Angilbert (fl. ca. 840/50), On the Battle Which was Fought at Fontenoy

The Law of Christians is broken,
Blood by the hands of hell profusely shed like rain,
And the throat of Cerberus bellows songs of joy.

Angelbertus, Versus de Bella que fuit acta Fontaneto

Fracta est lex christianorum
Sanguinis proluvio, unde manus inferorum,
gaudet gula Cerberi.

Friday, December 18, 2009

John Calvin and the Natural Law: Introduction

John Calvin

THERE IS SOME INCONSISTENCY in John Calvin's theological anthropology of "total depravity" and his express acceptance of the existence of a natural moral law. This inconsistency has led to varied interpretations of his thought. At one extreme perhaps is Karl Barth, who grudgingly admitted that Calvin mouthed natural law concepts, but believed that the consistent application of Calvin's doctrines of total depravity necessarily required rejection of the existence of a natural moral law. At the other extreme, one may find the Calvin scholar, John T. McNeil, who maintained that there was no essential discontinuity between Calvin's view of natural law and its medieval predecessors, making Calvin almost a crypto-Thomist.

It is a fact that Calvin's opinion of fallen man is brutally pessimistic: "such is the depravity of his nature," Calvin insists, "that he cannot move and act except in the direction of evil" (qua tamen est naturae pravitate, nisi ad malum moveri et agi). Institutes, II.3.5. A nature that cannot move and act except in the direction of evil cannot yield forth fruit that is, even in a manner, virtuous and good, much less a source of law and a latent voice of God. Yet it is indisputable, if not entirely consistent with his total depravity theory, that Calvin expressly maintained a notion of natural law, using the term lex naturalis often enough. It is found in various places in his magnum opus, the Institutes of Christian Religion, even in language traditional. "God provided man's soul with a mind, by which to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong; and, with the light of reason as guide, to distinguish what should be followed from what should be avoided." Institutes, I.15.8; see also II.2.12, 22, 24; II.8.1; IV.20.16. It is also mentioned in his Commentary on the Book of Psalms (discussing Psalm 119:52) and his Commentary on Romans (discussing Romans 2:15).

This is hardly the place to develop a full and comprehensive review of Calvin's doctrine of natural law. The literature in this area is immense, variform, and inconsistent. Any full treatment would probably be problematic anyway, since Calvin never developed any systematic treatment of the natural law. (Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering The Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 91). It appears, further, that Calvin may have adopted notions of the natural law from the intellectual milieu almost unthinkingly or unguardedly, and without fully integrating them into the fundamentals of his theological doctrine. (See R.S. Clark, Calvin on the Lex Naturalis, Stulos Theological Journal 6:1-2 (May-Nov 1998), 3.) So knowledge of what Calvin exactly thought about the natural law is probably foreclosed to us, at least with any certainty. Overarchingly, it may be said, however, that Calvin's negative assessment of man's post-lapsarian epistemic and moral abilities resulted in a severe restriction of the role and effect of the natural law in his doctrine.

Some things appear to be clear regarding Calvin's assessment of the natural law. The first is that Calvin's view of the natural law is markedly more negative that St. Thomas's view, and its role much more limited and circumscribed than the role St. Thomas gives it. Related to this view is a second feature of Calvin's doctrine of the natural law: that being that Calvin seems to have given short shrift to the role of practical reason in the natural law, emphasizing almost exclusively the role of the natural law in conscience. The third feature seems that Calvin appeared to have identified the natural law with the Ten Commandments or Decalogue and so he neglected any reason-based or philosophical basis for determining its content. The fourth feature is that Calvin, consistent with many reformers, including Luther who influenced him, nowhere links the natural law with the eternal law of God. The severance of any linkage between the natural law and the eternal law, and the collapse of the distinction between them, is probably a result of Calvin's rejection of a realistic philosophy and an adoption of a nominalistic one. There is therefore significant discontinuity between Calvin's notion of the natural law and the received teaching, perhaps most systematically framed by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Title Page to Calvin's Institute of Christian Religion

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Augustine: Natura Gratiaque aut Gratia Naturaque

The Catholic St. Augustine

THE DOCTOR OF GRACE, SAINT AUGUSTINE, SOUNDLY REJECTS Karl Barth's view of the total depravity or corruption of man's nature, the unreliability or irrelevancy of the natural law, and the doctrine of sola gratia. In this blog posting, St. Augustine's balanced viewpoint as found in his book Nature and Grace (written in response to Pelagius's book Nature) is presented as a balanced theory of the interplay between Grace and Nature, Grace and Law.

