The Moral Law
The process of sanctification and justification in the Christian life, necessarily engages with the reality of human freedom and responsibility. Without freedom and responsibility, we can never truly speak about love or morality or the process of working out our salvation. The two go hand-in-hand: without freedom we cannot have responsibility, and without responsibility we can never have freedom.
Human freedom is a power that God has given man so that he can choose what is good, and so to share in His Goodness, His Divine Life. Every choice that we make should be brought into full harmony with God’s plan for His creation.
Because of the connection between love and God’s plan, God’s law is objectively true; it is not arbitrary. It is given to us for our happiness, and when we give our full assent to God’s will, we take one step closer to eternal happiness. The law of God by which we attain this eternal beatitude, is also called the moral law, because it informs our behavior.
All moral law begins in the mind of God, from His eternal wisdom for His creation. From the mind of God, moral law comes to us in two basic streams: in nature and in divine revelation.
Moral law found in nature is called “the natural law.” The natural law is our human awareness, through reason, of how to act according to God’s eternal wisdom. It is the moral law as we know it by our natural ability of observing the world around us and applying our minds to the question, “How should we behave?”
Moral law found in divine revelation is called “the revealed law.” Revealed law is God’s eternal wisdom given to us by God through His prophets and in the sacred scriptures of Israel and the Church. There are two stages to the revealed law: the Old Law, and the New Law (also known as the Law of the Gospel).
Is the moral law just a set of rules that God imposes on us because he wants to be a dictator? No. The moral law is more like “family rules.” God, our loving and wise Father, has communicated to us, His children, “rules for the family” through our human reason, and through divine revelation. They are given us for the sake of helping us live good lives here on earth, so that we may be like Him, live in peaceful union with Him now, and journey with Him towards eternal happiness.
When talking about the moral law, it’s important to say something about conscience. The Catechism defines conscience as “a judgment of reason by which the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.” The Second Vatican Council explained it this way, “Man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…. conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary.”
Conscience is where the law makes contact with our hearts. It is not just a general ability that enables us to navigate between what’s right and what’s wrong. Conscience is our ability to make judgments that are aligned with what we sincerely believe to be the truth. God works within the conscience, helping us make those judgments, and leading us forward to growth in our understanding of the truth.
We have a “good conscience,” then, when our judgments about right and wrong are based on our best attempts at sound reasoning and at discerning the wisdom of God as He reveals Himself. We have a “bad conscience” when we ignore the call of truth and of God, choosing instead to do what feels right or what we prefer to do, even if it conflicts with what we know is true.
A conscience is “well-formed” when it is fully aligned, in reality, to God’s guidance in reason and revelation. Every one of us, as baptized Christians, are called to listen to and follow Christ in continual formation of our conscience, and we do so by means of study, prayer, the reading of Scripture, meditation, receiving the Sacraments, and performing works of charity in obedience to God. Conscience, then, requires lifelong formation.
Having talked a little bit about what moral law is, let’s talk in a little further detail about the two streams of the moral law that I mentioned earlier: nature and Divine Revelation.
Through both of these streams, God has communicated His law to us. Divine law has been revealed by God through His prophets and the Scriptures. It has two stages: the Old Law, and the New Law of the Gospel. First, let’s discuss the Old Law. We will discuss the New Law in the next segment.
Revealed law came first to Abraham and his family, and again to the people of Israel, his descendants, through Moses and the many prophets and anointed leaders that came after him. This is God’s revelation in the Old Testament, and so is called “the Old Law.”
Now let’s consider the natural law. Natural law is composed of statutes that can be naturally discerned by reason even without the help of Divine Revelation. Scripture tells us that sin has darkened the human intellect, and tarnished the soul’s capacity to be able to reason out the actions that are required of it. Because of this, natural law, and its principles and requirements, are not so easily known by all men. That is one reason why God gives us revealed law.
Natural law is necessarily universal. Its authority applies to every human being. It is natural law that determines how man, regardless of whether or not he has received the gift of the Gospel, should live.
Because of human weakness and sin, the natural law is always obscured to some degree or another in every society. That does not mean, however, that natural law is not the fundamental basis upon which civil law of human society is based. Moreover, in those societies that have accepted the Revelation of God, divine or revealed law strengthens, purifies, and restores what we already know, or should know, through natural law.
The Christian life calls for a well-formed intellect and purified will that directs us on how to live in ways that please God and truly express love for Him. Because of this, God, in his benevolence, has engraved natural law upon every human heart and has given us revealed law to help guide our weakened intellect.
In the next segment, we will discuss the perfection of the moral law: the Law of the Gospel.