more to Jefferson and Rousseau than to St. Paul.[12] Niebuhr complained that progressive moralists failed to comprehend “the brutal character of the behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all inter-group relations.”[13] Although human beings individually are capable of doing some good, human society always tends towards the violent exertion of power.  This creates a fundamental pattern of conflict that cannot be fully overcome, even by those who are influenced by God’s grace.[14] Therefore, societies must use coercive power — the power of government and law backed by force — to achieve rough justice.[15] And because power corrupts, all such exertions of force must be subject to democratic control.[16]

Abraham Kuyper’s ideas about “sphere sovereignty” and “common grace,” meanwhile, offered resources to evangelicals who were seeking by mid-twentieth century to emerge from the foxholes of fundamentalism, as well as to other Christians in the Reformed traditions.[17] Kuyper accepted basic Reformed anthropology, which understood human nature to have been thoroughly corrupted by sin.  However, he held an expansive concept of common grace, by which God holds back the corrupting effects of sin.[18] “To every rational creature,” Kuyper said, “grace is the air he breathes.”[19] He thereby held together the Reformed “antithesis” between natural and regenerate people with the need to find some common ground for constructing social order.  Like Maritain’s conception of subsidarity, Kuyper argued that human beings are granted authority by God to create social structures, and that such authority inheres in various “spheres” of society such as the family and industry — not only, or even primarily, in the state.[20] In fact, Kuyper viewed the state’s authority as “mechanical,” by which he meant “unnatural.”[21] The state exists only to compel order, which would not have been necessary except for sin.[22] Thus, Kuyper famously stated that “God has instituted the magistrates, by reason of sin.”[23]

Summary

This very brief survey (including Part I and Part II) of Christian theological anthropology in relation to law suggests several enduring themes:  (1) human beings are more than physical; (2) human beings are corrupted by sin; (3) “sin” is something other than the “image of God” with which human beings were endowed by the creator; (4) sin affects the interior human life — the “soul” — as well as human social life; and (5) “law” has both interior-personal and exterior-social functions in restraining sin and directing human beings towards God.[24] The next part of this chapter examines how the contemporary neurobiological sciences view the human person, surveys some theological responses to neuroscience, and suggests some resulting points of agreement and points of tension with Christian theories of law.


[1] Id. at 26.

[2] Id. at 27.  See also Brian Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End:  Threat to the Rule of Law (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006).

[3] See Witte, supra Note 22, at 30.  For a discussion of Pope Leo XIII’s influence, see Russell Hittinger, “Pope Leo XIII,” in Witte and Alexander, eds., The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics & Human Nature, Vol. 1 (Columbia Univ. Press 2006).

[4] Patrick Brennan, “Jacques Maritain,” in Witte and Alexander, supra Note 26, at 86 (quoting Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (University of Chicago Press 1951), at 85)).

[5] Id.

[6] Angela Carmella, “John Courney Murray,” in Witte and Alexander, supra Note 26.

[7] Id. at 121.

[8] Id.

[9] Id. at 122.

[10] Id.

[11] See id.

[12] See Davison M. Douglas, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Witte and Alexander, supra Note 26.

[13] Id. at 418 (quoting Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Scribner 1932), at xx.).

[14] Id. at 421-22.

[15] Id. at 423-24.

[16] Id.

[17] See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Abraham Kuyper,” in Witte and Alexander, supra Note 26.

[18] Id. at 311.

[19] Id.

[20] Id. at 313-17.

[21] Id. at 317-18.

[22] Id. at 318.

[23] Kuyper, Calvinism:  Six Lectures Delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton (Revell 1899), at 102.

[24] For a good general summary of these themes, see Charles Sherlock, the Doctrine of Humanity (InterVarsity Press 1996).

Categories
Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul: Part II — Sin, the Soul, and Secular Law

Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Below is Part II, and here is a link to Part I.

Sin, the Soul, and the Need for Secular Law

If the rational soul inclines human beings to God, why do we end up with the chaos of Judges 19 when “everyone does as he or she sees fit” and gross violence ensues?  The answer – or at least a significant part of the answer, particularly in Western Christian theology – is sin.  Augustine, in particular, connected the need for a King – secular law – to sin.  Without sin, man would live by the divine law and would not become subject to other men.  Because of sin, men need the scourge and penalty of human law:

And beyond question it is a happier thing to be the slave of a man than of a lust; for even this very lust of ruling, to mention no others, lays waste men’s hearts with the most ruthless dominion. Moreover, when men are subjected to one another in a peaceful order, the lowly position does as much good to the servant as the proud position does harm to the master. But by nature, as God first created us, no one is the slave either of man or of sin. This servitude is, however, penal, and is appointed by that law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and forbids its disturbance; for if nothing had been done in violation of that law, there would have been nothing to restrain by penal servitude. And therefore the apostle admonishes slaves to be subject to their masters, and to serve them heartily and with good-will, so that, if they cannot be freed by their masters, they may themselves make their slavery in some sort free, by serving not in crafty fear, but in faithful love, until all unrighteousness pass away, and all principality and every human power be brought to nothing, and God be all in all.[1]

