{"id":51,"date":"2004-07-26T18:26:58","date_gmt":"2004-07-27T02:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=34"},"modified":"2004-07-26T18:26:58","modified_gmt":"2004-07-27T02:26:58","slug":"evangelicalism-and-natural-law-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2004\/07\/26\/evangelicalism-and-natural-law-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Evangelicalism and Natural Law Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Enlow&#8217;s thoughtful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidopderbeck.com\/cgi-bin\/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=446\">comments<\/a> on my &#8220;anti-Catholicism&#8221; post got me thinking about Evangelical \/ Protestant perspectives on natural law theory.  An excellent  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/ftissues\/ft9201\/braaten.html\" title=\"FT January 1992: Protestants and Natural Law\">1992 First Things<\/a> article helps put the question in perspective.  I think I tend towards the author&#8217;s conclusion that the reformers didn&#8217;t dramatically break with Catholic thinking on natural law.  The core of natural law theory &#8212; that there exists a natural law, rooted in the moral structure of creation, that can be apprehended through reason &#8212; remained intact, but with qualifications arising from the reformed view of original sin and the sufficiency of scripture.<\/p>\n<p>As an Evangelical, I am uncomfortable with an overly optimistic natural law theory, precisely because of my understanding of total depravity.  Yet, I&#8217;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&#8217;t speak directly to a legal concept, am I then left only with positivism?  And if the answer to that question is &#8220;no,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t the gap have to be filled with something resembling classical natural law theory?  I don&#8217;t have the answers, but these are questions I hope to be able to pursue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Enlow&#8217;s thoughtful comments on my &#8220;anti-Catholicism&#8221; 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&#8217;s conclusion that the reformers didn&#8217;t dramatically break with Catholic thinking on natural law. The core of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-P","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}