J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction is about the best and most accessible defenses of natural law one could hope for.  At the micro level, J. Bud’s arguments, rejoinders, and observations are sharp, often witty.  (I mean no disrespect with the abbreviation, faintly reminiscent of J. Lo, but if I try Budziszewski throughout this post, I’ll miss it half the time at least, which is more disrespectful.)  His dissection of the coercive confessional politics of contemporary liberalism is superb.

Like the best of traditional Christian natural lawyers (Aquinas), J. Bud’s treatment of natural law refuses to dodge theological issues.  Faith and reason, nature and supernatural, creation and revelation, are intertwined, mutually illuminating but inseparable.  He is very good on the ways that the norms of natural law, which he says everyone knows in some respects, get distorted by our culpable subterfuges.  He rejects the “Second Table” project that attempts to detach the “second table” of the law from the first.

He is also aware that these theological points are problematic for some versions of natural law theory.

The Fall, he says, “does not deprive us of our nature . . . but our nature is not in its intended condition.  For natural law, this is no insignificant consideration.  If we had never seen healthy feet, it might have taken us a long time to discover that broken feet were broken - to reason backwards from their characteristics even in their present broken condition, to the principles of their purpose and design, to the fact that their condition deviates from that design.  In the meantime we might have taken their broken condition as normative.  Even if we grasped that something was wrong with our feet, we might have understood what it was.  We might have thought that feet are bad by nature, or that they are good but corrupted by shoes.”  He concludes that “Apart from revelation we make the same mistakes about human nature” - a point on which Thomas and Calvin would, despite their differences, be in happy agreement.   This is not the natural law of John Courtney Murray, who sees natural law as the moral system derived from consideration of man strictly speaking, man as man without any input from revelation.

In one chapter, he cites  Gaudium et spe s and John Paul II’s declaration that “The key to [man’s] self-understanding lies in contemplating the divine Prototype, the Word made flesh, the eternal Son of the Father.  The primary and definitive source for studying the intimate nature of the human being is, therefore, the Most Holy Trinity.”  J. Bud knows that this nouvelle theologie raises questions about natural law: “is man’s very nature - not just his destiny - so intimately tied up with supernature that it cannot be grasped fully by reason alone?  If so, then it might seem that the whole idea of a philosophy of natural law is destroyed.  Nothing is left - it might seem - but theology.”  He doesn’t think this follows, nor does he think this was the intention of the Council or the Pope, and he goes on to examine the ways that revelation and natural law are connected: revelation presupposes natural law, underwrites rational reflection on natural law, and invites “the intellect to reason more fully and adequately about matters that it may in principle be capable of finding out on its own, but rarely does.”

Having worked out these interrelations in some detail, and in a fairly satisfying fashion given his premises, he concludes: “It might be held that all this talk of light from revelation is bad news for natural law.  Getting people to take natural law seriously is hard enough as it is.  If it gets out that the tradition has been cheating for all these years . . . then the game is up.”  He doesn’t think appeals to revelation are cheating; they are not smuggled crib sheets but rather appeals to the teacher for help.  He concludes that “The Bible says” is persuasive only to “those who are already substantially convinced,” but “the philosopher should not be afraid of revelation either.”  Again, all this is a substantial improvement on Murray.

Good as J. Bud’s defense is, it’s not good enough to persuade me that natural law is a coherent construct or that it gives Christians any advantage in public discourse.  Let’s start with his criticism of a “The Bible says” approach.  That’s only able to persuade the converted.  But he’s admitted virtually the same is true of natural law.  ”Sodomy is against nature” is persuasive only to those who believe there is such as thing as nature, and that it has normative force.  J. Bud has an arsenal of arguments to support both of those claims (including appeals to revelation along the way), but the point is that he’s got to deploy them.  The fundamentalist who appeals to the Bible, if he’s competent, will also have an arsenal of arguments, including appeals to common experience.  ”The Bible condemns sodomy as an abomination” seems just as likely (or unlikely) to make headway as the natural law approach. How is one an inherently superior, inherently more compelling approach than the other?

That is to say, even claims that J. Bud thinks arise from natural law (illuminated by revelation) require as much of a “conversion” as appeals to Scripture.  In a thoughtful and powerful chapter on personhood and life issues, he slips back and forth (quite legitimately, in my view) between describing human beings as persons and describing them as beings made in God’s image.  Why should anyone but a Christian or Jew believe that ?  Insofar as natural law is designed to provide Christians with a discourse persuasive to those outside the faith, it fails.  At its best, this book is a book of apologetics and evangelism; not proto -evangelism, but evangelism per se, since J. Bud refuses, as I’ve said, to separate nature and supernature, revelation and reason.  J. Bud’s natural law is too theological to pass itself off as a common language for believer and nonbeliever.

So much for advantage in public discourse.  As for coherence, I will limit myself to a few lines of reflection.  J. Bud nicely describes the ways that (as Thomas said) Scripture clarifies and illuminates what all men know from creation about God and His demands.  He says that revelation presupposes natural law.  He does not reverse that relationship: He does not say that recognition of natural law presupposes revelation.  He has given all the necessary arguments for drawing this conclusion.  In the passage quoted above, he recognizes that we cannot infer the design of human being from the current state of humanity since the Fall intervenes and distorts.  We need revelation to correct us and show us what humanity is supposed to look like.  But if that’s true, then we need revelation even to recognize that human nature is in a dilapidated state.  Apart from a fall story, why would we not conclude that the horrors of human history reveal the way human beings are ?

J. Bud’s welcome emphasis on the Fall means that he has to qualify the ways in which natural law is natural to us.  He has a subtle discussion of how “unnatural” becomes “connatural,” for instance.  Once that concession is made, though, analogies like this no longer work: “we can’t quite wipe the law from our intellects.  It is woven into the deep structure of our minds, as linguists say the threads of language are.”  Well no.  It’s not like that.  He goes on, in the next sentence, to acknowledge that “we use every means we can devise to pretend that we are really being good.”  Do we do that with the “threads of language”?  Paul says all know God and His requirements from creation, but J. Bud is right that we suppress, evade, rationalize, pretend, and can do that for so long that we virtually forget we’re evading.  However that law is woven into our minds and hearts, it is woven differently from the way language, thought, creativity, and many other human qualities are woven.  Somehow, it is possible to unravel knowledge of God and remain human, which must mean that it is woven differently.

Let me make that point stronger, in a Hauerwasian direction. The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain.  But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture.  When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be.   To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere.   Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority.

This circles back to the practical point.  If this argument is true, then the persuasiveness of natural law of J. Bud’s variety requires just as radical a conversion as the fundamentalist demands.  It requires the same conversion.

J. Bud has provided a number of helpful tools for evangelism and apologetics, and for that I’m grateful.  He provides ways for believers to communicate meaningfully with unbelievers, again as part of evangelism. My complaint comes to this: he thinks, wrongly, that he has provided something other than evangelism.