Theologians and the Law Series
Luther and the Law: Law is Not the Gospel
Learn how Luther’s ideas continue to shape Christian views on law, vocation, and the balance between faith and legal responsibility.
October 24, 2024
Our blog offers short, accessible, reflections on important and urgent issues for Christian lawyers, and anyone else involved in law. Here you’ll find quick, stimulating reads created to help and encourage you as you practise your legal vocation – and, indeed, as you live all of life – as a follower of Christ.
Learn how Luther’s ideas continue to shape Christian views on law, vocation, and the balance between faith and legal responsibility.
Discover how Thomas Aquinas’s view of law as an expression of love and justice offers profound insights for Christian lawyers. Learn how faith and reason work together in shaping a just society.
For Augustine, natural law is a critical, objective, standard against which any legal system can be measured. Augustine saw justice as essential to law. Rules only amount to laws if they make a plausible claim to be morally in order. Rules which do not make such a claim are not laws.
The post discusses a 2024 conference at Kylemore Abbey where scholars explored Irish Christian perspectives on the common law, highlighting Richard O’Sullivan’s view that the common law embodies Christian values which promote human flourishing, natural law, and resistance to totalitarianism.
As we navigate through 2024, an election year, it’s essential to reflect on biblical principles that can guide us in discerning which parties and candidates to support. This post is something of a summary of that sermon for readers of the Theology of Law blog, and explores—as the sermons does in greater detail—the intersection of faith and politics, focusing on Jesus’ teachings, the importance of prayer, and the biblical view of government and justice.
In this post David McIlroy explores the ethical dimensions of Pratchett’s universe and its commitment to morality, law, justice, and freedom.
David McIlroy explores the contours and goodness of what it means to be finite in this instalment of the Soul Care for Lawyers series.
David McIlroy points us to the spiritual disciplines as a way to open ourselves to intimacy with God and fellowship with others.
The day-to-day practice of law can feel like a further weight of brokenness, selfishness, disingenuousness and compromise. Cases revolving around people’s abject failure to love each other even vaguely like Jesus commanded… Yet, in a sense even our discouragement can be an encouragement to us.
Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God. Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer to show us how our prayers should be concerned about God’s glory, our needs and our relationships with others.
In reality we are all pretty dispensable at the end of the day. Legal workplaces keep going when lawyers leave, and clients can always find another lawyer fairly easily in the competitive legal market. This might make us feel discouraged. No matter how talented or successful we might be, the legal world will likely barely register a shudder when we leave. If we are so dispensable, what is the point of all of the hard work that we put in, and all of the stress and pressure that we endure?
I’d like to suggest that being dispensable should not discourage us, but actually help us to enjoy our work.
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