Sola Scriptura and Shapeshifting Strawmen

I had the misfortune to see the following quote from a recent post by David Reece on CrossPolitic appear in my Twitter feed today:

Most natural law proponents will not very clearly define their view.

When they do, they either:

(1) agree with theonomy that the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power), or

(2) disagree with theonomy that the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power).

If they disagree, then they reject Sola Scriptura and the term “natural law” provides a useful distinguisher from theonomy.

The manifold errors in this little passage I will discuss momentarily. First, though, I decided to grab a free trial to the CrossPolitic Substack so I could read the rest of the article and try to do a more complete job responding, rather than leaping on a snippet alone. The core issue I want to flag here is the definition of sola Scriptura as it relates to natural law. There are a few other things wrong with the article as well (indeed, no part of it is particularly salvageable),1 but I would like to narrow my focus to this point.

Reece makes his key claim about sola Scriptura here:

Many natural law advocates want to say that they (1) believe in Sola Scriptura, and (2) they believe in the ability to authoritatively derive the law of God from a source other than Scripture alone, namely, natural law.

Listen to me carefully. That is not Sola Scriptura. That is Scripture plus some other process of authoritatively deriving doctrine.

He proceeds to elaborate on what sola Scriptura means by creatively expositing WCF 1.6, which reads as follows:

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

He expands on this point to note that it covers everything. Everything necessary for man’s life is in Scripture, which surely includes everything needful for politics and ethics and the like. So if we have the Bible, we have no need to look anywhere else to learn of such matters.

So, with his definitions and explanations about sola Scriptura in place, he moves on to defining natural law. This, he claims, is a shapeshifting term full of ambiguity. He says that natural law is “a term that normally means ‘what I find reasonable’ when used in either an ethical or civil context” before proceeding to lay out a taxonomy of sorts. Never mind that most of the usages he gives are basically just strawmen, either things no one actually believes or else simply ways in which random fools use the term off the tops of their heads. The list is below:

1. Irrationalistic Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon feeling, experience, or a non-rational intuition. Where the heart is defined as feelings and you are told to follow your heart. This is the ethics of Romanticism and Walt Disney.

2. Rationalistic Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon logic alone. Logic is how God thinks, it is a set of forms used to interpret content, but it has no content in itself. These natural law proponents are smuggling in terms through experience (see below) or philosophies (like Scripture).

3. Empirical Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon sense experience alone. Without making logic an additional attachment onto this axiom, experience is a mere chaos that cannot sort itself. Rationalistic and Empirical Natural Law normally end up collapsing into each other, so we determine what is good by reasoning through our own experiences. This does not take into account our finite perspectives, limited experience, and fallen nature.

Before proceeding, I should note that the people who hold to a view resembling (1) almost never use the term “natural law.” The second and third versions sound like taxonomies one has made by accident, misunderstanding the people who speak of logic or empirical knowledge in ethics. The claim that an empirical view would not take in account our finite perspectives, limited experience, and fallen nature sounds like doing an empirical take badly, since finitude and limited experience are things people can empirically verify characterize human life anyway. Even for fallen nature, though the full reality of original sin cannot be known empirically, it is perfectly possible and has often been done for people to observe How Stuff Works and realize all actual humans are very dysfunctional creatures.

Finally, though, he moves into the fourth definition, what he identifies as the Reformed view and names “Innate Natural Law Theory.” I want to quote the definition here to make something quite clear:

The Reformed view of natural law involves innate categories, written on the heart of all image-bearers that cause us to make judgments—we excuse and we condemn. However, this innate knowledge is not the source of certainty about right and wrong but rather a mirror to show us our own hypocrisy.

The first sentence is more or less correct, and the second sentence is wildly contrary to any historic Reformed, Protestant, or even Christian views generally.

There are, off the top of my head, three chief problems with this second sentence that rejects a use of natural moral light as providing certainty about ethics in favor only of an accusatory role.

