1 Early Influences on John Witte
To understand the evolution of John Witte’s interest in law and religion, it is necessary to explore its early origins.1 His Dutch parents immigrated to Canada in 1953; family and faith were crucial to his early life in Ontario. He explains: “I am a Christian believer, and I have been a member of a Christian family from the very beginning. My parents … were of the Christian Reformed faith. I was brought up in that tradition, catechized both at home and at church, sent to Reformed primary and secondary schools, and imbued with the idea that Christianity is the fundamental part of life.”2
Witte attended Calvin College, a liberal arts college founded in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by the Reformed Church. Among his many teachers, he studied with the philosophers H. Evan Runner and Nicholas Wolterstorff (later of Yale Divinity School); these both taught him “to discern the religious sources and commitments implicit or explicit in historical and modern ideas and institutions,” such as law and politics,3 and he later collaborated with them around their shared interest in Christian approaches to human rights.4 At Calvin College, Witte majored in history, philosophy, and biology—indeed, he took the Medical College Admission Test, the Law School Admission Test, and the Graduate Record Examinations. While these gave him considerable latitude in choosing a career, Witte decided upon a future in law; he explains: “the field of
Then came the plan to pursue a doctor of jurisprudence (JD) and/or a doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree. Witte’s preference was to study law and history at Yale Law School and the Yale history department with the Reformation scholar Steven Ozment (1939–2019). Ozment left Yale for Harvard, however, and Harvard had no joint JD/PhD program with the history department. So, with “the dilemma of where to go,” Witte “wrote to Harold J. Berman at Harvard Law School, whose work I had read at some length as a college student, and asked what I should do.” Witte recalls, with typical admiration and respect, that Berman “was very generous in responding with a hand-written two-page letter, inviting me to come work with him.” It was, for Witte, “a deep privilege to sit at the feet of a great master who was wrestling with some of the fundamental questions of law and religion in the Western tradition.” Indeed, Berman was “a man who had sacrificed much for the sake of coming to the Gospel, accepting it notwithstanding his Jewish upbringing and with the result of eventual ostracism by his family. Berman worked me very hard, forty hours a week, during the time I was going to law school; my Dutch Calvinist work ethic carried me in that context.” Witte wrote his thesis on the scientific revolution and the law.6
Berman (1918–2007) continued to be a major influence on Witte. They worked together closely for over twenty years. Berman, the “twentieth-century master of the idea of law and revolution,” taught Witte “the importance of mapping the shifting belief systems in the evolution and revolutions of the Western legal tradition.” Berman himself had been influenced as a student by his own mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973). It was the work of Rosenstock-Huessy on change and continuity consequent upon revolution that Berman invoked in his treatment of legal transformations attendant upon, for example, the Papal Revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Lutheran revolution of the sixteenth, the English Revolution of the seventeenth, and the French and American revolutions of the eighteenth.7 A key aspect of Witte’s work, therefore, shaped by these formative experiences, is unravelling the idea of legal development—transformation and reformation.
