Joe breaks down a talk by J. Budziszewski on how Catholics can use the Natural Law to draw the truth out of people, without them even realizing it is there. This method has completely transformed how Joe approaches apologetics and evangelization. We strongly encourage you to watch the video for yourself and support the original release! Get the “cheat sheet” for the episode with all the main points distilled into one document by subscribing to the Shameless Popery Patreon!

Transcript:

J.B.:

Women used to say things to her like, I know abortion is wrong, but I just can’t have a baby right now. And then my wife used to say, what do you call, what’s in you? Women spontaneously say, well, I call it a baby, but that made it possible for my wife to say. Then it sounds like the real issue for you isn’t whether you can have a baby right now, but what you’re going to do with the one you say you’ve already got.

Joe:

And you don’t have to tell them that. You can let them tell you that and you can just help highlight that by asking questions to get them to state the obvious. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to share with you a 2011 talk that I heard many years ago that totally changed how I approach evangelization and apologetics and which I find myself mentally going back to pretty frequently for a half hour talk, the sheer number of times where some line from the talk is very relevant and pops into mind in a critical moment. It’s incredible the impact it’s had on me these now 14 years later. So I wanted to share it with you. It’s by J. Budziszewski and it’s on the topic of what’s called natural law. And I was reminded of it because someone asked me a question about natural law in Romans two yesterday, and so I mentioned the talk and I said this, he gives a great talk at I believe Westmont College many years ago.

You know what, I might do an upcoming video where I just unpack this because I think this is so beautiful. I would love to sort of take these principles of how we can use natural loft for evangelization. Okay, so first things first, yes, I’m wearing the same shirt that I wore yesterday in my defense. I forgot I was going to be on camera both days and thought I could get away with it. It looks clean, but second and more importantly, it is in fact a talk he gave at Westmont College. It’s a chapel talk, like a reflection. They invited him in to come and speak to the students and he spoke on a subject that he’s actually written pretty extensively about. So there are plenty of books you can find where he goes at greater length into all of this. But this talk is great.

He spends the first 20 minutes explaining what natural law is and then the last 10 minutes, which is what I really want to focus on, gives really practical tips for how do we use this If natural law is true, how does this change? How do I speak to a nonbeliever? How do I speak to somebody about pro-life stuff or about God or about the church? Whatever it is, what can we take from this that can help us become better witnesses to the truth? And so we should probably at the outset at least give a little bit of a sense of what do we mean by natural law at all and why should we believe this exists and why should we care about it? So a good starting point would be looking at Romans two, which is what the prompt was this week. St. Paul is talking about the Jews and Gentiles and the Jews had the Old Testament.

They had revealed law from God and the Gentiles didn’t. And yet their times where both of them act in accordance with divine law and there are times when both of them act not in accordance with divine law where both of them sin. And so St. Paul says of this, for it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. Now you might question at the outset, wait a second, if they’ve never heard the law, how are they obeying it? How are they doers of the law? We’ll get into that. He says, when gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they’re a law to themselves even though they do not have the law. What does he mean by nature? He doesn’t just mean that they compulsively always do the right thing.

That’s clearly not the case for any of us. He means instead that they know about the moral law, which is what he’s talking about here, but they don’t know about it because they’ve heard of it externally, but rather within themselves they have a voice telling them do this, don’t do that. And that this voice is speaking to the truth of this thing called the natural law, hence by nature natural, that’s where it comes from. Paul says it like this, he says, they the Gentiles show that what the law requires is written on their hearts. So let’s pause on that because that’s going to be a really critical idea. Some parts of divine truth are written on the human heart, but that’s clearly not true of everything. So for instance, the kosher laws wouldn’t be something you would know from reason alone. And granted, those aren’t immortal divine truths, but even something like the Trinity, you wouldn’t know that from reason alone.

But there are other things that I shouldn’t murder or commit, adultery or steal. Those are things that are noble by reason alone. And Christians should know based on things like this, that it is true that non-Christians have huge swaths of the moral law and might live in accordance with it. Paul is saying that I’ve seen too many debates where it’s a Christian and a non-Christian debating whether for instance, atheist can be moral. And if what Paul is saying is right, then the atheist side is also right, that yes, there is huge elements of the moral law that they can act in accordance with and maybe act in accordance with better than their Christian peers. They might act more justly, they might act more prudently, they might act more temperately. Those kind of things are completely consistent, not only consistent with but really taught by St.