1. There is no conflict between providing moral knowledge and providing a mirror of hypocrisy, so the “not, but rather” construction needs to be justified; the matter is not either/or.

2. If these innate categories provide no moral certainty, then neither can they provide any certainty about our own hypocrisy or about hypocrisy being a bad thing.

3. This accusatory role differs drastically even from the traditional Reformed “First Use of the Law,” exposing our sin and need for Christ. Historically, Protestants have viewed this role as the conscience providing moral axioms and applying them to our own cases to produce the judgment that we are deeply guilty. But since Reece denies that our innate moral categories provide certain knowledge, he seems to replace this function with an alternative, one flavored by presuppositional concerns: “the contradictory beliefs, valuations, and choices of men cause them to be without excuse in the sight of God.” Rather than our sure innate knowledge of a moral standard applied to our choices revealing our sinfulness, the model seems to be our own self-contradictions between our alleged beliefs, values, and choices proving we are hopelessly lost. The model moves from seeing you are guilty according to a known standard to realizing you must be guilty according to some standard or another because you constantly morally contradict yourself.

He then continues with what appears to be his core contention: “The Reformed view is not that a second authoritative source needs to be put side by side with Scripture as an infallible standard of knowledge.” The wording here is loaded, but it seems especially targeted against the “two books” language which speaks of nature and Scripture as both ways in which God has communicated to men. “Infallible standard of knowledge” is a fishy phrase here, and it’s hard to be sure how he is using it except perhaps to make you want to agree with him out of an instinct to reserve “infallible” for Scripture.

Then he moves on to a curious section in which he identifies four possible relationships between the Bible and natural law in order to establish that natural law approaches are “useless” in ethics and politics. The four possibilities:

1. The Bible and the natural law contain the same content. In this case, he says we should just keep talking about what the Bible says and ignore the potentially misleading philosophical language.

2. Natural law contains less than the Bible. In that case, he says, might as well stick with the Bible, as natural law is less useful.

3. Natural law contains more than the Bible on some points and is thus a standard in those areas. This, he notes, Protestants must reject as incompatible with sola Scriptura.

4. Natural law contradicts the Bible. In this case, he points out, natural law must be rejected.

What I find fascinating here is that, after complaining about the alleged lack of definition for what natural law is, he writes this section without reference to any definitions at all. Indeed, a cursory familiarity with the actual natural law tradition would make this section almost unintelligible. No one who is familiar with the kinds of things Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Vermigli, Hooker, Witsius, Junius, Hemmingsen, the Westminster divines, the assembly at Dort, the Reformed Orthodox giants like Turretin, or any other representative historic Protestant and Reformed authors wrote about natural law could even have contemplated proposing this dilemma. (He also makes the claim in the conclusion of this section that when people speak of God’s law as discernible through two sources and then make a focus on reasoning from creation, “God is dishonored and his word is not exalted as it should be,” without explaining how or why this is the case.)

So, fundamentally, what’s wrong with his argument?

It’s all about nature, grace, and definitions. I will tackle these in the reverse order as above.

Natural law is where Reece has most violently departed from the Reformed and Protestant approach, and where he seems to be the least aware of the traditional teachings. He complains about the lack of definitions, but as it happens, Protestants have historically defined natural law pretty rigorously. It is not a wax nose, and most of its actual features do not resemble anything Reece reflects awareness of in his article.

Let us survey a few definitions. First comes from Herman Witsius, famed 17th century Dutch Reformed covenant theologian:

The law of nature is the rule of good and evil, inscribed by God on man’s conscience, even at his creation, and therefore binding upon him by divine authority… It is moreover to be observed, that this law of nature is the same in substance with the decalogue… This law is deduced by infallible consequence from the very nature of God and man.2

Our next definition comes from Niels Hemmingsen, a 16th century Danish Lutheran at the University of Copenhagen:

The law of nature is a certain knowledge, imprinted on the minds of men by God, of the principles of knowing and of acting, and of the conclusions proved from these principles that are in agreement with the proper end of man. Reason constructs these conclusions from the principles by necessary consequence for the government of human life, so that man may recognize, want, choose, and do the things that are right, and avoid their opposites; and God has bestowed on men the conscience as the witness and judge of all these things.3

Speaking of Lutherans, here are a couple random bits from him, across multiple sources.

