Christianity and Global Law

Rafael Domingo, John Witte, Jr., Rafael Domingo, John Witte, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000039221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book explores both historical and contemporary Christian sources and dimensions of global law and includes critical perspectives from various religious and philosophical traditions.

Two dozen leading scholars discuss the constituent principles of this new global legal order historically, comparatively, and currently. The first part uses a historical-biographical approach to study a few of the major Christian architects of global law and transnational legal theory, from St. Paul to Jacques Maritain. The second part distills the deep Christian sources and dimensions of the main principles of global law, historically and today, separating out the distinct Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian contributions as appropriate. Finally, the authors address a number of pressing global issues and challenges, where a Christian-informed legal perspective can and should have deep purchase and influence. The work makes no claim that Christianity is the only historical shaper of global law, nor that it should monopolize the theory and practice of global law today. But the book does insist that Christianity, as one of the world's great religions, has deep norms and practices, ideas and institutions, prophets and procedures that can be of benefit as the world struggles to find global legal resources to confront humanity's greatest challenges.

The volume will be an essential resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of law and religion, transnational law, legal philosophy, and legal history.

Part I

Historical-biographical approach

1 St. Paul and the moral law

C. Kavin Rowe

Introduction

Although St. Paul’s thought has often been examined in discussions of natural law, on first glance it is not obvious that he would actually have had much to say about a universal moral law.¹ When Paul speaks of “law,” he most frequently means the Torah, the Law given to the Jews by the God of Israel. The Jews were God’s elect people, and Law was the pattern of life that expressed and maintained their covenant with God and publicly distinguished them from all non-Jews.² In Paul’s thought, Torah is not equivalent to a universal moral law. In fact, the most likely ancient progenitors of much current natural law discussion were the Stoics.³

On further reflection, however, we can see in Paul several critical points about the way that human beings are, and are supposed to be, in the world that constructively intersect today’s questions about a universal moral law. In this chapter, I discuss the principal Pauline passages that should figure in any treatment of Paul and natural law, and then reflect briefly on the theological consequences of the exegesis for the shape of Christian thought about global law.

Texts

Because Paul wrote so much of what is in the New Testament, it can be difficult to know where to focus. Yet there clearly are places in his letters and in New Testament traditions about him that are most relevant to our question. Those places are in his letter to the Romans and in the Acts of the Apostles. We must say clearly, however, that the following passages are treated in relation to Paul’s overall theology and its reception in Acts rather than simply lifted out of context and made to speak on a contemporary question. All too often in the history of exegesis, readers of scripture have practiced hermeneutical “snatch-a-verse” and reflected on a wider question in light of passages that are distorted by leaving their original grammatical home behind. Insofar as we seek Paul’s wisdom on the question of natural law, we will have to read him—and his reception—in the context that gives his words their specifically Pauline meaning.⁴

Romans

On any account, Romans is Paul’s most theologically elaborate missive. It is also the letter in which he deals most explicitly with the question of the Gentile knowledge of God. Precisely because Romans is an account of God’s dealings with the Jews in past history and now in Christ Jesus, Paul finds that he must also write about the Gentiles’ relation to God. To think about Israel’s election in light of Christ is, for Paul, simultaneously to think about how the Gentiles fit into that history.

Romans 1:1–3:31

As most New Testament scholars now recognize, Romans 1:1–3:31 is the first major section of the letter. On the way to his main point, Paul deals extensively with Gentile knowledge of and obedience to the God of Israel. For the purposes of this chapter, four key points emerge from Paul’s opening argument. First, Paul clearly affirms that God’s creative power is written into creation in an obvious enough way that it makes sense to say God “has revealed” to everyone aspects of what it is to be God, namely, his eternal “God-ness” and “power” (1:19–20). This revelation is quite specific at this point: there is no mention of a divine law, moral or otherwise; Paul speaks of what later came to be called God’s attributes.

Second, Paul characterizes the Gentile response to God’s self-revelation in creation as rejection. Though they can “know God” in the sense of some divine attributes, the Gentiles have refused this knowledge: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (1:22). Their “reasonings” are not knowledge in any significant sense; they are, rather, senselessness, darkness, confusion, a covering over of the heart.⁵

Third, Paul’s adduced evidence for this description of Gentile reasoning is not that Gentiles make poor analytic arguments, have no intellectual sophistication, or draw the wrong conclusions from what would otherwise be laudable insights. The evidence is practice. The Gentiles live in ways that disclose the worship of creation rather than God. The “truth” is that only God should be worshipped, but precisely by the way they live, the Gentiles show that their knowledge of God is a lie—idolatry (1:25).