The rational soul’s natural inclination towards God and the good, then, is corrupted and must be disciplined by positive law.  The extent of this corruption remains a lively debate in the Christian tradition.  Is reason erased or merely limited by sin?  Catholic, Reformed and Eastern Orthodox thinkers disagree with each other, and often among themselves.[2] Yet all agree that human beings, absent divine grace, are bound to, or at least (in the Eastern tradition) are deeply influenced by, sin.  Indeed, we find this theme embedded in the heart of St. Paul’s theological anthropology in Romans 7:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.[3]

The interplay of reason, sin, and law is ingrained in the Western legal and ethical tradition.  As Harold Berman traces the trajectory of Western jurisprudence, in the interplay of Roman law with Biblical sources, the canon law came to focus on the role of positive law in preparing the soul for life with God after death.[4] Initially, the Christian theology had little use for temporal law.  Christ was expected to return within the Church’s founding generation, and  “[a]s long as the Last Judgment was understood solely as the inauguration of divine rule in the world to come, imminent or already present, it did not inspire the creation of parallel legal institutions for the interim period on earth.  The vision was essentially apocalyptic rather than prophetic.”[5]

Western Christian thinking began to shift toward the end of the first millennium, however, when it became clear that Christ’s return would not be immediate.  Elaborate doctrines of purgatory and penances were developed by the Church to deal with “ordinary” life in the absence of Christ’s return.[6] Under this system, “sin” took on a legal character, “as specific wrongful acts of desires or thoughts for which penalties must be paid in temporal suffering, whether in this life or the next.”[7] The hierarchy of sins and punishments “was to be established primarily by the moral law revealed by God first in Scripture (divine law) and second in the hearts and minds of men (natural law); but it was to be further defined by the positive laws of the church.”[8]

The resulting legal system heavily emphasized notions of human culpability.  Penitential works became identified with punishment that would expurgate the sinner of taint so that time in Purgatory could be remitted.[9] Penance was a means of God’s vengeance against human rebellion.[10]

These connections between soul and will, and law and penance, led to detailed canon law rules for assessing a criminal’s mental state so that the appropriate punishment could be meted out.[11] The canon lawyers required “a specific inquiry into the mind and heart and soul of the accused.”[12] The canon law required proof of both an intentional act and proof that the external act “revealed a depraved mind and heart and soul,” thus anticipating modern criminal law’s categories of actus rea and mens rea.[13] They developed defenses for wrongful acts committed without requisite malicious intent, for example, as a result of mistake or pursuant to a just reason such as self-defense.[14]

Although the ferment of the Age of Anxiety and subsequently of the Protestant Reformation broke down the explicitly ecclesial and salvific functions of positive law, the tradition that positive law serves to punish and correct intentional behavior persisted.  In the Reformed traditions, law was no longer understood as serving any purgative function.  Indeed, particularly in the Lutheran tradition, “law” was considered antithetical to “grace” in the economy of salvation.[15] Sin could be expurgated only by God’s grace in applying the merits of the Christ’s atoning death to the sinner.  Nevertheless, particularly in Reformed traditions influenced by Calvinism, positive law was understood as part of the sanctification of the elect within the covenant community.[16] John Witte summarizes the Calvinist-Puritan view of positive law as follows:

Every person is a prophet, priest, and king, and responsible to exhort, minster and rule in the community.  Every person thus stands equal before God and before his or her neighbor.  Every person is vested with a natural liberty to live, to believe, to love and serve God and neighbor.  Every person is entitled to the vernacular Scripture, to education, to work in a vocation.  On the other hand, every person is sinful and prone to evil and egoism.  Every person needs the restraint of the law to deter him from evil, and to drive him to repentance.  Every person needs the association of others to exhort, minister, and rule him with law and with love.  Every person, therefore, is inherently a communal creature.  Every person belongs to a family, a church, a political community.[17]

In both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, then, positive law served a penal and restorative function.  Law ultimately was designed to bend the will towards God and to lead the inner person, the “soul,” into fellowship with Him.


[1] Augustine, City of God, Ch. 15.

