Consider the following questions:
(1) Can a criminal court or judge, convict and sentence an abortionist doctor for the crime of murder simply on the basis that it is murder due to divine law regardless of whether the crime has statutory codification?
(2) Can a court or judge, hold doctors/parents liable or even criminally guilty, of harming/assaulting their child by subjecting them to damaging trans medical procedures, simply because it violates divine law regardless of whether it has been defined in statute?
This post is an exploration into questions like these and an argument for why the older conception of natural law, and indeed the justice system, would have simply said yes.
Let's abstract from these questions and ask a much more general one: is God's law part of the law of the land and does it have "direct effect", that is, can courts and judges directly enforce God's law in concrete particular cases even without codification, whether in custom or in statute?
An analogy to international law might help. In most legal systems the executive would normally have power to negotiate treaties and agreements with foreign governments, but even if such treaties were ratified and becomes legally binding in international law, it has no domestic legal effect until the national parliament or government "transposes" or enacts the law domestically in national law. America, interestingly, is one of the few exceptions in that treaties have "direct effect" in domestic law. In the Constitution, the supremacy clause states that treaties agreed by the President and ratified by the Senate automatically become part of the "supreme law" of the US, there is no need for Congress to pass a corresponding federal law to give effect to the international agreement domestically.
Thus, the connection to divine law here is clear: does divine law have "direct domestic effect", that is, whatever God has decreed from creation, has direct domestic legal effect, which domestic courts can directly enforce? Or while God may decree one thing on the divine or natural plane, but it has no legal effect domestically until national parliaments pass a code or law "giving effect" to divine law?
We shall call the first option, where divine law has direct effect, the "direct common law view" (the reason will come obvious later). We shall call the second option the "higher order" view, where divine/natural law, like international law, must be "transposed" by national legislatures before it can have domestic legal effect.
I think it would be particularly instructive here to look at Blackstone for his take on natural law:
Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these. There is, it is true, a great number of indifferent points, in which both the divine law and the natural leave a man at his own liberty; but which are found necessary for the benefit of society to be restrained within certain limits. And herein it is that human laws have their greatest force and efficacy; for, with regard to such points as are not indifferent, human laws are only declaratory of, and act in subordination to, the former. To instance in the case of murder: this is expressly forbidden by the divine, and demonstrably by the natural law; and from these prohibitions arises the true unlawfulness of this crime. Those human laws, that annex a punishment to it, do not at all increase its moral guilt, or superadd any fresh obligation in foro conscientiae [in the court of conscience] to abstain from its perpetration. Nay, if any human law should allow or injoin us to commit it, we are bound to transgress that human law, or else we must offend both the natural and the divine. But with regard to matters that are in themselves indifferent, and are not commanded or forbidden by those superior laws; such, for instance, as exporting of wool into foreign countries; here the inferior legislature has scope and opportunity to interpose, and to make that action unlawful which before was not so.
-Volume 1: Section 2: Of the Nature of Laws in General
Note well the following points:
(a) The "true unlawfulness of this crime" is the fact that it violates divine law, it doesn't come from statute or human law, the divine law directly criminalises the act, all human law does is to "annex a punishment to it". But human laws did not create the crime, it was already a crime from Creation, all human laws do is to enforce it with penalties.
(b) Blackstone here contrasts natural/divine law, not with statutory law or codified law, but with laws which are purely constructs concerning amoral or matters indifferent. Note well his example, import-export duties, which are certainly not part of natural law.
(c) Note also the interesting way he describes national legislatures as "inferior". Inferior to what? Clearly, inferior to the divine government. Thus the legal hierarchy in Blackstone clearly includes national parliaments within the same legal system as the divine government, and national legislatures are subordinate governments to the supreme divine government. God decrees and national legislatures enforces divine decrees after the fact with sanctions, but they do not make it lawful or unlawful.
We can here draw from Joseph Butler's The Analogy of Religion a much more developed conception of the "moral government of God", and how it relates to civil authorities:
...Ought it to be entirely passed over, that tranquillity, satisfaction, and external advantages, being the natural consequences of prudent management of ourselves, and our affairs; and rashness, profligate negligence, and wilful folly, bringing after them many inconveniences and sufferings; these afford instances of a right constitution of nature: as the correction of children, for their own sakes, and byway of example, when they run into danger or hurt themselves, is a part of right education. And thus, that God governs the world by general fixed laws, that he has endued us with capacities of reflecting upon this constitution of things, and foreseeing the good and bad consequences of our behaviour; plainly implies some sort of moral government: since from such a constitution of things it cannot but follow, that prudence and imprudence, which are of the nature of virtue and vice, must be, as they are, respectively rewarded and punished.
