THE RELATIONS OF LAW AND RELIGION

Justice is the fundamental moral requirement of human life in community. Historically in Western culture, it has been a central concern both of law and of religion. Reflection on justice is a perennial theme not only in the classical political thought of Greece and Rome but also in the biblical understanding of the righteousness and sovereignty of God. Although justice has both a legal and a transcendent dimension in each of these traditions, its transcendent character achieves its fullest expression in the ethical monotheism of the Hebrew prophets of the sixth to the eighth centuries BG. While acknowledging that all three of these traditions have made major and distinctive contributions to the development of modern law, Harold Berman argues persuasively that the Western legal tradition as a whole rests upon the underlying religious “belief in a God of justice who operates a lawful universe, punishing and rewarding according to principles of proportion, mercifully mitigated in exceptional cases.” In the twentieth century, however, this historical connection between law and its religious roots has been substantially broken. This erosion of its historical foundations constitutes the real crisis of modern law.

Berman's study is primarily analytical rather than constructive. The secular and increasingly global context of present-day law precludes the possibility of return to the legal systems of the past. Nevertheless, a study of the tradition is an essential preparation for the constructive task which lies ahead.