On
Law and Spirit
October
27, 2020
I have an unusual
though certainly not unique professional background. Much earlier in my life I
earned a JD degree. For more than twenty years I was a practicing attorney at
law. Much later in life I earned an M.Div. degree. For most of the last twenty
years I have been ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament in the United
Church of Christ. Before my retirement I spent years as a practicing church
pastor. I have been a professional in both the law and religion. Religion
involves more than spirituality, but spirituality is a big part of it. Recently
I have been giving some thought to the relationship between law and Spirit. I
mean both spirit generally and more specifically the Holy Spirit as understood in
the Christian tradition. I will speak of Spirit here and mean the Holy Spirit,
but what I say applies as well to spirit in a more general sense. I want here
to explore what that relationship is and how we are called to live within it. I’ll
start as I so often do with definitions.
The online
dictionary merriam-webster.com gives as its first definition of law “a binding
custom or practice of a community; a rule of conduct or action prescribed…or
formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority.” In law
school I was taught that law, especially criminal law, is a set of minimal behavioral
standards the violation of which can result in punishment imposed by a
governmental authority. All secular law deals with human behaviors and the
relationships between people or between people and their environment. Secular
law sets standards of behavior that are the least that a community expects of
its members and violation of which can have consequences imposed by some
authority which the community recognizes as empowered to enforce the law in
that way.
At it most basic
level religious law is similar to secular law in that it relates to relationships
between people. Like secular law it specifies minimal levels of behavior and
provides for consequences for violation of that restriction by a human
religious authority or by God. Religious law differs from secular law in that
it also governs the way people relate to God. It typically provides for
negative consequences for actions which violate the minimal requirements it
sets for a person’s relationship with God, again imposed either by a human
religious authority or by God.
Our online
dictionary merriam-webster.com defines spirit as “an animating or vital
principle held to give life to organisms.” As a second definition it gives “a
supernatural being or essence: such as a. CAPITALIZED: HOLY SPIRIT….” That
second definition does a decent job of expressing what religious people mean
whey they speak of the Spirit. It comes close to what non-religious people mean
by spirit, although not all of them by any means would say that the being or
essence they experience as spirit is supernatural. Christianity understands the
Holy Spirit to which this definition refers as the Third Person of the Trinity,
fully God as God is active in creation.[1]
Whether by Spirit one means the Holy Spirit in a traditional Christian sense or
something less specific and less specifically Christian, Spirit is a nonphysical
reality that we can’t see or otherwise sense (at least most of the time) with
any of our ordinary senses but which we can experience in other ways. Spirituality
is the way we relate to that ineffable but very present reality.
Law, whether
secular or religious, and Spirit differ fundamentally in how they function in
human life. Law sets limits. It marks boundaries. It consists of more or less
specific written provisions to which one can look for reliable (in theory at
least) information about what is legally permissible and what is not or what is
legally required and what is not. Law creates order. Law gives life structure,
a form the primary purpose of which is to improve life by regulating how people
live together. Ideally law reduces conflict between people and has substantive
and procedural rules for resolving conflict when it does arise. Any specific
legal resolution of a conflict may be unsatisfactory to one or more of the
parties to the conflict, but law at least gives a resolution to the conflict
and, with very few exceptions, does so peaceably.
While law is or
at least is supposed to be ordered and certain, Spirit is free and creative. It
can also be wildly disordered and utterly unpredictable. The Gospel of John
expresses the nature of Spirit brilliantly when it describes the Spirit using
the metaphor of wind: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound
of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with
everyone who is born of the Spirit.”[2]
Law is concrete or at least as concrete as something expressed in human words
can be. Spirit is fluid. Law is more or less predictable. Spirit does what it
chooses, and what it chooses is often wild and surprising.[3]
Law, especially secular law, is what humans make it. Spirit makes itself, and
what it makes itself is transhuman such that we humans can never fully comprehend
it. Law and Spirit have in common only that they both interact with humans and
affect human behavior, but they do it in radically different ways.
