Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
We have Judy from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Okay, this was a deep dive. She's referring to the latest dicta that went out on natural law, and this is one dicta I'm going to have to go back to think about.
Is natural law another alternative to the word of God and apologetic discourse so as not to come off as Bible thumpy? Where does one look to read more about the various laws of natural law? Great question, Judy.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I really appreciate that, Judy. So this. There's been a renaissance of natural law thinking and a couple of things I think we need to distinguish between natural law as a fact versus natural law as a theory. Theories about natural law, those are two different kinds of things. And to begin with, what your question posed, you know, as if you can read what are the laws of natural law? Natural law was never designed to be a code or a codified census or a recipe book as to do this, don't do this, do this, don't do this. Rather, it is the idea that in God being the creator and being a moral being, when he created, he imposed a moral order upon his created order so that those made in his image, humans can apprehend through the use of their reasoning, general ideas of morality.
The natural law tradition would go on to say that the Decalogue is a good summary of natural law and those sorts of things. But I think we need to understand at the outset that the Christian worldview teaches us that there are two books of revelation, general revelation and special revelation. And those books can be distinguished but should never be separated. Because if you separate them and say, oh, natural law is an alternative to special revelation and the law of God, what happens then is it puts a lot of resources and reliance upon natural man's reason. And that's a problem. It's a problem because the Scripture tells us that natural man has fallen in all his capacities, including his reasoning. And the Apostle Paul makes this point in several ways. In his epistles, the natural man becomes vain in his reasoning, vain in his thinking, Gentiles are futile in their thinking, so on and so forth. And so special revelation, the content will never differ from general revelation. Trouble is that we're flawed in those ways. And so those are kind of the basic backgrounds of what we're talking About.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So for putting flesh on this in terms of, like in a case situation or a legal situation, the unbeliever, when they are arguing for something, they're reaching down to some sort of presupposition or some sort of law. Are they reaching into the same handbook, as it were, as the believer is in all situations?
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Well, I think that we take what we publish here at Truth Exchange, which is where Paul says they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Romans 1. And what that tells us is that they know the truth, but they hold it down and they do not obliterate it.
So what a natural law discourse does is tries to dredge up and bring to the surface those moral norms that have been suppressed. So, for example, everyone knows, because it is written on their heart, Romans 2, that taking innocent life is wrong. So then what does the communist or the Nazis say? What they say is those who they exterminated are not human. So we hear rhetoric like, oh, the Uighurs are not real Chinese. They're not human, so we can exterminate them. Or we hear, Jews are not really. They're animals, they're not people, so we can exterminate them. That reinforces the natural law. They're just misapplying it. So we see all the time this idea of a moral vector that we try to justify our own actions. Again, Paul says that this law either accuses us or excuses us, but we know these things through special revelation. And so we have to be very careful because understand that free fall creation is governed by special revelation. When God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden, he says, okay, this is perfect paradise. Just look at the garden, just experience things and just use your minds and that'll tell you how you're supposed to live faithfully. No, he instructed them with special revelation. And of course, now post fall, there are some people who say, oh, you know, the public square should be governed only by natural law. I'm thinking of the Christian nationalists that say this. Well, the trouble is, if you look out into the, quote, natural world today after the fall, what do you see? Things like polygamy, things like ethnic and racial segregation, things like kinism, things like barring interracial marriage or interethnic marriage. And so what we have here is a real fallacy. The is odd fallacy. And so there's a saying, if it exists, it must be moral. That, of course, is simply not true. And so we can't really rely upon that with those things. The other thing we have a problem with is There's a lack of what we would call epistemological granularity or specificity with respect to natural law. So, classic example, a human being dies. Well, is that murder? Is it manslaughter? Is it justifiable self defense? Is it an excused killing?
We ask those questions because those things matter morally. The law of God tells us those things. But the natural law really does not help us in that regard. And so we need to understand that the imago DEI tells us that every person possesses equality and dignity and should be valorized accordingly. But if you look, just look around, you know, the largest slave traders during the slave trade were black Africans, kidnapping and selling other black Africans. So I guess slavery is consistent with natural law. And those arguments, of course, were made prior to the Civil War in the United States. In fact, John Quincy Adams was sanctioned by Congress because he took the position that slavery should be abolished and people would invoke things like divine law and that sort of thing. So it's true and good, but we're not. And so we need the correcting lens of special revelation.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's helpful.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: But let me just. Can I add one thing about that, please. Yeah. To the question? I'm a skeptical supporter of it because making natural law arguments, like many abolitionists did prior to the Civil War, they used like Lincoln did and Frederick Douglass did and so forth.