Natural law is a practical first principle in the sphere of morality; it forbids evil and commands good. Positive law is a decision that takes circumstances into account and conforms with natural law on credible grounds. The basis of natural law is God, who has created this light, but the basis of positive law is civil authority. When theft is punished by hanging, this occurs according to positive law on acceptable grounds, but not as in the case of the Draconian law which condemned every thief to hang, even if he stole only a chicken; this has no acceptable grounds and is contrary to nature. Consequently it was said that this law was written in blood.4

It is natural to honor God, not steal, not commit adultery, not bear false witness, not murder; and what Moses commands is nothing new. For what God has given the Jews from heaven, he has also written in the hearts of all men. Thus I keep the commandments which Moses has given, not because Moses gave commandment, but because they have been implanted in me by nature, and Moses agrees exactly with nature, etc.

But the other commandments of Moses, which are not [implanted in all men] by nature, the Gentiles do not hold. Nor do these pertain to the Gentiles, such as the tithe and others equally fine which I wish we had too. Now this is the first thing that I ought to see in Moses, namely, the commandments to which I am not bound except insofar as they are [implanted in everyone] by nature [and written in everyone’s heart].5

Thus should one deal with all property unlawfully held, whether in public or in private, that love and natural law may always prevail. For when you judge according to love you will easily decide and adjust matters without any lawbooks. But when you ignore love and natural law you will never hit upon the solution that pleases God, though you may have devoured all the lawbooks and jurists.6

Perhaps dearest to me on this point is Richard Hooker, who was my best introduction to the subject of natural law. He uses a different terminology, preferring “law of nature” for the laws that govern physics and biology and the like, while “law of reason” he uses for the laws that govern rational beings, namely humans:

The law of reason or human nature is that which men have discovered, by process of natural reasoning, that they are perpetually and universally bound by. We know the laws of reason by these marks, and those who keep them resemble in their actions the works of nature herself. All of nature’s works are necessary, and beautiful, with nothing superfluous or lacking, and so will be the works of anyone who follows the law of reason. These laws can be discovered through reason, even without divine revelation, and indeed are so apparent upon investigation that they have been known to the world from the beginning of time… Men often call these laws, “the law of nature,” because this is the law which human nature is universally obligated by reason to follow, but our term “the law of reason” seems more precise. This law encompasses everything which men naturally know (or at least may naturally know) to be seemly or unseemly, virtuous or vicious, good or evil.7

Finally, here is Francis Turretin, giant of Reformed Scholasticism:

Natural law is taken strictly and properly for the practical rule of moral duties to which men are bound by nature… [The Reformed orthodox] affirm that there is a natural law [arising] from a divine obligation being impressed by God upon the conscience of man in his very creation, on which the difference between right and wrong is founded and which contains the practical principles of immovable truth (such as: “God should be worshipped,” “parents honored,” “we should live virtuously,” “injure no one,” “do to others what we would wish them to do to us” and the like). Also that so many remains and evidences of this law are still left in our nature (although it has been in different ways corrupted and obscured by sin) that there is no mortal who cannot feel its force either more or less. Now they wish this law to be called natural, not because it has its origin from bare nature (since it depends upon God the supreme lawgiver), but because it becomes known from the aspect of creatures and the relation of man to God, and the knowledge of it is impressed upon the mind by nature, not acquired by tradition or instruction.8

Similar passages to many of these abound in figures like Calvin, Vermigli, Melanchthon, and many more.

So what do these passages have in common? What kind of account of natural law emerges from them? We could summarize the features below:

• The law is natural. This has two related meanings here:

  • The reason for the law and its content is our nature, that is, what we are, how God made us, and how we relate to Him as our Maker.