Law and Spirit
always exist in tension with each other. They aim at radically different
things. Law seeks order and certainty. Spirit seeks creativity and freedom. We
humans are cast into the midst of that tension, and for the most part we don’t
much like living with tension. It makes us uneasy. We want to resolve it so
that we can be more at ease. So in the case of law and Spirit we often decide
to live with one and ignore, reject, or even deny the value of the other. When
we opt for law without Spirit our thinking becomes concrete and logical, for
the functioning of law is always logical in the extreme. It may also become
mechanical and wanting in true humaneness. When we opt for Spirit without law
we may become creative and free, but we will probably also become unpredictable
in our lives and may adopt practices or ways of life that that are unhealthy
and put us at odds with others with whom we live. It may also cause us to do
things that are downright immoral or destructive because we think we’re
following the call of Spirit, not that Spirit ever actually calls us to
anything immoral or destructive. Both law and Spirit have distinct shadow
sides, and it is far too easy for us to
be trapped by them. Examples of that truth are sadly easy to find.
The temple
authorities of Jesus’ time as they are presented in the Gospels of the
Christian New Testament are good examples of the shadow side of law. Those
worthies understood the essence of their Jewish faith to be compliance with
Torah law and more particularly with the holiness code (also called the purity
code) of the book of Leviticus. Their passion for compliance with that code sometimes
led them to fail to do things that we and most everyone would consider simply
to be the moral and humane thing to do.
We see how the
shadow side of law led them to such moral failings in the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. You’ll find it at Luke 10:30-37. In that famous parable we’re told
that a man going on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked and beaten
by robbers who left him by the side of the road half dead. Two other men came
along the road. The first of them was a priest. That means he was one of the
leading Jewish authorities of his time who worked in the Jerusalem temple. He
sees the beaten man but passes by on the other side of the road without doing
anything to help him. The second a man is a Levite, a sort of lay assistant to
the priests, who also worked in the temple. Like the priest before him he too
passes by the beaten man without doing anything to help him. Jesus rejects this
behavior and affirms the actions of a Samaritan, that is, a non-Jew whom Jews
were supposed to despise and avoid, who does all he can to help the beaten man.
We usually think
that the priest and the Levite failed to help the beaten man simply because
they were hard hearted and uncaring. The situation here is however considerably
more complex than that. As officials of the Jerusalem temple the priest and the
Levite believed that what God wanted from them was that they obey the laws of
the holiness code at all times and in all circumstances. That law forbids
contact with blood. It also forbids priests from coming in contact with or even
being in the presence of a dead body. Luke tells us that the beaten man was
half dead. We must assume that he was bloody and to all appearances could well have
been or even probably was dead. The priest and the Levite knew what their law
required of them. It required them to avoid all contact with a bloody, possibly
dead body. So they passed by on the other side of the road leaving the poor
victim of robbers to his fate. The priest and the Levite were trapped in the
shadow side of the law. They let their behavior be dictated by a written
regulation that they believed themselves bound to follow. So they failed to do
what Spirit clearly would call them to do, namely, stop to do what they could
to help the beaten man.
Thus it always is
when we devote our lives exclusively to the law. The priest and the Levite of
Jesus’ parable knew what the law said, and that’s all they cared about. They
could not allow specific circumstances with which they were faced to temper
their adherence to the law. Strict followers of law make the same mistake all
the time. For example, there is a line in Leviticus that says that a man lying
with a man as with a woman is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22. Generations of
Christians, believing themselves to be bound by that law and thus by God to
condemn all homosexual people, overlooked realities that would have been
obvious to them had they just open their eyes and ears. They didn’t hear the
explanations of homosexual people that their sexual orientation was not a
choice but was an innate part of their personhood that they discovered in
exactly the same way that heterosexual people discover their heterosexuality. They
overlooked the fact that a great many homosexual people entered into committed,
monogamous relationships that lasted a lifetime in the same way that many heterosexual
people do. The law, they believed, calls homosexuality a sin, and that’s all
there is to it. These Christians’ commitment to the law as they understood it
led them to acts of prejudice, discrimination, and even violence against God's
LGBTQ+ people. The law stopped them from being decent, humane people at least
in this regard.
