I was reading James Boice's study of the Book of Romans today, and he was discussing the difference between theologians who believe the Bible is the very, unvarnished word of God and theologians who believe "the Bible is a mixture of human words and divine words, and it is the task of scholarship to separate the two, extracting the kernals of divine truth from the human chaff."
What is the result of allowing scholars to determine the line between truth and chaff?
Boice puts it this way:
"Of course, what happens in this framework is that the scholar becomes God so far as revelation is concerned. That is, the scholar becomes the authority who tells us what is true and what is not true, what is of God and what is not of God, what we are to believe and what we are not to believe."
Is Living Constitutionalism a little bit like this? Constitutional law becomes not so much what the Written Constitution says and what those words meant at the time they were ratified into law; but rather, what contemporary law professors (and judges) want it to mean, what the Constitution would say if the professors and judges were the ones writing it.
Again, for me it always comes back to the Rule of Law (originalism) versus the Law of Rulers (living constitutionalism), the "lesser of two evils" (and the quiet librarian versus the loud librarian) as Scalia put it.
Something to think about as we prepare to discuss the Lochner era and the Return of Substantive Due Process.
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