After the Law is More Law

...No Law, No Caesars

The Christian tradition is full of insurrectionary talk. 

“Christ has abolished the law…” so it says.

This is a dangerous idea. What state would tolerate communities who really believed this? What hotbeds of anarchy have been quietly brewing in the village hall? I remember, as a child, feeling a little thrill at these words, which lasted right up until the preacher would explain them. The art of the stable religious community relies on the ability to swallow the dynamite of strange archaic mysteries and stomach the blast. After all, how does one faithfully preach such things without sowing the seeds of uncivilization?

In my days I have occasionally passed through those Christian groups that revel in anti-law rhetoric. Somewhere on the sprawling map of Protestantism there is an enclave of very Reformed sorts, for whom the end of the law is a cherished principle.

It sounds like anarchy. Indeed there is a flavour of pious anarchy about the small religious communities who refuse the rule of big structures, and who revere an imageless and un-manageable God. But when they say that “Christ has abolished the law!” it doesn’t really sound like the end of the law. It sounds more like a new law, with its own threat of punishment.

Beneath this rhetoric is the ghost of historical memory, when protestants stuck their flag into the Bible and declared their freedom from the rule of the Catholic Church. They did this by retelling a misconstrued story in which the first Christians claimed their freedom from the law-based religion of Judaism. I think that story is false, but this is for another post. The point of the story was to do away with the tyranny of “legalism.” But, of course, these communities were as riddled in law as any other. Scores of people were executed in Geneva under the watch of the great reformer, John Calvin. Open disagreement with Calvin's doctrinal Institutes was, in fact, against the law. As the historian E. H. Tawny wrote:

“Calvin composed in the Institutes a protestant Summa and manual of moral casuistry, in which even the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule. It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a comprehensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whole range of civic administration, from the regulations to be made for markets, crafts, buildings and fairs, to the control of prices, interests and rents. It was in that spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a generation consistory and council worked hand in hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death.”¹

The purpose, said Tawny, was only that each would understand the duties of their position. “It's sad to reflect” he continued, “that the attainment of so laudable an end involved the systemic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years.”

Even as the preacher proclaims “Christ has abolished the law,” history tells us that something stern and disciplinary all too easily re-emerges. The end of the law becomes a law of its own. 

Most reformed talk about “freedom from the law” really just ends up meaning that a person is no longer saved by being Jewish or Catholic. Indeed, all things Jewish or Catholic are to be held with suspicion. How is one saved? By being a Protestant, best of all a reformed Protestant. The law of salvation by religious membership is simply passed on to the next group. Christ has freed us from the law of the Catholics and given us the law of the Protestants instead. In the end a person must be circumcised—so to speak—into one group or another. Law endlessly reproduces itself in the image of the usurper.

Not all Protestant traditions are this way, and of course, the law of salvation by membership is not just a religious phenomena. This is precisely how the state works, as the stateless person knows, and there are all kinds of groups and movements and ideologies that operate under the same deeply held assumption. The new atheist movement was as sternly evangelical as the Christians about the enclosing righteousness of their own dogmas. The capitalist imagination sincerely believed that history had come to a happy and liberated ending when the law of Soviet communism fell. Rome believed that Roman rule had finally arrived as the world’s salvation. Everyone sees their own law as liberation from the last. 

If we were to stop this pass-the-parcel from one law of membership to another, the question sits wide open: what does this refusal amount to? What is the nature of law, and how is it even possible to speak of it's coming to an end without reproducing it in some new kind of management? How can it mean anything other than the rule of the next mob? What does it really mean to consider oneself, as it says, “discharged from the law?”

1. From Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by E. H. Tawny. pp125—126, Penguin, 1972.