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In the forty-fifth episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with John Witte, Jr., the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Faculty Director of Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Witte begins by discussing how the 3 Fs – faith, freedom, and family or the things for which people would die – serve as the connective threads between his otherwise diverse expressions of the academic vocation. He then unpacks how those threads are woven into a sample of his books including From Sacrament to Contract, Law and Protestantism, and The Reformation of Rights. Ream and Witte talk about Witte’s education at Calvin College and Harvard University along with texts and mentors who left a great impact upon him. Those influences then found another form of confirmation in the invitation Witte recently received to serve as a bicentenary Gifford lecturer, delivering “A New Calvinist Reformation of Rights.” Ream and Witte then close their conversation by discussing Witte’s appreciation for the academic vocation, the virtues which make the expression of such a vocation possible, and the vices against which legal scholars must guard.
- John Witte, Jr.’s The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
- John Witte, Jr.’s Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- John Witte, Jr.’s From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is John Witte Jr., the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, the McDonald Distinguished Professor, and the Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Thank you for joining us.
John Witte, Jr.: Thanks so much for having me.
Todd Ream: You earned a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University. At what point did you become aware that your sense of vocation had something to do with the practice of religion and the practice of religion as it intersected with the law?
John Witte, Jr.: I think it came during my early college days. I went to Calvin College, now called Calvin University, a strong, religiously-inspired, interdisciplinary institution. I studied history, philosophy, and biology. I was contemplating medical school, law school, or graduate school.
And I began to realize that my real interest lay in the Reformation period initially, focused on what happened with this transformation of theology, of Church-state relations, and more, and began to realize that shift had both deep theological, as well as legal dimensions and political dimensions to it.
And my interest began to focus there, philosophically and historically. I continued to think about the vocation of medicine, but I realized that my gifts, such as they were, were studying this interaction of law and religion, first in the Reformation period and looking backward and forward from there.
Todd Ream: Were any individuals particularly influential in your understanding of your vocation as a legal scholar?
John Witte, Jr.: Well, Calvin College, as a whole, was deeply influential in underscoring the importance of finding one’s vocation with whatever talents God has given us. That was a constant message that we received as young scholars.
I had the privilege of working with Evan Runner, who was a charismatic philosophy professor in the philosophy department and was very strong on the need to find one’s vocation. I also worked with Nick Wolterstorff and George Marsden and the Van Kley brothers in the history department, and others.
All of them strongly emphasized the need to experiment with different genres of scholarship to discover areas where I felt my talents were best deployed, and all of them gave me the leisure of writing directed studies and other things that otherwise weren’t available in courses.
Runner was very kind to tutor me for a year in studying the history of Western legal philosophy from Homer to Hegel. He ran me through all the old sources, all the way through to the 19th century, and then the semester ran out, but it was a wonderful opportunity to try out, in a number of different settings, where my vocation lay.
Todd Ream: Of those texts that you read then at that time or since were any of them more influential on you than others?
John Witte, Jr.: Well, it was a sort of Great Books reading, so it’s very hard to pick out any one of them that’s particularly influential. But we read some of the classics from Greek and Roman times — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. We read some of the great Roman law texts that emerged, both before and after the Christianization of the Roman Empire. We read some of the great Church Fathers, where I found particularly inspiring, Chrysostom and Augustine. And then marching through the tradition, Hincmar of Reims, who became an important figure, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the march into early modern Protestantism. It was a rich diet of material. Runner in particular, but all the scholars whom I mentioned, stressed the need to read primary sources, unfiltered by secondary literature, and to develop the textual skills and the discernment process of understanding the letter and spirit of those contributions. I found that reading period for a year, and the whole four-year experience at Calvin College, deeply formative in giving my attention to these core historical texts. And I have spent the rest of my career going back to them intermittently with new questions in mind.
Todd Ream: Wonderful education. Finally, I want to ask if any particular experiences proved influential in terms of your development of your vocation?
John Witte, Jr.: Going to Harvard Law School was particularly providential for me. I was still struggling to choose between law school or graduate school in history or philosophy. I also took the MCAT and got into medical school and tried to decide on different law schools where I was admitted. I took the occasion to write to Professor Harold J. Berman at Harvard Law School, who had been working in the law and religion field in the prior 25 years.
