The Word Became Flesh

A Rapprochement of Christian Natural Law and Radical Christological Ethics

Griffin

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498239264
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Is following Jesus natural? Many would say no, but this book argues yes. Saying no suggests that grace and human nature are alternate moral categories. Saying yes implies that our humanity is gracious in origin, capacity, and intent. Much of this discussion hangs on what is meant by "nature" and "natural," and this book explores these ideas creationly and christologically. Part One considers natural law as commonly found in the classical Christian tradition. Part Two explores the radical christological tradition of Anabaptism. Part Three then proposes the two-nature christology of the Chalcedonian definition as a theological resource enabling their reconciliation. The Chalcedonianism of the modern Barth and the ancient Maximus the Confessor are appropriated, along with scientific theology of T. F. Torrance and Nancey Murphy. If Chalcedon correctly affirms Jesus's humanity as being homoousios (one nature) with our humanity, created like Adam's through the eternal Spirit, then Jesus's life was natural--proper to its created intent. And as his divine nature was homoousios with the Father's nature, he is the human expression of the divine Word which gives creation its contingent moral rationality. As such, the life of Jesus (Anabaptists' concern) is morally normative for all humanity (natural law's concern).

Part One

Natural Law Christian Ethics

1

Philosophical, Theological and Biblical Considerations

1. Introduction

Natural law affirms that both nature generally, and human nature specifically, are intrinsically and inherently ethical. Human value consists in and is simultaneous to its factuality, constituting it an ontological and ethical realist theory. Thus three alternatives are discounted: the Humean rejection of value-laden facts, the Cartesian separation of objective fact and subjective value, and existentialism’s voluntarist manufacture of post-existence essence. Natural law affirms moral existence and moral essence as simultaneously co-inherent.

Historicism rejects natural law’s metaphysical realism along with its static anthropology: historical consciousness opposes both mythos (primordial creation dramas legitimizing static social order and nature, including the human), and the realist philosophies of antiquity (the eternal and timeless one against the changing many, as seen in Parmenides and Plato).11 “The mythic focus on primordial time gave human beings security against the uncertain historical future,” while philosophy “identified the essential with the abiding,” with both sharing “a reserve towards history.”12 Accordingly, natural law as a form of substantive ethics is one center of an elliptical debate, with historicism and its dynamic developmentalism the other center.

The contemporary renaissance of natural law’s realism contests four expressions of historicism: first, unjust state positivism; second, various forms of moral subjectivism and non-cognitivism; third, the perceived failure of the enlightenment ethical project; and fourth, ethnology’s culture-specific diversity undergirding relativism. The critique of positivism is based on the thesis that human rights, grounded in human nature, are pre-legal.13 This echoes Cicero, discussed below. In all four cases, human ontology, understood as invariant, singular and real, acts to correct perceived unstable societal practices, historicism and unjust legal positivism.

Non-theistic contemporary natural law theory is predicated “on the supposition that reality is completely rational and can be known by human reason.” This realist rationalism provides non-theological legitimacy for the “continuation of the natural law in the circumstances created by the modern consciousness of freedom,”14 sustaining commensurable cross-ideological rational moral discourse in a non-theistic setting.15 Thus “the term ‘natural law’ in the context of moral theology also denotes a ‘cognitive’ ethics, or one ‘guided by reason,’ which claims to be able to distinguish between good and evil, and correct and false, in such a way that it establishes substantial norms.”16 By contesting non-cognitivism it implies that reason is itself moral and not dependent upon external moral foundations or canons.

This thesis functions with a duplex taxonomy of natural law: protological and teleological. They are not mutually opposed and may be combined. Both theories tend to ontological and instrumental optimism.17 However, three factors render protological natural law currently problematic: first, the contested views of human origins and therefore essence and existence; second, the modern situation of free historical consciousness, which opposes natural law’s static character that is grounded in the two presuppositions of non-developmental fixed realist human ontology, and a realist metaphysic of divine immutable ontology; and third (as a more specific form of the second), the postmodern malleable and decentered self. Thus contemporary natural law theories tend to be non-eschatologically teleological (ends), rather than metaphysical (origins), as universal human goods and ends are more perspicuous, historically adventurous and less controversial than protological claims. Primary consideration will be given to Cicero and Calvin as protological theorists, and Aristotle,18 Augustine and Aquinas as teleological theorists, as well as the new natural law theory of the Finnis school.

Two recent attempts to soften natural law’s realism with virtue ethics are Boyd’s and Black’s. Boyd argues that virtue ethics needs a proper understanding of human nature, and natural law needs the warmth of structured human relationships in the virtues. Human relations and deontological rules exist reciprocally, but the relational element is primary (e.g., “Sabbath made for man”).19 Black argues that Hauerwas and Grisez are “capable of functioning as mutually enriching . . . forms of ethics.”20 As virtue ethics are often teleological —“What type of person do I want to become?”—this is unsurprising.

Because natural law is primarily a realist ethic, the philosophical matters of critical realism and naturalism will be first examined, followed by theological and biblical concerns.

2. Philosophical Consi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Natural Law Christian Ethics
• Part Two: The Radical Tradition of Christian Ethics
• Part Three: The Word Became Flesh
• Conclusion
• Bibliography