Paul Harvey
We're a bit tardy in taking note of this, but for those who haven't been following, CNN is the latest entrant into the religious blogosphere, with CNN Belief Blog (now added to our blog sideroll under "BlogFavs"). Noted religious historian Stephen Prothero is one of the contributors. His early post "Souter V. Scalia at Harvard Yard" is an excellent start. In it, he addresses the connection between methods of reading the Bible and the Constitution which doubtless many of us discuss in the classroom, and Americans used to (in the 19th century, anyway) argue about constantly. Prothero discusses former Justice David Souter's address to the Harvard graduates at commencement this year (full text at the link); here's a taste of his analysis:
Although he drew on the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes for his observation “that certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny,” the spirit that animated his final remarks derived more from the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work called attention to the unintended consequences of efforts by mere mortals to grasp the reins of history. The “fair reading model” is driven, Souter concluded, by an understandable yet nonetheless naive “longing for a world without ambiguity” - by the “basic human hunger for certainty and control.” . . . just as there are Constitutional originalists who read passages from the Constitution as absolute, there are Biblical fundamentalists who read individual passages from scripture as absolute. Souter is not one of them, in part because he is steeped in Episcopal tradition, which has historically resisted the “proof text” method of fundamentalists in the name of reading the Bible as a whole.
Although he drew on the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes for his observation “that certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny,” the spirit that animated his final remarks derived more from the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work called attention to the unintended consequences of efforts by mere mortals to grasp the reins of history. The “fair reading model” is driven, Souter concluded, by an understandable yet nonetheless naive “longing for a world without ambiguity” - by the “basic human hunger for certainty and control.” . . . just as there are Constitutional originalists who read passages from the Constitution as absolute, there are Biblical fundamentalists who read individual passages from scripture as absolute. Souter is not one of them, in part because he is steeped in Episcopal tradition, which has historically resisted the “proof text” method of fundamentalists in the name of reading the Bible as a whole.
The irony is that in certain religious freedom cases (notably Smith in 1989, where the litigant was fired from his position as a counselor due to peyote use in the Native American Church), Scalia et al have been quite capable of exercising judicial activism in the name of compelling state interest, and without the fig leaf of "originalism."
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