Another early influence on Witte was Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977), the Dutch professor of jurisprudence at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (1926–65). As Witte recalls, for Dooyeweerd the “founding metaphors and motifs or fundamental law ideas” both anchored and transformed “the basic ideas and institutions of a given civilization,” such as in the Christianization of Rome, the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution.9 Witte edited lectures that Dooyeweerd delivered in 1937 in Amsterdam—and in his introduction to the volume, Witte unpacks brilliantly the originality of Dooyeweerd as a Christian thinker who used biblical and Christian teachings to understand law, politics, society, and “the natural, voluntary, and contractual social institutions” between “the individual and the state,” that is, between the public and the private spheres.10 Witte later took up Dooyeweerd’s complex Christian theory of rights, and summarizes it in his collected works.11
Of both Berman and Dooyeweerd, Witte sums up: “Those two big figures had a deep influence on me early in my scholarly life.” What he took from them “was the idea that there are fundamental seams, transformative moments, watershed periods” throughout history—and he builds on this idea, particularly with regard to his keen interest in “the consequences of what happens when there is a bend in the stream” or “fundamental shift” in juridical change.12
a set of intellectual habits and methodological instincts … particularly the basic respect for Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience; the emphasis on social pluralism and sphere sovereignty, and the wariness of political, ecclesiastical, or any other kind of monism or monopoly in social organization and authority structuring; the appetite for covenant thinking; the insistence that everyone operates with a basic worldview [of] beliefs, values, or metaphors.13
Witte’s continuing admiration for Kuyper work is evident in several scholarly works, which include the lectures and articles Witte produced for the centennial conference on Kuyper’s Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 199814 and his receipt of the Kuyper Prize at Princeton University in 1999.15
2 The Concept of Law and Religion in the Thought of John Witte
In the four decades since Witte’s move from Harvard to Emory, he has produced a torrent of books, articles, and lectures, all while administering the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, teaching more than eight thousand law students, and convening seminal international conferences. The bedrock for all this energy, exploration, and endeavor is Witte’s rich and powerful understanding of “law and religion.” It has three streams, which Witte himself explains as follows. The first is the dialectical interaction of law and religion: “Religion gives law its spirit and inspires its adherence to ritual, tradition, and justice.” Equally,
The second stream of thought in law and religion might be styled the religiosity of secular laws, the idea that “the laws of the secular state retain strong religious dimensions.” “Every legitimate legal system … has what Harold Berman calls an ‘inner sanctity,’ a set of attributes that command the obedience, respect, even reverence of both political officials and political subjects.” Like religion, “law has authority” (it is “decisive or obligatory”); “law has tradition” (for example, in precedent, principles, and practices); and “law has liturgy and ritual” (for example, courtroom procedure, professional pageantry, and legislative language).17 These commonalities between law and religion may differ in origin and purpose (temporal and spiritual), but they exist profoundly in substance and form. These are products of the centuries-long interaction of law and religion in the Western tradition, Witte shows in several writings.18
Legal habits of the heart structure the inner spiritual life and discipline of religious believers, from the reclusive hermit to the aggressive zealot. Legal ideas of justice, order, judgment, atonement, restitution, responsibility, obligation, and others pervade the theological doctrines of
countless religious traditions. Legal structures and processes … define and govern religious communities and their distinctive beliefs and rituals, mores, and morals.19
However, law and religion may be in tension: as “every major religious tradition has known both theonomism and antinomianism—the excessive legalization and the excessive spiritualization of religion,” so “every major legal tradition has known both theocracy and totalitarianism—the excessive sacralization [and] secularization of law.” Equally, as “every major religious tradition strives to come to terms with law by striking a balance between the rational and the mystical, the prophetic and the priestly, the structural and the spiritual,” so it is that “every major [secular] legal tradition struggles to link its formal structures and processes with the beliefs and ideals of its people.”20