  • We know the law naturally, i.e. God “pre-loads” our minds with its first principles/fundamental rules (though not necessarily all its conclusions).

• The law is universal. Because it is based on how God made us, it applies to all men at all times.

• The law is rational. Once someone knows what men are like and who God is, the things the law requires you to do or not do logically follow from its first principles. By valid reasoning, you can go from “what man is like” and “God made man” all the way to specifics like “Fornication is immoral” or “People should regularly rest from daily labors and worship God publicly” or “I should not slander the natural law tradition on the Internet while claiming to be Reformed.”

• All men know it. This does not mean all men know everything about what is right and what is wrong, but all men do know the basics: you should do good things, not bad things; God deserves your worship; life is better than death; you should treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated. The answer to every moral question ultimately traces back to these basics that everyone knows.

• This law is equivalent to the Great Commandments and the Ten Commandments. The traditional Protestant view is that every moral truth follows consequently from the commands to love God and love neighbor, that these two laws are necessarily implied by man’s nature as a rational creature under God, and that the Ten Commandments represent a summary and guide to all the main implications of those two great commandments.

• The knowledge of the law is hindered by the Fall. Only the Turretin quote here directly addresses this, but it comes up often enough in Hooker, Calvin, and elsewhere. The reason for the hindrance must be carefully understood: the problem is not that unbelievers have no access to its truth without Scripture. On the contrary, as was said about, the whole law follows logically from the basic and clearly evident realities of man’s nature as God’s creature. The law is there to be known. But the fall hinders man’s willingness to reason about it clearly along with the strength of his recognition of its chief implications and the reliability of man’s teachers, such as parents, educators, and social or political leadership, who sinfully fail in passing down both what the conclusions of the law are and how to think about it correctly.

Let’s go back to the part I quoted first, where Reece treats the following statement as equivalent to sola Scriptura: “the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power).”

This is a great confusion, as it fails to distinguish between the Christian faith and, well, stuff in general. Now, do not misunderstand: the Christian faith touches on all of life in various respects, and it directly addresses the purpose of life as a whole. But the faith as the faith consists in the articles of supernatural doctrine and the means of grace. This affects and orients the rest of life, but it is not identical to every other part of life. It is in this respect kind of like the relationship between a church service and a daily vocation: there is a sense in which corporate worship is the most important thing and gives meaning and orientation to the daily vocation, but a church service is not building bridges or teaching classes or writing books or doing laundry.

All this is a preamble to make the point that the historic Reformed definition of sola Scriptura does not claim Scripture is the lone standard for anything and everything. Rather, the statements about what Scripture is perfect and sufficient for are nearly always specified as “for faith,” “of faith,” or “for the faith.” For example, Turretin defines it in the terms of Scripture being the “only and perfect rule of faith”9 and of the Scriptures containing all things necessary for salvation so “that they can be a total and adequate rule of faith and practice.”10 To be as specific as possible, the Reformed usually identified Scripture’s role as the only and adequate source of supernatural truths (e.g. the Trinity, the way of salvation, the resurrection of the body, and anything else man could never find out from general revelation) and the only and adequate rule for the way to salvation.

So only in the questions “What do Christians believe about things unseen?” and “What must we do to be saved?” do the Reformed propose Scripture as the only rule, source, or standard. In other matters, it is not the lone or sole source, but instead the highest and only infallible verbal source. It speaks without error and can always be trusted as carrying divine authority for whatever it says, but it is not the only thing that speaks. For an obvious example, take fly fishing. Scripture in no wise teaches us how fly fishing works, how to get better at it, or anything else of the sort. It does speak to fly fishing in one sense, in that it tells us it should be done to the glory of God and with love toward neighbor, but these aren’t specific to fly fishing. They apply to all things. For a moderate example, take the conquest of Jericho. The conquest of Jericho isn’t a supernatural mystery one must know to be saved nor is it part of what we must do to be saved, and one could have known about it without the Bible (e.g. by being to witness it personally, like Rahab), but whatever the Bible says about it is most certainly true, and contrary historians must yield.

