Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

In view of this sharp rejection of natural law, it seems only logical that reservations be raised
against the doctrine of the „biblical order of creation“ as it is held by Emil Brunner, for instance.
The idea of an order of creation allegedly renders eschatology innocuous and threatens
to remove the world from the „judgment of God.“ 23 Also disputed is the traditional concept of
the „divine orders of preservation,“ which are distinct from the order of creation but presuppose
it, and which, like marriage, law, and state, for example, are allegedly ordained as the
„reaction to God’s wrath to sin“ in order to protect fallen humanity from full annihilation
through the powers of evil. 24
Against this doctrine, it is emphasized that it is too one-sided to see only the wrath of God in
those orders.
Incidentally, many Protestant social scientists state that the monotonous rejection of natural
law has been made too easy.
Protestant social ethics cannot do without „what is essential in natural law“ either. 25 Through
sin the „essence of man was indeed radically determined,“ but the „continuity of his humanness“
was not abolished. 26 It is not a question of „the alternatives, Christ or natural law, but of
the task of taking natural law into Christ without thereby obliterating it.“ 27 Consequently, the
„impetus towards natural law“ must be preserved without Protestant theology „thereby biting
its own tongue, so to speak.“ 28
In spite of the sharpness of the formulations, the differences of opinion between Protestant
and Catholic theology should not be unbridgeable since, on the one hand, Protestant theology
„of course“ recognizes that man has remained man even after the Fall and since, on the other
hand, according to the conception of Catholic theology, the concrete, historical man has been
wounded and changed for the worse by sin, which does not exclude the possibility of deriving
a natural law from the nature of man metaphysically understood even after the Fall.
5. It is often objected to natural law, even by those who do not reject it in principle, that it
mistakes and devalues the historicity of man and of society and evaporates into an unrealistic
abstraction. The natural-law doctrine allegedly avails itself exclusively of the deductive
method and derives its norms in sublime speculations from the lex aeterna. Inductive investigation
of current social conditions is foreign to natural- law thinking. „No one“ has allegedly
been tempted to provide „the reader with a factual inventory“ through a „real description“ of
concrete conditions. 29
This judgment not only mistakes the concern of natural law, but also does not fit the naturallaw
doctrine of scholasticism. Thomas Aquinas explicitly distinguishes between divinely appointed
values and orders whose transhistorical validity stems from the „unchangeableness
and perfection“ of God, the creator of human nature, and historically variable social and economic
conditions (I-II, 97,1, ad 1). In the sixteenth century, Francisco Suarez, renowned for
the depth and the clarity of his thought, showed in reference to Thomas that the mutability of
social orders is grounded in the variability of man and in the change of mores and customs as
well as, above all, in the change of the circumstances of times. Luis de Molina, however, sets
out from the principle that ethical judgments „ are all the less useful and all the less correct
the more generally they are formulated.“ 30 In order to avoid this error, the Spanish teachers of
natural law, of the sixteenth century in particular, attempted with amazing success to become
23
E. Wolf, Gottesrecht und Menschenrecht. München 1954, S. 24.
24
H.D. Wendland, Die Kirche in der modernen Gesellschaft. Hamburg 1956, S. 227.
25
C. v. Dietze, in: Das christliche Deutschland. Stuttgart 1947, S. 183.
26
W. Stählin, Zusage an die Wahrheit. Stuttgart 1951, S. 48.
27
H. Wenz, in : Evangelische Theologie VIII (1948/49), S.177.
28
H. Thielicke, a. a. O.,S. 345.
29
W. Braeuer, Handbuch zur Geschichte der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Frankfurt/M. 1952,S.32 f.
30
De Justitia et Jure. Tr. II disp.35.n.1.
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