Live-blogging from Malibu: Calo responds

Zachary Calo offers a second response to Prof. Hunter:

Prof. Hunter's account of Christians being in the world offers important models for Christians engaging the law in a world of intensifying and unstable pluralism.  In the absence of any shared moral meaning, law just becomes a weapon in the culture wars.  But the problem of pluralism goes deeper than this, for post-secularity challenges the idea that law possesses a universal meaning.  Legal universalities that were developed in modernity depended on severing law from religion.  Now post-secularity undermines these foundations of the modern legal project.  Legal modernity remains resistant, though, and post-secularity may not have penetrated the modern legal imagination to the extent that Hunter believes it has. 

Post-secularity has shown how legal modernity has subsisted on inherited intellectual and cultural capital.  Question is not whether there should be more or less secularism, but how to give law meaning.  Theology might offer itself as an alternative legal imaginary, emerging in the space afforded by pluralism.  Hunter's "faithful presence" -- i.e., that Incarnation is the only adequate reply to the current condition, inhabiting the world rather than trying to change the world -- is an intriguing model.  Law creates and preserves space for culture.  Law is not just about power, but also about contextualizing the meaning of power.  The problem is not with power as such, but with lack of cultural resources to exercise it properly.  The task of Christian theological jurisprudence is to relocate law and law's meaning within a theological jurisprudence.  Law is oriented for, and ultimately consummated by, grace.  Law is grounded in a basic act of trust, in the meaningfulness of creation, and the possibility of justice.