These are inspirational understandings of the relationship between law and religion. But they come at a high price. Their pursuit, study, and substantiation all clearly necessitate an interdisciplinary expertise—the specialist knowledge and methods of jurists and theologians, of historians and sociologists, and of philosophers and political theorists. So, how does Witte see himself within this multifaceted field of law and religion? He says, “I am not a philosopher, political theorist, ethicist, or theologian, though I dabble in these fields. I am a lawyer and legal scholar, focused on the history of law and religion.” He works, therefore, “largely as an historian,” tapping into “the wisdom of the Protestant and broader Christian traditions on fundamental questions of law, politics, and society.” He is not a politician seeking “to hammer out political platforms,” nor a litigator pressing constitutional cases. However important that work is for the law and religion field, that is “just not my vocation,” Witte writes.21 Indeed, “I have long felt that my calling is to be an historian.” “In college and certainly in law school, I became interested in the Protestant Reformation as a … transformative moment in the history of the West, and the influence the Protestant reformers had … on law, politics, and society.”22 Witte links this calling to his earlier experiences: “My parents and pastors taught me from the beginning
3 The Methods of John Witte as a Scholar of Law and Religion
The methods Witte uses as a historian of law and religion are broadly triadic: “I try to study this history with three ‘R’s’ in mind,” he says: “retrieval of the religious sources and dimensions of law in the Western tradition, reconstruction of the most enduring teachings of the tradition for our day, and reengagement of an historically informed religious viewpoint with the hard legal issues that now confront church, state, and society.” At the same time, Witte bears three “I’s” in mind; he explains: “Much of my historical work is interdisciplinary in perspective, seeking to bring the wisdom of religious traditions into greater conversation with law, the humanities, and the social and hard sciences.” Moreover, “it is international in orientation, seeking to situate American and broader Western debates over interdisciplinary legal issues within a comparative historical and emerging global conversation.” Also, there is the interfaith aspect: “it is interreligious in inspiration, seeking to compare the legal teachings of [Roman] Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy,” and “sometimes” those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.25
However, Witte’s methods make particular demands on the ethics of scholarship. As such, he recognizes five responsibilities that attach to the Christian
Witte has a deep appreciation of the horizons open to Christian scholars of law and religion and the fields in which they may live out these responsibilities of stewardship, discipline, accessibility, influence, and engagement. First, there is the field of secular law. On one hand, Witte accepts the “common sentiment” that Christian faith and the legal profession may be “incompatible” or at least “in tension.” Quoting Luther’s claim, Juristen, böse Christen (Jurists are bad Christians), Witte accepts that law is often seen as “a grubby, greedy, and ugly profession, and some of that is true.” However, law is “fundamental,” one of the “universal solvents of human living,” for “a society without law would quickly devolve into hell itself.” And so “we need Christians at work in the law.”27 For example, as to secular law, Christian lawyers have a part to play in the field of human rights on the basis that: these are “natural gifts of God”; “human beings are created in the image of God”; and “God has given us the gifts of [for example] companionship of other humans.”28 Witte himself has
Witte also considers that Christian scholars of law and religion may contribute to ecumenism and inter-Christian dialogue. One challenge is for “Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians to develop a rigorous ecumenical understanding of law, politics, and society” and “together to work out a comprehensive new ecumenical ‘concordance of discordant canons’ that draws out the best of these traditions, that is earnest about its ecumenism, and that is honest about the greatest points of tension.” For Witte, “few studies would do more both to spur the great project of Christian ecumenism and to drive modern churches to get their legal houses in order. Law is at the backbone of the church, and at the foundation of Christian solidarity.”31 This thinking bore fruit in the work of an ecumenical panel whose statement of principles of Christian law was launched at the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2022 as an instrument for greater unity among Christians worldwide—and Witte and the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory have provided invaluable support to this, including Witte’s sharing his aspirations at a meeting of the panel in Oxford in 2018.32
A related challenge that Witte advances, “perhaps the greatest of all,” is “to join the principally Western Christian story of law, politics, and society known in North America and Western Europe with comparable stories … in the rest of the Christian world,” in the Global South and East—Africa, Korea, China, India, Philippines, Malaysia, and beyond, where “rich new indigenous forms and norms of law, politics, and society are also emerging, premised on very
The same applies to interfaith dialogue. Under the direction of Witte, the Emory center has convened “deep conversations between and among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, sometimes Eastern religions too, on fundamental legal, political, and social questions.”35 Likewise, “Christian scholars have been among the leaders of [the] global law and religion movement,” with growing numbers of Jewish and Muslim scholars, and specialists in Asian and traditional religions who “have already learned a great deal from each other” and “cooperated in developing richer understandings of … legal and political subjects.” This “comparative and cooperative interreligious inquiry into fundamental issues of law, politics, and society needs to continue,” especially in a world today of “increasing interreligious conflict and misunderstanding” struggling “to discover from within and impose from without proper, responsible, and effective legal constraints on religious fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism.”36 Once again, Witte’s call for more comparative religious law studies has been heard and acted upon.37