I’d read a lot of his stuff, and I just wrote to him out of the blue as a 21-year-old punk coming out of Calvin College and asked him what he thought would be the best path I should follow. This was a great, great scholar at Harvard Law School, been there since 1948, was a convert to Christianity from Judaism, one of the great people in legal history. He took the time in three days after receiving my letter to write a two-page letter back, whose principal instruction that I remember was, “come study with me.” And I took that occasion as a door opening to work with him. And I sat at his feet for 40 hours a week as a research assistant while going to school full-time.
We worked together intensely over the next 25 years, first, in my completing my law degree, and then Berman, out of the blue, decided to go to this place called Emory University in Atlanta and take a Woodruff chair. And one of the perks of the chair was for a young fellow to come with him, and that was I. And so I went, as a stowaway in his briefcase, joined the faculty a couple years later, and was able to build with Berman a field of law and religion studies. I have been doing that ever since.
I saw that as real divine intervention, because one could get a degree from Harvard and go practice law and make a fortune but not really feel vindicated in one’s vocation. So that experience was, for me, very formative. And Berman was a great colleague and mentor. We worked together intensely over the years.
Todd Ream: To be able to hold the chair that someone who meant that much to you and did that much in terms of shaping your sense of vocation must be a real privilege and honor then.
John Witte, Jr.: Yeah, a wonderful divine pat on the back is how I took it to be appointed by the president to this university professorship and to have the privilege of continuing the work that Berman had trailblazed at Emory.
And to now have the privilege of starting to mentor the next generation. I’ve been teaching for nearly 38 years now. I’ve taught 10,000 plus students and now a number of them have gone on to distinguished academic careers and legal careers and judicial careers. And it’s just wonderful to watch that next generation coming along and taking over leadership.
I’m trying to do a bit of the pay forward that Berman did for me and to do that for the next generation – for a number of wonderful Christian law students in particular who have come and worked with me over the years. And that’s been deeply gratifying.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Yeah, that’s wonderful. Your expertise includes legal history, human rights, religious freedom, marriage and family law, law and religion, and legal theory. What connective thread, if any, runs through these areas of expertise?
John Witte, Jr.: Well, it shows an inability to focus in on one thing. But what holds them together is the three things that people will die for: their faith, their freedom, and their family. And what I have found to be my vocation is to engage deeply those three questions, separately and together, to look at them historically, comparatively, legally, and theologically. And to spend time looking at how those fundamental questions still divide us and unite us in 21st century culture.
Each of the buckets that I have worked in has been a separate area of interest and expertise, such as it is. But what holds them together for me is really this passion of trying to get to the heart of fundamental aspects of human life, human society, and human aspiration. And I see those three Fs of faith, freedom, and family as the organic tie amongst them.
Todd Ream: Of all the questions then that you pursued that came out of those three domains then, is there one question perhaps, or maybe two or three, that you’ve returned to with greater frequency than others?
John Witte, Jr.: I’d say one clearly is the fundamental place, role, and responsibility of marriage and family life, and the need for us to continue to recognize that most organic institution, set out in the created order and fundamental to any organized society.
I’ve been deeply engaged in trying to understand sex, marriage, and family life, trying to understand parental roles and rights and responsibilities, the children’s place and rights in the home, the importance of the form and the function of marriage and family life, as all that gets buffeted in different periods, including in our day. That’s been one question of deep importance for me. And especially as we watch the culture wars over those questions, dividing us at our family level, in our churches, and in our societies, trying to situate modern debates in a 3,000-year tradition of thought is an important question for me.
I think a second one clearly is this fundamental gift that we have of freedom – a gift that is part of our basic created order, which is constantly besieged by those who would betray it or to abridge it at least. I have focused on the need to ground freedom and attendant rights and liberties claims; to be able to find the structures of authority and liberty that allow for a happy harmony between the exercise of one’s liberty and the need for a well-ordered society; to work through the constitutional and cultural mechanisms by which that has been done over the centuries. That’s a second really important question for me.
And related to that is a third perennial question of how do Church and state get along? How do we think about these two most fundamental institutions in society alongside the family, and how do we construct relationships of semi-autonomy, of cooperation, of collaboration, of assurance that each discharges its own fundamental responsibility, while being sensitive to the sovereignty of the other sphere.
These are deep constitutional questions that have confronted religious communities around the world from the beginning, but are fundamental to the 2,000-year history of the Western and Eastern churches and the variety of ways by which we’ve constructed, theologically and legally, the appropriate relationships of Church and state. That is a third question of deep import for me and ongoing engagement.