[2]The Western Christian tradition’s concept of “original sin” holds that all human beings share in the “Fall” of Adam, the first human, and consequently that all humanity is enslaved to sin.  See Alister McGrath, Christian Theology:  An Introduction (Blackwell 2001), at 445-446.   All orthodox Western Christian traditions resist “Pelagianism,” the doctrine taught by the monk Pelagius that human beings could improve themselves and gain salvation and true goodness by their own merit.  However, Catholic thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas, held that sin did not erase the human capacity for reason.  Human beings, therefore, remain capable of understanding what is right and good according to “natural reason” even after the fall.  All human beings, according to Aquinas, “possess a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men”  (Summa Theologica, I.93.4.).  The “likeness” of God, however, is a resemblance to God’s glory, which can only be recovered by those who are regenerated by God.  (Ibid.) A person can only “habitually” know and love God through grace.  (Ibid.) People therefore are capable of knowing and doing good, but can only habitually do good through divine grace, and can only become perfect and thereby have the “likeness” of God restored through ultimate divine salvation.

In contrast, Reformed thinkers held that sin thoroughly corrupted human will and reason, albeit without erasing the “image of God” in humanity.  See Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology (Hendrickson 2006), at 90-92 (summarizing Reformed thought on “total depravity”).  This is stated with Puritanical clarity in the Heidelberg Catechism:

Question 8. Are we then so corrupt that we are wholly incapable of doing any good, and inclined to all wickedness?

Answer: Indeed we are; except we are regenerated by the Spirit of God

Both Catholic and Protestant / Reformed thinkers have always agreed, however, that sin infects all of human life.  Indeed, there has been significant progress in recent years in ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and some Protestants concerning the contentious relationship between original sin, the nature of human depravity, and salvation.  See Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church (1999), available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html (last visited March 8, 2010).  The Joint Statement states that:

We confess together that all persons depend completely on the saving grace of God for their salvation. The freedom they possess in relation to persons and the things of this world is no freedom in relation to salvation, for as sinners they stand under God’s judgment and are incapable of turning by themselves to God to seek deliverance, of meriting their justification before God, or of attaining salvation by their own abilities. Justification takes place solely by God’s grace.

Id. ¶ 19.  The Eastern Christian perspective is somewhat different.  For Eastern Orthodoxy, humanity is tarnished by sin, but the essence of human nature cannot be corrupted, because it was created “good” by God.  See James R. Payton, Jr., Light from the Christian East:  An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (IVP Academic 2007), at 112-17.  Nevertheless, in the Eastern tradition, “[s]ince our first parents’ original sin . . . human beings suffer from the terrible disadvantage that humankind has a long history of mortality, sin and disobedience. . . .  We thus freely but inevitably fail to live up to our logos — and so fail God.”  Id.. at 114.  A detailed treatment of the Eastern view is beyond the scope of this Chapter, which focuses on the Western theological and legal traditions.

[3] Romans 7:21-25 (NIV).

[4] Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (Harvard Univ. Press 1983), at 166-71.

[5] Id. at 169.

[6] Id. at 170.  Berman marks the creation of the All Soul’s Day holiday shortly after the year 1000 as the watershed in changing attitudes about the relationship between temporal and eternal judgment.  Id.

[7] Id. at 171.

[8] Id.

[9] Id. at 172.

[10] Id. Berman quotes an influential eleventh-century tract as follows:  “punishment (poena) is a hurt (laesio) which punishes and avenges (vindicat) what one commits.”  Id. (quoting De Vera et Falsa Poenitentia, chap. 10),

[11] Id. at 185-98.

[12] Id. at 189.

[13] Id.

[14] Id. at 189-90.

[15] See, e.g., Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, available at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/bondage.titlepage.html (last visited March 8, 2010).

[16] See generally John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights:  Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge Univ. Press 2007).

[17] Id. at 15.

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Religious Legal Theory Science and Religion Theology

Law, Neurobiology and the Soul: Part I – Introduction

Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life:  Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference.  It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!).  I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul.  This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed.  I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts.  Here is Part I.

Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul

The neurosciences present fundamental challenges to traditional religious conceptions of the nature and functions of positive law.  These challenges stem from the deep revolution the neurosciences promise for our understanding of the nature of the “self.”  For many neurobiologists, the “self” is reducible to natural history, physics, and brain chemistry.  We are nothing more than the impulses of our brains.  At most, human “will” is an emergent property of the brain that allows us to choose among some set of evolutionary strategies.

Some contemporary legal theorists seek to tie the neurobiological understanding of the “self” to theories of positive law.  In their view, positive law is entirely a social construction shaped by sociobiology.  Normative notions of “justice,” “intent,” and “retribution,” for them, are somewhat archaic.  Positive law is best understood as an instrumentalist tool for calibrating behaviors that are construed by various social groups to benefit the group.  Any notion of a deeper ethical basis for law is elided as superfluous.  As noted philosopher Michael Ruse succinctly frames this view, “Ethics is a collective illusion of the genes, put in place to make us good cooperators.  Nothing more, but also nothing less.”[1]

This paper summarizes the challenges neurobiology presents to Christian theories of positive law, and suggests a way forward.  It begins by summarizing the Western Christian tradition’s tight linkage between theological anthropology and theories of positive law.  It next discusses the contemporary Christian theological engagement with neurobiology, which is surprisingly diverse.  The discussion then turns to points of convergence and divergence between Christian and neurobiological accounts of law and personhood.  It concludes with an outline of a methodological proposal for constructive engagement between Christian theories of law and the neurosicences.

