Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Creation Or Nature? Or Both?
Author: Tim Walker

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 98

Creation Or Nature? Or Both?

Oliver O’Donovan and Carl F. H. Henry on Natural Law, the imago Dei, Creation, and Gender Distinctions.

Tim Walker

Tim Walker is the Communications and Pastoral Care Pastor at First Baptist Church Biloxi, MS. He teaches theology, philosophy, and ethics adjunctly for New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and William Carey University.

As the distinction between the genders continues to be erased, Christians must wrestle with how they will engage their non-Christian, secular neighbors with what they know to be true about God’s world. In engaging their neighbors, Christians have God’s special revelation that tells human beings they are made in God’s image as distinct, complementary genders, male and female. What Christians have wrestled with for

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 99

millennia is whether they have moral resources outside of God’s special revelation in Scripture to make appeals to their non-Christian neighbors for an objective moral, natural law. Particularly for our time, on what grounds do Christians engage their non-Christian neighbors about the objective reality of gender distinctions and a normative nature to those distinctions? At the root of these questions lie discussions about natural law, the doctrine of creation, the imago Dei, and divine revelation.

Christian ethicist, Daniel Heimbach, offers a sufficient definition of natural law. According to Heimbach, “this moral ideal or ethical law is in some way present in nature or the natural order of things; that what this moral ideal or ethical law demands is knowable in some natural way (by reason, or intuition, or experience, or sensation) by men in their natural state (apart from revelation, regeneration, or specialized training); and that what this moral ideal or ethical law requires may or may not be the same for all people, for all time, in all places.”1

Carl F. H. Henry and Oliver O’Donovan are two prominent Protestant moral theologians who have developed public, political theologies apart from natural law theory. They provide accounts of the objective moral character of creation and human beings as made in the imago Dei yet without appealing to natural law. Rather, their accounts are thoroughly theological, while affirming that the normative features of reality and humanity can be and are known by even those who do not have Christian presuppositions. By looking at their treatment of natural law and their proposals for Christian engagement with the world around them regarding gender distinctions, Henry and O’Donovan both show that Christians have the rich theological resources of the ...