However, cultures strewn with the unregenerate can be stabilized by the presence of believers who are not suppressing reality and who read Natural Law aright because they are reading it through the lens of Special Revelation. In such cultures and in such cases what happens is that fallen man, being inconsistent with his self avowed God denying principles, sneaks into his Christ hating worldview capital from the Christian world and life view. This stolen capital keeps the unbeliever afloat so that, as one example, in a culture leavened with Christ (a Christian culture) they can make marriages that last and are comparatively stable.
In such a culture stabilized by a Christian ethos you would then expect there to arise a philosophy that embraced Natural Law because then the stability of the culture can be ascribed to man who reads NL aright instead of being ascribed to the Biblical beliefs of the Christians in the social order. However, all along, the epoxy of the social order is special revelation.
In such a culture, Christian thinkers themselves may well begin to talk about Natural Law as being the epoxy that allows Christians and fallen man to together create a stable social order. However, if those same Christian thinkers could live long enough lives to see the deterioration of their once stable cultures because the Christ hater began to be more and more consistent with their suppressing the truth in unrighteousness they would then realize that it was not Natural Law that was the epoxy that held the culture together but rather it was the explicit special revelation that was embraced by them and their kind that created a sturdy headwind that allowed the unregenerate to sneak that earlier spoken of stolen capital into their worldviews in order to keep stability in the culture leavened with Christ.
If the above isn’t helpful try to reverse engineer all of this. Imagine growing up in a Cannibalistic adulterous ridden culture where treachery and treason were exalted as genius and so was untouched by Biblical Christianity. Could anyone imagine that such fallen people would ever come up with a Natural law that taught the precepts found in the 10 commandments?
Of course the problem here is never with God’s natural revelation of which Natural Law is a subset. The heavens do indeed declare the handiwork of God. All of creation screams the truth of God. However, fallen man is like the chap who is constantly pushing the buttons in order to find a radio station that doesn’t play “the truth of God’s revelation.” Fallen man, becoming increasingly consistent with his enmity against God (Romans 8:7) would go as far as to rip his own eyeballs out in order to not see the truth contained in Natural Law.
Because of this Natural Law is a weak reed in order to lean on to make law for a particular social order populated by a large majority of people who are being ever more increasingly consistent with their hatred of Christ. We are seeing this daily in the West.
For Christians in the West then, the appeal is not to Natural Law. The appeal is to the politicus usus of God’s perspicuous Law in order to order social order aright. This, in combination of heralding the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only way to pull back anti-Christ social orders from the edge of the abyss. Appeals to Natural Law will only hasten our nearing, ever nearing, to the final fall.
Excellent article brother! Like so good! I agree wholeheartedly you you.
One question:
What do you mean by “the final fall ” at the very end?
Well two questions:
What is your name?
Micah,
The fall of Western Civilization.
My name is Bret L. McAtee
We call him BLM for short. 😉
LOL
Black Lives Matter
Bureau of Land Management
Yours truly
One could say that natural law, or natural revelation, is indeed “a slender reed to lean onto.” Like the proverbial reed, it does exist, it is not just a figment of imagination, but alone, all on its own, it simply cannot do the work it is supposed (by secularists) to do.
Marquis de Sade, in his “120 Days of Sodom,” makes one of his characters mock the notion of natural law in cynical Hobbesian spirit – that your ideas of right and wrong change along with your power status:
“If one were to raise the objection that, nevertheless, all men possess ideas of the just and the unjust which can only be the product of Nature, since these notions are found in every people and even amongst the uncivilized, the Duc would reply affirmatively, saying that yes, those ideas have never been anything if not relative, that the stronger has always considered exceedingly just what the weaker regarded as flagrantly unjust, and that it takes no more than the mere reversal of their positions for each to be able to change his way of thinking too; whence the Duc would conclude that nothing is really just but what makes for pleasure, and what is unjust is the cause of pain; that in taking a hundred louis from a man’s pocket, he was doing something very just for himself, although the victim of the robbery might have to regard the action with another eye; that all these notions therefore being very arbitrary, a fool he who would allow himself to become their thrall.”
And Gary North also observed:
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/pdf/westministers_confession.pdf
“If you want my thesis of natural law theory in one graphic sentence, I will provide it: the most consistent defender of natural law theory was the Marquis de Sade. De Sade’s incomparable perversity was self-consciously based on his observation of the workings of nature. … He also opposed civil laws against prostitution, adultery, incest, rape, and sodomy. After all, these are all natural urges and practices; they are found in nature. Marriage and monogamy are not normal in nature.”
When fallen man observes such “natural” phenomena like spiders eating their partners after mating, it proves to their fallen minds that human moral institutions are nothing but arbitrary, “unnatural” customs. Ancient Greek Sophists already contrasted human “nomos” with nature or “phusis.” To them, human norms, or standards of decency, seemed like mere fragile spider webs compared to the amoral ruthlessness of natural forces.
Natural Law “WHEN INTERPRETED ARIGHT” agrees with Scripture. But NL is a wax nose, being twisted to suit the desires of its interpreter. For instance, animals the eat their young are used to justify abominations. The real thing about NL advocates is that they are “ashamed of Christ and His words”. They will do anything to avoid the reproaches of Christ because they esteem the treasures of Egypt greater riches and have NO respect to the recompense of the reward. In this they are like Esau in that they despise their birthright. They are not merely embarrassed that some Christians advocate God’s Law, they are embarrassed that God ever spoke such things as punishing blasphemers, whipping certain transgressors, stoning people, establishing a patriarchal order and do much more. They can rationalize away present application of these things but they can never escape the plain fact that God did command these things. In their heart they wish this wasn’t so. In their heart they imagine a different, more winsome, “kinder gentler” god that will cause then no embarrassment. The offense of Scripture is that it is explicit and offers no road of escape.
Long live the Scripture. All hail the Word of God.
Amen!
Agree 100%
An example of “Natural Law” being totally perverted by fallen man is the book and movie Peace Child by Don Richardson. That movie and book should dispel any ideas that NL, without Special Revelation (the Bible), can produce anything but utter evil!
Paul,
It is fascinating that you bring up that example because that is one I often reach for to make the same point yo made above.
Thanks for dropping by,
Bret