Christianity and Natural Law and Natural Rights

Abstract Christians have long found scriptural support for the natural law as God’s moral law written on the heart, and they have thus accepted that there are ethical standards to which persons are properly held responsible apart from divine revelation. Medieval theologians, most notably Thomas Aquinas, wove Stoic notions of an immanent rational order together with their understanding of God’s law on the heart to construct a rich account of the natural law. The idea of natural rights, meanwhile, was developed gradually by medieval canonists and became prominent in the early modern period, adding to earlier conceptions of positive legal rights the claim that there are rights that ought to be recognized by any and every legal order. While natural law has at times been contrasted with divine command morality, and some Christian thinkers have regarded natural rights discourse as corrosively individualist and as displacing natural law, increasingly it is acknowledged that Catholic and magisterial Protestant thinkers alike have for the most part harmonized natural law and divine command and seamlessly integrated the doctrine of natural rights. Natural law thinking has frequently been seen to run afoul of the is-ought fallacy. The new natural law and neo-Aristotelian naturalism offer different responses to this charge. Increasingly, Christian thinkers have come to acknowledge the natural law as a theological doctrine of a universally accessible moral standard, which construes nature as ordered to God’s purposes and thus as intrinsically normative.