This post is a preview of a forthcoming online Davenant Hall class, “Natural Law and Scriptural Authority”, running in the Michaelmas Term 2024 (September to November), and convened by Dr. Brad Littlejohn.

If you wish to register for the module you can do so here.

As recently as a generation ago, the idea of Reformed natural law would have been almost inconceivable. Chastened by decades of influence from figures ranging from Abrahm Kuyper to Karl Barth to Cornelius Van Til, and perhaps even longer decades of biblicism, pietism, and hyper-Protestantism within popular evangelical religion, the idea of natural law was driven underground within Reformed theology and ethics in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, even though more conservative Reformed thinkers and institutions had harsh words of criticism for both Barthian neo-orthodoxy and what they saw as the unsophisticated and ahistorical “me and my Bible”-ism of American evangelicalism, they had imbibed similar prejudices against natural law as representing “Roman Catholic scholasticism,” “the myth of neutrality,” or “autonomous reason.”^[1]

But the landscape has changed profoundly since the 1990s. Provoked by initiatives like Evangelicals and Catholics Together to give Roman Catholic thought a fair hearing, and by historians like Richard Muller to pay closer attention to the contours of their own theological tradition, Reformed thinkers have rediscovered an appreciation for natural law as a crucial tool not merely for political engagement and moral reasoning, but for doing good theology and hermeneutics. Not only that, but they have come to terms with the fact that natural law was and always has been deeply embedded in the Reformed confessional tradition, with much of the twentieth century representing a curious case of theological amnesia. Indeed, natural law was taken almost for granted by Reformed stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic for four centuries following the Reformation. Far from being in tension with a Protestant commitment to sola Scriptura, it was seen as a clear conclusion from scriptural teaching. As Presbyterian giant Charles Hodge wrote in his 1873 Systematic Theology, “That there is a binding revelation of the law, independently of any supernatural external revelation, is expressly taught in the Bible. Paul says of the heathen that they are a law unto themselves. They have the law written on their hearts.”^[2] Moreover, it was also seen as part of the Reformed rejection of radical Protestantism’s biblicistic retreat from created reality: “natural morality and its fruits have very great values,” insisted Herman Bavinck in his Reformed Ethics. “Not recognizing their value is narrow-minded, petty, and superficial Methodism and quietistic pietism—anything but Reformed.”^[3]

Even among those Reformed thinkers who resisted the anti-natural-law tide of the past century, however, there has been a tendency to insist upon the distinctiveness of a uniquely Reformed approach to natural law. Bavinck himself was an influential representative of this trend, frequently insisting that even when it came to foundational doctrines of creation and anthropology, Roman Catholicism was infected by corrupt premises that skewed its understanding of revelation and morality, so that a Reformed natural law must proceed on fundamentally different grounds. While such claims have some merit, they depend sometimes on polemical oversimplifications that fail to properly reckon with Roman Catholic theology both during the time of the Reformation and today. More often than not, the Reformed distinctives are merely about emphasis and preferred terminology.

Defining Reformed Natural Law

What, then, do we mean when we talk about “Reformed natural law”? If we break the term down into two—the “Reformed” and then the “natural law”—we can provide some basic definitions.

First: what do I mean by Reformed? I mean churches that:

1. trace their descent from the magisterial Reformation (with its stress on catholic reform rather than restoration of the primitive church, and its conviction that grace perfects rather than replaces nature),
2. retain a commitment to the central doctrines articulated in the family of confessions that runs from Augsburg to Westminster, and
3. do not feel bound by strict fidelity to the teachings of Luther, as summarized for instance in the 1577 Formula of Concord. “Reformed” is thus by definition “not Lutheran” (although I think this is mostly down to historical misfortune than deep theological difference)
   

Second, of course, some working definition of “natural law” may be in order to get us started. Sometimes the term is used vaguely to refer to any sort of natural revelation, but clarity here requires greater precision. Natural revelation we may define as: all those means whereby God reveals to mankind in general, without the aid of spoken or written word, (i) himself, (ii) his will for the created order, and (iii) his will for mankind.

Natural theology then relates to (i), and names mankind’s reflection, on the basis of natural revelation, on the existence and attributes of God. Natural science relates to (ii), constituting mankind’s reflection, on the basis of natural revelation, on the nature of the created order. Finally, then, natural law relates to (iii), and designates mankind’s reflection, on the basis of natural revelation, on the human moral order (which, as we shall soon see, must be triangulated in relation to both God and our fellow creatures).

Reformed natural law, then, could be defined as the particular reflection, on the basis of natural revelation, on the human moral order, as articulated by churches which are descended from the magisterial Reformation, committed to the confessions running from Augsburg to Westminster, and not bound by strict fidelity to the teachings of Martin Luther.

There is, of course, a huge amount more detail one could go into here. The Reformed natural law tradition detailed thinking about various theological tangles such as realism v. voluntarism, the effects of the Fall, common grace, as well as how it relates to the divine laws of Scripture and the civil laws of the land. Such things are precisely what I will be exploring with students in my online Michaelmas Term class “Natural Law and Scriptural Authority” this Fall at Davenant Hall.

