Evangelicals and Natural Law.

Given that Martin Luther founded the Evangelical position on the proposition that "reason is Satan's whore," it is a hopeful sign that Christianity Today can find that the Evangelical antipathy for Natural Law is softening.

This is an interesting observation - at least for those few who read Communio -

Second, the authors' account of marriage depends upon their understanding of the physical body that is not opposed to evangelical theology, but is certainly not a mainstream view. As they put it, "The body is a real part of the person, not just his costume, vehicle, or property." Yet as adults, we are naturally incomplete "with respect to one biological function: sexual reproduction." For this reason, inasmuch as marriage is a comprehensive union, it is "oriented toward children."


The nature of this "real bodily union" has drawn the most attention from their respondents—and evangelicals would do well to attend to it as well. Whatever our concerns about natural law in general, the philosophers' argument about marriage depends upon the fact that the body is a "real part of the person," which cuts against many evangelical understandings of the body and its relationship to the soul. The argument itself isn't new—they draw upon George's work with Patrick Lee in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics—but the way they unpack it in relationship to marriage and sexual arrangements deserves careful consideration, especially given the reaction in the past decade against forms of "dualism" that value the soul over the body.

This a theme of a lot of articles in Communio, but then it is also a theme of Aquinas for whom, pace Aristotle, we are always embodied spiritual beings who are incomplete without a body, who are, in fact, not "us" without a body, and for Pope Benedict XVI, for whom a love that omitted eros is a human impossibility.