Abstract
Constitutionalism is the doctrine that a government’s authority is determined by a body of laws or constitution. More generally, it can also refer to efforts to prevent arbitrary government with mechanisms that regulate who can rule, how they rule, and for what purposes. But constitutionalism is a contested field: there is disagreement over what is arbitrary and which mechanisms offer the best defence against this, with some arguing that such constitutions should be based on reason and the promotion of the common good, and others arguing that constitutions are merely ‘what happens’ through the contingencies of political history. The Christian tradition, from Jesus and Paul through Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas to the Protestant reformers and their followers, has engaged with and influenced these controversies, sometimes in profound and unacknowledged ways.
Augustine in his Confessions, for example, concluded that the ‘greater authority’ of the divine and natural law is to be obeyed over the ‘lesser authority’ of human laws. Aquinas built on this by proposing four categories of law: the eternal law by which God governs the entire cosmos; the divine law, which is those aspects of the eternal law revealed in the Bible; the natural law, which is those aspects of the eternal law known by natural reason; and human laws, which apply the general principles of law to human life in society. He believed that if a human law contained anything contrary to natural law it had no binding force. In this way, he provided strong grounds for constitutionalism and resisting tyranny. Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, adopted this schema and through him such Christian constitutionalism has become formative of Anglican political theology.
This collection of extended essays helpfully opens up and explores these issues, especially looking at the contribution of Christianity to constitutional law and constitutionalism from the perspectives of history, law and theology. With one exception the authors come from the USA, UK and Australia. There are historical chapters that give an account of the relationship between Christian faith and fundamental ideas about law, justice, government and constitutionalism. These range from the Old and New Testaments through to the modern era, focusing on a number of key theologians. They include chapters by Dorothea H. Bertschmann and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan. There are chapters on legal doctrines and principles of constitutional law such as sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy and human rights, evaluating them from a range of Christian perspectives. This section includes chapters by the editors, Ian Leigh and Nicholas Aroney. Finally, there are theological chapters, which focus on particular Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity, Christology, natural law and eschatology, exploring their implications for constitutional law and constitutionalism, including chapters by Jonathan Chaplin and John Milbank. An important final chapter by Douglas Farrow, on eschatology, shows the key role of this doctrine in laying down a higher teleological authority that measures all human law and requires a distinction between Church and state, this in turn avoiding the extremes of both absolute theocracy and absolute autonomy in a Christian polity.
This substantial volume makes a significant contribution to mapping a topic that ranges over the disciplines of history, jurisprudence and theology. While it does not and could not uncover an underlying uniformity in the ways in which the Christian tradition has thought about constitutionalism, it does lay out the main trajectories of Christian interactions with this field and will become an essential resource for students approaching it for the first time.