Christianity, the Soul, and the Functions of Positive Law

The Soul in the Patristic Tradition

Throughout the Christian intellectual tradition, the “self” historically has been conceived of as multivocal and persistent.[2] The “soul” or the “spiritual” nature of human beings distinguished human from animals and rendered humans eternally accountable to God.

For Athanasius, for example, the soul was the seat of rationality and the nexus between the human person and divine law.  As Athanasius said in his early fourth century treatise Contra Gentes, “the rational nature of the soul is strongly confirmed by its difference from irrational creatures. For this is why common use gives them that name, because, namely, the race of mankind is rational.”[3] Because of the  rational soul, human beings, and only human beings, become amenable to law.  Athanasius notes that

the body is not even constituted to drive itself, but it is carried at the will of another, just as a horse does not yoke himself, but is driven by his master. Hence there are also laws for human beings to practise what is good and to abstain from evil-doing, while to the brutes evil remains unthought of and undiscerned, because they lie outside rationality and the process of understanding. I think then that the existence of a rational soul in man is proved by what we have said.[4]

Likewise, Augustine emphasized the link between the rational soul and Divine law.  For Augustine, as for Athanasius, the rational soul distinguished humans from brute animals, enabling humans to seek transcendent knowledge.  Yet the soul requires discipline.  “[O]wing to the liability of the human mind to fall into mistakes,” Augustine warned, “this very pursuit of knowledge may be a snare to him unless he has a divine Master, whom he may obey without misgiving, and who may at the same time give him such help as to preserve his own freedom.” [5] Therefore, a mortal person “walks by faith, not by sight,” and “refers all peace, bodily or spiritual or both, to that peace which mortal man has with the immortal God, so that he exhibits the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law.”[6]

These examples from Athanasius and Augustine reflect a broad theme in the Christian tradition:  the rational soul is the seat of the intellect and the will, and it naturally impels human beings towards God’s law.  Human beings, however, do not obey God’s law.  The familiar refrain of the Biblical Book of Judges highlights what happens when the legitimacy of secular law is eroded:  “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.”[7] As modern people, we are inclined affirm this as good, but as the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges 19 makes clear, the fruits of this circumstance are betrayal, rape, oppression and violence.[8]


[1] Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Ethics Past and Present, in Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss, eds., Evolution and Ethics:  Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective  (Eerdmans 2004).

[2] For a brief historical survey of Christian doctrine concerning the soul, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting (Eerdmans 1989), at 7-13.  For a discussion of the “immortality of the soul” in early Christian thinkers and the relation of that doctrine to Greek philosophy, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition:  A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Univ. Chicago Press 1975), at 47-52.

[3] Athanasius, Against the Heathen (Contra Gentes), available in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.vi.html,  at  ¶ 31.

[4] Id., ¶ 32

[5] Augustine, City of God, Ch. 14.

[6] Augustine, City of God, Ch. 14.

[7] Judges 25:21 (NASB).

[8] Judges 19 tells the story of “a certain Levite staying in the remote part of the hill country of Ephraim.”  Judges 19:1.  The man’s concubine cheats on him and then runs away to her father.  Judges 19:2. The man goes after her, and on the return journey, he and the concubine receive hospitality in the home of an old man, also from the hill country of Ephraim, near the Benjamite city of Gibeah.  That evening, “certain worthless fellows” pound on the door and demand to have sex with the man — in a clear echo of the story of the demands made upon Lot in Sodom.  Judges 19:22-25;  cf. Genesis 19:1-11.  Like Lot, the old man in Judges 19 offers the men his virgin daughter, as well as his guest’s concubine.  Judges 19:24.  The men savagely rape the concubine until morning, and she dies.  Judges 19:25-29.  The Ephraimite traveler cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them “throughout the territory of Israel.”  Judges 19:29-30.   The other tribes subsequently band together and destroy the Benjamites.  Judges 20.  The other tribes realize, however, that the decimated Benjamites will not be able to reconstitute themselves as a duly chastened tribe, so they raid a village that failed to participate in the civil war, kill its inhabitants except for virginal girls, and permit the Benjamites to kidnap the girls for wives.  Judges 21:1-24.  There are many layers to this story, but one of its main themes is summed up by the concluding verse in Judges:  “[i]n those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”  Judges 21:25.