4 Testing the Contribution of John Witte to Law-and-Religion Scholarship
Responses to the scholarship and leadership of John Witte in the field of law and religion provide an appropriate forum in which to test the extent and
The extent to which Witte collaborates with others across the world is further evidence of his inspirational leadership in the field. Witte’s zeal for collaboration not only functions at the professional level. He also thrives on and stimulates friendship, fellowship, and fun inherent in collegial work, especially through his now well-known roundtables, which he has convened in dozens of universities around the world. This is nowhere better seen in recent years than in the preparatory work and roundtables in Atlanta and London to advance a coedited volume, under the leadership of Mark Hill KC, on Christianity and criminal law. Hill himself—a distinguished ecclesiastical judge and leader in the renaissance of the study of English ecclesiastical law and the wider field of law and religion—also has a genius for inspiring a sense of community among scholars, including bridging the experiences of practice and scholarship. The
How have Witte’s published studies been received? Of his books on law and religion, human rights, and religious freedom, four may be selected here as ground-breaking. Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, 2002) provides an account of the eventual recognition of the need for norms in Lutheran ecclesial and earthly life, and the transformative impact of Lutheran theological ideas on the secular laws of Germany and Scandinavia. God’s Joust, God’s Justice provides a powerful case for the study of law and religion.40 The Reformation of Rights explains how early modern Calvinism (anticipating the Enlightenment) contributed to the development of constitutional law, the rule of law, human rights, and religious freedom; it shows that the Calvinists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century articulated a religious understanding of rights and liberties bounded by responsibilities and duties, all in a covenantal framework. The Blessings of Liberty documents and defends the essential interdependence of human rights and religious freedom from antiquity until today and the Christian roots and routes of rights developments in the Western legal tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. In this book, Witte answers both modern Christian critics who see human rights as a betrayal of Christianity and modern secular critics who see Christianity as a betrayer of human rights.
There are also those works on faith, freedom, and family, topics treated “separately and together, historically and today, in the West and beyond.”41 For example, of his books, From Sacrament to Contract explores how Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican reformers replaced the traditional Roman Catholic idea of marriage as a sacrament with a new idea of the marital household as a social estate, covenant, or little commonwealth to which all are called—clerical and lay alike. The Sins of the Fathers is “in some sense a plea against the stigmatization of the other, especially the bastard as that person is called in this tradition. My adopted brother was a bastard, and that book was dedicated to his memory. It is … a troubling story about Christian brutality and charity
Book reviews are an obvious barometer to test opinion about Witte’s contribution to the field. A typically balanced review is of his Church, State, and Family, a book of equal ambition and achievement. The reviewer, himself a distinguished scholar of law and religion, writes: “The first six chapters provide a rollercoaster ride through history, visiting the teachings on sex, marriage and family life by those who have shaped the family teachings of the Western legal tradition”—these chapters alone “would be more than enough to mandate [the book’s] inclusion on reading lists and bookshelves.” However, chapter 7 (as Witte states) reconstructs traditional teaching into “a multidimensional theory of the marital family sphere, with natural and spiritual poles, and with social, economic, communicative and contractual dimensions radiating between these poles.” The remaining chapters apply this theory to “several hard issues born of the modern sexual revolution,” such as defects in religious approaches to children’s rights; the case against polygamy; arguments for and against the use of faith-based family laws in modern liberal democracies (he proposes a shared jurisdictional model); and equality within marriage, which, Witte argues, is “not well served by legal equality between all forms of marriage, or by its wholesale abolition.” In the conclusion, Witte calls for “radical same-sex marriage and LGBTQ advocates [to] stop viewing religious liberty as the enemy” and for Western churches and other religions “to rein in their anathemas and actions against same-sex marriage in public life and instead focus on improving the culture of marital life more broadly.” The reviewer concludes: “Whether you agree with Witte’s assessment or not, this is a book which needs to be read. Impressive and epic in scope yet providing an integrated and focused argument, it is a work of first-rate scholarship”—in sum, writes the reviewer, it is “a definitive work” and sets “a high benchmark.”43
