International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

(human justice); the vulnerable are to be protected and their claims of right
vindicated. Or, as an older prophetic tradition told us,
Bring no more futile sacrifices; incense is an abomination to me. … Your
new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they are a trouble to
me…. I will hide my eyes from you … I will not hear. Your hands are full
of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean…. Cease to do evil, learn
to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead
for the widow. Come now … let us reason together, says the Lord. 59
These simple and categorical demands play out at every level, and the force of
these demands is continuous in scale, from family, to neighbourhood, to nation, to
the world. The nation-state and national law have as their mission the doing of
justice, the rebuking of oppression, the defence of the widows and the fatherless,
and the vindication of the rights of the poor within the boundaries of a national
territory and among a delineated section of the world’s population. They have as
their mission the ordering of France or New Zealand or Argentina or the United
States. And this, at its best, national law does—though of course it is seldom at its
best. But this, at its best, national law does with a density and an intricacy and a
power that international law, global legality, cannot match. This can be
acknowledged. But the effectiveness with which the laws of nations order their
own realms does not make the challenge of ordering the world go away. There too
there is justice to be done; there are poor and vulnerable people to be protected,
norms of right and righteousness to be proclaimed, conflict to be resolved, evils to
be mitigated, human goods to be provided. If there is this need for a law of nations
as well as for the particular laws of nations, then we cannot set up the demands of
the one as a way of precluding the other. Nations and national law have their
mission and their dignity, but a Christian will not see any religious foundation for
setting up national self-interest, or the exigencies of national policy, in opposition
to the tasks of international governance. There is no basis in Christian thought for
any consecration of national sovereigns that would obstruct or interfere with the
ordering of the international realm. As I said the tasks of order are continuous. The
only claim that can be made in behalf of a national sovereign is that it is already
ordering a part of the world. But that is not a claim that can be set up against the
necessity of ordering the world as a whole. I will turn to this issue of sovereignty
in Monday’s lecture. But this is more than enough for today.
59 Isaiah 1: 13-18.
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