International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

My point about Pauls’ appeal to the pax Romana was to introduce (rather
than conclude) a conversation about Christian attitudes towards forms of law—
forms of legality and legal institutions, forms of authoritatively maintained order—
that transcend national polity, just as other theorists and theologians have begun a
conversation—no doubt also beginning with Romans 13—about modes of
community that are smaller and more local, modes of neighbourhood that are more
modest, some would say more human in scale than the over-bearing institutions of
the nation-state. 8
3. Not history
I began in the first century, but my account will not be historical. The role of
Christian thinkers in the formation of international law, in its emergence in
something like its modern form, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is too
well-known to require rehearsal here. So: no Vitoria, no Grotius, no Gentili, no
Pufendorf; except occasionally. (Gentili will have a cameo role in Lecture 3). This
is not that sort of account. When I talk about Christian foundations of international
law, I mean foundations in the sense of normative premises: understandings and
characterizations that have to do with how we ought to regard international law and
the claims it makes on us as citizens, voters, lawyers, and perhaps also officeholders.
I want to explore the possibility of a normative jurisprudence of
international law rooted in Christian premises. So it is not a matter of tracing the
historical impact of Christian premises but looking for the actual implications of
those premises for international law for people here and now—not in the
seventeenth century Netherlands— who take those Christian premises seriously.
But if it is not an historical account, then why Christian foundations.
How—in the modern world—can that be of any more than historical interest?
International law has to work for a world of multiple faiths; how can a normative
account specific to one religion be anything other than sectarian and divisive in this
regard—pulling us apart when it the mission of international law to bring us
together? My answer will depend on some views about public reason and
overlapping consensus that I will set out in a moment. But first some history of my
own.
4. The Working Group at CTI
In September 2007, a small group of about a dozen jurists and theologians—
scholars (some American, some British and European) working in a variety of
areas (international law, legal philosophy, legal history, Christian ethics, and
8 See, for example, John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Ashgate, 2003), esp. Ch. 5, quoting Alasdair
Macintyre, Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis etc.
7