Christianity & Law

Must Christian lawyers compromise their religious principles? Do they have special problems of conscience? To discuss such questions, 226 lawyers, judges, law students, theologians and seminarians met at the University of Chicago last week for U.S. Protestantism's first major conference on Christianity and the law.

Sparkplug and chairman of the four-day conference was young Manhattan Lawyer F. William Stringfellow, 30, a graduate of Harvard Law School ('56), who, after visiting 30 law schools during the past year, became convinced that faculty members are disturbed by the excessive pragmatism of U.S. legal education.

"The conviction is growing," he says, "that the law should not be isolated from other disciplines." Episcopalian Stringfellow merges his own Christian concern so thoroughly with his profession that he lives and works in an East Harlem tenement section, practicing criminal law in order to "share the burdens of other men."

Most of the lawyers at the conference were much interested in problems of practical legal ethics, such as those set forth in a "dialogue address" between Chicago Attorney John Mulder (a Presbyterian) and Karl Olsson. minister (Evangelical Covenant Church) and professor of church history at North Park Theological Seminary. Lawyer Mulder submitted a case history for moral scrutiny: three hoodlums tell the owner of a gas station that they will protect him from broken windows and sugar in his gas for $200 a year, and the owner asks his lawyer whether he should pay. "We have here," said Mulder, "a neat issue of trying to serve the interests of the client and at the same time trying to ... uphold the law. As a practical matter, he cannot look to law enforcement agencies to protect him against the hoodlums." Therefore, Attorney Mulder concluded, "a policy of expediency can be morally justified"--that is, the owner may pay, if he will also try to work for better law enforcement.

Professor Olsson wanted to know about the lawyer's conscience. "Are you suggesting," he asked, "that the Christian lawyer all his life is sentenced to living with an anguished conscience?" Replied Lawyer Mulder: "Yes, I am . . .1 feel a sense of despair at what can happen to his spirit as he tries to balance the obligations to the moral law and to his client."

In an address on Christ and the law, the Rev. Markus Barth, son of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth and a member of Chicago University's Federated Theological Faculty, developed the same theme. "Lawyers feel much more exposed to a conflict of conscience than most other people," he said. Some try to "keep their hands clean by becoming office lawyers," in hopes of escaping the "dirty work that might involve their own consciences." But "since Christ interceded for sinners," said Earth, "Christian lawyers therefore obey Christ's fulfilled law by pleading for sinners--that they may live and receive what is right for their salvation under God. This means that the Christian lawyer is duty bound to take hopeless cases, as Christ did for all."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.