The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (NONE)

The ultimate implication in natural theology is the autonomy of man. A true “natural theology” will recognize what Scripture and the confessions tell us about God the Creator; it will not attempt to go from nature to God but will begin with God’s enscriptured Word and will know nature in terms of it. Autonomous reason is then rejected, and all thin

state government was a vicegerent of God and His absolute law—rather than God and morality being the arbitrary tools of an absolute state (as in Machiavelli’s The Prince,7 first written in 1513).

les arguments reposant sur l’ordre naturel ne sont plus perçus comme des absolus intangibles et convainquent de moins en moins.

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

The ancient law giver was a benevolent myth; the modern law giver is a terrifying reality. The world has become more like that of Machiavelli than it was, and the modern man who hopes to refute his philosophy must think more deeply than seemed necessary in the nineteenth century.