The legacy of Witte to date is formidable. Of the work of the Emory center, Witte says: “It has been deeply gratifying to see the growing interest in law and religion study around the world.” In the 1980s, “we were almost alone; now fifty-five centers and institutes of law and religion have popped up on campuses around the globe.” Then “there was only a small handful of journals and books”—now there are twenty-seven periodicals with more than seventeen hundred books on law and religion published worldwide in the past twenty years. In the United States, virtually all law schools now have a basic course on religious liberty or church-state relations, a growing number also have courses in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, and some consider religion in such courses as legal ethics, legal history, jurisprudence, law and literature, legal anthropology, comparative law, environmental law, family law, and human rights. Therefore, religion is no longer a “hobbyhorse” of lone scholars or religiously chartered law schools. Rather, “Religion now stands alongside economics, philosophy, literature, politics, history, and other disciplines as a valid and valuable conversation partner with law.”44 It was a particular delight and honor for the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff Law School—the establishment of which, in 1998, was inspired by the work of the Emory center—to welcome Witte to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the LLM in Canon Law in 2021 when in the Fall of 2022 he delivered the keynote address on metaphors and the law.45
For so many of these achievements, Witte has rightly received a host of honors—yet another sign of the esteem with which he is held globally. At Emory Law School, he has been recognized on twelve separate occasions (from 1992–93 to 2011–12) as the Most Outstanding Professor and in 1994 received the Emory University Scholar/Teacher Award. In 1995, the United Methodist Foundation for Christian Higher Education awarded him the Most Outstanding Educator Award for all Methodist-affiliated Schools, and that same year he received the Max Rheinstein Fellowship and Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, in Bonn. In 1998 the Black Law Students Association at Emory Law School presented him with its Professor of the Year Award,
What of the future? Witte has a particular project in mind. First, typically, he looks to the past: “For two thousand years, Christians have wrestled with the place of Scripture in the evolving legal cultures around them” and “the fundamental questions of faith, freedom, and family, of politics, law, and society.” “It takes a special form of arrogance to simply … offer one’s own normative perspective uninformed by the tradition.” Second, therefore, “it might be wise to try to distill this into a more systematic [and] normative form”—namely, a modern “Christian jurisprudence.” Third, it will be a jurisprudence that is “authentic,” “engages the hard legal questions,” “is accessible to insiders and outsiders,” and “tries to distill the two-thousand-year tradition [into] a form that other people might be able to profit from and build upon.” Fourth, in other words: “In my more audacious moments, I feel the pull to try to write a modern Summa, Institutes, or Dogmatics on Christian Jurisprudence.” Fifth, he admits: “I am sure pride is part of this,” but “to answer the fundamental questions of law, politics, and society with power, precision, and prescription” is “maybe my calling … to say more.”47
In 2021, Witte’s collection of recent articles and book chapters was published under the title Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Essays on Law and Religion. This eight-hundred-page volume contains a wealth of studies that reflect and bring together in a single accessible volume the fundamentals of Witte’s work in this field. All the elements of the story we have seen thus far in this chapter are to be found in the studies unfolding there. All the labor of research, all the deep thinking, all the tireless honoring of the past and recalibrating what it teaches for the hard issues of today are set out there. Part one, on “Faith,” has three studies that map in general terms the field of law and religion—its educational value, its use of metaphor, and its Christian contribution. Several
6 Conclusion
All in all, it is clear that Witte has been shaped personally in his interest in law and religion by his family and his faith, and advantaged by the ample academic freedom and institutional support that he has enjoyed at Emory. The intellectual influences upon him were many, but he generously recognizes those of Berman, Dooyeweerd, and Kuyper. His move from Harvard to Atlanta was a watershed moment—there he has helped to bring together a vibrant community of talents. The responsibility of the directorship of the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion has, indeed, stimulated a profound and rich understanding of law and religion around notions of the dialectical interaction between them, the religiosity of secular law, and the juridical character of religion. In all this, Witte is a historian of law and religion. His methods are to retrieve, reconstruct, and reengage these disciplines with the challenging issues of today, with interdisciplinary, international, and interreligious elements. Not only does Witte offer a work ethic for the Christian scholar in this field around ideas of stewardship, accessibility, and engagement but he also provides a challenging agenda for ecumenism and greater interfaith dialogue. His studies on religion, human rights, and religious freedom have been ground-breaking, bringing into clear relief the contribution of Reformation thinkers as they anticipate Enlightenment approaches to law and religion. His work—recognized by his academic peers globally and from many disciplines—has been an inspiration to many and will continue to shape this discipline.
