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Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

Jennifer A. Herdt
Jennifer A. Herdt*
Affiliation:
Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut, 06511, USAjennifer.herdt@yale.edu
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Abstract

Recent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

Keywords

CalvinCarmichaelconscienceinstinctnatural lawWitherspoon
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , November 2014 , pp. 414 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

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References

1 Drunen, David Van, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 427–9Google Scholar; Beach-Verhey, Timothy A., ‘Calvinist Resources for Contemporary American Political Life: A Critique of Michael Walzer's Revolution of the Saints’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37/3 (2009), pp. 473–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grabill, Stephen, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), p. 6Google Scholar; Schreiner, Susan E., ‘Calvin's Use of Natural Law’, in Cromartie, Michael (ed.), A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 51–76Google Scholar; Klempa, William, ‘John Calvin on Natural Law’, in George, Timothy (ed.), John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1990), pp. 72–95Google Scholar; Verhey, Allen, ‘Natural Law in Aquinas and Calvin’, in Orlebeke, Clifton and Smedes, Lewis (eds), God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 80–92Google Scholar; and Little, David, ‘Calvin and the Prospects for a Christian Theory of Natural Law’, in Outka, Gene and Ramsey, Paul (eds), Norm and Context in Christian Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), pp. 175–97Google Scholar.

2 Both Van Drunen and Grabill aim to do this, though Grabill is more limited in his claims of continuity: ‘that tradition, to a large degree, remained unbroken in the theology of the Protestant Reformers and their orthodox sixteenth- and seventeenth-century successors, but sometime after 1750, succumbed to rationalist currents popular among the educated elite of Europe and, by extension, the intellectual descendants of the Reformation’, Rediscovering, p. 2.

3 As by Haakonssen, Knud, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy [hereafter NLMP] (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The designation of certain seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers as modern natural lawyers goes back to these thinkers themselves, who shared a broad urge of the era to see itself as beginning something decisively new. Irwin, T. H.argues that Barbeyrac did perhaps the most to cement the perception that there was something distinctively modern about the understanding of natural law introduced by Hugo Grotius, The Development of Ethics, vol. 2 (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 70Google Scholar.

4 Van Drunen, Two Kingdoms, p. ix. There is one passing reference in Haakonssen's book to Althusius as a defender of tyrannicide rather than of passive-obedience, NLMP, p. 97.

5 Van Drunen argues that ‘a number of important Presbyterian theologians of this era carried on significant aspects of the Reformed natural law tradition precisely through their utilization of common sense realism’, even as Haakonssen examines in detail a series of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers whose natural law reflections contributed to common-sense philosophy. Van Drunen, Two Kingdoms, p. 268; Haakonssen, NLMP, chs 2–10.

6 See e.g. Van Drunen, Two Kingdoms, pp. 1–2, 427–9; Grabill, Rediscovering, pp. 2, 7.

7 Pufendorf clearly affirms these doctrines, but he considers them off-limits for the discipline of natural law, Specimen controversiarum. In Eris Scandica, vol. 5 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Fiammetta Palladini, pp. 114–98 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002; originally published 1678), 2.4. Trans. in Krieger, Leonard, The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and the Acceptance of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 220–1Google Scholar. I have learned from the research and analysis in Neil Arner, ‘Theological Voluntarism and the Natural Law’, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2012.

8 Scholars have disagreed over the extent of continuity and discontinuity between Calvin and his scholastic predecessors; Barth and his followers have tended to emphasise discontinuities, while those who focus on Calvin's political thought have seen more continuity. As exemplary of the latter view, which in my judgement is gaining ground, see e.g. Backus, , ‘Calvin's Concept of Natural and Roman Law’, Calvin Theological Journal 38/1 (2003), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; Grabill, Rediscovering, ch. 3; Helm, Paul, ‘Calvin and Natural Law’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 2 (1984), pp. 9–12Google Scholar; McNeill, John T., ‘Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers’, Journal of Religion 26 (1946), pp. 168–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schreiner, ‘Calvin's Use of Natural Law’, pp. 54–5. While recent scholarship has done a great deal to redress an overemphasis on Calvin's thought within Reformed theological reflection, and more fully developed accounts of the natural law are available within later Reformed scholasticism, the particular features of Calvin's account on which I am focusing have a long afterlife within Reformed traditions and are closely reflected in Reformed catechisms and confessions of faith. On the need to redress an overemphasis on Calvin's theology, see Grabill, Rediscovering, pp. 14–15, Van Drunen, Two Kingdoms, p. 18. On Reformed natural law as reflected in Reformed confessions of faith and catechisms, see Andrew Forsyth, ‘Reforming the Natural Law’, unpublished.

