Pentecostalism and Natural Law

The recent discussion about evangelicals and the natural law has prompted Dale Coulter, an associate professor of historical theology at Regent University, to weigh in with a perspective from Classical Pentecostalism :

Anderson, Ballor, and Carter rightly point out that the issue of the effectiveness of natural-law arguments really points to a deeper debate on the psychology of the human person. Ballor says its about voluntarism, but this is his short-hand way of signifying the underlying issue of the relationship between intellect and will.

I think that evangelicals largely operate within what I will call a Ciceronian-Augustinian trajectory that runs from Augustine through twelfth-century thinkers like Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St. Victor to Bonaventure, and then to Martin Bucer, and on. One could call this a voluntarism, but that classification really does not fit well. It would be better to say that this psychology privileges the role of affections as internal movements of emotion and desire that determine both what reason assents to and what the individual delights in. These internal affective movements are also connected to bodily states such that the human body does matter when it comes to making moral decision, which is why I would say healing of the body is a critical part of salvation. The affections are the integrating center of the human person because they bind the body to the soul. Bodily states inform states of mind because of human affectivity.

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