Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: An Interview With Oliver O’Donovan And Andrew T. Walker On The Natural Law
Author: Anonymous

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 148

An Interview With Oliver O’Donovan
And Andrew T. Walker On The Natural Law

Oliver O’Donovan is Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.

Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Executive Editor of Eikon.

ATW: The Christian faith today seems to be challenged most immediately in the domain of theological anthropology. Is this your assessment?

OOD: A challenge to faith may come from within or from without, as an objection presented by unbelief or doubt nursed within belief itself. It may take the form of a pressure to conform in practical ways rather than as a challenge directly presented to thought, and for that reason may need to be thought about all the more carefully. And it may present itself in one place where the real heart of the problem is in another place, for faith is all of a piece. It can be said, perhaps, that the one and the only perpetual challenge of faith is to think rightly about God. Yet if we do seek to think rightly about God, there is a great deal else that we shall need to learn to think about, too. Faith in God certainly requires us to think about the glory of his creation and the particular dignity and responsibility assigned to our human race within it.

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 149

There are immediate, short-term challenges –– viruses, wars, and so on. There is a long-term problem of the future of the human race itself under the judgment and mercy of God. And in between the two, there are problems of civilization, peculiar to a given epoch in human existence. The manipulation of the human genome, the technicization of human numbers of men and women over their personal sexual histories and endowments, are symptoms of a problem of civilizational scope, peculiar to an epoch in which technical control has taken over from reflective knowledge. Robert Spaemann wrote that it seemed that the concept of “the person” was in danger of being forgotten. It is not the only important category to suffer that fate. Future generations, if God gives them, will look back on our ways of handling these things with something like the moral horror that we look back on slavery –– as a kind of stupidity about ourselves affecting the way we see and interpret everything else. How can the church be faithful in such an epoch? It has above all to maintain a witness to an alternative way of thinking, a different evaluation of human nature, given it in Christ. Sometimes there is a place for a well-argued and well-targeted protest; but being noisy and strident is not a long-term strategy. What is needed above all is good teaching, and a community in which good understandings are k...