With ethics, then, Scripture is not the only source of true information. The fundamental principles of ethics are not uniquely revealed in Scripture, but rather God has planted them in every human mind. That, for example, we should not needlessly harm people is a basic principle every man knows from within all his days, and even pagans who’ve never heard one iota of Scripture are generally quite aware of it. Points like this are frequent in Reformed writers like Calvin or Vermigli.

So what use is Scripture in ethics? Much in every way. First, it restates everything that has been part of the natural law since the day God made Adam and makes it clearer and more certain with the voice of God backing it up. Since it is not always easy to determine whether something is right or wrong by reasoning from first principles, God put His own verbal stamp on all the most important heads of the law for our edification. Beyond this, He illustrated for us further with examples and illustrations, whether the model of Torah, the narratives with endings of blessing or punishment, the prophetic critiques of specific personal or social sins, or anything else, which gives ordinary people far more to go on to understand the law.

But Scripture adds no new moral principles that God “left out” from general revelation, and, more importantly, it is not the ground of right and wrong. Good and evil were what they were since the beginning, long before Moses put pen to paper. The reasons that things are right or wrong go back to God’s own nature and how He designed us. Natural law makes this point explicit: X is good and Y is bad because X fits how God made you and what He made you for, whereas Y cuts against the grain of your design, being bad for you as a rational creature from a good Creator. Scripture is thus here like the owner’s manual for a complicated kitchen appliance: it gives you the whole scoop of how it works, how to use it, how to avoid safety hazards, etc. Without the manual, you can still learn how to use the appliance by inspection, trial and error, and the like, but you are more likely to make mistakes, miss things, or go the whole time without realizing you could have drastically improved or simplified what you did.

To go back to Reece, then, this is the main reason why we should speak of natural law. Out of his silly four options, the option that the Bible and natural law teach the same ethics is correct. Both teach love of God and love of neighbor, and everything else follows from those two things. But his inference that this makes natural law talk pointless is unjustified. Scripture mostly reminds us what is right and what is wrong, chiefly to get us to repent and to help us progress. Natural law as a framework turns the focus onto the how and why behind what is right and wrong, helping us to understand ethics rather than only obey. It looks at how God designed us, how the human machine works, what is beneficial or harmful, and it connects the dots. Nothing about this threatens sola Scriptura as the Reformed and wider Protestant traditions have historically understood it.

Theonomy here falls into essentially the trap of flattery with Scripture, trying to honor it by attributing to it false things. On this point, I return to Richard Hooker, dealing with a similar case of people abusing the notion of Scripture’s sufficiency in his day:

There are two opinions concerning the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, each opposite to the other, but both repugnant to the truth. Rome teaches Scripture to be so insufficient that, without adding traditions, it would not contain all revealed and supernatural truth necessary for salvation. Others, rightly condemning this view, fall into the opposite ditch—just as dangerous—thinking that Scripture contains not only all things necessary for salvation, but indeed simply all things, such that to do anything according to any other law is not only unnecessary to salvation but unlawful, sinful, and downright damnable. But whatever is spoken of God or things pertaining to God other than the truth, even if it seems like an honor, is actually an injury. And just as exaggerated praises given to men often turn out to diminish and damage their well-deserved reputations, so we must likewise beware lest, in attributing too much to Scripture, such unbelievable claims cause even those virtues which Scripture truly possesses to be less reverently esteemed.11

• A post of my own about proving the whole law from natural knowledge:
  

  Whether We All Know How to Live

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  December 23, 2023

  

  (This is one of the last posts from my previous blog. I have Twitter discussions about this so much that I decided it deserved migrating to here.)

• So much of this argument (especially much of what I said in conclusion) is well-handled in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which I have been citing. Read it, preferably in the Davenant modernization if you are new to this.

• Martin Luther has an excellent little treatise about natural law and the Torah, which I have also cited here: “How Christians Should Regard Moses.”