Peter Leithart posted a great review of J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through The Heart, a new work on natural law theory. Leithart is quite complementary in his review which concludes with the suggestion that natural law, even with all of Budziszewski’s qualifications, can’t achieve what many of its enthusiastic supporters think it can:
Paul says all know God and His requirements from creation, but J. Bud is right that we suppress, evade, rationalize, pretend, and can do that for so long that we virtually forget we’re evading. However that law is woven into our minds and hearts, it is woven differently from the way language, thought, creativity, and many other human qualities are woven. Somehow, it is possible to unravel knowledge of God and remain human, which must mean that it is woven differently…Let me make that point stronger, in a Hauerwasian direction. The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain. But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture. When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be. To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere. Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority…This circles back to the practical point. If this argument is true, then the persuasiveness of natural law of J. Bud’s variety requires just as radical a conversion as the fundamentalist demands. It requires the same conversion.