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LEGAL REASONING AND
CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

By John Warwick Montgomery
Dean, Simon Greenleaf School of Law

Excerpted w/o permission from
his book "The Law Above The Law"

The interrelations of law and theology are multifarious, and one of the
most striking lies at their point of conjunction in apologetic task.

Readers of older apologetic literature are aware that lawyers and
legal scholars have often been concerned with the credibility of
Christianity.  The 'founder of modern apologetics' by way of his
classic work, 'The Truth of the Christian Religion' (1627), was Hugo
Grotius - and he is even more well known as the 'father of
international law' for his treatise on 'The Law of War and Peace'
(1625).  The greatest authority on American common-law evidence in the
19th century was Harvard Law School professor Simon Greenleaf (his
status was similar to Wigmore's in our own century), and he was the
author of the still published 'Testimony of the Evangelists', a
demonstration of the reliability of the Gospel accounts of our Lord's
life.  Irwin Linton's popular volume, 'A Lawyer Examines the Bible',
the tracts and booklets of J.N.D. Anderson (director of the University
of London's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies), and the writings of
Jacques Ellul (professor of law at Bordeaux) are a valuable barometer
of the extent to which the legal mind is drawn like a moth to the
flame of apologetics.

Why does this occur?  Why are lawyers more inclined to do apologetics
that engineers or dentists?  One reason might be that the law plays a
very large role in Scripture itself - not only through the Old
Testament covenant of law but also in the centrality of the trial of
Jesus and Pauline legal imagery in the New Testament; thus such works
as A. N. Sherwin-White's 'Roman Society and Roman Law in the New
Testament' (1963), with their powerful apologetic overtones.  But an
even more important reason lies in the very nature of the legal
operation.

In spite of the popular notion that lawyers are sophists who (to use
the language of Plato's 'Apology of Socrates') 'make the worse
argument appear the better,' the fundamental function of the legal
profession is to seek justice by seeking truth.  The lawyer endeavors
to reduce societal conflicts by arbitrating conflicting truth-claims.
Inherent to the practice of the law is an effort to resolve conflicts
over legal responsibility, and such conflicts invariably turn on
questions of fact.  To establish a 'cause of action' the palintiff's
complaint must allege a legal right which the defendant was duty-bound
to recognize, and which he violated; at the trial evidentiary facts
must be marshalled in support of the plaintiff's allegations, and the
defendant will need to provide factual evidence in his behalf to
counter the plaintiff's prima facie case against him.  To this end,
legal science, as an outgrowth of millennia of court decisions,
developed meticulous criteria for distinguishing factual truth from
error.  The preoccupation of the law with canons of evidence creates a
natural interest on the part of lawyers to investigate religious
truthclaims.

Concretely, here are some fundamental principles of the law of
evidence, which, if applied to the question of the factual truth of
Christianity, will yield most significant results:

1) The 'ancient documents' rule: ancient documents will be received as
competent evidence if they are 'fair on their face' (i.e. offer no
internal evidence of tampering) and have been maintained in
'reasonable custody' (i.e. their preservation has been consistent with
their content).  Applied to the Gospel records, and reinforced by
responsible lower (textual) criticism, this rule wold establish their
competency in any court of law.

2) The 'parol evidence' rule: external, oral testimony of tradition
will not be received in evidence to add to, subtract from, vary or
contradict an executed written instrument such as a will.  Applied to
the biblical documents, which expressly claim to be 'executed' and
complete (Rev. 22.18-19), this rule insists that the Scripture be
allowed to 'interpret itself' and not be twisted by external, extra-
biblical data (comparative New Eastern religious texts and practices,
Sitz im Leben interpretations, 'historical-critical method,' 'New
Hermeneutic,' etc.).

3) The 'hearsay rule' - what Wigmore calls the 'proudest scion of our
jury-trial rules of evidence': a witness must testify 'of his own
knowledge,' not on the basis of what has come to him indirectly from
others.  Applied to the New Testament documents, this demand for
primary-source evidence is fully vindicated by the constant
asseverations of their authors to be setting forth 'that which we have
heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon,
and our hands have handled, the Word of life' (I Jo 1.1).

4) The related 'cross-examination' principle: 'All trials proceed upon
the idea that some confidence is due to human testimony, and that this
confidence grows and becomes more steadfast in proportion as the
witness has been subjected to a close and searching cross-examination'
(Justice Ruffin, in State v. Morriss, 84 N.C. 764).  Applied to the
apostolic proclamation, this rule underscores the reliability of the
testimony to Christ's resurrection which was presented
contemporaneously in the synagogues - in the very teeth of opposition,
among hostile cross-examiner who would certainly have destroyed the
case for Christianity had the facts been otherwise.

These apologetic applications of legal reasoning are a mere sampling.
What makes them particularly important is the place of the legal
system in society: the indisputable consideration that upon just such
rules of evidence issues of life and death are necessarily decided and
so far as to recommend that philosophy itself ceases to rely primarily
the deductive, mathematical, Cartesian model to solve its metaphysical
problems, and instead 'treat logic as generalized jurisprudence' -
learn from the inductive, fact-orientated structure of legal argument.
Such an approach would accord well with the twofold stress of modern
Wittgensteinian thought on the necessity of verification and the
importance of doing philosophy within the framework of ordinary
language.  Apologetically, the modern man faced with legally grounded
evidence for Christ's claims is in the awkward position of having to
go to the Cross or throw away the only accepted method of arbitrating
ultimate questions in society.  Luther put it nicely in the
'Tischreden', 'If the world will not hear the divines, they must hear
the lawyers, who will teach them manners.'

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