WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL POWER / TUTORIALOUTLET WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL POW | Página 3

those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other
inspired writers. Natural law can be
discovered by reason alone and applies to all people, while divine law
can be discovered only through
God's special revelation and applies only to those to whom it is
revealed and who God specifically indicates
are to be bound. Thus some seventeenth-century commentators,
Locke included, held that not all of the 10
commandments, much less the rest of the Old Testament law, were
binding on all people. The 10
commandments begin “Hear O Israel” and thus are only binding on
the people to whom they were
addressed (Works 6:37). As we will see below, even though Locke
thought natural law could be known
apart from special revelation, he saw no contradiction in God playing
a part in the argument, so long as the
relevant aspects of God's character could be discovered by reason
alone. In Locke's theory, divine law and
natural law are consistent and can overlap in content, but they are not
coextensive. Thus there is no
problem for Locke if the Bible commands a moral code that is stricter
than the one that can be derived from
natural law, but there is a real problem if the Bible teaches what is
contrary to natural law. In practice,
Locke avoided this problem because consistency with natural law was
one of the criteria he used when
deciding the proper interpretation of Biblical passages.
In the century before Locke, the language of natural rights also gained
prominence through the writings of
such thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Whereas natural law
emphasized duties, natural rights
normally emphasized privileges or claims to which an individual was
entitled. There is considerable
disagreement as to how these factors are to be understood in relation
to each other in Locke's theory. Leo
Strauss, and many of his followers, take rights to be paramount, going
so far as to portray Locke's position