Strict adherence
to secular law can lead people to inhumane beliefs and actions too. For
example, in 1994 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia stated that actual
innocence of a crime for which a person has been convicted and sentenced to
death does not make the execution of that person unconstitutional. In other
words, Scalia asserted that newly discovered proof of the convicted person’s innocence
of the crime for which he or she was convicted was not grounds for reversal of
a death sentence. I oppose capital punishment in every case mostly on moral grounds,
but I am also trained and experienced as a lawyer. When I heard of Scalia’s statement
about innocence not being grounds for reversal of a death sentence I got it. It
upset me that I got it, but I understood why Scalia would say such a thing. In
the case before him the law and the judicial system had worked the way they’re
supposed to work. The defendant had what the law considers to be a fair trial. His
constitutional rights had not been violated. Therefore there was no legal
reason to reverse the judgment of death that had been imposed upon him. From a
purely legal perspective Scalia was absolutely right. From a moral perspective
what he said is an outrage, bur from the legal perspective it is no such thing.
Thus it often is with too strict a commitment to the law as the sole determiner
of human thought and action. Morality and even common decency give way to a
mechanical application of the law even when the law produces grossly immoral
and indecent results.
Spirit has a
shadow side too. When people commit their lives to living only as they believe Spirit
has told them to live they far too often become untethered from standards of
morality or even common decency in the same way that people do who have a
one-sided commitment to law. The example of a spiritualistic sect from the
history of Russian religion may be extreme, but I believe it makes the point. The
sect I have in mind is called the Khlysty. They were known for their
unrestricted sexual practices. In worship they would dance themselves into a frenzy,
then fall to the floor and engage in orgiastic sexual acts. They believed that
only a true sinner could truly repent of sin, so they came to see behavior that
nearly everyone considered to be immoral in effect at least not to be immoral
at all. They believed that all of this came from the Holy Spirit. Although they
were nominally members of the Russian Orthodox Church they rejected all of the
ritual practices of that church as well as its moral teachings. They chose
instead to live as the believed Spirit inspired them to live without any
counterbalancing legal restraint, a decision that led them to with utterly
immoral actions.
The Khlysty are
an extreme example of the dangers of an unbalanced commitment to Spirit, but
that danger appears in less extreme forms as well. People who believe that they
are living only by Spirit often end up estranged from their families and from
society at large and living in unhealthy ways. Back in the 1960s many of the
people called hippies believed that they were living the life of Spirit. Much
of what they stood for was proper, peace and love in particular; but they
became so detached from the necessary constraints of law that they lived
sexually immoral lives and became isolated from all of human society other than
their small group of hippie friends. Many of them consumed drugs that were not
only illegal but more importantly were physically harmful and even fatal such
as heroin and LSD. Many of their cultural icons died of drug overdoses, Janis
Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix being prime examples. In their commitment to the
freedom and creativity they found in the life of Spirit they came unmoored from
necessary restraints and ended up living self-centered, unproductive lives.
Such is always the danger of too great a commitment to Spirit without law.
Thus there are
great dangers in both the law and Spirit when we commit ourselves too
completely to one and ignore or reject the other. As is true in so many areas
of human life, wholeness and fulfillment of God’s call to us to be who God
created us to be lie in maintaining a proper balance between conflicting
values. The restrictions law imposes must be balanced with the freedom of
Spirit. The freedom of Spirit must be balanced by the grounding of law. We
humans need both order and freedom. We need both set limits and free creativity
if we are to be who God created us to be. Religion properly understood and
practiced can be an effective way of finding and living the balance that we
need, but whether we are religious or not we have the same need for that
balance. We must perform a never-ending balancing act. It’s not easy. We keep
falling off to one side or the other, but it is the only way to be truly and
fully who we really are.
[1] This
isn’t the place to get into the morass of Trinitarian theology. In that
theology each of the three Persons of the Trinity both is what it is and is not
what it is at the same time. Don’t worry about it.
[2]
John 3:8. The connection between wind and Spirit is stronger in the Greek
original of this verse than it is in English translation, for in Greek the word
used here, pneuma, means both wind and spirit.
[3] In
my own life the Spirit decided that what I really am is a Christian church
pastor. It was right about that, but that I turned out to be a church pastor
was so surprising and unexpected to me that it took me a long time and a lot of
trouble to realize that the Spirit was right about me. Thus it often is with
the Spirit.
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