Rev Dr Peter Barnes
What has final authority in this world? Or perhaps we should ask: ‘What should have final authority in this world?’ At the Diet of Worms in 1521 Martin Luther famously declared: ‘my
conscience is captive to the Word of God.’ In the next century, Samuel Rutherford wrote his Lex Rex – meaning God’s Law is king, not the law of the Stuart kings. The Medo-Persian empire thought that its laws could never be changed (Esther 1:19; 8:8; Dan.6:8-15), but this was a false claim to divinity. In biblical thinking, the laws of man are to be obeyed unless they conflict with the Word of God (Rom.13:1-8; Acts 5:29). Human legislation (law) hopefully is to reflect God’s revealed will (Law). Law is to inspire law, and be its foundation.
When we lose sight of this, law becomes arbitrary, or we can misuse good law, as does King Ahab in seizing Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21). Judges and politicians are invariably influenced by society’s standards. Indeed, in a democracy, this is generally regarded as something laudable. However, it is not always so. In 1857 the US Supreme Court declared that slaves imported from Africa were to be regarded as chattel or property, not human beings with constitutional rights. Mark Twain deals with this issue as Huck Finn struggles to treat the runaway slave, Jim, as a fellow human being, and only does so by, as he sees it, disobeying the law.
Parallels have been drawn, rightly so, with the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, which in effect declared the unborn child to be chattel or property without constitutional rights. The majority judges – seven out of nine – found a right to privacy, which is not actually in the constitution, to be determinative of a right to abort. One of the two dissenting justices, Byron R. White, had good reason to declare:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes … As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.
In July 2012 a German court has ruled that circumcision is an act causing bodily harm, and therefore criminal. In these cases, for all the legal jargon, law has become a prisoner of human whims. We find the same sort of thing in attempts by modern judiciaries of various Western democracies to find a constitutional right to homosexual marriage hidden away in some poor unsuspecting phrase or clause. Divine Law must drive human law, or it is the law of the jungle – or at least the law of prevailing fads and fantasies.