Scripture and Natural Law, Friends or Foes?

Discussion of the distinct ways human knowledge is communicated and received often takes place within a competitive framing. One such instance is evident in the question, Natural Law or Scripture? Here, to commend a compatible framing of these, I rehearse Christian dogmatic foundations for contemplating the relation between the two.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed asserts, “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” This articulates the baseline commitment of a Christian view of reality: only two principal kinds of things exist, the Creator and His creation, uncreated and created being. Expanding on this, it’s a Christian commonplace that to be of the second kind—a creature—is to exist in a perpetual condition of absolute dependence upon the first. If God should, even for a moment, cease to sustain creaturely being, it would cease to exist. Creaturely reliance on the Creator is astonishingly total: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

While proximate sources of knowledge are manifold, the ultimate source is single—the One True God. He is the “Father of lights,” from whom “every good gift and every perfect gift . . .cometh down” (Jas. 1:17). There are no real distinctions between where all authentic knowledge is sourced, for the source of all knowledge is singular. True human knowing of anything is possible only as knowledge is bequeathed by Him. Thus, while Christians may consider the mechanics of how humans know, we ought to do so while agreeing that we know only as creatures in receipt of God’s good gift of knowledge.

The knowledge which the infinite God shares with finite creatures is announced loudly and clearly (Psa. 19:3). And, because He cannot lie, what God pronounces is unchangeably true (Heb. 6:18). Further, because He is Almighty, His truth is transmitted without interruption, “to the end of the world” (Psa. 19:4). Still, we must be cognizant that the kind of knowledge we receive is accommodated to befit our finite capacity. Even when given knowledge by God, we do not know as God knows. Rather, we know in accordance with what we are, creatures.

All this holds, mutatis mutandis, for fallen creatures. God is the one source of all that can be known, and He generously shares knowledge with humans in ways they can receive it. In so doing, He sovereignly and pervasively communicates truth to them. The difference, this side of the fall, is with the creature’s ability to receive the knowledge God transmits. Among humans, the fall took place after humans allied themselves with the questioning (Gen. 3:1) and refutation (Gen. 3:4) of divinely conveyed knowledge. The result was a darkening of their understanding (Eph. 4:18). While the perfection of God’s epistemic transmission did not change, the creaturely ability to receive it without distortion did.

A standard Christian line is that humans were given the capacity to know for the purpose of knowing God, and every other created thing as it relates to Him—“in thy light shall we see light” (Psa. 36:9). Most of all, fallen humans lost the ability to relate diverse dispersions of knowledge to their unified source in the divine Giver. Yet, as Athanasius underscores in his De Incarnatione, it would be unfitting for God to allow those created to know Him (and all else truly only insofar as it relates to Him) to persist in a state of epistemic impairment. God’s purpose for humans cannot be thwarted, as “he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased” (Psa. 115:3). And so, God not only created humans to know and continually supplies the knowledge needed to do so but effects the restoration of their ability to rightly receive what He communicates.

While Natural Law has been given by God “from the creation of the world,” thus communicated to humans both before and after the fall, Scripture was occasioned by the fall, conveying that which Natural Law cannot, namely, God’s redemption of fallen creation in Christ.

The means by which this repair is undertaken is sketched in the Creed’s second and third articles. In the Lord Jesus Christ, the person of God the Son was incarnate “for our salvation.” Testimony concerning Christ was spoken by the Holy Spirit through the Prophets, such that the Son’s mission unfolded “according to the Scriptures.” The application of Christ’s work—which includes the restoration of rational fellowship with God, stemming from a renovated ability to receive God’s truthful transmission of knowledge—generates and unfolds within a particular context—the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”

Based on the above dogmatic rehearsal, proper Christian attention to the diversity of ways God transmits knowledge requires, at the outset, acknowledging their singular source. If querying the difference between Natural Law and Scripture, we can make distinctions regarding items such as mode, content, and purpose. But we ought not allow such distinctions to suggest any real competition between the two. Further, there should be no dispute about the essential clarity, veracity, fittingness, or efficacy of these varied ways in which God’s gift of knowledge is communicated to humans. Still, it is appropriate to ask, “clear, true, fitting, and efficacious, according to what mode, in respect to what content, unto what end?”

For fallen creatures, these questions cannot be answered by Natural Law. Scripture, while not opposed to Natural Law, supplies God’s corrective lens through which to rightly understand both Natural Law and the Sacred Writings. In Scripture, what God’s publication of knowledge through Natural Law can teach is outlined in Romans1:18-32, where we learn that it was given “from the creation of the world” for items such as: glorification of God (v. 20), thanksgiving to God (v. 20), knowledge of the truth (v. 25), worship of the Creator (v. 25), promotion of natural affections (vv. 26-27), doing of what ought to be done, instead of all manners of unrighteousness (vv. 28-31), covenant-keeping (v. 31), and the recognition of God’s justice (v. 32). It is precisely because this knowledge is given by God to humans that those who reject it are “without excuse.”

While Natural Law is clear, true, fitting, and efficacious as a vehicle by which God communicates select knowledge to humans in a certain mode unto specific ends, for fallen humans only Scripture can make them “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 3:15). While Natural Law has been given by God “from the creation of the world,” thus communicated to humans both before and after the fall, Scripture was occasioned by the fall, conveying that which Natural Law cannot, namely, God’s redemption of fallen creation in Christ.

Still, neither can be rightly understood apart from the Holy Spirit’s enablement in God’s work of regeneration and sanctification, in the context of the saintly community He forms. Apart from this, the pure, radiant light of God’s pervasive self-communication, refracted and dispersed through the prism of the Creator-creature distinction, shines on those without the spiritual sight to rightly recognize the singularity and simplicity of its source, and the wisdom and beauty in its presentation to complex, finite creatures. Far from being in competition, in presenting us Christ—the one in whom uncreated and created being are united, Scripture is the divine lens—à la Calvin—which God gives and illumines so that the knowledge He sheds abroad by Natural Law might redound unto His magnification.

_{1 Here, I am glossing “Natural Law” as that which pertains to God’s perpetual communication of those precepts basic to human achievement of the good, and Scripture as the supremely authoritative means by which God has preserved His reparative communication to humans.}

_{2 In the three articles of the Creed, God’s work of creation is appropriated to each person of the Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.}