Natural Consensus?

Brad Gregory (Unintended Reformation) emphasizes the role of Christian division in the formation of modern institutions and ideologies. But he also shows at several points that the modern efforts to head off the unintended consequences of the Reformation failed or even made the disease worse.

Natural law was one of the solutions to interminable theological debates. Confessional divisions could not be reconciled; nature could transcend because it was shared by all.

It didn’t turn out that way: both the notions of natural law and natural rights “had stimulated a welter of rival truth claims that replicated the open-ended indeterminacy of the Protestant appeal to scripture, without any impartial means of adjudicating among them. . . . Natural laws or natural rights were supposed to provide a consensual and uncontroversial basis to settle disputes. Instead, like appeals to reason, recourse to them created new disputes and new things about which to disagree, without prospects of rational resolution” (221).