Todd Ream: Thank you, thank you very much. You’re the author or editor of more than 45 books. Are any of those books more reflective or definitive of your thinking, perhaps, than any of the others?
John Witte, Jr.: Picking among your children, I guess? I believe in justification by faith alone, but I like to have a backup plan and all these works are there in part to provide the same, before they send me to the left gate on the day of judgment – facetiously!
More seriously, I think that each of the areas in which I work has a favorite early text or two.
One of the early books was Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation. This 2002 title was where I, for the first time, engaged very deeply in book form what the Reformation had to say about public, private, penal, and procedural law, legal theory, political theory, constitutional structures, Church-state relations, and the like.
That was a deep organic book that took a long time to write. It took the ironic posture of looking at the Lutheran Reformation — which Troeltsch and others had always said was a sectarian rather than a much more engaged form of Protestantism — and tried to show that the Lutheran Reformation was both a theological and a legal reformation. And I’ve published a series of subsequent works in the Reformation field that continue to demonstrate that thesis in other denominational settings, mostly early modern.
I think a second important book is called From Sacrament to Contract. That, too, was an early organic book that tried to tell audaciously, in 300 pages, a 3,000-year history of marriage, family, sexuality, theology, and law in the Western tradition. It was an outrageously superficial book in one sense, but also a book that was designed to be a sketch and set of models of how Church, state, and family got along in the tradition. And juxtaposed sacramental, covenantal, social commonwealth, and contractarian models of marriage in that book.
I’ve developed two or three different editions of that book and other iterations of those these themes in several other books since then. But that early book, commissioned from a project at University of Chicago run by Don Browning and Martin Marty, was a very important shaping book for me both to focus on the Reformation and to radiate backward and forward from the Reformation’s contributions to marriage and family life and the law and theology that govern it.
A third title was The Reformation of Rights, which is a history of Calvinist rights talk, from the 16th to the 18th century: to what extent did this Reformed tradition help shape what we call rights and liberties today; to what extent did some of its theologically-grounded teachings on rights and liberties shape attendant constitutional structures; to what extent does that theologically-grounded vision still have a place in the 21st century.
In part, this book was an answer to secularists who would prefer to see that rights emerged out of the Enlightenment as a rebuke of the Christian tradition. This book argued, to the contrary, that the Enlightenment lived off much of the legal and constitutional capital that the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformations had produced. And in part, it was a rebuke to some of my Calvinist brethren and sistren who say that rights are simply a betrayal of the fundamental teachings of the Reformed tradition and a product of the secular Enlightenment. My answer is that rights and liberties that Christian regard as prodigal today, nonetheless, are our children. We produced a good number of them, theologically grounded them, and it’s time to retrieve, welcome, and reconstruct that rights tradition.
That was a hard and fun book to write, and in many ways is an anchor for an ongoing set of studies about how rights and liberties in the Western tradition are grounded. I’m working on the sequel to that book now that takes the 18th to 21st century story forward and have been working on a lot of other books that take up aspects of rights and liberties history from antiquity till today, including notably historical and modern religious freedom norms.
Those are three of my early intellectual “children,” if you will. While I’m still very happy about those early books, all the other books I don’t want to eclipse by singling those out. But each one of these early titles provided a wonderful chance to mine and engage a big body of literature, do deep research and writing, to develop my own historical methods, and then lay out my findings at length, albeit inevitably leaving most of the findings on the cutting floor when finally done.
Todd Ream: The inevitable experience of working with an editor with a sharp eye. So yeah, thank you.
John Witte, Jr.: Yep. Exactly right.
Todd Ream: You write and edit books in any number of areas at one time, and I just have to ask, what habits of mind have you forged that allow you to track with those respective efforts and stay engaged with them?
John Witte, Jr.: Part of it is having an organic tie amongst them — the faith, freedom, and family tie – and recognizing that these topics are different corners of the same canvas, rather than new canvases that you’re turning.
Part of it is appreciating that, like scientific experiments, scholarly writing often produces byproducts of the writing, of the experiment, which can be more interesting results than what was intended when you started.
And I find, oftentimes, when I’m writing deeply in one area it triggers analogous or sometimes completely unrelated thoughts about another area. And thank the Lord for split screens these days, because I’ve been doing a good bit of split screening. I find myself — when I have a good, deeply creative day — working on three or four projects at the same time and flipping from one to the other. Some of that’s dilettantism to be sure, but some of it’s also just the mutual creativity that emerges when you’re deeply focused. And I try to take advantage of that when it comes along.
