The Church and the Legal System

As Christians we know that our ultimate loyalty is to God. Yet we also live in a nation that requires us to follow its own rules. While the relationship between those two things has caused problems for the church since its earliest days, two recent legal cases suggest some of the current problems. The first case shows how the nation's attempt to use a Christian symbol can deprive that symbol of its Christian meaning. The second shows how the legal system can attempt to impose its own rules and values on the church.

In Salazar v. Buono the Veterans of Foreign Wars had erected a cross on public land in the 1930s as a memorial to World War I veterans. After the lower courts held that that use of a religious symbol on public land violated the First Amendment, Congress approved a land trade to transfer the land to the VFW. In order to uphold the transfer, the United States Supreme Court had to treat the cross as a purely secular symbol, devoid of all religious significance. Stanley Fish describes some of the problems that that approach created:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/when-is-a-cross-a-cross

As Fish points out, the heart of the problem is that we live in a secular and pluralistic society that both protects the freedom to exercise religious belief and prohibits the government from establishing its own religion. The only way that such a society can use a religious symbol for its own purposes is to deny that it is religious. From a Christian perspective, what happened in this case is that the nation took control of the most important symbol of our faith, depriving it of everything that makes it significant to Christians. What began as the property of Christians became the property of the secular society.

The empty cross is the preeminent symbol of the most fundamental, and at the same time most audacious, claim of our faith: that Jesus who died lives again, is present with us, and is our Lord and God. From the earliest days of the church the cross has been the great barrier that divided those who joined from those who did not. As Paul said, it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (I Corinthians 1:23-24) The cross is not a symbol of sacrifice in general; it is a symbol of a specific sacrifice, one that occurred once and for all and that was for the benefit of all nations and all peoples, not of any particular nation or people. When this or any other nation uses the cross for a war memorial or for another secular purpose (placing a cross over the grave of a soldier who was a Christian is obviously proper), it tames the cross, depriving it of its challenge and its power. From a Christian perspective, the Supreme Court's decision was wrong because it the distorted the nature of a fundamental Christian symbol.

The second case is closer to home. In Hope Presbyterian Church of Rogue River v. Presbytery of the Cascades, the minister and members of a congregation of this presbytery left the denomination and attempted to take the church's property with them. They did so although the Book of Order--to which the minister and elders of the congregation had sworn obedience--expressly provides that every particular church holds its property in trust for the church as a whole. When the presbytery established an Administrative Commission to deal with the situation, the minister and members obtained an injunction from an Oregon court that prohibited the Commission from doing its job. In issuing the injunction the trial court expressly refused to take the congregation's obligations under the Book of Order into consideration. That is, the court failed to treat the congregation as a particular church that was part of a larger church. The Presbytery has appealed the case, and the oral arguments on the appeal give us some hope that the appellate court will reverse the trial court's decision and let the Administrative Commission function. Whatever happens on appeal, however, this case reminds us that there is always the possibility of a conflict between our understanding of the nature of a church and what the secular legal system will permit. We can never expect the world readily to accept our ultimate loyalty to God rather than to it.