There has been a widespread resurgence of natural law thinking across the landscape of Protestant Christian higher education. While Roman Catholic colleges and universities have long incorporated natural law theory into their curriculum and practice, given its pride of place in Catholic social thought and the ongoing influence of Thomas Aquinas, Protestant and evangelical colleges and universities in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and beyond have only recently become a veritable hotbed of one particular type of natural law activity—though from an unexpected direction. The CCCU as an umbrella organization has made grants to several colleges to promote these initiatives, and scores of schools now include classes, clubs, lectures, conferences, and off-campus trips that indicate a commitment, conscious or not, to natural law thinking by way of creation care or environmental studies. Westmont College has a new minor in environmental studies and hosted “Faith. Climate. Action.” advocacy workshops in the summer; Houghton College sponsored “Caring for God’s Creation” Life Together groups and a major in environmental studies; Wheaton College has a science center partly dedicated to sustainability concerns and hosts competitions to promote environmental concerns while advancing them on campus, in Chicago, and around the world; and Calvin University lists environmental sustainability as one of the four essential components of the core curriculum and boasts no less than fifteen creation-care initiatives. Visiting the websites of others among the other CCCU members shows similar offerings.
Whether they know it or not, tens of thousands of students, staff, faculty, and alumni have been relying on the core precepts of natural law thinking and practice as they have sought to be faithful stewards of God’s creation. All things considered, we think this is a very good thing. But what does creation care have to do with natural law?
The answer is that creation care proceeds from the belief that the created order is good, we understand it can be ordered in better and worse ways, and that our actions should align with a right ordering of creation—we can and should seek its flourishing. Consider the college student who arrives on campus and finds herself inspired by a powerful lecture from a gifted professor in an environmental sustainability class. Persuaded that Scripture gives us sound reasons for investing our time and energy into preserving and protecting the environment, she sees this as one way to love God and her neighbor. She changes her major to environmental science and joins a campus club that hosts speakers and events and partners with other groups in the community—some Christian, many not—to clean up a local polluted creek. She becomes more interested in state and national legislation regarding climate change and the environment and writes letters to her representatives about various proposals and legislation. She recognizes that not everyone agrees with her convictions and the policies that flow from them, and so she winsomely advocates for her beliefs, both with her fellow believers and those outside the church. Our student, whether she knows it or not, is acting like a Christian natural lawyer.
While chapter two will expand on this, natural law at its most basic involves two propositions that apply to the creation-care description above. The first is that human beings have a normative nature that is directional: some behaviors accord with and promote the fulfillment of that nature, and others hinder and corrupt it. Second, people have the capacity to reason and thus understand to some extent what helps or hinders this nature. In Christian terms, 1) God created our natures, and 2) he gave us reason, through which we can understand some of this nature even without special revelation. And the conclusions of reason about our nature entail obligations about what humans ought to do. God made us a certain way, and all people, Christian or not, can know something about this.
To be clear, a Christian approach to natural law does not cordon off the witness of Scripture or special revelation, even as we must take care to distinguish between them and the purposes to which they are put. As we will argue, Scripture itself points to God’s authorship of the natural law. The Christian advocate of natural law believes that God reveals his purposes for his creation, including human beings, through Scripture. While Scripture does not address every moral issue or ethical dilemma, where it does speak, it is authoritative and obligatory. Scripture informs us of the sort of creatures we are and the kind of world we live in, sometimes describing the people we are to be as well as the things we should do, and not do. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. / And what does the Lord requires of you?” proclaims the prophet Micah (Micah 6:8). We can know that we are to care for the poor, honor our parents, pay taxes, defend the weak, and act as good stewards of God’s creation.
Yet Scripture does not offer us everything we might want or need to know regarding exactly how we are to take care of the creation, how we are to responsibly exercise that stewardship. Even where God has revealed truths about worthy ends to pursue in the world through his word, he mostly seems to have left it to us to use our reason to figure out the best means available to achieve those ends. For example, Scripture clearly teaches that physical healing is good, but it doesn’t provide guidance for training surgeons. Likewise, we can know from Genesis that we ought to care for creation but look beyond Scripture for the particulars of resource stewardship in our particular context. Our reason contributes to how we discern what is good for us as human beings and what is good for our world and the other creatures in it.