This chapter draws on Norman Doe, “An Introduction to the Work of John Witte, Jr.,” in John Witte, Jr., Faith, Freedom, and Family New Essays on Law and Religion, ed. Norman Doe and Gary S. Hauk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 1–17.
Interview with John Witte, Jr., May 6, 2015, Handong International Law School, Pohang, South Korea, https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/5/4/6/6/54662393/handong_interview_2015.pdf (hereafter Handong Interview), 1.
John Witte, Jr., Heidelberg Lecture, “Promotionsfeier der Theologischen Fakultät,” University of Heidelberg, February 8, 2017, lecture on receiving Dr. Theol., Honoris Causa (hereafter Heidelberg Lecture), 3.
Interview with John Witte, Jr., Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong, August 9, 2019, https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/9/0/1/4/90145433/witte_interview_christinaty_human_rights_and_culture_r_.pdf (hereafter Hong Kong Interview), 2 and 13.
Handong Interview, 2.
Handong Interview, 1.
Handong Interview, 8–10. See, for example, Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); see also his Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also John Witte, Jr., and Frank S. Alexander, eds., The Weightier Matters of the Law: Essays on Law and Religion in Tribute to Harold J. Berman (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); John Witte, Jr., “A Conference on the Work of Harold J. Berman,” Emory Law Journal 42 (1993): 419–589; John Witte, Jr., “In Praise of a Legal Polymath: A Special Issue Dedicated to the Memory of Harold J. Berman (1918–2007),” Emory Law Journal 57 (2007): 1393–643; and John Witte, Jr., and Christopher J. Manzer, introduction to Harold J. Berman, Law and Language: Effective Symbols of Community, ed. John Witte, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–35.
Handong Interview, 10.
Herman Dooyeweerd, A Christian Theory of Social Institutions, ed. John Witte, Jr., trans. Magnus Verbrugge (Toronto: Paideia Press, 1986).
See chapter 16 of Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Essays on Law and Religion, ed. Norman Doe and Gary S. Hauk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021).
Handong Interview, 10. See, for example, his overviews of major eras and shifts in law and religion in chapters 4, 14, 24, and 37 of Faith, Freedom, and Family as well as in his introduction to John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds., Christianity and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–32; and his introductions to his monographs The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012); Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005, 2022); and John Witte, Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Hong Kong Interview, 1–2. Kuyper had also been prime minister in the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. See further chapters 1, 2, and 10 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
John Witte, Jr., “The Biology and Biography of Liberty: Abraham Kuyper and the American Experiment,” Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for the Twenty- First Century, ed. Luis Lugo (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 243–62.
John Witte, Jr., “God’s Joust, God’s Justice: The Revelations of Legal History,” Princeton Theological Seminary Bulletin 20 (1999): 295–313.
Heidelberg Lecture, 1–2. See further chapter 1 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Heidelberg Lecture, 2. See further chapter 11 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
See esp. chapters 4–9, 14–15, 25–29, and 34–37 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Heidelberg Lecture, 1–2.
Heidelberg Lecture, 3. See also John Witte, Jr., “The Interdisciplinary Growth of Law and Religion,” in The Confluence of Law and Religion: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Work of Norman Doe, ed. Frank Cranmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 247–61; “The Study of Law and Religion in America: An Interim Report,” Ecclesiastical Law Journal 14 (2012): 327–54; and afterword to Leading Works in Law and Religion, ed. Russell Sandberg (London: Routledge, 2019), 197–205.
Hong Kong Interview, 3.
Handong Interview, 2, 11–12.
Heidelberg Lecture, 3.
See, for example, John Witte, Jr. et al., eds., Texts and Contents in Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue (Berkeley, CA: Robbins Collection, 2016); John Witte, Jr. et al., eds., The Equal Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Witte and Alexander, The Weightier Matters of the Law; John Witte, Jr., “Hugo Grotius and the Natural Law of Marriage: A Case Study of Harmonizing Confessional Differences in Early Modern Europe,” in Studies in Canon Law and Common Law in Honor of R. H. Helmholz, ed. T. L. Harris (Berkeley, CA: The Robbins Collection, 2015), 231–50; John Witte, Jr., “Canon Law in Lutheran Germany: A Surprising Case of Legal Transplantation,” in Lex et Romanitas: Essays for Alan Watson, ed. Michael Hoeflich (Berkeley: University of California Press-Robbins Collection, 2000), 181–224. See further chapters 11–13, 17–24, and 35–37 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Heidelberg Lecture, 3.