9 Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, John T., trans. Ford Lewis Battles from the 1559 edn (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960Google Scholar; orig. publ. 1559), bk. II, ch. ii, sect. 22, p. 282; subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given in this format, abbreviated.

10 The broader context here is Calvin's discussion of the state of the unregenerate, in servitude to sin and incapable of any good thing, with both will and reason radically corrupted. As natural gifts, reason and will were not lost entirely, but are bound by ignorance and wicked desires.

11 Inst. II.ii.17.276.

12 These are, together, the three modes of spiritual insight. Inst. II.ii.18.277.

13 Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2:14–15, trans. from Calvin's Commentaries: The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, trans. Ross MacKenzie, ed. David and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1961).

14 Zachman, Randall, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 100Google Scholar.

15 Zachman, Assurance, p. 117; Comm. Rom. 2:15.

16 Van Drunen, Two Kingdoms, p. 102.

17 Inst. IV.xx.16, 1505; Comm. Rom. 2:15.

18 Inst. II.ii.22.282, Zachman, Assurance, p. 118.

19 Inst. II.ii.23.282.

20 Comm. Rom. 2:16; Comm. Rom. 5:1.

21 Inst. II.ii.25.284.

22 This is the arena of deliberate malice and depravity. Comm. Rom. 2:15.

23 Inst. II.ii.24.284.

24 Inst. IV.xx.16.1505; see also Inst. IV.xx.15.1503.

25 Summa Theologiae I.79.12–13; I-II 19.5–6, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948).

26 Backus, ‘Calvin's Concept’, pp. 10–11.

27 Backus, ‘Calvin's Concept’, p. 11. Grabill argues that Calvin's association of conscience more closely with intellect rather than with will runs counter to Backus’ claims, as well as to Marc-Edouard Chenevière's argument that ‘Calvin broke the bonds that attached the knowledge of natural law to reason and rested it upon conscience, which he understood in conventionally modern terms as a subjective faculty that had no need for reason to authenticate its prescriptions and prohibitions’, Grabill, Rediscovering, p. 93, commenting on Chenevière, La pensée politique de Calvin (Geneva: Editions Labor et Fides, 1937), pp. 49–50. However, the point is not to dispute that conscience is associated with intellect rather than will, in the sense that it brings knowledge, but rather to note that Calvin's view leaves no active reflective role for intellect in arriving at this knowledge – except potentially that of obscuring the knowledge which conscience reveals.

28 Inst. III.xxv.10.1005.

29 Inst. II.viii.51, 415.

30 Comm. Romans 12:1.

31 Inst. I.ii.2,42.

32 Comm. Romans 12:2.

33 Inst. I.xvii.2, 214.

34 Inst. II.ii.12.270–1.

35 Inst. II.ii.26.286.

36 Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 47.

37 Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 52.

38 ST I.93.4. For the language of ‘immanent summons’, see O’Donovan, Oliver, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 157Google Scholar.

39 Inst. II.II.26.

40 Inst. II.ii.13.272.

41 On this theme, and more generally on the influence of Seneca's thought on Calvin, see Backus, ‘Calvin's Concept’, p. 20.

42 Inst. II.ii.13.272. This connection is somewhat surprising, given that the instinct for sociability is presumably an aspect of the will's affection for well-being or advantage, while the seeds of civic fair dealing remain present to the fallen intellect in the form of judgements of conscience. The former would seem, then, to be merely instinct, not a discerning of the good through right reason, in contrast with the latter. Yet in this context Calvin thinks that the two complement one another. This trust that social instincts are in harmony with the judgements of conscience concerning civic fair dealing and order becomes intelligible when we remind ourselves that we have to do here, after all, with an aspect of the knowledge of earthly things, rather than with the aspect of spiritual understanding which concerns obedience to God's law.