It should be kept in mind that Augustine's Nature and Grace was a polemic against Pelagius's book Nature (which essentially denied the need for supernatural Grace). (Barth's opposition to the natural law doctrine is that it detracts from the doctrine of Grace, and essentially leads to Pelagianism, and so it is interesting to compare Barth's response to St. Augustine's response.)

In his Retractions, St. Augustine discusses how Pelagius defended human nature "in opposition to the grace of God" (hominis naturam contra Dei gratiam), and how he sought in his response "not [to] defend grace in opposition to nature," but rather sought to show grace as nature's complement, a "grace by which nature is set free and ruled" (gratiam non contra naturam sed per quam natura liberatur et regitur) (I/23, p. 204, quoting Retractions II, 68(42)). Barth's mistake was to oppose grace to nature when confronting adversaries--real or imagined--that he felt opposed nature to grace. In contrast to Barth's either/or approach, St. Augustine chose a more balanced both/and response to nature's threat against grace, a via media that linked the two together.

St. Augustine views man's nature as vitiated, but not entirely destroyed, since Adam's fall. Man's nature is like that of a "man whom robbers left half-dead on the road" (semivivum latrones in via reliquerunt). "Injured and seriously wounded," gravibus saucius confossusque vulneribus, man's nature "cannot rise up to the peak of righteousness," non ita potest ad iustitiae culmen ascendere, as it was "able to come down from there," sicut potuit inde descendere, and even if at the inn, that is, even if Christian, "he is still undergoing treatment," etiam si iam in stabulo est adhuc curatur. Thus, for Augustine, all men are injured, and in urgent need of a divine Samaritan's and Physician's aid, to transfer them from the roadside, provide them medication, and assure them confinement in an inn while they heal. (I/23, No. 50(43), p. 250) Man's need for Christ the Divine Physician is essential, and the Cross of Christ is not rendered vain by a doctrine that salvation is obtained through natural means.

Man's wounded nature thus cries for a divine physician, and yet withal it does not decry its fundamental dignity:

The God who is his creator is also his savior. Hence, we should not praise the creator so that we are forced to say, indeed so that we are found guilty of saying, that the savior is unnecessary. We should, then, honor human nature with the praises it deserves, and we should refer those praises to the glory of the creator. But we should be grateful that he created us in such a way that we are not ungrateful that he heals us. We should attribute our defects which he heals, not to God's work, but to the human will and his just punishment. As we admit that it was within our power that they not occur, so we should admit that it lies in his mercy rather than in [our] own power that they be healed.
Ipse est autem Creator eius qui Salvator eius. Non ergo debemus sic laudare Creatorem, ut cogamur, immo vere convincamur dicere superfluum Salvatorem. Naturam itaque hominis dignis laudibus honoremus easque laudes ad Creatoris gloriam referamus; sed quia nos creavit, ita simus grati, ut non simus, quia sanat, ingrati. Vitia sane nostra, quae sanat, non divino operi, sed humanae voluntati iustaeque illius vindictae tribuamus; sed ut in nostra potestate fuisse ne acciderent confitemur, ita ut sanentur in illius magis esse misericordia quam in nostra potestate fateamur.
(I/23, No. 39(34), p. 244)

In his response to Pelagius, though he stresses mankind's need for Grace, Augustine insists on the value of Nature in a manner at odds with Barth. Augustine thus navigates between the Charybdis of Pelagius's sola natura, and the Scylla of Barth's sola gratia, preserving the role of the law of Grace and the law of Nature. Augustine's doctrine may therefore be summarized as natura gratiaque aut gratia naturaque. Augustine insists that the life of a Christian is nature and grace, grace and nature. Either way, nature was part of the equation. While St. Augustine insists on the necessity of grace in the matter of salvation and sanctification, he equally insists that man's nature, though severely injured by the Fall, retains sufficient amounts of its original image so as to be a natural source of God's law, that is, his reasoned, even naturally revealed will. For St. Augustine, the Christian life requires a cooperation between the Spirit and Grace, and the natural moral law.

