Excerpt #21

That politics and nature are so intimately conjoined is perfectly consonant with the character of God’s dominion as expressed in the Decalogue. In this regard, it is clearly correct to speak of the Decalogue as God’s ‘natural law, insofar as the Ten Commandments reveal what our lives should look like as people created for friendship with God. But the expression ‘natural law’ does not entail a knowledge which could be had anterior to or separable from an understanding of the politics of God’s law. Because politics and nature are indissolubly joined, because grace and nature cohere, it would be a mistake to assume that a correct understanding of one could be had without the other. As both Aquinas and Luther argue, the last nine commandments in the Decalogue depend upon, and in that sense are an elaboration of, the first. This means that our understanding of the natural cannot be separated from the political any more than the theological can be separated from the ethical/ecclesial.

Stanley Hauerwas, “The Truth About God: The Decalogue as Condition for Truthful Speech” in Sanctify Them In The Truth, page 45