Religionens plats i det offentliga rummet. Rättshistoriska och rättskulturella perspektiv

Abstract

Religion in the Public Square: Legal Historical and Legal Cultural Contexts

This article is based on a lecture held by the author when he received an honorary doctorate from the Theological Faculty at Lund University, May 27, 2004.

From a late modern perspective the author identifies the deep structures of law in relation to religion. After having been excluded by the modem era, critical to history and traditions, law, religion and politics again have increasingly become a part of the public square. Law and religion were in the premodem era closely related. Secularization, positivistic, realistic, rational and pragmatic views on law, however, have for more than a century excluded the field of church law from the cognitive structures of legal education and legal science.

In the late modern era, however, in the multi-cultural and multi-religious society of our times, the relation between law and religion is again on the agenda. The author wants to fulfil the intentions given by Göran Göransson when he, in an article of 1995, emphasized the need for a more contextual dimension of church law and argued for a theological analysis of law (Rechtstheologie).

With the help of legal historical and legal cultural examples from idealistical pre-modern society, the author identifies a legal culture which still is a Christian one. Through a comparative analysis he shows how the concepts of constitutional faith and civil religion, used in international discourses since the 1970’s, also are useful in identifying the current late modern Swedish legal culture.

New interdisciplinary centres for law and religion are founded both in the USA and in Europe, and in co-operation between the theological and law faculties in Copenhagen and Lund, a similar centre as well as a common course in Law and Religion within the legal education are in progress. Late modern legal cognitive structures thus can be identified with the help of the postmodern concepts of retraditionalization and desecularization.