In navigating between the shoals of grace and nature, St. Augustine is the better guide. If we follow Barth we shall founder and, in denying the Natural Law, ultimately deny the Gospel.


The Calvinist Karl Barth

(English translation is taken from Volume I/23 of The Works of Saint Augustine (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1997). Citations are to paragraphs and page numbers. The Latin text is taken from the excellent web page dedicated to the works of St. Augustine, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/)

Karl Barth: Rubbing Out the Image of God in Man


Karl Barth

THE FALL OF MAN IN ADAM according to Karl Barth wholly destroyed the image of God, the imago Dei, in man, and shattered thereby any ability of man naturally to know God and naturally to know the good and the right. Added to this, Barth had tremendous difficulty seeing how a natural theology and a natural knowledge of morality did not detract from Christ's exclusivity as God's revelation. For this reason, though perhaps with good intentions but nevertheless in error, Barth rejected any role of natural theology in the knowledge of God and natural law in the knowlege of the good. This position is against de fide Catholic teaching, and it is clear heresy.

Jacob Jordaen's Fall of Man


According to Stephen J. Grabill, for Barth the natural knowledge of God, while perhaps theoretically possible, was, in practice, absolutely foreclosed to man. Grabill, 24. "Between what is possible in principle and what is possible in fact there inexorably lies the fall," wrote Barth. Grabill, 24 (quoting Natural Theology, 106). Indeed, so extreme was this post-lapsarian chasm, that any natural knowledge of God "was nothing more than idolatry and superstition." Grabill, 25. A duplex cognitio Dei, a two-fold knowledge of God, natural and supernatural, was impossible. For Barth, Christ was the "exclusive epistemological point of entry into the knowledge of God." Grabill, 24.

In the area of morality, Barth's doctrine was similarly narrow. For Barth, the only source for our knowledge of the good and the right was God's revelation in Christ. The effect of the Fall was cataclysmic to the point where it erased any of God's image in us. There is less of God in us remaining after Adam's sin than there was left of Carthage after its sack and destruction by the Romans in the Third Punic War.
Aquí donde el romano encendimiento,
dond´el fuego y la llama licenciosa
solo el nombre dexaron a Cartago . . .
wrote the 16th century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega in his Sonnet, "A Boscán desde la Goleta" (Sonnet XXXIII). The fire and licentious flame of the Roman, the Spanish poet tells us, left but the name of Carthage. In like manner, the fire and flame of the fall, the Swiss theologian avers, left nothing but the name of man, an empty shell, a nature wholly rendered barren by the plowing of Satan's salt. The imago Dei was thus wholly rubbed out, leaving not the least smidgen of God's plan to be salvaged from the smoldering rubble. For Barth, there was "no Anknüpfungspunkt [German = point of contact], no relics of the imago Dei," remaining in us after the Fall." Grabill, 33. Our nature was natura deleta, natura corrupta, nature totally depraved.

[T]he image of God is not just, as it is said, destroyed apart from a few relics; it is totally annihilated. What remains of the image of God even in sinful man is recta natura, to which as such a rectitudo cannot be ascribed even potentialiter.

Grabill, 34-35 (quoting Barth's Church Dogmatics, I.1, p. 238-39).