Handong Interview, 10–11.
Ibid., 15–16. See also, for example, John Witte, Jr., “What Christianity Offers to the World of Law,” Journal of Law and Religion 32 (2017): 4–97. See further chapter 2 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Hong Kong Interview, 9–10.
See, for example, John Witte, Jr., “Christianity and Human Rights,” Journal of Law and Religion 30 (2015): 353–495; John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds., Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and John Witte, Jr., ed., Christianity and Democracy in Global Context (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
See, for example, John Witte, Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver, eds., Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Legal Perspectives (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996); John Witte, Jr. and Michael J. Broyde, eds., Human Rights in Judaism: Cultural, Religious, and Political Perspectives (New York: Jason Aronson Publishers, 1998); John Witte, Jr. and M. Christian Green, eds., Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); John Witte, Jr. and Michael Bourdeaux, eds., Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); and John Witte, Jr. and Richard C. Martin, eds., Sharing the Book: Religious Perspectives on the Rights and Wrongs of Proselytism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).
Heidelberg Lecture, 4–6.
John Witte, Jr., foreword to Church Laws and Ecumenism, ed. Norman Doe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), vii–ix.
Heidelberg Lecture, 4–6.
For example, the contribution of Emory Center member Johan D. van der Vyver, “African Traditional Religion and Indigenous Perspectives on the Environment,” in Law, Religion and the Environment in Africa, ed. M. Christian Green (Stellenbosch: Sun Media, 2020), 333–42. See further John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds., Modern Christian Teachings on Law, Politics, and Human Nature, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The Cambridge Studies on Christianity and Law series that Witte edits and the Routledge Law and Religion Series that I edit include several commissioned several studies on “great Christian jurists in world history” from across the Christian world. See further chapter 3 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
Hong Kong Interview, 3–4.
Heidelberg Lecture, 4.
See, for example, Norman Doe, Comparative Religious Law: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Norman Doe, Christian Law: Contemporary Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Heidelberg Lecture, 3. See, for example, John Witte, Jr. and Gary S. Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Norman Doe, ed., Christianity and Natural Law: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Rafael Domingo and John Witte, Jr., Christianity and Global Law (London: Routledge, 2020). The Emory Center has commissioned a score of other such “introductions” to Christianity and law for publication in the Routledge Law and Religion Series and the Cambridge Studies in Christianity and Law series.
Mark Hill, Norman Doe, R. H. Helmholz, and John Witte, Jr., eds., Christianity and Criminal Law (London: Routledge, 2020). The roundtable at London (October 2018) also allowed new friends to hear the power of Witte’s preaching at the Temple Church, London (prominent in the genesis of Magna Carta and mother church of the common law).
This was later abridged and translated as John Witte, Jr., The Foundations of Faith, Freedom, and the Family, trans. H. Ohki and Y. Takasaki (Tokyo: Seigakuin University Press, 2008) (Japanese edition).
Heidelberg Lecture, 3.
Handong Interview. See also John Witte, Jr., Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). On these volumes and their critics, see further chapters 35 and 37 of Faith, Freedom, and Family.
The quotations are from Church, State, and Family, xiv, 365, and 377. The reviewer is Russell Sandberg: Ecclesiastical Law Journal 22 (2020): 260–63.
Heidelberg Lecture, 4.
In 2008 Witte also attended the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Cardiff Centre for Law and Religion, and in 2017 he attended a symposium that helped to inspire the publication of R. Sandberg, ed., Leading Works in Law and Religion (London: Routledge, 2018), and on the same visit delivered a magisterial lecture to mark five hundred years since the Reformation—later published as “From Gospel to Law: The Lutheran Reformation and its Impact on Legal Culture,” Ecclesiastical Law Journal 19 (2017): 271–91.
Rex Ahdar, ed., Research Handbook on Law and Religion (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), 5.
Handong Interview, 11–12.