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This is the second article in a two-part series about Bishop Robert Barron address to an audience of senators, representatives, and Capitol’s Hill staffers at the Library of Congress.
Next, I referenced the strange and illuminating account in the sixth chapter of Isaiah regarding the call of the prophet. Isaiah says that he saw the Lord in the temple surrounded by angels crying “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
The Hebrew term here is kadosh, which carries the sense of “other.”
God is source of existence
God is not one being among many, not one true thing among true things; rather, he is the source of existence itself, the unconditioned ground of all that is — and this entails that he is greater than all of the particular projects and desires that customarily preoccupy us.
His call to us is, accordingly, greater than career, family, personal pleasure, country, or anything else. Isaiah speaks further of how smoke filled the place where he was and how the foundations shook.
Both of these symbols indicate the manner in which the experience of God puts anything finite or conditioned into question.
So, I told the senators, representatives, and staffers, the summons to serve justice itself must trump anything else, any other concern, any merely personal project.
It properly shakes the foundation of your life and relativizes everything you once considered supremely important.
Doctrine of law
To make all of this a bit more pointed, I moved to a consideration of Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of law.
For the great medieval Dominican, positive law (the concrete statutes by which a polity is governed) properly nests inside the natural law (that whole range of moral precepts evident to reason), and the natural law nests finally within the eternal law, which is coincident with the divine mind itself.
This entails, I argued, that an unjust positive law is not simply a political problem; it is a moral and finally spiritual problem. To legislate unjustly, I concluded, is therefore to stand athwart the God who originally called the legislator to be a servant of justice.
And lest this analysis seem too abstract and distant, I drew their attention to the extraordinary letter that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City Jail in 1963, prompted by a group of white Christian ministers who were questioning King’s methods.
In response, the great civil rights activist said that just laws ought always to be obeyed but that unjust laws can and should be opposed — always and despite the cost or inconvenience.
And for justification, he reached to the very teaching of Aquinas that I just sketched. King was a political agent to be sure, but he had a keen sense that his activism was but an expression of finally moral and religious convictions.
My hope was (and is) that my presentation would both inspire and discomfit my audience. I wanted them to see both the high spiritual dignity of their call and the rather awful responsibility before God that they bear.
Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Learn more at www.WordOnFire.org