Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1996

Publication Information

27 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 1345 (1996)

Abstract

Consider the way we American lawyers learn about the relationship between the church and the law: This grand constitutional and legal order we propose to serve is unfolded before us and built up in our minds and hearts; it comes to us out of multi-volume sets of course books, and, like the gods of Canaan, it comes to us as religious: Thomas Jefferson said America was God's New Israel; David Hoffman, the grandfather of legal ethics in America, spoke of the law as a temple and of us lawyers as priests who served in the temple; Law Day speakers commonly talk about our duties in this "calling" as the highest duties we have. Most of us aging males in the trade can look back with some regret at the many times when we believed that stuff and neglected family and psychic health as well as the moral implications of our being among a consecrated people.

We are formed by legal education for service in the temple of the law, and then along come people like Professors Floyd and Baker, who reasonably, plausibly raise the question: "How do you reconcile your faith with that?" It should be a painful question for a believer whose professional formation says that faith cannot be allowed to complicate, confuse, or confute the imposing legal order we were taught to admire and serve above all other orders. But the priority I identify here would say that faith among Christians is nothing until it can be allowed to mess up American democratic, constitutional, legal, professional commitment.

If the present question were put right, I think, it would go like this (I speak now in the language of some believers, not others): How does a Christian go about being a lawyer? In William Stringfellow's phrase, the issue is about being "a biblical person who works as a lawyer." Stripped of the pretensions of professionalism, the question would be much the same for a biblical person who worked as a plumber or a clerk for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. But, for a lawyer, it is a particularly difficult question, if you take it seriously, as a few of my students have done over the years, because "the law" is a grander thing than pipes or papers. Because the law is grander, and therefore more like the gods of Canaan, some of my students have taught me to remember this: "Maybe a Christian cannot be a lawyer."

Comments

Reprinted in Can a Good Christian Be a Good Lawyer? A Book of Reflections, Thomas E. Baker & Timothy W. Floyd eds., Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1997.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.