Meeting the Protestant Prejudice

Meeting the Protestant Prejudice June 16, 2014

RJ Snell is aware of what he calls the “Protestant Prejudice” against natural law, and, though himself an advocate of natural law, admits that Protestants lodge “reasonable and sensible objections” against theoretical models of natural law (The Perspective of Love, 12).

Snell, though, argues that these Protestant objections don’t touch natural law worked out “from the mode of interiority,” which is capable of making ample room for “the effects of sin on intellect and will, the role of grace, the importance of community, history (including salvation history), and the centrality of the Gospel.” For Protestants to continue to attack natural law theory as if they were refuting “natural law as interiority” is to engage in straw-manning (12-13).

Snell gives full weight to the standard objections. Summarizing Hauwerwas’s critique of natural law, he notes that it is seen as forgetting or minimizing “the unique ethic of the church” and therefore given to “cultural assimilation and captivity.” Rather than emphasizing “the practices of the Christian community with their logic in the form of Christ, the prevailing, ‘neutral’ norms of consensus govern action, but since the prevailing norms are unfaithful, fallen, and hostile powers and dominions, such consensus is a form of capitulation and even idolatrous collaboration” (58). Even when natural law theory begins from creation and Trinitarian foundations, it ends up turning nature into “a static, a-historical given,” that resembles the “mythos perpetuated on the Church by Enlightenment Liberalism” (59).

To take one standard objection: Snell argues that natural law in the mode of interiority avoids minimizing sin because it starts from “concrete subjects and concrete operations” (146). In fact, “interiority not only makes the noetic effects [of sin] non-abstract, but radicalizes its effects. A good many proponents of the noetic effects of sin confine it to an impairment of our knowledge of God while remaining remarkable sanguine about ordinary knowledge. Interiority allows the totality of depravity in a way that a surprising number of adherents of total depravity do not!” (147; in a footnote, he refers to “Reformed Epistemology”). 

This is still a natural law position because it assumes that there is an “immanent law contained in the structures of consciousness” that is not followed because of deranged desires and a mis-directed disposition (141). In place of knowledge and order, humans fall into “interruptions and irrationalities, refusals and intelligibility” (141).

I’m not convinced that natural law is a good way to describe what Snell is describing, but when a natural lawyer starts talking about the noetic effects of sin and depravity, even Prejudiced Protestants should take note.


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