And the habits are, I try to write for a few hours every day and start with the thing that’s most important to get out because there’s a due date. But oftentimes I find myself breaching my due dates because I’ve been stimulated to work on something that doesn’t have as much pressing import on my schedule, but it has, you know, pressing import on my mind.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to talking about your offering as a Gifford lecturer. In 2022, you delivered the first of five bicentenary lectures. The stated purpose of the Gifford lectures is for “promoting, advancing, teaching, and diffusing the study of natural theology.” And the title for your lecture was “A New Calvinist Reformation of Rights.” Would you please start by offering some details concerning your response to receiving the invitation to serve as a Gifford lecturer?
John Witte, Jr.: Yeah, it was a wonderful occasion to be invited to give that to be part of that august lecture series and participate, especially in the bicentennial. For a guy who’s working in law to be included in that kind of theology, humanities world: I took it as a pat on the back from on high to say, your work is having an impact in the religion world too and thanks for that.
Since natural theology was part of the conversation that the Gifford lectures encouraged, I wanted to work on some of the natural rights and natural law discussions that the Protestant tradition had contributed. The lectures got postponed twice in the COVID era so we got pressed into a much more confined presentation than would have been warranted in the day.
And so, I just focused in on one story in that ongoing early modern to modern Calvinist contribution to rights talk — a story of James Pennington, an escaped slave, who became one of the great Presbyterian advocates for abolitionism. And became, in fact, president of the World Abolitionist Society.
Pennington, on the strength of deep Calvinist premises and on the strength of natural law theologies that inspired constitutional order in America, made a very strong case for abolitionism. And telling his story, which is virtually unknown to the non-specialist, was a special treat.
After two plus years of waiting for the lectures, that theme became a little less special, because Pennington has, in the interim, been discovered by friends at Heidelberg and Yale, where he had had a special place. By reason of that, my contribution was a little less novel than I would have hoped. But nonetheless, it was well-received by wonderful hosts, and it was a special time in my life, in my wife’s life, who was there to exercise censorship to the extent it was needed.
Todd Ream: As spouses are often helpful in doing, yes. Would you please offer few details concerning your hope about the lasting influence of that lecture? What do you hope that it left with audience members? And then, and I think you’ve already echoed in some ways that it’s currently at work in, in this, in efforts that you’re currently leading.
John Witte, Jr.: Yeah, one of the nice things about the Gifford lectures is, by reason of their distinction, they tend to be used a good bit by subsequent generations. And nowadays with audio visual capacities, there are different ways you can consume them even before the lectures are published. My hope for what people will see in the lectures is threefold.
One is that the Calvinist tradition is not averse to natural law and natural rights or human rights that emerged from the same. To the contrary, it tends to be exemplary in many instances in the pre-18th century period, certainly, and even into the 19th century, even when anti-naturalism and anti-rights discussions began to become more and more prominent in the Calvinist tradition.
The second thing I hope people will take from this is that there are many new things under the sun, under rocks, and buried in archives. Being alert to the important stewardship responsibilities that we have as historians, we need especially to look at the deposit of the tradition and to recognize that there are many, many contributions that have been lost on modern scholarship that need to be both rediscovered, reconstructed and, and reengaged. This is another reason for the lecture what otherwise might be viewed as a kind of arcane story.
And the third thing, I guess, is in a day when the country on this side of the Atlantic, but in the UK and Europe as well, is roiled with debates about race, about religion, and about violence, here we have in James Pennington, the subject of my lecture, a remarkable exemplar of a guy who emerges from the ravages of slavery and the brutality that he faced and his family faced, who develops, 150 years before the Civil Rights Movement, a Calvinist theory of rights and resistance, but nonviolent resistance, and works out a really interesting comprehensive theology and philosophy, and, I would say, a jurisprudence of rights that has an awful lot to teach us today. And he does it without the bitterness that attends some of the discussions of race relationships today, does it in a way that both prophetically engages but also sympathetically adduces the power of the Church to be important voice for rights and important advocate for removal of rights violations.
Pennington struck me as a guy leading a Black Lives Matter movement a century and a half before his time. And with a level of faith and fervency, patience and perseverance that it would be nice to see in our 21st century culture sometimes.
