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Ching on Bonhoeffer, Church, and State

Kenneth Ching  (Regent U. School of Law ) has posted Would Jesus Kill Hitler? Bonhoeffer, Church, and State. The abstract follows.

“Would Jesus kill Hitler?” is a symbolic question about the relationship between church and state. Jesus, of course, did not have occasion to answer. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer did. Bonhoeffer was a pastor, theologian, and philosopher who, while trying to “live the life of Jesus,” conspired to assassinate Hitler.

This will be the first law journal article to take Bonhoeffer as its primary subject. The article summarizes a long tradition of Christian political theory, the natural law/two kingdoms (“NL2K”) tradition. The NL2K tradition runs through St. Augustine, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many others. Some argue that Bonhoeffer rejected this tradition. This article’s descriptive thesis is that Bonhoeffer was part of the NL2K tradition. Also, a problem in the tradition is identified. Sometimes, the church has had too much influence on the state (theocratic Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts); sometimes, it has had too little (the antebellum South and Nazi Germany).

This article describes and assesses Bonhoeffer’s developments of and deviations from the NL2K tradition both theoretically and in the context of his opposition to Hitler and the Nazis. Using Bonhoeffer, this article also offers an answer to the problematic question “how much influence should the church have on the state?” The normative thesis of this article is that the state must remain religiously neutral, but the church must oppose a state that acts illegitimately.

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Waldron on Natural Law

Jeremy Waldron  (NYU School of Law) has posted What is Natural Law Like? The abstract follows.

“The State of Nature,” said John Locke, “has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one.” But what is “a law of nature”? How would we tell, in a state of nature, that there was a natural law as opposed to something else — like positive law, a set of customs, natural morality, natural ethics, a set of natural inclinations, the truth of certain prudential calculations, a widespread but perhaps false belief in some transcendent law, the voice of God, or just a natural disposition on the part of some pompous people to make sonorous objective-sounding pronouncements? What form should we expect natural law to take in our apprehension of it? This paper argues three things. (a) John Finnis’s work on natural law provides no answer to these questions; his “theory of natural law” is really just a theory of the necessary basis in ethics for evaluating positive law. (b) We need an answer to the question “What is natural law like” not just to evaluate the work of state-of-nature theorists like Locke, but also to explore the possibility that natural law might once have played the role now played by positive international law in regulating relations between sovereigns. And (c), an affirmative account of what natural law is like must pay attention to (1) its deontic character; (2) its enforceability; (3) the ancillary principles that have to be associated with its main normative requirements if it is to be operate as a system of law; (4) its separability form objective from ethics and morality, even from objective ethics and morality; and (5) the shared recognition on earth of its presence in the world. Some of these points — especially 3, 4, and 5 — sound like characteristics of positive law. But the paper argues that they are necessary nevertheless if it is going to be plausible to say that natural law has ever operated (or does still operate) as law in the world.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Dyer, “Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition”

A very interesting looking book by Justin Buckley Dyer (Missouri), which in part defends the traditional view of the relationship between natural law and opposition to slavery against recent revisionist attacks: Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (CUP 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism – which he identifies with principles of natural law – were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is an understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America’s greatest constitutional crisis.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: The Original Source of Law (May 9)

The Crossroads Cultural Center will host a panel discussion, “The Original Source of Law: The Individual? The State? God?”, at NYU on May 9. The panel will address natural law, both as a general concept and in its practical implications. Speakers include Robert George (Princeton) and Andrea Simoncini (Florence). Details are here.

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Upham on Society of Sisters, Natural Law, and the Pope’s Undeserved Praise

David R. Upham (U. of Dallas) has posted Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Natural Law, and the Pope’s Extraordinary — But Undeserved — Praise of the American Republic. The abstract follows.

In his 1929 encyclical, Divini Illius Magistri (On Christian Education), Pope Pius XI paid an extraordinary tribute to the United States, the Supreme Court, and more specifically, the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. In the course of affirming that parents have the primary right and duty to direct their offsprings’ education, he quoted with approval from Justice McReynolds’s opinion in Pierce. Moreover, the Pope praised both the Taft Court for its reliance on natural law, and the whole American Republic for having ordained the natural rights of the family, and the natural law in general, in the Constitution.

This article will explore the significance and validity of this praise. This article concludes that this tribute, while extraordinary, was simply unwarranted. Rather, the Taft Court evinced an increasing indifference, if not hostility, to natural law concepts–an indifference clear in Pierce itself as well as Buck v. Bell and other cases. Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Martin Luther King on Just and Unjust Laws

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States. In commemoration, here’s a passage from Dr. King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote in 1963 to answer clergy who had criticized his willingness to break laws as part of his anti-segregation campaign:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

John Finnis: Books and Conferences

John Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights is one of the most important books in jurisprudence of the past century — and an erudite and magisterial interpretation of the tradition of natural law.  On a personal note, it was also one of the books that most influenced my decision to want to teach law; I thought, a life spent trying to create a monument as lasting as  this book is a life well lived.

A five-volume collection of Professor Finnis’s shorter work has now been published, The Collected Essays of John Finnis (OUP 2011), which provides a comprehensive picture of the man’s views in legal, political, and moral philosophy (each book can be purchased singly).  For readers here, the last volume, Religion and Public Reasons, looks especially worthwhile (though all of them look terrific), as it engages masterfully with the issue of the role of religion in political decisionmaking.

And there are two excellent conferences this fall which will discuss and celebrate Professor Finnis’s work: first, at Notre Dame Law School on September 9; second, at Villanova Law School on September 30.