Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought

by Michael W. McConnell

Book Overview

This book explores for the first time the broad range of ways in which Christian thought intersects with American legal theory. Eminent legal scholars--including Stephen Carter, Thomas Shaffer, Elizabeth Mensch, Gerard Bradley, and Marci Hamilton--describe how various Christian traditions, including the Catholic, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and Lutheran traditions, understand law and justice, society and the state, and human nature and human striving...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300087500
• ISBN13: 9780300087505
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Relevant contribution for legal thought in general

Western Law owes much to Christianity. American Law in particular, owes much to Christianity, since the Bible played a very important role in the foundation.Marci Hamilton's article on "The Calvinist Paradoz of Distrust, Hope at the Constitutional Convention" is particularly clear on this point. The Declaration of Independence speaks about nature and nature's God as the foundations of liberal constitucional government.I wonder how America would be like, it its Constitution had been based on the "self-evident truth" that "all man are the result of a meaningless, purposeless and pointless evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection, and so they have no self and no rights". One of the points that needs to be made by Christian legal scholars, time and again, is the special dignity of human beings, against its materialistic, naturalistic, neo-darwinistic detractors. Alschuler points out the excessive influence of the "nasty" Oliver Wendel Holmes in American Law. In fact, influenced by the dominant naturalistic paradigms of poswitivistic scientism, O.W. Holmes once said (as quoted by Alschuler): "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Well, as a christian I see at least one substantial reason not to do so: Man (male and female) was created in the Image of God, as a rational and moral being, with free will and responsability. From this perspective, Man has nothing to do with baboons or grains of sand. Not even with chimps, as they are trying to make us belief with that "scientific myth" of 98,5% DNA homology. Because of Man's sin, God himself assumed the image of Man, through Jesus Christ, and became the advocate that payed, through His life and physical ressurection, the penalty due for our sin. Thus created and redeemed, Man is incapable of being understood by means of naturalistic reduction. Another point worth making is that of "Law as moral design", not just a random aggregate of adaptive strategies of "our" "selfish genes" (Richard Dawkins)or a kind of purposeless "self-organization of complex systems" (Stuart Kauffmann). As the dicta of Oliver Wendell Holmes about Man, baboons and grains of sand goes to show, Philip Johnson may have a point after all, with his seminal book "Darwin on Trial", when he warns against the ideological agenda behind the "scientific myth" of "particles-to-people evolution". In fact, it is this ideological agenda, and not so much Holmes' nastyness, that has taken over a significant part of american legal scholarship, christian scholars notwithstanding. Christian legal scholarship, it seems to me, has no choice but to debunk naturalistic and darwinian accounts of the law, and to start from creationist and intelligent design assumptions. Science shouldn't be a christian's final authority, since "science" per se doesn't exist apart from basic assumptions (v.g. teism, deism, naturalism, uniformitarianism, catastrophis