APO:Legal Reasoning & Christian Apologetics  by John Warwick

   By John Warwick Montgomery Dean, Simon Greenleaf School of Law

   Excerpted w/o permission from his book "The Law Above The Law"

   The interrelations of law and theology are multifarious, and one of
the most striking lies at their point of conjunction in apologetic task.

   Readers of older apologetic literature are aware that lawyers and
legal scholars have often been concerned with the credibility of
Christianity. The 'founder of modern apologetics' by way of his classic
work, 'The Truth of the Christian Religion' (1627), was Hugo Grotius -
and he is even more well known as the 'father of international law' for
his treatise on 'The Law of War and Peace' (1625). The greatest
authority on American common-law evidence in the 19th century was
Harvard Law School professor Simon Greenleaf (his status was similar to
Wigmore's in our own century), and he was the author of the still
published 'Testimony of the Evangelists', a demonstration of the
reliability of the Gospel accounts of our Lord's life. Irwin Linton's
popular volume, 'A Lawyer Examines the Bible', the tracts and booklets
of J.N.D. Anderson (director of the University of London's Institute of
Advanced Legal Studies), and the writings of Jacques Ellul (professor
of law at Bordeaux) are a valuable barometer of the extent to which the
legal mind is drawn like a moth to the flame of apologetics.

   Why does this occur? Why are lawyers more inclined to do apologetics
that engineers or dentists? One reason might be that the law plays a
very large role in Scripture itself - not only through the Old
Testament covenant of law but also in the centrality of the trial of
Jesus and Pauline legal imagery in the New Testament; thus such works
as A. N. Sherwin-White's 'Roman Society and Roman Law in the New
Testament' (1963), with their powerful apologetic overtones. But an
even more important reason lies in the very nature of the legal
operation.

   In spite of the popular notion that lawyers are sophists who (to use
the language of Plato's 'Apology of Socrates') 'make the worse argument
appear the better,' the fundamental function of the legal profession is
to seek justice by seeking truth. The lawyer endeavors to reduce
societal conflicts by arbitrating conflicting truth-claims. Inherent to
the practice of the law is an effort to resolve conflicts over legal
responsibility, and such conflicts invariably turn on questions of
fact. To establish a 'cause of action' the palintiff's complaint must
allege a legal right which the defendant was duty-bound to recognize,
and which he violated; at the trial evidentiary facts must be
marshalled in support of the plaintiff's allegations, and the defendant
will need to provide factual evidence in his behalf to counter the
plaintiff's prima facie case against him. To this end, legal science,
as an outgrowth of millennia of court decisions, developed meticulous
criteria for distinguishing factual truth from error. The preoccupation
of the law with canons of evidence creates a natural interest on the
part of lawyers to investigate religious truthclaims.

   Concretely, here are some fundamental principles of the law of
evidence, which, if applied to the question of the factual truth of
Christianity, will yield most significant results:

   1) The 'ancient documents' rule: ancient documents will be received
as competent evidence if they are 'fair on their face' (i.e. offer no
internal evidence of tampering) and have been maintained in 'reasonable
custody' (i.e. their preservation has been consistent with their
content). Applied to the Gospel records, and reinforced by responsible
lower (textual) criticism, this rule wold establish their competency in
any court of law.

   2) The 'parol evidence' rule: external, oral testimony of tradition
will not be received in evidence to add to, subtract from, vary or
contradict an executed written instrument such as a will. Applied to
the biblical documents, which expressly claim to be 'executed' and
complete (Rev. 22.18-19), this rule insists that the Scripture be
allowed to 'interpret itself' and not be twisted by external, extra-
biblical data (comparative New Eastern religious texts and practices,
Sitz im Leben interpretations, 'historical-critical method,' 'New
Hermeneutic,' etc.).

   3) The 'hearsay rule' - what Wigmore calls the 'proudest scion of
our jury-trial rules of evidence': a witness must testify 'of his own
knowledge,' not on the basis of what has come to him indirectly from
others. Applied to the New Testament documents, this demand for
primary-source evidence is fully vindicated by the constant
asseverations of their authors to be setting forth 'that which we have
heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and
our hands have handled, the Word of life' (I Jo 1.1).

   4) The related 'cross-examination' principle: 'All trials proceed
upon the idea that some confidence is due to human testimony, and that
this confidence grows and becomes more steadfast in proportion as the
witness has been subjected to a close and searching cross-examination'
(Justice Ruffin, in State v. Morriss, 84 N.C. 764). Applied to the
apostolic proclamation, this rule underscores the reliability of the
testimony to Christ's resurrection which was presented
contemporaneously in the synagogues - in the very teeth of opposition,
among hostile cross-examiner who would certainly have destroyed the
case for Christianity had the facts been otherwise.

   These apologetic applications of legal reasoning are a mere
sampling. What makes them particularly important is the place of the
legal system in society: the indisputable consideration that upon just
such rules of evidence issues of life and death are necessarily decided
and so far as to recommend that philosophy itself ceases to rely
primarily the deductive, mathematical, Cartesian model to solve its
metaphysical problems, and instead 'treat logic as generalized
jurisprudence' - learn from the inductive, fact-orientated structure of
legal argument. Such an approach would accord well with the twofold
stress of modern Wittgensteinian thought on the necessity of
verification and the importance of doing philosophy within the
framework of ordinary language. Apologetically, the modern man faced
with legally grounded evidence for Christ's claims is in the awkward
position of having to go to the Cross or throw away the only accepted
method of arbitrating ultimate questions in society. Luther put it
nicely in the 'Tischreden', 'If the world will not hear the divines,
they must hear the lawyers, who will teach them manners.'
