Julius Stahl on the Failure of Natural Law

“The core problem w/ Natural law, having hitched its wagon to reason, converts reason from an instrument to discover truth into a, indeed the, source of truth. Thus, we look to reason, not to revelation or divine authority to discover the truth. But this is to put the cart before the horse. ‘The true, the just are therefore that at which reason in its activity arrives, not what what it is; they are what is discovered through it and not from it. It sees the light and testifies of the light, but it is not the light and did not make the light. This is precisely what is wrong with rationalism: it turns the organ of truth into truth itself, and because of this, it thinks by dismantling and examining this organ it has obtained the content of the true, which this organ was supposed to convey’ (pg. 216). To view reason as the source of knowledge and truth is akin to believing ‘that corporeal instruments through which we receive food, actually are our food. Such a conception corresponds with rationalism’s procedure’ (p. 217).”

The Rise and Fall of Natural Law
Julius Stahl
Preface – XVI

“What impelled the career of natural law was the effort to discover a common ground for all right-thinking persons beyond the dividing lines of sectarian religion. If our times have taught us one thing, it is the absolute untenability of the notion of a such a natural law accessible to people of “good faith,” regardless of how flawed they might be in themselves, should by now have disabused us of this fata morgana. Stahl had already anticipated such a turn of events nearly two centuries ago. As he wrote “Every philosophical system of whatever name in the final analysis rests on a foundational presupposition that is nothing more than faith, no matter what claim it may make to so-called scientific certainty. Even unbelief is a faith – one cannot reason from naked doubt. We have no immediate or homogeneous view of the highest principles of things and thus no absolute certainty; therefore for philosophical systems a purely objective knowledge independent of all personal judgment, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, or even the positive sciences, is ruled out.”4 Modernism is not based on neutral science but on specific presuppositions enthroning autonomous reason, which, consistently applied, end up destroying life.”

From the forward to Frdereick Stahl’s “The History of Legal Philosophy”

“Prior to philosophizing, the Christian world recognized a cause of the ethic independent of reason in the will of God and in the content thereof, divine holiness, which is of specific determinacy, positive, not susceptible to and without need of any further logical deduction. To remove this cause was therefore the precondition, the first step natural law had to take to clear space for itself. The beginning of this were already given in the philosophy of the Middle Ages: in the lex eterna, which the scholastics set in holy nature over God, which was in Him prior to any resolutions, from which they believed they needed to derive the ethic. This abolished freedom of decision and determination in God, and it was now requisite to explain reason as that which by necessity is determinative of Him and the world. This took place by asserting that the differences of right and wrong would stand according to reason, even if there were no God. Because in that case God could not possibly be the cause of them, neither His sanctas nor His voluntas — otherwise without Him the consequences would lapse as well — this cause could only be reason.”

Fredrich Stahl
The Rise and Fall of Natural Law – p. 95

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

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