43 Inst. II.ii.15.274.

44 See e.g. Pufendorf, Samuel, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, ed. Hunter, Ian and Saunders, David (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003Google Scholar; orig. publ. 1673; trans. Andrew Tooke, 1691), pp. 28–9; Hobbes, Leviathan xxix.6–7, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: CUP, 1991; orig. publ. 1651), p. 23; Schneewind, Invention, pp. 93–4, 127. These debates had important political ramifications, which are not my focus here: the Calvinist doctrine of conscience was seen as legitimating political resistance, which Hobbes and many others regarded as politically dangerous.

45 Haakonssen, NLMP, p. 25.

46 He speaks of reconciling modern natural law theory with ‘scholastic ethics’, by which he evidently means seventeenth-century Reformed, not medieval Catholic, scholastics. Carmichael, Gershom, Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael, ed. Moore, James and Silverthorne, Michael (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002), ch. l, p. 11Google Scholar. Further references are to this edn, given parenthetically to chapter, section, and page. He saw his corrections in part as a response to Leibniz's accusation that Pufendorf's voluntarist account of the natural law rendered God a mere tyrant. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, ‘Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf’. Trans. Patrick Riley, in Political Writings, 2nd edn (New York: CUP, 1988; originally publ. 1706), pp. 71–2Google Scholar.

47 Here Carmichael seeks to correct Pufendorf's derivation of sociability from self-interest. Sociability is neither instrumentally necessary given human weakness, as Pufendorf had argued, nor simply another basic instinct of human nature alongside self-preservation, as Grotius had claimed. Rather, sociability is a duty since it is necessary to the common good of the human race, and promoting the common good of the human race is required of us by God (5.7, 49; 5.3, 47).

48 One possibility is that the moral philosopher succeeds in penetrating the opacity of the natural law in understanding how God has made obedience psychologically possible for us, but as moral agents we must let that curtain fall again so as to preserve the purity of our obedience.

49 Turretin followed Calvin closely, discussing conscience as that which renders humankind inexcusable and makes present to them the judgement of God (Turretin, Institutes, 1.3.4; discussed in Grabill, Rediscovering, p. 159). Perhaps more significantly, key Reformed confessional documents, such as the Heidelberg catechism, echoed Calvin's emphasis on Rom 2:14–15 and judicial conscience (Heidelberg Catechism, q. 60, 37), see Forsyth, ‘Reforming the Natural Law’. Whatever the variations, it is striking that by the eighteenth century, those who invoke conscience seem increasingly to rely on it as a source of moral knowledge more than as grounds for universal moral responsibility.

50 ‘Remarks on an Essay on Human Liberty’, Scots Magazine 15 (1753), p. 165, quoted in Noll, Mark, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in Philosophical Works, ed. Hamilton, William (Hildesheim, 1983Google Scholar; facsim. repr. of 8th edn, 1895), p. 638b.

52 Van Drunen argues against Noll that Witherspoon preserved older reformed views of the natural law and did not uncritically adopt the new Scottish moral philosophy, with its optimistic anthropology, Two Kingdoms, pp. 270–3. Yet he does note that ‘in the case of common sense realism, the American Presbyterians certainly found attractive its affirmations of a moral sense present in all people everywhere and of the objectivity of knowledge over against contemporary skepticism’, Two Kingdoms, p. 273.

53 Witherspoon, John, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, in Works of John Witherspoon, vol. 7 (Edinburgh: Ogle & Aikman; J. Pillans & Sons, J. Ritchie, and J. Turnbull, 1805), p. 37Google Scholar.

54 Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, p. 29.

55 Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, p. 13.

56 Ibid.

57 Noll, America's God, p. 103. See Hatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 6Google Scholar, and also Fiering, Norman, who makes a similar argument in Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 300Google Scholar.