Todd Ream: Someone whose example certainly merits great consideration and perhaps even emulating in a number of ways today. Thank you.
I want to transition to talking about your perception of the academic vocation as you’ve understood it and as you’ve exercised it. And would you start simply by offering your assessment and understanding of the Christian academic vocation?
John Witte, Jr.: I come at this as an old-fashioned Protestant, who starts with the idea of vocation: each of us is given a set of talents, and we’re called to exercise those talents in the vocation that seems best fit to the talents we’ve been given and meets the opportunities that are there for us to discharge the other things that we have in life, not least our care for our faith and freedom and family.
The academic vocation is one of them, and it is important that those who come into the academic vocation as believers, Christian believers in particular, recognize that that vocation has certain metes and bounds that are part of it — expectations, methodologies, and literatures that are to be engaged. It is important to master the vocation as it’s defined for us.
If you’re an historian, you be an historian. If you’re a mathematician, you be a mathematician. If you’re an architect, you’re an architect. It is important not to simply walk in and say, because you’re a Christian, therefore you’re exempt from some of the basic canons and methodologies of your discipline.
That said, the Christian academic vocation as I see it — beyond its responsibility of vindicating the highest ideals of that vocation — has also the responsibility of injecting, emphasizing, exemplifying the deep religious foundations, dimensions, sources of the particular vocation the person is in. I’m an old-fashioned enough Calvinist and a Calvin College graduate to think that God’s created order, God’s life and spirit, are at work in everything that we do, and by reason of that, we have a responsibility to echo and engage that as God’s image bearers and ambassadors.
And so, in the legal academic vocation that I have, it is to be a great law professor and to take care of my students and to teach excellent classes and to do scholarship, but then also find ways of teaching and doing scholarship and engaging the legal profession in a manner that allows you to serve God, the Church, and God’s people.
In my case as a Christian legal historian, it’s to retrieve and reconstruct the wisdom of our own Christian tradition with respect to law and politics. It’s also to emphasize — in classes on religious freedom or history of Church-state relations in the West, or history of law, religion, and family – what a deep theological tradition like Christianity can offer to the fundamental questions of law, politics, and society. It is to debate with students, colleagues, and project participants, some of the hard questions that they encounter around First Amendment issues or around sex, marriage and family issues and to equip them to forensically engage the debates, and participate authentically, in contributing to them.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What unique challenges, if any, then come when one’s vocation intersects or exists at the intersection between law and religion, as you’ve described?
John Witte, Jr.: There are different kinds of competitions. One of them goes back to the old adage of Martin Luther that lawyers are bad Christians — “Juristen, böse Christen” — famously echoing an adage of the tradition. That old idea is still there today, in some pious Protestant and sometimes Catholic circles, too: the idea that oftentimes you betray an awful lot of your own faith by entering into a profession that sometimes is typified by its grubbiness, by its greed, by its cavalier attitude toward truth and truth seeking.
It doesn’t have to be that, but that certainly is one kind of caricature that one faces as a person of faith going into law. And I spend time with my students trying to talk about what a “prophet, priest, and king” needs to be in the legal profession. And that’s been deeply meaningful.
A second thing that I face, especially as a law and religion guy, is inevitable skepticism about what I’m doing in a law school teaching this stuff. Some people view this as proselytizing Christianity. Some people view this as introducing a soft inapt subject into legal studies. Some worry deeply that we’re distracting students from the fundamental preparation that they need to be good lawyers.
And facing those epistemological headwinds is a normal part of my day-to-day life. I think it’s a healthy part, because it keeps you from being complacent, and it forces you constantly to be in the position of being careful not to use the classroom lectern as a mode of proselytism. Your private conversations and office hours are another matter – but not the classroom.
Third, it is important for Christian scholars in this field to show that religion is a critical dimension of law, politics, and society, and its understanding and interdisciplinary engagement helps rather than hurts the legal profession. And it’s important also to show that law is a universal solvent of human living and that, to be understood properly, it needs to be understood in conversation and in concert with many other basic disciplines in life. Literature, economics, philosophy, politics, and all the other humane and social sciences, including religion and theology, offer different windows on the legal profession, different ways of helping understand law and the legal profession’s responsibility in law, rather than distractions from core legal education.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Yeah, as you’ve described, I’ve often thought that in relation to almost any discipline or profession for which one seeks training and expertise in, in the academy today, that there’s a certain amount of amnesia that we often have about the history that has brought these disciplines or professions into existence, and thus our knowledge of them and the changes that they will undergo even in our lifetime is quite thin and doesn’t serve us nor our students as well as we need to be prepared to do so. We’re to shepherd them over the course of our lifetimes.