Paul here that there are non in this case, but we would also say non-Christians, those who don’t have divine revelation, who nevertheless act in a way that reveals that there is a moral law that is written on their hearts in which their conscience bear witness to and on judgment day, Paul says this will either accuse or excuse them. That if you think about it like this, you can imagine there’s one group of people who have divine revelation. This would’ve been the Old Testament Jews, and then there’s another group of people who don’t have divine revelation. This is everybody else, all the gentile nations. And Paul is saying not so fast that in terms of what we call special revelation, that’s true that the Old Testament is divinely inspired in a way that no other set of writings was. On the flip side, there is no one who has not heard the voice of God as Paul is going to say in Romans 10, the voice of God has gone out to all the world.

And so there is some sense in which everybody has received something and will be judged according to what they’ve received. So our question is number one, if that’s true, what are the limits of it? Number two, why should we care about it? And number three, how do we make use of that effectively in proclaiming the fullness of the truth? If they already are elements of the truth that a person has received the seeds of the truth, how do we build upon that? So in terms of why we should care about it, that kind of middle question, but Chesky argues that we should care about it both because it’s true and because it’s going to be very useful in how we can speak to those people who aren’t Christians or aren’t living in the way that they know they ought to be.

J.B.:

Now, all of this has implications by the way, not only for learning the truth ourself respecting the truth, loving the truth, trying to live according to the truth, being edified by the spirit of God as he reveals himself even in the created order. But it also has implications for how we converse with our non-believing friends as well as with Christian friends who have fallen into sin as perhaps includes some of you.

Joe:

But as he points out, the problem here is that even though we can never completely erase the moral law, even though we can never completely erase the natural law, the law written on our hearts, we can try to obscure it because there are times where we know deep down that the thing we want to do isn’t moral. And so we convince ourselves, oh, well morality is all arbitrary, it’s all subjective, it’s all cultural, whatever. And the danger there as Bud Shefsky explains is that we become stupider and wickeder than we intend because in his words, knowledge is connected to knowledge. Here’s how he puts it.

J.B.:

I do believe the genuine ignorance is possible about some things, but a good many things. But I also think that a lot of what passes for ignorance isn’t really ignorance at all, self-deception. The problem isn’t that we don’t know that there is a real God and a real right and wrong. It’s that we know and that we tell ourselves that we don’t how hard it is to discover the truth. We complain when it’s sitting right next to us. I’m doing the best we can that we say when we aren’t really trying at all. Yes, a few of our errors are innocent errors, but a lot of them aren’t innocent at all. Philosophers have a term for this motivated error, motivated error for one reason or another because we’re with God or because we’re trying to make excuses for something or because we’re running away from our consciences for one reason or another, we commit these errors on purpose. We work very hard at making ourselves selectively stupid and wicked. What happens is that we get more than we bargained for. It isn’t easy to be selectively stupid and wicked. You want to always end up stupider and wickeder than you had planned.

Joe:

Sometimes you’ll hear people say like, oh, well if God judges us based on what we know, then maybe we shouldn’t evangelize because then people won’t have very much to be judged based on this is the antigo, this is the opposite of the great commission. This would say, go out to all the worlds and don’t tell them anything about Jesus. The truth won’t set them free. The truth will corrupt and damn them. It’s the antithesis of everything Christianity stands for. And I think Bosky is showing here why that is, because it relies on this idea that people who don’t have the fullness of revelation are just living in some sort of perfect holy innocence. They’re kind of the noble savages to use the archaic term. And the truth is that’s just not true. The rest of us, they have inconvenient things that their conscience tells them, and it’s very easy to pretend to be deaf to those things.

In fact, it’s much easier to be deaf to that interior voice in some ways than it is to be deaf to something that’s external and objective like, well look, here’s the 10 Commandments telling you not to do that thing you really want to do. So it’s harder to rationalize around what is being told to you both internally and externally compared to what’s being told to you only internally. So all that is to say one of the reasons we should care about natural law is because like the rest of us, people who don’t have the fullness of revelation can be prone to this kind of motivated error where they end up making themselves stupid and wicked. And St. Paul warns about this actually in Romans chapter one.

