Law and Redemption: Political Judgment and the Church's Proclamation

Abstract

To situate the human enterprise of giving law or political judgment within a theological understanding of "the higher law" is to situate the political reality of human freedom within a theological understanding of the total reality of human freedom. I suspect that every practitioner of law views the legal enterprise both as expressing human freedom and as serving human freedom, "serving" in the sense of securing, protecting, and promoting it, despite the constraints placed on human conduct by the practice of political judgment in its adjudicative, executive, and legislative forms. I also suspect that, if asked to define or describe the freedom which the enterprise of law serves, most practitioners would light on a structural understanding of human freedom as the individual's power of choosing among alternatives, whether alternative things, actions, or courses of action. Or perhaps, with a little more philosophical sophistication, they might expand this definition of freedom into the individual's power of determining or realising themselves through acts of choice.