Years ago, I attended a party near the Capitol. Naturally, conversations tended toward politics, political theory, religion, and the like. At one point, I struck up a chat with a student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). At the time I was a practicing Roman Catholic, and so was delighted to hear him unabashedly concede that Rome possessed the tradition and moral language necessary to counteract malign liberal cultural trends. Given his answer, I asked him whether he would soon be “swimming the Tiber.”
Humor aside and, now ironically with myself as a Protestant, I was delighted to pick up SBTS Associate Professor Andrew Walker’s new book, Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good. The book is an invaluable resource to any reader, but particularly evangelicals seeking to navigate cultural tumult and ethical confusion with clarity of purpose and confidence in the Christian tradition.
Indeed, one purpose of the book may be described as explaining natural law in a manner consistent with the principle of sola scriptura. Walker respectfully critiques “the biblicist nature of much of evangelical ethics,” while emphasizing he is “not dismissing the relevance and supreme authority that the Bible provides for Christian ethics.” His concern, however, is that “absent larger textual horizons…we are left grasping for clarity about an ever-expanding number of issues that the Bible does not, on its surface, address.”
In this regard, he cites the example of in vitro fertilization (IVF), noting that the Bible does not mention it. “The absence of direct reference to this practice could, for some, signal an embrace of the practice,” Walker warns. This narrow view occurs, he adds, “when individuals are left without a larger field of action from which to understand how the Bible speaks ethically.”
Walker’s explication of natural law in no way seeks to undermine the finality of scriptural authority but rather aims to draw out the richness of what God speaks in His Word. He writes, “Scripture posits a divine order imbued with moral significance. Natural law, I submit, is the mode of ethical reasoning that explains the universal, intelligible, objective, and binding nature of morality. It is the ethics of creation order.”
There is much to highlight in this book, including its explanation of, and argument for, natural law as a distinct mode of moral reasoning in the public square. In the interest of brevity, I will focus on just a couple areas of his arguments in the realm of applied natural law.
Take, for example, religious liberty. Walker outlines the case for religious liberty as an “architectonic moral good,” given that “one’s relationship to God orders (or, in the right conditions, ought to order) all other features of a person’s existence that should, in principle, lead them to the life of virtue.” Religious liberty, in other words, “facilitates the exercise of one’s duty to God.”
On the other hand, Walker argues this liberty in religion is not absolute. Restrictions are “legitimate insofar as rightly authorized authorities carefully delineate what harms a religion’s adherents pose to society….”
In fairness to Walker, his book is not intended as a comprehensive analysis of religious liberty and proper maintenance thereof. Insofar as the book seeks to provide an applied ethical framework around freedom of religion, the basic principles are (1) that religious liberty is essential, but also (2) that it is not absolute, and both are reasonable.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty to be said about religious freedom as an “architectonic moral good” while acknowledging the limits of religious liberty when deleterious to the social order. Later, Walker writes that, where restrictions are necessary, “one must hope that legislators tasked with determining the boundaries of religious expression are possessed with the requisite virtue and prudence so as to draw appropriate boundaries, rather than capricious ones.”
The word “hope” does a substantial amount of legwork, something to remember about the character required among leaders in a republic.
Walker also addresses the relationship between God and the state. He argues that “the natural law naturally lends itself to recognizing God as the ultimate force for public order.” He goes on to observe that no society “practices pure atheism,” because such a philosophy “eviscerates moral accountability and flowers into genocidal totalitarianism or anarchical nihilism.”
Civil religion is the means by which the natural law has an effect, with Walker going so far as to say that “the general category of a nation anchoring itself to a theistic tradition is not extraneous to sound public order. It requires it.”
There is, however, a distinction between recognizing God as a necessary basis for public order on one hand and conceiving of the political community as being in covenant with the Triune God. Citing America’s use of the phrase, “In God We Trust,” Walker writes that this language “suggests that America, as a nation understands itself as accountable to a God, but it does not go so far as to put America in covenant with God the redeemer (a principle left for ecclesial authorities to determine).”
As Christians wrestle with the proper relationship between religion, the state, and social order in the United States, there are valuable insights to be gleaned from this book. Walker compellingly argues that religious liberty is the first freedom; that God is the only sure ground for coherent ethical discourse and public order; and that the only certain protection from totalitarianism is deference to the church as an alternative moral authority to the state. Christians are well-equipped to stand up for and participate in a society founded on eternal truths about humanity’s place in God’s world.
Walker has written a timely and well-argued book that demands further reflection. One need not agree with every conclusion to come away with a more profound appreciation of how natural law ethics can serve God’s glory and our good.