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Religious Particularity, Religious Metaphor, and Religious Truth: Listening to Tom Shaffer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Howard Lesnick
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Extract

I have met Tom Shaffer no more than two or three times in my life. Nonetheless, we have for several years been carrying on a conversation that has been of central and growing importance to me and to my work. He has spoken to me through his writing, about professional responsibility, about teaching, and about religion and law. Except for the ways in which he has influenced my teaching, I have responded mostly in my head. It is a unique opportunity to be able to acknowledge to him and others the gift of his work; I am proud to participate in this collective appreciation. I am grateful too for the chance to engage in this forum with some of what his writings have said to me.

To select, for a brief reflection, from a bibliography of Shafferiana that extends well up into the three-digit range is a daunting task. I have chosen two themes that have special salience for me: first, he celebrates the “particularity” of specific religious communities, while linking Judaism and Christianity to a common “Hebraic tradition”; second, he calls on those attracted to the use of “religious metaphors” to be clear about what beliefs underlie that use. I have found the first liberating and affirming, and the second profoundly challenging.

Type
Commentary on the Work of Thomas L. Shaffer
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 317 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1993

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References

1. For an acknowledgment, see my coursebook, Being a Lawyer: Individual Choice and Responsibility in the Practice of Law vii (West, 1992)Google Scholar. See also the opening excerpt of the book of readings that Dvorkin, Elizabeth, Himmelstein, Jack, and I prepared, Becoming a Lawyer: A Humanistic Perspective on Legal Education and Professionalism 5 (West, 1981)Google Scholar (hereinafter Becoming a Lawyer).

2. For published fruits of this work, see Reassessing Law Schooling: the Sterling Forest Group, 53 NYU L Rev 561 (1978)Google Scholar, a symposium of essays by attendees at an early meeting (the occasion of my first meeting Tom Shaffer); Becoming a Lawyer (cited in note 1).

3. “[M]y servant Caleb showed a different spirit; he followed me with his whole heart.” Numbers 14:24.

4. Emily Fowler Hartington writes of a “nonpropositional… manifestation of ‘truth,’ … that illuminates rather than ‘proves’.” From Righteousness to Beauty: Reflections on Poethics and Justice in Translation, 67 Tul L Rev 455, 458 (1992)Google Scholar.

5. H. Richard Niebuhr says of himself: “In one sense I must call myself a Christian in the same sense that I call myself a twentieth-century man. To be a Christian is simply part of my fate ….” The Responsible Self 43 (Harper & Row, 1963)Google Scholar. Except for the connotation of the stoic acceptance of bad luck, I think that this idea captures the thought, and provides a simple escape from the notion that, to remain secure in our particular religious tradition, we must assert its exclusive or superior claim to truth.

6. Shaffer uses the word “sectarian” in a sense that differs from the way I have commonly understood it. See his Erastian and Sectarian Arguments in Religiously Affiliated American Law Schools, 45 Stan L Rev 1859, 1869–1870 (1993)Google Scholar. I am using it with a connotation of exclusivity or triumphalism, which, although inconsistent with Shaffer's usage, is not wholly idiosyncratic on my part. Cf. II Oxford English Dictionary 2703 (Compact ed 1971)Google Scholar.

7. Shaffer, Thomas L., The Tension between Law in America and the Religious Tradition, in Neuhaus, Richard John, ed,Law and the Ordering of Our Life Together 28, 29–30 (Eerdmans, 1989)Google Scholar.

8. Id at 30-31.

9. If you want documentation for this assertion, I suggest that you ask a random sample of Jewish friends or associates. If you want an explanation of the feeling, I suggest that you “go and study” (as Rabbi Hillel said in a somewhat different context); from me, now, you will get only the bit of ‘60s wisdom to the effect that, if you don't understand, I can't explain it.

10. Id at 33-34.

11. Id at 45-47.

12. Deut. 6:6-7.

13. The teaching is to be bound “as a sign” on our hands and on our foreheads, and written on the doorposts and gates of our houses. Deut. 6:8-9.

14. Id at 33.

15. Consider his perception that Christianity appropriated from Israel the “troublesome” idea of vicarious atonement: “Moses did it first” by his fast on the mountain. Id at 41. Shaffer does not attend to this account because he sees in it a foreshadowing of the Crucifixion.

16. See Gaffney, Edward McGlynn Jr., In Praise of a Gentle Soul, 10 J Law & Relig 287 (1993–1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. “The God in whom we have faith is the God of the Hebrews,” “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The first quotation is from Jurisprudence in the Light of the Hebraic Faith, 1 J L, Ethics & Pub Policy 77 (1984)Google Scholar, the second from On Thinking Theologically about Lawyers as Counselors, 42 Fla L Rev 467, 471 (1990)Google Scholar.

18. Id at 30.

19. Id at 32.

20. It would be interesting to hear Shaffer come to grips with the very different challenge of the particularity of Islam, the religion of those descendants of Abraham who are neither Jewish nor Christian. Would the temporal relation, by which Islam is to Christianity as Christianity is to Judaism, be too facile a way of stating the central issue that he would encounter?

21. Matt. 16:24.

22. Deut. 6:4.

23. Ed Gaffney has expressed the point with simple eloquence and profound insight, in noting that, although Christians should “understand that they are Jews, [they] may not expect all Jews to answer the Jesus question in a way that would make them Christians.” Gaffney, , 10 J Law & Relig at 287 (cited in note 16)Google Scholar.

24. Shaffer, Thomas L., Judges as Prophets, 67 Tex L Rev 1327 (1989)Google Scholar.

25. Id at 1337.

26. Id at 1338-39.

27. See the text partially quoted above (cited in note 26).

28. See Maguire, Daniel, The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity 33–34 (Fortress Press, 1993)Google Scholar (defining religion as “the response to the sacred”).

29. Bibliographic references seem out of place here, but I have found Reinhold Niebuhr and Sallie McFague extremely thought-provoking in this regard. See the former's As Deceivers, Yet True, in Beyond Tragedy: Essays in the Christian Interpretation of History 3 (Scribner, 1937)Google Scholar, and the letter's Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Fortress Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

30. See text at note 4.

31. These are the words by which the U.S. Catholic Bishops have described Mary. See One in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Response to the Concerns of Women for Church and Society, para. 137 (Second Draft, 04 3, 1990)Google Scholar.

32. The Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin, Order, Sanhedrin, Tractate98a (Soncino, ed 1935)Google Scholar.