There is no good to be found in human nature, even potentially. Any "direct discernment of the original relation of God to man, the discernment of the creation of man which is also the revelation of God, has . . . been taken from us by the fall . . ." Grabill, 33 (quoting Church Dogmatics, I.1.) It follows that any attempt independent of revelation to determine morality was doomed to failure because fallen man, man in status corruptionis, "sees and thinks and knows crookedly even in relation to his crookedness." Grabill, 30 (quoting Church Dogmatics, V.1, p. 361.) "Once we begin to toy with the lex naturae as the inner lex aeterna we are well on the way to [supplanting Christ with reason]. And once the reversal has taken place . . . there can be no stopping on this way." Grabill, 31 (quoting Church Dogmatics, IV.1, 373.) So for Barth, arguments based upon the natural law compromise Christ's message, are "Janus-headed," they lead to a "misty twilight in which all cats become gray," and simply result in a pagan opposition of Apollo to Dionysius, leaving Christ out of the equation.

Ultimately, the Barthian false opposition between Christ and Nature, Faith and Reason, leads to a horrible moral exclusivity, a tragic lack of solidarity between the Christian and his unbelieving brothers. There is a certain blindness in stubbornly maintaining that morality is either/or, when it is both/and. By the will and plan of God, morality is both Nature and Christ. There must be something good in the Nature of Man after the Fall, for what else did Christ assume? What else did Christ come to save? The Barthian pseudo-Christian--disdainful of the nature he shares with all men--shares nothing with his unbelieving brother except a lifeless, stinking corpse.

As to Barth's moral doctrine, I say we ought to sentire cum ecclesia: Anathema Sit!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Karl Barth's Tin Ear: Notes, But No Melody


IN THE PRIOR POST REGARDING KARL BARTH, we quoted Stephen Grabill's observation that the followers of Barth's theological and philosophical presuppositions regarding natural theology led them, as well as Barth, to reject a natural law theory of morality, and predisposed them toward a "divine-command ethic saddled with the concomitant problems of actualism and occasionalism." (Grabill, 23.)

The concept of actualism is a difficult one, but it is one of Karl Barth's principal motifs. George Hunsinger, the Director of Princeton Seminary's Center for Barth Studies, provides a lengthy explanation of this Barthian concept which warrants quotation in full:

Actualism is the most distinctive and perhaps the most difficult of the motifs [in Barth's theology]. It is present whenever Barth speaks, as he constantly does, in the language of occurrence, happening, event, history, decision. At the most general level it means that he thinks primarily in terms of events and relationships rather than monadic or self-contained substances. So pervasive is this motif that Barth's whole theology might well be described as a theology of active relations. God and humanity are both defined in fundamentally actualistic terms.

For example, when Barth wants to describe the living God in a technical way, he says that God's being is always a being in act. Negatively, this means that God's being cannot be described apart from the basic act in which God lives. Any attempt to define God in static or inactive terms, as is customary in certain theologies and philosophies, is therefore to be rejected. Positively, the description means that God lives in a set of active relations. The being of God in act is a being in love and freedom. God, who does not need us to be the living God, is perfectly complete without us. For God is alive in the active relations of love and freedom which constitute God's being in and for itself. These are the active relations of God's trinitarian self-differentiation. From all eternity the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. God is free to be God, to constitute the divine being, in this distinctively trinitarian way. God is the Lord, the acting subject, of this self-constituting, mysterious event. Although there is much more to it than this, the basic point of the actualism can already be suggested, as far as the doctrine of God is concerned. Actualism emphasizes the sovereign activity of God in patterns of love and freedom--not only in God's self relationship, but also in relationship to others (II/1, 257-321).

As far as human beings are concerned, the basic point is to understand them strictly with regard to the pattern of God's sovereign activity. Negatively, this means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into fellowship with God. An ahistorical relationship would be a denial of God's activity, and an innate capacity for fellowship would be a denial of God's sovereignty. Positively, therefore, our relationship to God must be understood in active, historical terms, and it must be a relationship given to us strictly from the outside. Our active relationship to God is a history of love and freedom; we are capable of it not because it stands at our disposal, but because we who stand at God's disposal are given it. Our relationship to God is therefore an event. It is not possessed once and for all, but is continually established anew by the ongoing activity of grace. Paradoxically, however although befalling us from the outside and exceeding our creaturely capacities, the event of grace deeply enhances rather than diminishes us. It draws us beyond ourselves into a relationship of communion, of love and freedom, with God. The sovereignty of grace is thus not the negation, but the condition for the possibility, of human spontaneity and fulfillment. God's sovereignty in our lives is enacted as God establishes us with a history of love and freedom.

