International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

human laws—treaties, customs, earth-bound entities—not human perceptions of
God’s laws or at least not directly. I will spend time on this in my third lecture,
which is entitled “Why Natural Law is Not Enough.” Suffice for the moment to
say that I am a sort of Christian positivist. Our task is to make positive law that
can do human work in the midst of human problems, not to anticipate God’s
judgments or His rule upon earth, which we will experience in its glory soon
enough.
One way of driving this point home is to emphasize that many of the
activities to which law brings orders are in fact forms of human sinfulness. I don’t
just mean that law condemns sinfulness. Nor do I just mean that law has to
respond to man-made evils as well as natural evils. I mean international law
actually also regulates sinful conduct and provides a framework for it. Think of
the laws and customs of armed conflict—particularly ius in bello—which instruct
wicked men (among others) how exactly they should proceed in their wickedness.
It is as though law gave instructions to murderers: practise your homicidal activity
in this way rather than that. I am not condemning this. International law brings
some order in the midst of anger, violence and death, but sometimes it is just a way
of ordering anger, violence and death, not as God’s rule would have it, abolishing
anger, violence and death altogether.
I don’t know that I want to go as far as O’Donovan in his warning, in regard
to any exaltation of international law, that the reign of the Antichrist, too, is
perfectly expressed the idea of world-rule. 38 But O’Donovan is right to emphasize
that, like all politics, international law can go badly wrong, and it probably will go
badly wrong if it is associated with millennial hubris. In some areas, the best it can
be is a shabby human response to human shabbiness, 39 and it is as important for
that point to be driven home to its dewy-eyed proponents as it is for the cynical
critics of international law to bear it in mind when they reproach us with the
shortcomings of international institutions.
9. Modest tasks of international order
We should think of the tasks of international law, therefore, as modest, not
apocalyptic. It is not our job to usher in the new Jerusalem. True, the international
community has to respond to apocalyptic crisis: to war, famine, mass murder,
earthquake, tsunamis—disasters, as we sometimes say, of biblical proportions. But
the responses are, and have to be, human—sometimes all-too-human in character.
38 O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 236
39 Cf. Montesquieu on a science of human shabbiness. “As an intelligent being, he incessantly transgresses the laws
established by God” (On the Spirit of the Laws, I.1) – political science is the study of the history and structures of
these transgressions
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