The Christian natural law advocate thus believes that God has given us general revelation in addition to the special revelation of his word. One can believe that theft and domestic abuse are wrong without deriving those norms from sacred writ, offering good reasons for these positions. One can know that we should honor our mother and father without even knowing about the Ten Commandments. God has given human beings reason, just as human beings irrespective of religious identity, and with that reason we can know certain things about our nature, and nature generally, and what is and is not good for both. Just as God has given human beings who are Christians the capacity to reason, with which we can determine the best means to accomplish various ends, so God has given human beings as such the same human capacity to know not only means but also ends. God speaks through his word (2 Timothy 3:16-17), and God speaks through his world (Psalm 19, Romans 1), and he has given us the faculty of reason with which we can, albeit imperfectly, understand and act on both.
It is worth emphasizing the critical balancing act we aim to achieve here. We posit some measure of confidence in our capacity to know things about ourselves and God’s world with the undeniable reality that our knowledge is partial, incomplete, and not only impaired by creaturely finitude but also tainted by sin and self-interest. Throughout the history of the church, Christians have, in true Goldilocks fashion, often veered too far toward one of this divide, usually out of understandable concern about the dangers of the other side. We aim to say yes to both sides but insist the two insights hold together in an uncollapsible tension on this side of the eschaton. As the apostle Paul teaches, we see through a glass darkly. Thus, we should be cautious about overconfident claims to have ascended from the dark shadows into the bright daylight, but we must also recognize that we still can “see” to some extent. And this is true in an important sense not only for Christians but non-Christians as well. If non-Christians were in complete darkness with regard to the creational goods, it would be hard to make sense of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16)
What would it mean for nonbelievers, the “others” in that last verse, to recognize good deeds if they had no capacity to understand what is praiseworthy and good for human beings?
This is why our student committed to stewarding God’s creation is not puzzled that many non-Christians share her convictions about what is good for the environment and what harms it, and that it is good for human beings to protect the environment, and bad for us to harm it. It is true that the Christian will tell a different story than the secular citizen—a truer story—about why creation matters and who is behind it. The Christian will also have the resources to better resist an idolatrous posture toward the creation, whether from fellow believers or unbelievers, because she knows that God has commanded us not to have any gods before him. We want to be clear in affirming that God’s special revelation gives us a more complete story than we would have from observing the creation on our own—and it transforms our interpretation of general revelation. And yet we maintain there is something very important about our shared humanity that makes common cause and action with nonbelievers possible given our shared creational context.
Finally, this common cause and action can at times be political in nature. Creational goods are also often public goods, and even in a society characterized by a plurality of ultimate commitments, we can and should engage our neighbors about the public goods we share as citizens and how best to employ the unique capacities of the state to protect and promote these goods. It is true that the Christian environmentalist is motivated by her faith, but that is no reason for embarrassment in the public square because her positions can be shared by others with different motivations and grounding principles. We’ll say more about this later.
We begin in this roundabout way with environmental stewardship to get to the heart of natural law thinking while trying to sidestep some of the concerns that the mention of “natural law” may elicit. If you believe that God has so ordered the world that there are goods genuinely constituent of healthy and flourishing human beings (and our environment); that Christians and non-Christians alike can know about these goods and to some extent act to promote them; and that some goods are so paramount and some evils so wicked that governments can and should act to protect the former and prevent and punish the latter, then you may be an unwitting natural lawyer. Indeed, our tongues are only slightly in our cheeks in claiming that “we may not all be natural law theorists, but we are all natural lawyers.”
Jesse Covington (PhD, Notre Dame) is professor of political science and director of the Augustinian Scholars honors program at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He teaches and writes in the fields of political theory, political theology, and constitutional law, with particular interest in the interrelation of religion and government.
Bryan T. McGraw (PhD, Harvard University) is dean of social sciences and education and associate professor of politics at Wheaton College, where he also directs the Aequitas Fellows Program. He is the author of Faith in Politics and has published articles on pluralism, liberal democratic political thought, and the place of religion in public life.
Micah Watson (PhD, Princeton University) is the Paul Henry Chair for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University, where he also directs the politics, philosophy, and economics program.
Read more in Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics (IVP Academic, 2025)
