Unsurprisingly, the fruit of subservience to this concept of arbitrary rule-making that is imposed on us is the breakdown of social stability and the consequent personal distress we see mounting to unprecedented proportions today.
However, this concept could not be further from the truth. A profound insight into how God’s law enlivens rather than suppresses the human project is contained in a reflection on the experience of the Hebrews after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt:
God had promised to make Abraham’s descendants a great nation. He had called them out of Egypt and separated them from the gods and practices of the Egyptians. The Israelites must now learn to become a nation that will reflect the character of the one true God to the nations around them. God called Moses up on a mountain where He gave him the laws by which they are to live. This will become the moral guide they must follow in order to reflect the character of a holy God.
[…] If they were to be the nation that represented God to the world, then they must reflect His character to the world. But they, like us, sometimes struggled to live up to God’s standard.
[…] God took Moses up onto a mountain and gave him the standards by which the people should live. These standards would retrain them to reflect the character of a loving God, rather than that of the Egyptians and their many gods.
Then the idea is presented that God employs His laws to form His people into an expression of His values. This is key: God is the Good, the True, the Beautiful; humans are created in the image of God; therefore, we are endowed with those same values and qualities. However, we are wounded in our nature – blame Original Sin – and need to be trained to live as fully as God has made us to live based on the qualities God and all humans share, a factor whereby the grace of God rescues the human condition.
God's laws as a mirror into our own self
From a linked video reflection on the topic:
There is a long Biblical tradition that describes God’s laws as a mirror. The closer we look at what God wants, the more we understand Him [and, therefore,] we understand our own hearts and desires. We [also] catch a glimpse of how our own hearts distort the love and community God is calling us into.
The Ten Commandments are “staggering in their timelessness”, given that hearts and mind space of today’s restless generations – plural – are largely devoted to idols of self, money, fame or at least status, to pleasure, and appearances.
Notice how the Ten Commandments are expressed in the context of a relationship.
God spoke all these words:
“I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of that place of slavery. You shall not have other gods instead of me.
“You shall not make idols or any image of things that are in the heavens above or that are upon the earth or that are in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow before them nor shall you serve them.
“You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain, for the Lord will not leave unpunished those who use his name in vain.
“Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath in honor of the Lord your God.
“Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened in the land that the Lord your God, will give you.
“You shall not kill.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not give false witness against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male slave, nor his female slave, nor his oxen, nor his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
— Exodus 20:1-17 (edited). See also Deuteronomy 5.
These are the ways God wants His people to reflect His own qualities and so to live as a community in conformity with all that was right and just.
Just how far from the truth it is to see this set of 10 laws as mere dictatorial restrictions or limitations is made clear in the words of Jesus, who was challenged to identify the most important of the 613 Jewish commandments (mitzvot in Hebrew) extracted from the Old Testament. Jesus went to the heart of the matter:
When the Pharisees learned that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and, to test him, one of them, a lawyer, asked this question, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Everything in the Law and the Prophets depends on these two commandments.”
— Matthew 22:34-39
Elsewhere, the gospels say we are to love God and neighbor with all our strength, to be prepared to lay down our lives for our friends, to cross ethnic and social boundaries as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and much more, as Jesus outlines in his Beatitudes discourse (Matthew Chapter 5).
The video reflection states that Jesus recognized that the Ten Commandments were not arbitrary restrictions but were “an invitation to live out what God valued: life, rest, respect, honor, worship, gratitude”.
This is what it meant to be God’s people, a new community for the enjoyment of his promised land.
Each of these commands had been designed to lead Israel into that promise, into its fullest enjoyment – the fullness of what God had called Israel to be.
The speaker quotes from the Letter of James (1:22-25):
Be doers of the word and not just hearers who only deceive themselves. For anyone who listens to the word and fails to do it is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror. After seeing his reflection, he goes off and immediately forgets what he looked like. However, the one who looks intently at the perfect law of freedom and perseveres—not forgetting what he has heard but putting it into practice—will be blessed in everything he does.
This element of “Know God, and you will know yourself” is part of the richness of the Christian heritage, where, as stated in passing above, the concept is termed Natural Law.
The conclusion is that God’s law has a decided purpose. Its call, to love God and love your neighbor, is a “call into a better way of living, of being, into a better community and a better life”.
To briefly lay out the classical principles of Natural Law I want to excerpt material from a book titled Made This Way.
It states that we are made in such a way that we reflect God’s being. The universal moral law is of God and has been implanted in our being so it can be known by the use of reason alone. But we have to learn, by informing our conscience, how the moral law applies in particular cases. Our conscience also alerts us to issues that could harm our own moral decision-making and that of the whole of society.
For the person with a good grasp of where morality comes from, it matters not one jot that the majority of people might disagree that abortion, for example, is a crime against the humanity of the embryo. Our reason (using scientific findings) tells us that from the moment of conception a new human being exists; this human, therefore, requires our respect and protection. That's where legislation, usually termed positive law, often based on political expediency or public opinion differs from God-given natural law.
Understanding Natural Law
From Made This Way:
“If we want to know what is real and true, we must always ask, ‘What is the nature of a thing?’” Another way to put it would be, “What is this thing and what is it made for?” These questions unlock the force of the natural law. […]
America’s Constitution and [the US] system of laws were based on natural-law principles that transcend any merely human laws based on popular opinion or human will (what is called positive law). Abraham Lincoln, for example, cited moral truths that could be known through reason when he worked to deliver our nation from the evil of slavery. In a debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said that slavery wasn’t just a political issue but one that represented “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong”.
