If we were to ask the proverbial man on the street what Thomas Jefferson meant when he appealed to the authority of “Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, chances are he might shrug. A Christian might think Jefferson was referring to the God of the Bible; a cynic would think the phrase is empty rhetoric void of meaning; and anyone else might dismiss it as a vague, mystical notion of an earth-god named Nature.
If we were to ask someone in 1790, we would get a very different answer.
Jesse Covington, Bryan McGraw, and Micah Watson’s new book, Hopeful Realism, is not about the history of Jefferson’s God of Nature, but it is their effort to reacquaint us with him, his moral law, and its implications for our politics. In doing so, McGraw, Covington, and Watson advance no new ideas, as they would be the first to attest. Instead, the authors (and Jefferson) are invoking a concept that is very old: natural law. Their subtitle—Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics—summarizes the book well.
Natural law was a universally accepted teaching from antiquity through the early church, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, clear through to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It was such a basic concept in Christendom as to pass almost unnoticed, the way we do not notice the air we breathe, or fish the water in which they swim. It fell out of use for a few centuries but has enjoyed new life since World War II. As such, Covington, McGraw, and Watson’s book is a needful part of a generational renaissance of natural law thinking, particularly among Protestants, that continues to gather steam.
Other recent works by Protestants in this vein include Andrew Walker’s Faithful Reason; J. Daryl Charles’ two books, Retrieving the Natural Law, and The Idea and Importance of Natural Law; S.J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law; and most everything David van Drunen has written, especially Politics After Christendom, Divine Covenants and Moral Order, and his recent short introduction, Natural Law. The authors’ volume joins a growing chorus calling on the church to heed the historic Christian teaching on natural law.
What is natural law? Though first articulated by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics, when the early church fathers observed Scripture’s teaching about the moral order of creation, they borrowed from the Greco-Roman language of natural law to describe it. Doing so enabled them to communicate Scriptural truths to a pagan audience while illustrating how Christianity fulfilled and surpassed the best of pagan thought. Natural law gave them a language through which to speak to pagans about sin and their accountability to their Creator.
“Nature” in this sense is not a term for the physical world. It connotes something more: the innate moral structure of the world, the rational underpinning of the cosmos. Nature’s God is the benevolent Creator and the source from whom that rational pinning emanates. Natural law is the moral order of creation.
Covington, McGraw, and Watson offer two parts to their definition of natural law. First, “human beings have a normative nature that is directional: some behaviors accord with and promote the fulfillment of that nature, and others hinder and corrupt it.” Second, “people have the capacity to reason and thus understand to some extent what helps or hinders this nature.”
The authors summarize millennia of Christian thinking in this vein with a brief overview of natural law in the Bible coupled with a chapter on mainstream Christian thinking about politics. (Mainstream means the tradition of thinking that is neither theocratic nor pacifist; the tradition that accepts that the state is legitimate but limited). These initial chapters are written at just the right level for Christian undergraduates, seminarians, and young pastors who need an introduction to the very large topic of political theology.
Covington, McGraw and Watson attempt to offer a distinctively evangelical take on natural law, accounting for the unreliability of the human mind and the stark antithesis between special revelation and general revelation. Doing so requires a host of qualifications and caveats about what we are able to know, with what level of confidence, and how far such knowledge applies. The authors succeed in conveying the humility with which we should make claims about what Nature says.
That said, I’m not convinced there’s anything that is distinctively evangelical about this. The criticism of natural law—that it puts too much faith in the autonomous human intellect—might be true if we’re talking about Thomas Hobbes or Immanuel Kant. But it was never very persuasive when leveled against the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, or the 17th-century Protestant thinker Francis Turretin. The authors are not wrong to insist on epistemological humility, but evangelicals do not have a monopoly on that insight.
Covington, McGraw and Watson know this, of course. They cloak their argument in Augustine’s authority, using “Augustine” as a sort of shorthand for “Christian tradition that won’t sound too Catholic.” It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to get evangelicals to learn something about the broad and orthodox Christian intellectual tradition without provoking their autoimmune response to anything that smells like Rome. (This isn’t a criticism of the authors, but a compliment that they know their audience. I’ve used “Augustine” in the same way in my own work).
Covington, McGraw and Watson proceed to list the basic creational goods that Nature affirms as good: physical, relational, volitional, and rational goods. This is a shorter and more generic list than others writing in the same vein, but each category is elastic enough to get the job done. Within those categories, Covington, McGraw and Watson elaborate the natural law as applied to “the common good and civic friendship,” “confessional pluralism and religious liberty,” “restraint and liberty,” and “democracy and decentralization.” While I agree with their conclusions, some readers may want more connective tissue showing how their first principles get to their more specific categories.
The authors devote a chapter to making natural law practical. It is essentially a guide for thinking through issues of public concern, weighing pros and cons, recognizing tradeoffs, etc. It is a process, a rubric, or a heuristic. They cannot presume to cover every public policy issue themselves; instead they try to equip the reader with mental tools to structure their thinking.
All that is ambitious enough, but it is just half the book. The second half is a series of case studies: natural law as applied to economics, the family, war, and religious liberty. This follows a template of sorts in the other works on natural law I mentioned earlier. It helps demonstrate how to use natural law reasoning. Most readers will get the idea better by seeing it in action rather than reading the theory.
It again highlights this book’s target audience. It is meant for the nonspecialist Christian who want to think a bit more carefully about politics. Readers who want an extremely deep dive into the scriptural foundations of natural law can find it in Van Drunen’s Divine Covenants. Those who want a more technical argument rooted in Catholic thinking can find it in Melissa Moschella’s Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law (or in Robert George’s work). Those who want more on the history of natural law thinking can consult Charles’ and Grabill’s work (or older books by Heinrich Rommen or Paul Sigmund).
By design, Covington, McGraw and Watson leave a few things unaddressed. There are much longer conversations to be had about how we know natural law and about the relationship of natural law to civil law. Those questions are fit for the longer, more technical, or more historical books. Covington, McGraw and Watson have written an excellent and accessible overview for students relatively new to the subject who need some acquaintance with the church’s historic teaching about Nature and Nature’s God.