From the natural course of things, vicious actions are, to a great degree, actually punished as mischievous to society... It is necessary to the very being of society, that vices destructive of it should be punished as being so; the vices of falsehood, injustice, cruelty: which punishment therefore is as natural as society; and so is an instance of a kind of moral government, naturally established and actually taking place. And, since the certain natural course of things, is the conduct of providence or the government of God, though carried on by the instrumentality of men; the observation here made amounts to this, that mankind find themselves placed by him in such circumstances, as that they are unavoidably accountable for their behaviour, and are often punished, and sometimes rewarded under his government, in the view of their being mischievous, or eminently beneficial to society.
Thus, note that human authorities or civil laws which enact punishments for violation of divine/natural law are merely instruments of God to enforce his law after the fact. Thus, God governs all mankind directly by natural/divine law, they directly bind and directly criminalise certain actions, human authorities merely give effect or enforce these laws after the fact by sanctions, but they do not create these crimes.
Butler's and Blackstone's conception here is perfectly harmonised with the history of English law in his time. In England there still remains many crimes which are known as "common law offenses". Common law offenses are crimes which are literally judge-made, which were not codified in statute or by decree when it was committed. The judge can punish an act as a crime against natural or divine law even if it were not codified, and these judicial decisions set a precedent in criminal law as a common law offense.
Even as late as 1961 the House of Lords in Shaw v DPP upheld a conviction of person who created magazines containing advertisement for prostitutes on the grounds that it corrupted public morals. The defendant appealed, arguing that corrupting public morals was not defined as a crime by Parliament or by precedent, but their lordship dismissed that argument and maintained:
In the sphere of criminal law I entertain no doubt that there remains in the Courts of Law a residual power to enforce the supreme and fundamental purpose of the law, to conserve not only the safety and order but also the moral welfare of the State, and that it is their duty to guard it against attacks which may be the more insidious because they are novel and unprepared for.
[...]
...I now assert, that there is in that Court a residual power, where no statute has yet intervened to supersede the common law, to superintend those offences which are prejudicial to the public welfare. Such occasions will be rare, for Parliament has not been slow to legislate when attention has been sufficiently aroused. But gaps remain and will always remain since no one can foresee every way in which the wickedness of man may disrupt the order of society.
Thus, in the case of parents subjecting their children to trans procedures, indeed no one in the past could have foreseen that parents would commit such wickedness against their own children (castrati cases aside), but the eternal eyes of God sees all human depravity, past, present, and future, and civil courts have the power to enact the divine wrath against such unprecedented horrors and violation of divine law and nature with sanctions, even if Parliament had not the depravity to imagine such wickedness to anticipate it in statute.
The "transposition" conception of natural law however essentially destroys and eviscerates this understanding. According to the transposition conception, which has been traced to the Scholastic tradition, divine/natural law is not an instrument of God which directly govern men, but are merely higher order and general principles with no direct applicability to this earth (parallel to international law in relation to national law). Thus, in a colourful analogy used by them, natural law are not traffic codes written in the heart of man. For them to be applied on earth, national governments must codify and enact positive law to give effect to natural law, otherwise they are, paradoxically, legally meaningless. It is ironic as such that this conception should now be the dominant view of a lot of contemporary "ressourcement" natural law advocates.
Ironically, the American Constitution itself may have facilitated in the demise of natural law when they enacted the constitutional prohibitions against ex post facto law. Ex post facto law basically punishes an act which was not defined as a crime when it was committed. It may be just when it comes to crimes which are pure constructs, e.g. the customs and import-export laws Blackstone mentions, but it makes no sense when it comes to violation of natural/divine law which surely must have been criminal and wrong from Creation. Thus, this obviously is in considerable tension with the Anglo common law tradition of common law offences which criminalises acts which were not defined as crimes when they were committed. (When the UK was debating updating their Bill of Rights, in their proposed draft bill their section against ex post facto law contains an interesting exception for actions which are crimes against the "law of civilised nations".)
To sum up this discussion, the "transposition" conception of natural law is a legal tradition which ironically diverges from the common law tradition of divine/natural law, it has the effect of making positive law the sole source and mediator of law on this earth and obscures the divine government of God. This "institutionalisation" of the law and its monopolisation of its authorities not only interposes itself between divine law and man, but also robs man of their agency and liberties. If all of one's liberties and rights comes from the law, and if the only law there is which you can use and appeal to one earth is only positive law, then the man who controls the institutions controls your liberties, you cannot appeal directly to God or nature's God, as the American Revolutionaries did of old, because God is silent on temporal matters and only deals in abstract "higher order" principles.
It is here where, ironically, the Chinese here remains freer than the American because, regardless of the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, and even because of the lack of codified liberties and rights, the Chinese people retain his "direct" sense of natural law or rights which they assert against the government themselves, even if it has not been defined. The Americans on the other hand, have been so dominated and captured by the positive legal system, that they have no concept of freedom except as handed them to them on a plate by the courts or institutions. And thus, when the courts withhold it from them, instead of appealing to the Supreme Governor of the World for a feast of divine law and freedoms, they simply starve in tyranny.