originally published 5/1/2011

Jean Porter describes how natural law justifies legal and moral authority within the life of the human person. She argues that the ideals of legality are positive goods, not merely necessary evils or concessions to human weakness and sin. One of the motivations for her writing is her observation that a strong suspicion of government has in recent decades developed into something much stronger akin to a soft anarchism. Christians, in her view, have too uncritically bought into the notion that the government is always the problem. She contrasts this to ideas she finds in medieval Christian sources which portray the relationship of individuals to authoritative communities and their institutions not as an intrinsically antagonistic one, but one where the community and the individual find their proper fulfillment in each other: the community by its respect for the individual, and the individual by its participation and formation in the community. Individuals need institutions and culture to frame and structure their lives as rational beings. She notes how instability often arises in periods of radical change in social and technological spheres, and compares contemporary times to periods in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries where significant dislocations led to varied political responses, some richly innovative and fruitful and some not. The interview ends with an intriguing discussion of what she means by “the autonomy of the law” and the formal goods of legal proceedings and structures which do not merely serve as instruments to achieve justice, but actually embody justice. Jean Porter is the author of Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (W. B. Eerdmans, 2010).

17 minutes

PREVIEW

The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.

Related reading and listening