John Witte, Jr.: That’s a keen insight and it’s often striking how novel it is for people to hear that for centuries, until well into the 19th century, the three great department and divisions of the Western university were law, theology, and medicine. And one learned those three professions separately and together; they were the core foundation for the learned life.
And increasingly, one of the stories of the 19th and 20th century, as you know better than I, is the increased specialization and disciplinary positivism that begins to emerge, and these hermetic and then eventually hermeneutical divisions that we start making between departments and divisions and schools, and the consequent narrowing view of what theology means and what the law means in the 20th and 21st century mind. Trying to overcome that as an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher is not so easy.
If law is just one specialized department of knowledge, it’s very hard to say that this discipline requires access to a lot of other disciplines. And in turn, if law is viewed simply as one technique, one profession that you can pursue alongside dentistry, business, or nursing, you’ve lost sight of some of the majesty of the law and its central place in our ordered life and our constitutional rule of law system that we have today.
Todd Ream: As a legal scholar, then what virtues have proven most important for you to cultivate over the course of your lifetime and your career?
John Witte, Jr.: The usual ones — the notions of integrity, of responsibility, of stewardship, of creativity, of discovery, of mentorship, of faithfulness — those are all basics that I have found to be sine qua nons of success as a legal scholar, regardless of one’s own faith commitment.
Another aspect that is important, I group under the idea of covenant. That is, we tend in the academy to be highly isolated in what we do when we become good specialists. Covenant thinking allows us to recognize that we are part of an intellectual covenant community. It a community that is organically tied to our forebearers, who created many of the foundational things on which we build. It’s a covenant with fellow members of the academy — and in my case, of the legal profession, too — who are part of a global guild, whose presence is essential to the maintenance of a rule of law and a protection of faith, freedom, and family.
The idea of covenant also is helpful in recognizing that we are building something for the next generation. We have the responsibility not only for stewarding the tradition but transmitting it, reforming it as necessary, to the next generation. Those are all kinds of basics that are, I think, essential to bear in mind, especially when academics feel isolated in their own school or who feel their specialization really has no appreciation or no allies or no analogs.
Covenant thinking help us to remember that we’re part of a deep intellectual tradition, which has horizontal, vertical, and spatial dimensions, and helps us to take comfort when we especially feel buffeted or isolated.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask the sort of question in reverse then. What vices in your estimation are most important perhaps for legal scholars to confront?
John Witte, Jr.: Hubris, I think, is an important one for academics, especially law professors. We tend to think we know everything, and we view cogency of argument sometimes as the equivalent of truth. We need to be careful about recognizing the limitations of what our legal methodology can offer.
Besides hubris, I would say, the dangers of materialism. Those dangers are deep and real as you enter a legal profession that’s bristling with brass and glass offices, and flashy and fashionable people. It’s easy to let the glitter beguile you. It is important for folks in the legal profession to recognize that “not all that is glitters is gold” and “not all that is golden doth glitter.” It’s important to keep those together.
I think the third thing is distraction from our core mission. We tend, in the legal profession, often to pursue our client’s own self-interest without having the common good in mind. And it can be hard to balance the fundamentals of a just legal order and the necessity for catering to the common good with our client’s own self-interest. Finding ways of both vindicating our client’s interest but at the same time being responsible citizens is a hard one.
I think the fourth thing is monopolization. One of the things that the legal profession can do, and sometimes does, is it monopolizes your time, energy, and focus. Too many lawyers that go into serious work in the field find themselves bereft of their family, isolated because of the hard work that is demanded of them. And they put on some of the golden handcuffs that keep them on that treadmill – sorry for the mixed metaphor. They put on the golden handcuffs that keep them bound to be pursuing that ongoing life of high pay but massive workloads.
I’ve been teaching long enough now that I have many 40-year-olds wandering back into my office — dressed to the nines, looking very good, wonderfully coiffed — and saying to me, “Professor Witte, I’m absolutely miserable. I’ve made a fortune. I’m now on my third spouse. I see my kids three times a year. I’ve got a fleet of fancy cars in my garage, I can never use them. And I’m absolutely miserable because I’ve been caught up in this demanding, self-promoting, materialist lifestyle, forgetting about what I’m supposed to be doing. Can you give me some advice?”