A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was told that racial segregation was the “law of the land” and must be obeyed. MLK replied that unjust laws may be disobeyed. As he sat in jail for disobeying those laws, he wrote: How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Natural law is another term for the universal moral law of God. Thomas Aquinas said that the natural law “is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided.” This law is universal because everyone—including people who have never received divine revelation—can know it.
St. Paul proclaimed that even people who have never encountered something as basic as the Ten Commandments can still apprehend God’s important moral truths, because “what the law requires is written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15).
[…] Robert Cardinal Sarah has affirmed that “the Church’s social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being.” It is because of the natural law that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and even atheists and agnostics can hear their consciences tell them what they may do, what they must do, and what they must never do.
Natural law explains people’s deep-seated understanding that crimes like murder and theft are wrong, whereas charitable acts like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked are right. It helps us instinctively relate such actions to the way human beings have been made. When we ask, “What is human life for?” or “What is the nature of a human being?” we want to know our ultimate goal in life and how to reach that goal. Natural law shows us both, or as Professor Charles Rice says, it’s “a set of manufacturer’s directions written into our nature so that we can discover through reason how we ought to act”.
Just as we would not harm our car’s mechanical nature by putting molasses in the tank—which is made for gasoline—we should not harm our human nature by acting immorally; that is, in ways that contradict its design.
What Natural Law is not
Natural law is not the same as the “laws of nature”. Scientific laws explain how matter and energy behave in the physical world. These laws cannot be “disobeyed” because they describe what usually happens rather than what should happen. For example, the law of gravity (science) describes how a falling bomb accelerates toward the earth. Natural law (morality) tells us whether it is right or wrong to drop the bomb on a certain target.
Natural law is not “what happens with other mammals in nature.” When Christians say that certain human behaviors go against nature, they mean that those acts contradict how human beings ought to act, not merely what happens in the natural world. Humans are animals, but we are rational animals, and so we should not make the behavior of lower animals our standard of morality.
Lots of behaviors are “natural” for other animals, like stealing, forced sex, or infanticide, but that doesn’t make those behaviors natural for rational human beings.
Natural law is not “what feels natural to me”. A person may have a strong inclination to eat a whole box of cookies or a persistent desire to cheat on a spouse, but the consequences of those decisions show that we shouldn’t always follow our “natural feelings”. This doesn’t mean we should never follow our instincts and feelings; it just means we should use our minds to tell us which of them we should follow.
C.S. Lewis used the analogy of a piano to explain the relationship between our animal instincts that tempt us to do evil and our rational minds that know the moral law. He said that instincts are like the keys on the piano, and morality (the natural law) is like the sheet music that tells us when to play the keys at the right time. For example, the fight instinct is good for a young boy if a stranger is trying to pull his sister into a car and abduct her; it’s bad if he is frustrated with his sister during play and uses fists to settle the matter. Likewise, the flight instinct is good when running away from a tsunami; it’s cowardly when running away from an infant drowning in a play pool.
Unlike the lower animals, we human beings are created with an intellect and a will (made in God’s image), which means that we are the only ones with the ability to reason morally—to choose between right and wrong. According to Thomas Aquinas’s classic definition, natural law is man’s participation in God’s eternal law, an intersection between human reason and divine wisdom.
The benefits of Natural Law
Although natural law originates with God, it is not strictly a religious concept. Some truths of the Faith can be known only through divine revelation (e.g., the Trinity, the nature of the sacraments), and divine revelation—such as the Ten Commandments—can also more clearly reveal the truths of the natural law.
[…] Each soul is designed by God to be attracted to truth, and we all have brains that can reason. Natural law is the only firm foundation that can ground a debate (try debating based on “feelings” and see how far you get!). We can also appeal to natural law when secularists accuse Christians of “imposing” morality on them. We can show them that natural law prevents the unjust imposition of an unsound morality, because it is a safeguard against tyranny and oppression.
The convictions of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials were not based on man-made law (everything they did was perfectly legal in Germany), but rather on a universal morality that was recognizable by the world community.
[Of the twenty-four prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany charged in the initial Nuremberg trial, twelve were sentenced to death by hanging and executions were carried out for 10 of them. In other trials, especially related to the Holocaust, more death sentences were handed down. See here.]
The greatest benefit of natural law is that it is not arbitrary. Some people think that Catholics blindly follow whatever the Bible or the pope says, but our faith does not consist of such commands. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) says, “God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary: ‘In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God’s power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect’” (271).
God loves us, so not only his positive commandments but also the moral laws we discover through reason will always correspond to what is good for us as human beings; they will never just be a set of nonsensical, disconnected, inconsistent, incoherent rules. If anything, it is our culture that is arbitrary, because it reduces morality to mere popular opinion or the will of the powerful (“might makes right”).
Children who are raised in this culture of moral relativism, especially those who lack the stability of an intact family, can quickly become disoriented and lost. Yet, if we can provide them a moral foundation through the natural law—if we can help them see that the way they should act corresponds to the way they are made—they will feel safe and secure in the truth, even as the rest of the world stumbles in darkness. Children who understand God’s created order and how “everything fits together” are more likely to become holy, healthy, and happy adults [...].
KEY POINTS…
• The natural law is simply the universal moral law, accessible to all people by the light of human reason.
• Natural law is not the same as the “laws of nature” like gravity, nor is it simply “what happens in nature” or “what feels natural to me”. It is the law of God revealed in our very humanity, written in our consciences.
• Natural law is not an arbitrary set of rules. Instead, it is like an “instruction manual” that tells us how to live according to the design of our human nature, providing our lives with meaning, peace, and joy.
SEE ALSO:
💢 Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.
💢 Does Natural Law Need Theology?
💢 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Natural Law Ethics
💢 No Natural Law? Danger alert for society!
Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.