Natural law speaks in moral universals, and that expands our vocabulary, that allows us to have conversations where they should be on the oughts, in other words, what's truly right and what's truly wrong. We're not relativists. A natural law also exposes the myth of moral neutrality. We have to really understand that there are answers to these questions. It's not simply a matter of efficiency or populism that, oh, most people voted for it, so it must be right. No, that's not true.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: And so natural law allows us to make some claims that are not otherwise available.
As to resources, I would give her maybe three. A friend of mine, J. Buchashewski. That's hard to spell, but I can do it.
B U D Z I S Z E W S K I. He wrote Natural law for lawyers, which is very accessible. I commissioned him to do that and edited it, Natural law for lawyers. He also wrote what you can't or what we can't not know, what we can't not know, which is a good introduction to it. And then I think a very important one for applying natural law in evangelism is one called the revenge of conscience. The idea is this idea we've got to open up and tell stories and help people to come to what their moral sense actually tells them. And those are three good books by him. Charlie Rice wrote a book called 50 Questions About Natural Law, which is also helpful. He's a classic Thomist, so there's a lot of resources out there. But the trouble is people become Pied Pipers and want people to believe in Thomas Aquinas instead of Christ. Sometimes it's like, no, the natural law is a means to an end. But ultimately we need to wear the glasses, so to speak, of special revelation. I hope that helps. It's a very complicated, long topic, but the books I've recommended will help us take it to the streets, if you will. And I would just say one more thing. The new volume edited by Andrew Sandlin called the Sanctified State makes the Perfect Christmas Gift. It's out now, but it includes a chapter by Dr. Brian Matson, one of our truth exchange scholars. And I think he articulates some of the problematic features of an exclusive natural law methodology.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: What do you do when in an evangelistic moment where somebody is rejecting the natural order, natural law, and also rejects God's law or his special revelation? How do you, how do you navigate that kind of a situation? Because, yeah, it seems to me like we're coming. We're in that era where people, they completely reject the natural order and so the embracement of the whole lgbtq and then they reject God's special revelation. So they don't want to hear about what God it says.
What do you do in that situation? How do you help somebody?
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Well, I think you have to distinguish between God haters and actual inquirers. They just don't have the background to do this. But sometimes you have to press and say things like the person will say, I don't believe in your God. I don't think there's any more order. We're just molecules and we've evolved. And sex is simply about personal preference and pleasure. And I'll, and I'll say, I don't believe you and just leave it. Because they do not live consistently with that overarch. In fact, they don't run their car over pedestrians in the crosswalk. They do kiss their significant other goodbye. They do have preferences for eating healthy. Well, why? And so what you find is these touch points that demonstrate contradictions in what they're doing. So that's one way to do that. And you also, you know, like the, like in a post abortive situation. Which is a very difficult situation. I've talked to a number of, you know, post abortive women. One of the things you say is, and many women who have abortions, have multiple abortions and say, and you start talking to them in a counseling situation, you say, well, did you have any problems afterwards?
Just the normal ones. They'll finally say, and then you just wait and you wait and you wait and then things begin to come out. And what's interesting is oftentimes a young woman will begin to become very troubled, weepy, depressed, usually about nine months after the pregnancy was known, because there's this rhythm. She knows, she counted. She understands when that child would have been born. And she also knows in her heart of hearts that she was complicit with respect to ending that child's life. And so there's a real opportunity there to discuss that. Not to condemn her, but to really show that that moral knowledge is real knowledge.
She has real moral knowledge. So there's just things like that. There's ideas of justification and atonement. Let me put it this way, I'm getting ahead of myself. But the categories of reality are created by God. So the idea of atonement, justification, and all these kinds of things are God categories. What we do is we distort them. But we're always looking for justification. We're always looking for atonement. A good example of that is in the movie Unforgiven, classic Western. And there's this young guy who ends up, you know, finally killing somebody. And he all of a sudden, you know, he's, you know, drinking a lot. He's using alcohol to assuage his conscience. And in the conversation, the Eastwood character is engaging with them and the kid takes a swig and goes, well, he deserved it. Well, we do not know if that is true or not. But what we do know is that provides him a justification for this act of taking a life. And then Eastwood's response is, we all deserve it, everyone deserves it. Which is again, moral knowledge. At some level. It may not be Hallelujah, Damascus Road, but it is that. So in these kinds of ideas, you have these moral conversations. Then I would just quote Cornelius Van Til, which is kind of my vector for these things. It's like, always be in a position to buy the next cup of coffee.
You know, don't blow up the bridge, so to speak.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I always love that when you bring up that quote from, from Van Dyl. Always be in the position to buy the next cup of coffee.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: This concludes the recording of the Director's Bag removed. More resources from Truth Exchange Please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Guillo, and this is the Truth Exchange Podcast.