Barth's theology of active relations is therefore a theology which stresses the sovereignty of grace, the incapacity of the creature, and the miraculous history whereby grace grants what the creature lacks for the sake of love and freedom. This pattern appears again and again in the Church Dogmatics [of Barth]. The church, the inspiration of scripture, faith, and all other creaturely realities in their relationship to god are always understood as events. They are not self-initiating and self-sustaining. They are not grounded in a neutral, ahistorical, or ontological relationship to God independent of the event of grace. Nor are they actualizations of certain ontologically given creaturely capacities. Rather, they have not only their being but also their possibility only as they are continually established anew according to the divine good pleasure. They have their being only in act--in the act of God which elicits from the creature the otherwise impossible act of free response. God is thus the Lord--not only of the mysterious event which constitutes the divine being, but also of the mysterious event which constitutes our being in relation to God.

This point may be drawn to a close with a simple but telling example. Barth's actualistic mode of thought enables him to explain why it is a mistake to reverse the biblical dictum that "God is love." (1 John 4:8, 16) so that instead it would say "Love is God" as though God could be equated with an abstract concept of love in general. As Barth carefully shows on exegetical grounds, "God is love" is a concise way of describing God's activity. It means that "God acts in a loving way." The statement cannot be reversed, because "God" refers to an acting subject, and "love" to the quality of God's activity. (Or more precisely, it could be reversed only one were to take this sense into account.) This example illustrates how Barth wants his actualistic sensibility to arise from and point back to scripture. The actualism is considered valid only insofar as it can illuminate scripture patters of thought (I/2, 374; II/1, 275, IV/2, 756)


George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30-32 (emphasis added).

Occasionalism is a related concept to actualism. Occasionalism, as described by the Protestant ethicist James M. Gustafson, is "a view of moral action that emphasizes the uniqueness of each moment of serious moral choice in contrast to a view that emphasizes the persistent, perduring order of moral life and the continuities of human experience." In the context of morality, occasionalism results in a subjective morality, where "the moral life is without the props of principles of natural law, which have provided a basis for great objective certitude and for moral absolutes universally valid across time to all who share a common human nature." Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chichago Press, 1978), 71, 72 (quoted in Grabill, 204-05, n. 17.)

The problem with Barth's actualism and occasionalism is that it results in a lack of balance in his thought, a problem resulting from his overemphasis of act, and an underemphasis of being. There is a decided overemphasis of freedom and sovereignty of God, and an underemphasis of law and reason. It is the doctrine of a man who focuses on trees, and so is blind to the beauties of the forest; who focuses on the notes, and so fails to hear the song; who reads specific judgments, but is unable to distill therefrom the rule or law; it is the limitation of a child who mouths words using phonics, but misses the thought in the sentence, the paragraph, or the book. To such a man, God's relationship with creation and with man is, as it were, a series of discrete points instead of a continuum.

Perhaps the best analogy for understanding Barth and for revealing the defect of his actualism and occasionalism and the cul de sac to which they lead is to compare his thought to music. Under Barth's actualism and occasionalism, our relationship with God is one of infinite independent notes, each one free and sovereign. And yet there is no melody, there is no underlying music that we may discern. (Any melody suggests a self-limiting plan, an ordering of notes following a motif, phrase, or theme as part of a greater melody, which is not consonant with Barth's emphasis on freedom and sovereignty of God.) So our relationship with God is a series of ultimately arbitrary and discrete notes: events, acts, occasions, each one independent and not part of a greater whole. It is as if Barth advances a theory of morality which is analogous to the chance music of John Cage--the throw of dice, and not any plan, determines the next note. There is no relationship, no greater melody, that ties one note to the other.

