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."
Recommended Citation
Thomas L. Shaffer,
Maybe a Lawyer Can Be a Servant; If Not…,
27 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 1345 (1996).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/471
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.