God's Joust, God's Justice
John Witte, Jr.
Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006
498
Pages
Witte,
a professor at Emory University, offers an intriguing account of the role of
religious life shaping our legal heritage, and makes a case of its continued
relevance in tracing our history and its role both in continuing our particular
historical circumstances, as well as an argument for its necessity in
interdisciplinary legal studies.
The
book is a compilation of previously published articles that have been moulded
together, so one can expect less of an exhaustive argument, but rather
illustrative “snippets” that highlight and emphasize issues that align more
with both his methodological approach and traditional American preoccupations, viz.
human rights, constitutionalism and American founding, and understandings
of family before and after Roe v. Wade. As such, for the purposes of contextualization,
it does bear the marks of a distinct tradition and most notably in its debt to
his mentor Harold Berman.
Overview
of approach:
“For
me, history is more than a series of tricks that we play on the dead, or that
the dead play on us. History is more than simply an accidental chronology of
first one thing happening, and then another. For me, history is also a source
of revelation, a collection of wisdom...The challenge of the Christian
historian is to search within the wisdom of the ages for some indication of the
eternal wisdom of God. It is to try to seek God’s revelation and judgment over
time without presuming the power of divine judgment. It is to try to discern
God’s justice within God’s joust” (4).
Witte
puts forth what he calls “the binocular of law and religion” which is to say
that, in the Western tradition, the historical vision is one part law, one part
religion that interact and bounce off each other, and the means that informs
the major currents of change has been dialectic: “Every legal tradition has
known both theocracy and totalitarianism – the excessive sacralisation and the
excessive secularization of law. But the dominant reality in the West is
that law and religion stand not in monistic unity, nor in dualistic antinomy, but
in dialectic harmony” (5). The modes of cross-fertilization include, but are
not limited to:
Conceptual overlap –
eg, sin and crime, covenant and contract, righteousness and justice
Formal overlap – eg,
liturgy and ritual, habits of tradition and precedent, shared sources of
authority and power
Methodological
overlap – analogous hermeneutic interpretation, casuistic and rhetorical
methods of argument and instruction, systematic methods of organizing doctrine
Professional
relationship – both have officials
Institutional
interaction – political and ecclesiastical officials and institutions (5)
As
he notes, the goal of the “binocular” is to avoid the monocular view of looking
to history with law or religion alone, for the purposes of:
Grand civilizational
pictures – in which he follows Berman by identifying a distinctly Western
tradition with its distinct watershed moments, particularly Rome and its
conversion under Constantine, the Papal Revolution, the Protestant Revolution,
The Enlightenment, and Post-WWII.
Narrower
denominational pictures – in which emphasis is placed on mainly Protestant
interactions and influences post-Reformation
Discrete doctrinal
pictures of law and religion in Western history – revealing origins and
trajectories of issues as they have played out and influence our understanding,
with an emphasis on human rights and the family (6)
The
merits of the approach is an illuminating perspective that casts light on
panoramic glimpses of history and ways of conceiving unifying threads that persist
and continue to inform. It situates itself comfortably and contents itself as
being detached from other scholarly investigations of the past. The student of
history will find the approach most problematic, especially since it refuses to
engage itself with defences from competing interpretations and problems. One
issue comes notably to mind, that law and religion are not defended from the
critiques that would displace them as foundational, nor an outline of the basis
of granting them similar status in historical investigation, which would
require deeper theorization. Thus, the reader is left with an interesting
approach, but which presses no compulsion in acceptance. However, one suspects
a combination of textual approachability, time, faith, and perhaps other
unarticulated theological underpinning grounds the apparent complacency.
So
much for me trying to sound academic. Bottom line: interesting book,
controversial issues, moderated tone.
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