J.B.:

St. Paul agrees with me in the first chapter of the letter to the Romans where he complains about the pagans. Now, you might think that he would say something like this. You might think that St. Paul would say those foolish pagans, they ought to know about God, but they don’t. Instead he says something like, you can look at his words when you leave today, those foolish pagans, they do know about God. It has been known from the beginning from what God has made, but they pretend that they don’t. He says they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. He doesn’t say they don’t know the truth because of their, he says they suppress it. Their hearts are darkened. That’s the result. He didn’t just describe what they did, he described the result. Their hearts are darkened. That’s what I mean. Knowledge is connected with knowledge. Knowledge is connected with knowledge.

Joe:

And sure enough, that’s exactly what St. Paul says in Romans one. He talks about gentiles who turn from God to idolatry. He accuses him of suppressing the truth. He says that what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. He says they’re without excuse and that although they knew God, they didn’t honor him or give thanks to him that instead they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for worshiping images. All of this is I think brilliantly put. In fact, I was struck by the fact that I clearly was heavily influenced by bosky without even realizing it because I recently used almost the exact same formulation in addressing Romans one in another video to what you just heard. Now Paul even says of such men that for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

So Paul does not say, Hey, these nonbelievers, they don’t know about the Trinity, therefore they don’t have the same God we do. They don’t know God at all. No, he actually says they do know God even though they refuse to honor him and that’s just the wicked. I do have other shirts by the way, but Chesky then connects this with his own experience where he talks about how he had not been a Christian and then came back to Christianity and he could look back and realize all these areas where he thought he didn’t know the truth, but in hindsight he realized he was sort of lying to himself. Now that’s an important point, that it’s not just that someone might tell you they don’t know this thing that they really do know. They might be telling themselves that they don’t know this thing that they really do know.

And so he suggests we look to four different areas. I’m not going to go into all of these if you want this, just watch the talk. Like I say, it’s only half an hour, but he gives these four. Number one is deep conscience. He’s going to say there’s an external layer where there is a cultural conditioning to conscience. What is morally acceptable in one culture may vary from another culture. There’s an important role in society and your parents and your books of the Bible and all of this and helping to shape and form the conscience. But beneath all of that, there is this deeper reality that is instilled there by God that even before you heard the golden rule, you knew the golden rule was true at a basically intuitive level that you shouldn’t treat people in a way you wouldn’t want to be treated isn’t something that you had to be reasoned into and it’s not clear you could be reasoned into it if you didn’t already have that moral formation.

So deep conscience is already there before the superstructure of parenting or anything else is built upon it. Second, he’s going to look at design in general that the universe and everything in it appears to be designed. Third, details of the design, things like the complementarity of the sexes. And fourth, the natural consequences of our deeds that some behaviors lead to bad results here and now some behaviors lead to good results here and now all of that’s pretty straightforward. But all of that is going to point collectively to the fact that we live in a world that appears to be designed, that appears to have been created by a creator and that this design seems to be consistent with some actions and not other actions, that there are ways of acting in accordance with the way you were designed. And there are ways of acting that are not in accordance with the way you were designed.

It’s basic stuff, but it’s important and he does a good job of laying all of those things out. But then he gets to this really critical point. Now, like I say, there’s going to be eight conversational moves that he suggests for how you can evangelize better that they’re all building on this very basic premise. If God has already put things in the heart of the person to whom you are speaking, your job is to help draw out the truth. It’s not to pump truth in. Now, to be clear, there are times where you have to tell someone something that they don’t already know. But if he’s right and if St Paul is right, then you actually have a pretty different job where you want to help people realize things that they may know and may not realize that they know you want to help them kind of figure it out for themselves in a certain way.

And here I’m reminded of Blaze Pascal who gives very similar advice. I am regularly going back to this as well. Pascal and the Paul, when we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he heirs, we must do this. Notice from what side he views the matter for on that side it is usually true and admit that truth to him, but revealed to him, notice this is only the last step, but revealed to him the site on which it is false. This is the tricky part. We want to jump in immediately and say, Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Lemme give you the right answer. I think both Bosky and Pascal would say, no. You want to first figure out what the other person is getting right and then build from that. So in Pascal’s formulation, you’ve got to first number one, recognize what the other person is even saying.

