“But I didn’t ask Jesus to die for me…”
I was once a part of a Bible study in which we were asked to role-play a conversation between an atheist and an evangelist. As I was the only Christian who had converted in adulthood, I readily took up the atheist’s stance. None of the ladies in my group were particularly strong debaters, so the conversation lingered mostly on personal anecdotes and Jesus-themed elevator pitches. One lady went for shock value, grasping my hand and exclaiming: “Jesus DIED for your sins. Isn’t that incredible?!”
I later told this lady that her sincerity of conviction and loving desire to share Jesus were admirable, and an atheist may be intrigued enough by them to investigate further. But her seemingly simple exclamation had a bigger problem: it was packed full of presuppositions and vocabulary which an atheist wouldn’t have accepted or even understood.
Like many believers who reside in a Christian bubble, she automatically assumed that her responder would assent to his or her own moral corruption (“your sins”), Jesus’s identity as a real historical figure (“Jesus died”), and the need for debts to be paid if justice was to be satisfied (“died for your sins”). Not to mention that the word “sin” was likely to be misunderstood and to trigger an unproductive emotional response in her listener. In the words of a family member of mine: “I didn’t ask Jesus to die for me, so I don’t know why I should be grateful even if he did.”
So how does a nonbeliever (or a former atheist like myself) arrive at a final state of gratitude for Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross? Only by the grace of God, the faithful Protestant will reply. True— and yet, in a world where humans are endowed with free will, our decisions and actions also play a part. Personally, I arrived at this state of gratitude partly from a recognition of my inability to achieve (or even approach) moral perfection, partly from a historical interrogation to confirm the existence and identity of Jesus, and partly from a study of natural law.
Step One: Let’s Define Natural Law
The very first article I pulled up on JSTOR about natural law opened with this sentence:
Natural law is a term that has been used with a multitude of incompatible meanings, and this certainly has not helped its cause.
Oh dear.
Well, that’s what I am here for: to distill multiple definitions of natural law into easy (or easier)-to-understand summaries. In my Christian experience, natural law refers to the moral imperative to live in accordance with one’s telos, or God-given purpose, and with one’s identity as a creature and imager of God. I have also seen scientific laws and moral laws placed together under the umbrella of natural law with God as the lawgiver. Under the latter definition, natural law describes the way in which all of God’s creation (human and non-human) would function under ideal or Edenic circumstances. By either definition, natural law describes what a creation of God should be and do.
Let me give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. One common application of natural law is to the Catholic regulation of sexual practices: the morality of sexual acts is determined by how they harmonize with the God-designed purpose of the sexual act itself (i.e. for procreation between a man and woman joined in covenantal union). Protestants may be less familiar with this application, but most of us have likely read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and remember his analogy between man and car. This doesn’t address natural law as a whole, of course, but grasps at the idea of telos and of natural order (i.e. God above and man below)1:
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.
In non-religious terms, “human beings are a certain kind of being, and the features of that being should direct our understanding of how human beings should live.” 2
In legal ethics, natural law is defined in contrast to positive law, which refers to societal legislation. In other words, natural law is “the theory of an objective moral order (or unwritten norms for human actions)” while positive law is “the legislation or statutes of a political community.”3 The theory of natural law ensures that we have grounds to stand on if we wish to criticize a government which is acting in accordance with its own legislation but performing objectively evil acts, for example.
We can’t discuss natural law without Aquinas…
St. Thomas Aquinas, another Doctor of the Catholic Church, recognizes four types of law: eternal, divine, natural, and human law. The eternal law is equivalent to God’s unchanging nature, the divine law refers to the eternal law as revealed to humanity (i.e. the Ten Commandments), and human laws are positive laws devised by human reason and adapted to particular circumstances. Natural law, meanwhile, is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.”4
I have summarized several of Aquinas’s finer points on natural law below:
Natural law isn’t a mere moral habit of conscientious adults; it is present in all of humanity.
Natural law is engrained in a human regardless of his ability to intentionally act upon it.
However, humans unable to use their reason (Aquinas lists infants and “insane persons” as examples) aren’t morally responsible for their failure to adhere to natural law.
The first and foundational precept of natural law is that '“good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.”5 All other precepts are based on this one, such as:
The drive to preserve human life and to ward off its obstacles
Certain inclinations in common with other animals (sexual intercourse, education of offspring)
The use of reason to pursue good, manifested as a striving to “know the truth about God, and to live in society”6
An individual’s sin may “blot out” natural law from his or her heart, but the fallen and generally sinful nature of humanity doesn’t remove natural law from the hearts of all humans.7
Natural Law Presupposes Universal Human Reason
Aquinas appeals heavily to human reason as a means to live out natural law. While he certainly doesn’t believe that all humans are perfectly rational, he identifies those able to abide by natural law by their capacity for reason.