Using Reformed Natural Law

To conclude this brief preview of that class, however, let me suggest three key ways in which the Reformed natural law tradition retains its promise and relevance today. The reader may notice that in none of the three do I emphasize the natural law’s value as a neutral “common ground” for moral and political reasoning in a pluralistic post-Christendom society. This is certainly one role for natural law, and I do not wish to discount it entirely, but many have placed unrealistic hopes on just how much political common ground natural law can give us in a world that is in rebellion not merely against God, but against nature.

First, natural law renders fallen man “without excuse,” as St. Paul teaches and the Reformed tradition has constantly emphasized. This may seem trivial, but it is not. We live in a world in which many basic precepts of human dignity and natural order are under assault. Too often, Christians’ temptation has been to respond by retreating to the language of “biblical morality” or “a biblical worldview”—as if male-female marriage were simply a Christian faith-commitment that unbelievers could not possibly be expected to grasp or respect. Sin does have a powerful blinding effect, but the blindness is always (at first at least) self-imposed; it is a refusal to see. We must engage the moral chaos around us with the confidence that it is not merely a different religious value system, but a war against reality. And we must engage individual sinners in the confidence that on some level of their being, they know this—they know themselves to be lawbreakers. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law. It offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law, and by so doing re-affirms it.”^[4]

Second, for those within the community of faith, natural law offers a rich and cosmic context for the truths and commands of Scripture that might otherwise, on their own, seem isolated and arbitrary. Natural law is not something useful for unbelievers, but cast off as obsolete once we are led by the Spirit into the greater light of Scripture. Rather, as Calvin notes, Scripture is not merely something that we read, but something by which we read—it provides the “spectacles”^[5] through which the blurry world around us can come back into focus. But it does not do the reading for us—we must still do that. Or, to use another metaphor offered by Al Wolters, fallen man is like a spelunker lost in a cave, who can only guess at his surroundings by means of touch; the Bible is like a headlamp which brightly illumines it.^[6] But we do not gain knowledge of the world by looking into the lamp; rather, we must point it at our surroundings and follow its beam with our eyes. Scripture is a “lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105) by enabling us to read the world rightly and navigate it accordingly. With passions re-ordered by grace and thoughts corrected by Scripture, we as Christians are invited to study the world, soak in the riches of natural revelation, and reflect upon it with natural reason (sanctified, but still natural!) to discern God’s will.

Finally, then, part of the enduring value of natural law is its role for moral deliberation within the Christian community. This may seem counter-intuitive; again, we are accustomed to thinking of the natural law as something we use to talk with unbelievers, but amongst ourselves, the Bible is to function as the rule for our worship, our politics, and everything else—right? Such biblicism has been commonplace among American evangelicals over the past century, but it represents bad hermeneutics, bad ecclesiology, and bad ethics. Scripture, after all, does not present itself as a comprehensive rule-book; its most extended body of law, the Mosaic judicial corpus, is by common Reformed consent addressed to a particular historical and political context, and the New Testament’s rules for ordering church life are quite sparse. The church, while in certain respects a supernatural body, is also a temporal community that must organize its worship and set its budgets within the same constraints and according to the same canons of natural reason as other earthly communities. And while we understandably yearn for a “thus saith the Lord” that can put an end to our arguments and uncertainties, the false certainty gained by such sloppy ethics and poor use of Scripture is simply a recipe for arrogant legalism and unending church splits. In fact, the very uncertainty of the natural law, as a framework of principles that demands careful prudence and sustained attention to circumstances, is a feature, not a bug. For it is only by living with and working within such uncertainty, it is only “by testing” that we can with prudence and humility learn to “discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).

To delve even deeper into the richard tradition of Reformed natural law, and to learn how it can apply to life, the church, and everything, then I invite you to join me this coming Fall in “Natural Law and Scriptural Authority.”

This Core/Bible course will be taught by Dr. Brad Littlejohn. This course will run from September 9th through November 16th. Register here.

Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He founded and served for ten years as the President of the Davenant Institute after found it in 2013, and founded Davenant Hall in 2019. Brad regularly teaches core modules on Natural Law and Scriptural Authority and Reformation and the Modern World, and elective classes in Reformation history and Christian ethics. His publications include The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty (Eerdmans, 2017), The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed (Davenant Press, 2017), Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of Licence (B&H, forthcoming 2025), and an ongoing modernization project of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Davenant Press).

NOTE: this article is adapted from Brad Littlejohn’s chapter “Reformed Natural Law” from the forthcoming book Natural Law: Five Views, to be published by Zondervan.

1. For a good summary of the 20^th-century hostility to natural law in Reformed circles, see Stephen Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), ch. 1. ↑

2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols., reprint (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1940), III:266. ↑

3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume One: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 233. ↑

4. Quoted in Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 45. ↑

5. Calvin, Institutes, 1.6.1 (1:70). ↑

6. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2^nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eeedmans, 2005), 38. ↑