And that can be tricky to do because we’re quick to want to give our perspective and we have to stop and find out the other person’s. Number two, recognize what the other person is getting right. What is it that has convinced them that that view is true? And it’s often that there are elements of truth to it. And then number three, affirm those elements of truth, acknowledge what it is that they’re getting right? And only then are you ready for number four to reveal the places in which that perspective is false or at least incomplete? An example I would give for this, so take the conversation of abortion. That’s going to be a regular example that but Shefsky uses. You’re going to have people who say things like my body, my choice. What are they getting right there? Well, they’re getting right that there is a basic principle of bodily autonomy and that there are limitations to what the state can and should be able to tell you.

So they can’t just completely control your body. That’s a perfectly valid principle, and you want to recognize that and defer it. And only then are you in a good spot to reveal a shortcoming. Hey look. But if the unborn child has their own body, then wouldn’t bodily autonomy be a good argument against abortion rather than an argument for it? Because doesn’t abortion violate the bodily autonomy of the unborn child? You can have that kind of conversation, but to get there, you want to do the actual humble work of recognizing what the other person is getting, right? Even when you’re disagreeing with them. That is hard to do, but makes for a much more conducive and productive conversation because easy to just say, I’m on the side of life and the person says, I’m on the side of liberty and bodily autonomy, and you just talk past one another and you have these two different principles and both of you just hold them up and you just again, go right past each other with no real engagement because according to your views and your values, you’re right, according to their views and their value, they’re right.

And you have to do the actual work of saying, here’s where your values make sense and they fit in. And here’s where maybe even according to your own system, you’re falling short or you’re missing something. That is the harder work. That is the work that often has to be done. Pascal goes on to say, and this is a quote that it seems directly relevant to what Chesky says. People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. In other words, if I tell you that you’re wrong, you can just wave that away. You don’t know me, you just think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But if I can help you see that you’re wrong, it’s harder to disagree with yourself. And so it’s easier for that kind of truth to stick.

It has roots in a way that somebody else telling you the right answer doesn’t. And you can see this from a lot of different perspectives. I believe it’s Ben Franklin who said, A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still that you have to actually move the will. You can’t just give information to the intellect. And so as a result, if you listen to the examples, bud Shefsky is about to give notice the number of times where rather than telling somebody something, he asks them. Instead, there’s very much this kind of Socratic method of you ask good questions and you draw out things that people know that maybe they don’t realize, that they know he’s going to suggest. This should lead us to an attitude that is both confident and cautious. Here’s why.

J.B.:

One implication is that you should be both confident and cautious. I’ve been telling you that deep down all people know a great many things that they may not be aware of knowing or may even deny knowing. Well, the fact that deep down they do know should give you confidence. The fact that they may not be aware that they know these things or that they may even deny knowing them even though they do should make you cautious. I would say don’t be misled by surface denials. Speak in the language of heart knowledge. And in that language you may be able to draw that buried knowledge forth. You can find ways to get past people’s defenses and bring to the surface what they already know and to make it possible for them to acknowledge it instead of continuing to deny it. Now, how can that be done except for the three rules of mercy of truth and of prayer? I don’t know any theory of how to do it, but I can illustrate, lemme tell you about some real conversations

Joe:

He’s in going to give as he suggests, eight conversational moves, and this is the heart of what I really wanted to share. These are concrete tips that you can use to employ natural law even when the other person doesn’t realize that’s the principle that you’re working with. And he explains all of these at greater length in places like his book, the Revenge of Conscience, and he doesn’t cover all of them here. So I’m going to look partly at the talk and partly things he’s said in the book, but the first move is what he calls turning back the question.

J.B.:

So my name for the first one is turning back the question. A young man once said to me, he was a student, he came in and he spoke to me all relative anyway, how do we know that even that murder is wrong? I asked him, well, are you at any moment in real doubt about murder being wrong for everyone? Well, after a long uncomfortable silence and a little hemming hawing, the young man said, no, I guess I’m not. You might think you might think, well, that’s pretty good, professor you scored. No, you have to always have to follow through. I answered, well, good. Let’s talk about something you really are in doubt about because he had some reason for making this excuse and that was the important thing to find out what that reason is.

Joe:

Okay, so let’s dissect that for a second. First notice given that question, how do we even know that murder is wrong? I think the impulse many of us would would be to jump in with an explanation with an... Read more on Catholic.com