Ultimately, Barth's overemphasis on act over being, on freedom and sovereignty over law, leads to a moral deafness. One becomes deaf to the whole moral song when one insists that our relationship with God is not a melodious relationship, where there are not only discrete or arbitrary notes, but there also is an overarching melody, a complex and orderly panoply of motif, phrases, and themes in a unified whole. For Barth, God, and our relationship with God and his relationship with us, is a series of notes, and not one of melody. And where there is no overarching melody, there is no rule or law to be found; where there is no rule or law, there can be no discernible melody. For Barth's theological tin ear, the statement "God is Law Itself," as found in the Mirror of Saxons, would be jarring, when, in fact, for the trained ear, it is nothing but the most beautiful of melodies.

Indeed, in the moral life of man there is an underlying dual melody. There is a biphony in the moral song that God plays out in his creation naturally and in his redemption of that world in Christ supernaturally. Barth could not, would not hear it. That underlying melody is the Eternal Law. Played out in our world, and in the inner ear of our heart, this underlying melody is heard in the voice of the Natural Law. Played out in revelation, and in God's Word, the underlying melody is heard in the Divine Law. This dual melody is composed by God himself in the act of Creation and the act of Revelation. It is through this lovely melody that God woos us. It is through this melody by which God, as a man might his wife, beckons us to dance with him. It is in the harmonies and rhythm of this melody that we dance with God in the pas de deux that is the moral life. A dance that is ever and eternally in step with the dual strains of the Natural Law and Divine Law, which together harmonize into the one eternal and echanting melody of the Eternal Law.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Karl Barth's Response to Natural Law: Nein!


THERE IS MUCH IN THE PROTESTANT THEOLOGIAN KARL BARTH that may be admired, particularly his courageous stance against Nazism. But from the perspective of an advocate of the natural law, Barth is an enfant terrible. Or perhaps Barth is not such much an enfant terrible as he is like the little boy who revealed that the emperor had no clothes; in this case, the naked truth that Protestantism or at least Calvinism, at least when pressed to its logical extreme, has no doctrine of the natural law, and is pure divine positivism, not unlike Islam (though for different reasons). Barth's vehement, even vicious, rejection of the doctrine of the natural moral law stems from his rejection of the notion of natural revelation, and hence a natural theology. Barth's "categorical rejection of every form of natural theology and natural law" may be found in what has become a classical locus of the natural law debate among Protestants, the debate between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner (translated and published under the title Natural Theology (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1946)). "The task of our theological generation," the Protestant Brunner suggested in his article "Nature and Grace," is "to find the way back to a true theologia naturalis." (quoted in Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), 21). To which suggestion, Karl Barth acerbically and succinctly responded: "Nein!" To Barth, the burden was to "learn again to understand revelation as grace and grace as revelation." To paraphrase Barth's view in the context of the natural law, Barth suggested that the age did not require Protestants to find their way to a doctrine of natural law, a lex naturalis, but to learn again to understand revelation as law, and law as revelation. Barth rejected the notion that God may be known by both Faith and Reason--he rejected a duplex cognitio Dei. Similarly, he may be said to have rejected a duplex cognitio legis Dei, a two-form way of knowing God's law, that is, a two-form way of knowing the good to which we are called.



As it turned out, Barth's position won out over Brunner's position. Barth's position has therefore been a motif or a "subtext of sorts in mainstream Protestant criticisms of the natural-law tradition." (Grabill, 22) As Grabill points out, Barth's loud rejection of the natural law on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the Reformer's teaching has had the unfortunate effect of blinding Protestant theologians from seeing the vestiges of natural law teaching in the early Reformers, and so there has been inadequate study of what part of the natural law teaching was accepted by the Reformers and what part was rejected or modified. As a consequence, instead of a natural law concept that would allow rapport with Catholics or non-Christians, Protestants to the degree that they have adopted Barth's unequivocal rejection of natural theology and natural law, "have tended to advocate a divine command ethic with the concomitant problems of actualism and occasionalism that are evident in Barth's theology." Grabill, 23.