"Faith and Reason in Ethics"

The relationship between faith and reason in determining ethical positions and behavior has been a long-standing topic for debate among Christians. The most common way of solving the debate has been to find a third category that is known through reason, but requires revelation to truly understand it. John Locke had his idea of the inner light of reason. "Locke adheres rigidly to his view that the fundamental principles of ethics and politics are evident to a kind of rational intuition, able here to recognize what is essential to the status of man as man." (D.M. MacKinnon, "John Locke," Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, pp. 196-197). Biblical interpreters of the Sermon on the Mount often talked about the "lived faith," by which they meant that Jesus in Matthew's gospel called for responding to the radical challenges of Jesus by living out their faith as best as they could. Unlike Locke Jeremias and other late twentieth century theologians had a pessimistic view of human nature for people left to themselves. So faith guided the efforts of Christian people. But the third combination of the use of faith and reason in ethics kind of split the difference between the other two, seeing reason and faith working together to create an ethical life. This "natural law" view, which originates from the Roman Catholic tradition, has many followers today.

Natural law, usually identified as that which all people come to understand by their natural reason, as opposed to supernatural revelation, has long been identified with the Roman Catholic optimistic view of human beings. Thomas Aquinas formulated it most clearly in his Summa Theologica: “Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to divine providence in a more excellent way, in so far as he himself partakes of a share in providence, by being provident both for self and for others. Therefore, he participates in eternal reason, through which he possesses a natural inclination to a fitting act and end. Such participation on the part of a rational creature in the eternal law is called natural law.” (ST, Part II, First Section, q. 91, art. 2, quoted in Vernon Bourke “Natural Law,” Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, page 224). This view has usually been used for such things as abortion to say that according to natural law all life is sacred and anything originated, like a fetus, is as sacred as any other life.

It seems to me that faith and reason always need to be held in tandem. Although reason is a gift it is flawed in that human beings do not have perfect reason. But it is not as simple as where reason fails faith begins. One must hold faith and reason in paradox and not hold things that seem by science and ongoing research to be disproved by faulty reason. Ultimately, Christians hold to both revelation and reason, and as far as ethical living, must both be held in tension. Moral deliberation about any issue does not become a matter of blind faith, but using your reason as a Christian individual to deliberate on what God is leading us to do now.

Natural law may soon become a hot topic in the debate over the new Supreme Court nominee. In Monday’s CNN online article Daniel Burke wrote concerning “What is Neil Gorsuch’s Religion? It’s Complicated.” In the article, he contrasts the social issue progressive Episcopal Church where he worships in Boulder today to his Roman Catholic upbringing. He identifies Gorsuch's mentor in legal philosophy at Oxford University, John Finnis, a giant in the field and a former member of a prestigious Vatican commission. Burke writes: "Among laypeople, Finnis may be best known for his expositions on natural law, an often-misunderstood area of legal and moral philosophy. At its heart, natural law refers to a body of norms that adherents believe are not created by humans, but instead are revealed through the application of reason," according to Richard Garnett, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where Finnis now teaches. Because philosophers like Finnis have employed natural law to argue against abortion and same-sex marriage, natural law has become controversial, especially among liberals… Gorsuch himself drew on natural law while writing his 2006 book "The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia." In it, he argued that "all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

So it seems to be an open question whether Gorsuch's adherence to a mentor and natural law itself will be determinative of the positions he would take in a would-be Supreme Court justiceship. Part of it will also have to do with how he interprets natural law. I would take issue with the whole idea of pure natural law. Natural law seems to be interpreted today as the triumph of faith over reason, since there are great disagreements over issues today and the fact that it is written in nature for something to be true seems to understood through a certain use of revelation. It cannot be pure reason, since all people who morally deliberate on the controversial issues of today disagree. Faith and reason need to be held in tension. But when new science gives guidance we must progress in our religious view on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Where Scripture does not address something directly-- at least in today's understanding of things scientifically-- then the trajectory can be taken from Scripture in terms of how Jesus acted and what he would stand for today. There must be a place for approaching today's social issues not purely naturally, but in terms of asking "what would God be leading us to do today?"