In this (and most) conceptions of natural law, there is a presupposition that the average human is able to correctly perceive reality and to use his or her reason to pursue goodness. Of course there are recognized limits of the human intellect, biases from time and culture, and the influence of sinful desires on the rational will for Good. But Aquinas seems to believe that humanity in general is able, as designed by God, to overcome these limitations. A political scholar summarizes Aquinas’s natural law thus8:
The good life is understood, in particular, as a life of virtue [defined as acting according to reason] and excellence, grounded in intellectual and moral virtue. [Humans] choose particular ways of living well, guided by the self-evident basic principles of natural law, which they grasp through practical reason and right desire (the fruit of proper habituation).
…But What About Our Fallen Nature?
As a Christian who hears about her sinfulness in every sermon, I was surprised to find such an emphasis on human reason rather than solely on God’s grace in divining natural law. If we are so broken, how can we trust our reason at all? How can non-Christians without the indwelling Holy Spirit trust theirs? Of course, natural law would exist whether anyone obeyed it or not, but isn’t obedience the whole point?
Athanasius, the first Doctor of the Church whom we learned about last month, also appeals to natural order and God’s moral law to explain why Adam and Eve’s transgression resulted in their expulsion, yet he paints a different picture of Fallen man’s moral capacity, one in which human reason is not a key player.
In the quotes from The Incarnation of the Word of God below9, Athanasius focuses on man’s moral corruption and cites the grace of the Word (Jesus) as their only hope for redemption. Try not to be confused, but the English translation of Athanasius’s Incarnation uses the phrases “natural law” and “nature” in the opposite way to how we have used it above— to refer to our baser inclinations rather than our God-given ones. It’s similar to how the Bible uses the word “flesh.”
This, then, was the plight of men. God had not only made them out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on them His own life by the grace of the Word. […] [T]hough they were by nature subject to corruption, the grace of their union with the Word made them capable of escaping from the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created. That is to say, the presence of the Word with them shielded them even from natural corruption.
Here, he discusses why human repentance wasn’t enough to save humanity (i.e. why Christ’s incarnation was necessary) and why punishing sin thus is befitting of a good and just God:
Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God. […] His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all.
Both Aquinas and Athanasius recognize God as a moral lawgiver and Christ as necessary to save a fallen humanity. But they phrase the same theology quite differently, with Aquinas emphasizing reason as a means to discern God’s will and Athanasius emphasizing the grace of God.
Jesus Beautifies (and Simplifies) Natural Law
No matter how many church fathers’ writings we read, we must always return to the ultimate primary source: the Bible. I shall leave you with this verse from Galatians 5:13-14, sans my commentary, which I fear would muddy the waters of its simple yet radical beauty:
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Some tidbits:
Athanasius makes a small but effective point of support for the authenticity of Christ’s bodily resurrection: that Christ didn’t immediately ascend into Heaven following his resurrection (that would have been a much easier story to fabricate, requiring no verification of an empty tomb or witnesses who touched or interacted with his physical body). Why didn’t Christ immediately ascend? Athanasius says it was to remain as “an object of our senses”: “He stayed in His body and let Himself be seen in it, doing acts and giving signs which showed Him to be not onlny man, but also God the Word.”
Athanasius reminds us that the incarnate Word was not contained by his physical body even when on Earth: “far from being Himself contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself.”
Lewis, C. S. (2012). Mere Christianity. William Collins.
Wolfe, Christopher. Understanding Natural Law. The Good Society , 2003, Vol. 12, No. 3, Symposium: Natural Law and Secular Society (2003), pp. 38-42
Westberg, Daniel. “The Relation between Positive and Natural Law in Aquinas.” Journal of Law and Religion 11, no. 1 (1994): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1051622.
“Thomas Aquinas on Law.” Excerpts from On Law, Morality and Politics (Hackett), https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/302/aquinlaw.htm
Aquinas, ST I-II. Q94. A2. Retrieved from https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2094.htm.
Ibid.
Aquinas, ST I-II. Q94. A6.
Wolfe, Christopher. “Understanding Natural Law.” The Good Society 12, no. 3 (2003): 38–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20711143.
Athanasius. The Incarnation of the Word of God. Retrieved from https://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.ii.html