Fourth, in 2:14–16 Paul states that

whenever Gentiles who do not have the Law by nature do the things of the Law, even though they do not have the Law, they are a Law to themselves. These [Gentiles] manifest the work of the Law, written on their hearts, while at the same time their conscience also witnesses and among them their thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when God will judge the secrets of men according to my Gospel through Christ Jesus.⁶

Throughout the history of discussion of non-Christian knowledge of God’s law, these verses have been used repeatedly to argue that Paul believes in natural law. But in the context of the epistle, they actually say something quite different. Paul’s point is not that some Gentiles happen to know the universal moral law and behave accordingly while others do not. Nor is it that God has decided to write the moral precepts of the created order on some hearts and not others. Paul’s point in the context of Romans is rather that God’s promises in Jeremiah are now fulfilled in the life of Gentile Christians. The “new covenant” declaration from Jeremiah 31:31–34 (LXX 38:31–34) is brought to life in the ability of Gentile Christians to walk in the way of Torah. Torah, of course, is not a universal moral law but the covenant of the God of Israel with his people. Speaking of the Gentile Christians who do not have the Torah by birth but who, because of their reception of God’s Spirit, exhibit the purpose of Torah in their lives makes an excellent transition to an argument against negligent Jewish Christians who do have the Torah by birth but whose lives testify against it (2:17–29). The counterpoint is rhetorically striking and effective.⁷ The question at this point in Romans is about the place of the Gentiles vis-à-vis the election of Israel, not what morally praiseworthy behavior the Gentiles might have been up to in the world at large.⁸ On that matter, Paul has already decisively spoken only a few verses before (Romans 1:18–32).

Romans 1:1–3:31 contain the loci classici of Paul’s alleged endorsement of a natural law. Paul’s actual argument, however, complicates the attempt to find a universal moral law in his thought. In this section of Romans, Paul does not extol the “natural” knowledge of God or talk about a universal moral law. What he says instead is that the way that Gentile reason interacts with what God has revealed of himself in creation is idolatrously to distort that revelation. Quite in the face of the way God made the world, reason goes its own way, and that own way leads not to a discovery of God’s attributes or to a law that reflects God’s will for human behavior but to the absolutizing of creation. Reason here, for Paul, is not an abstract capacity native to all human beings but reason at work; and reason at work moves not toward God’s revelation in creation but toward cloudiness, darkness, and brokenness. Gentile patterns of life are constitutive of the knowledge they possess, and such knowledge is, for Paul, tantamount to ignorance. The Gentiles have forsaken the truth and live a lie.

Romans 6–8

After treating the figures of Abraham and Adam (chapters 4 and 5), Paul turns toward the character of Christian existence within a creation that still longs for eschatological redemption (chapters 6–8). Two major points from this section of the letter bear on our current question. First is Paul’s theological anthropology. In stark contrast to certain modern notions of human freedom, in which we will to choose what we choose and cannot be forced to choose anything that we do not will for ourselves, Paul’s view of humanity is that we exist in slavery. Baptism into the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection marks the transition from one slavery to another. Paradoxically, perhaps, this second slavery is for Paul what true freedom is (6:15–23). We do not move freely from one kind of unfettered self to another. Prior to baptism we are dominated by powers that are in principle beyond the power of our will: sin and death. We are slaves to sin and move in patterns of death. Upon transition to the true Lord, we become slaves to him—which is to say, we are freed from sin and death—and discover the patterns that lead to life eternal (6:23; chapter 7).

Second is Paul’s understanding of creation. Like his fellow Jews, Paul believed both that the God of Israel created the world and declared it good, and that the present world was in need of healing due to Adam’s fall and paled in comparison to the world to come. In Romans 8, however, Paul teaches the Roman church that their understanding of the world cannot be separated from their understanding of Jesus Christ and the active work of the Holy Spirit. The healing has already begun (8:22–30). It is here now. But precisely because this healing is also and inextricably linked to hope, Paul describes the creation as still existing “in bondage to decay” (8:21). The healing of creation is not yet complete. The creation still waits “with eager longing” for the consummation of God’s work in Christ.

What Paul’s argument in Romans 6–8 means for an attempt to find a universal moral law is of course varied and complex. But two points stand out. The first relates to anthropology: an account of a universal moral law that presupposes a human knower whose mind can work unfettered by sin and darkness runs directly counter to Paul’s view of human possibilities. At the very least, the quality of human knowledge, according to Paul, would always be bound up with the question of the will; there is no mind that can serve the Lord’s truth apart from the will that is enslaved to one master or another. A thinking mind whose thoughts are free from the will’s dominus is as un-Pauline an abstraction as is conceivable.⁹

The second point relates to the context in which one could (or not) discern a/the natura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Historical-biographical approach
• PART II Structural principles of global governance
• PART III Global issues and global public goods
• Index