My advice is always the same: find your vocation and find it a real sense. So those are some of the vices that I would be particularly concerned about in the legal profession.
I think in the legal academy, all those vices are in place. We don’t have quite the same temptations of materialism, given lower salaries. We don’t have quite the kind of self-defeating suffocating behavior, because the luxury of tenure lets you basically pursue your ideas. But I think that the added danger of tenure is complacency and lack of hunger when you’re no longer driven by a bottom line, or by an over-arching mandate of your firm, by relentless time sheet demands on you, or by the publish or perish ethic of the academy. It is easy to let tenure stop your creativity and your pen and make you complacent. And I would say that the academic legal profession has that as a big temptation.
And the complacency sometimes can simply lead to a life of leisure, but it also can be that you just use your academic platform to engage in consulting or a way to engage in litigation or other things, which are all wonderful things to do. But if your calling is to be a law professor, you got to be a law professor and not use your law professorship as an entrée into other kinds of pursuits that may be consistent with what the legal profession is about but not consistent with what the legal teaching profession is about.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Unfortunately, our time is running short, but I want to ask one more question, if I may, concerning the Church’s relationship to the legal vocation, and in particular, what role, if any, should the Church play in nurturing current generation of legal scholars and future generations of legal scholars, in your estimation?
John Witte, Jr.: You have put your finger on a number of things already, especially trying to instantiate in young congregants and catechumens the idea of vocation and the importance of finding that and recognizing that the legal vocation can be among the things that folks can pursue.
Beyond that, it’s important that the Church realizes it is itself a legal entity. The Church needs to be responsible to the state and responsible to the legal system that it’s in, and to recognize that it’s not just the exotic religious freedom claims of the First Amendment, but all the hard questions around employment and zoning and other things that go into the creation of a legal organization that really need to be attended to properly.
Some church members view it as a betrayal of the Church’s covenant relationship to be involved in thinking about Church charters or Church employment contracts and things like that. But it’s really important that the Church realizes that if you do not responsibly create these legal instruments for yourself, the Church is going to be subject to the secular authorities and what they might say, perhaps consistent, perhaps inconsistent with the Church’s understanding of its mission and ministry.
The Church also has an increasingly important responsibility in our 21st century society, not just to preach the Word, administer the sacraments, care for the poor and needy, and catechize the young, but also has an important prophetic role of speaking truth to power, of speaking against injustice, of not simply acquiescing in a particular political agenda or putting faith in certain kinds of princes and not in others.
Those are important lessons for the Church to remember. Too often, the Church has become too complacent with culture or too willing to hook its divine mission to a particular political platform. And I find that deeply disturbing. As a historian, I can say that never works in the long term.
In our 21st century society, it’s also important to realize that the modern welfare state, as we know it, will not be here in two or three generations. The Church will eventually need to return its formative and leadership role in education and charity and various kinds of engagement with society, consistent with, not as a distraction from, its fundamental ministry. We need to realize that so many of the needs, interests, and rights of others that the social welfare state has absorbed over the last century are going to increasingly go back to civil society, including the Church, to vindicate.
The state now is increasingly on the political, fiscal, and ideological ropes about its social welfare responsibilities. This is not a political statement so much as just a prediction that in the next 20 or 30 years, we’re going to be finding more and more federal, state, and local agencies incapable of delivering on the high promises of the New Deal and Good Society movements of a century ago – especially their promises to “the least of these” in society. And a Church that gets itself ready — legally, politically, culturally, and fiscally — to be able to take care of the least of these in society, especially, I think it’s going to be an increasingly important responsibility.
And the more resilient the Church in its core mission, the more capable it is of discharging, those increasing emergency functions that are going to come along. “Who’s going to take care of our grandchildren and great grandchildren,” is a question that the Church has to face already now, but much more frontally in the next 30 years. And this is a question that’s always been asked of the Church, until the turn of the 20th century, before the rise of the modern welfare state. It’s not a new question. It simply has to be newly engaged in responsible institutional ways — forewarned is forearmed for this mission.
Todd Ream: Important matter to consider as the Church moves forward and those of us who serve the Church, think through what our calling is in terms of how we allocate our time, efforts, and resources.
Our guest has been John Witte, Jr., the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, the McDonald Distinguished Professor, and the Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
John Witte, Jr.: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a joy to be in conversation.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
