The Pagan Core of Natural Law Theory

Debates on Natural Law seem to be the rage these days: David Bentley Hart set off a chain reaction after sharing his thoughts on Natural Law at First Things . . . replies on the Internets came from far and near, e.g.,  Edward Feser, Alan Jacobs, Peter Leithart, Peter Escalante . . . and Hart even circled back around to share his additional thoughts.

So, here is my contribution to the Natural Law noise on the Internets: it is an extended excerpt from Ray Sutton's magnificent That You May Prosper: Dominion by Covenant:

Let us not be misled: natural law theory rests on a self-conscious belief in the possibility of judicial neutrality. Civil law must be neutral-ethically, politically, and religiously. Civil law must permit equal time for Satan. There are Christians who believe in neutrality; they send their children to public schools that rest legally on a doctrine of educational neutrality. There are also Christians who think abortion should be legal. This belief rests on the belief that killing a baby and not killing a baby are morally equivalent acts; God is neutral regarding the killing of babies. That such Christians should also adopt a theory of judicial and political neutrality is understandable. But what is not easily understandable is that Christians who recognize the absurdity of the myth of neutrality in education and abortion cling to just this doctrine in the area of civil law and politics. This is a form of what Rushdoony calls intellectual schizophrenia. 

It is only the Christian who has the law of God itself written in his heart, what the author of Hebrews calls a new covenant- the internalization of the old covenant (Heb. 8:7-13). For a Christian to appeal to a hypothetical universally shared reason with fallen humanity is to argue that the Fall of man did not radically affect man's mind, including his logic. It is to argue that this unaffected common logic can overcome the effects of sin. Anyone who believes this needs to read the works of Cornelius Van Til and R. J. Rushdoony. 

The appeal to natural law theory is pagan to the core. It is in some cases a self-conscious revival of pagan Greek philosophy. Natural law theory is totally opposed to God's law. Sadly, we find throughout Western history that compromised though well-intentioned Christian philosophers have appealed to this Stoic concept of natural law in support of some "neutral" system of social and political order. Thomas Aquinas is the most famous of these scholars, but the same mistake is common today. Roger Williams appealed to natural law as the basis of the creation of a supposedly religiously neutral civil government in the 1630s in New England. This is the appeal of just about every Christian who refuses to accept Biblical law as the legal foundation of political order and civil righteousness. The only alternative to "one law" - whether "natural" or Biblical- is judicial pluralism, a constant shifting from principle to principle, the rule of expediency. It is the political theory of polytheism (184-185).