Bible Studies 

prepared by The Revd Canon Dr James McPherson

Preface

I have taken the expression ‘Bible study’ to refer to engagement with biblical texts, using appropriate scholarly tools, with a view to:

  ·                understanding the texts themselves

·                relating them appropriately to Christian life and discipleship

·                especially in the context of professional legal practice

 Such engagement requires both technical theological skills and experience in the realities of the legal profession. While I can lay claim to the former, I must leave the latter to Christians in the profession. My suggestions for ‘application’ or ‘exploration’ derive from perceptions of the profession and its functioning, gained during my time as Minister to the Legal Profession in Sydney (1999-2001). Hopefully, our gifts and insights will complement each other and prove richly stimulating!

 The Convention theme is ‘What does the Lord require?’. With this focus, I have chosen three passages:

  ·                Luke 11.1-4 - The heart of praying

·                Isaiah 5.1-7 - The heart of justice

·                Romans 12.1-8 - The heart of discipleship

 I have provided background notes for each passage. Such notes are provided in extenso for practitioners’ further research and/or meditation if desired, and are not for live verbatim presentation. (Where I quote biblical texts or cite by verse numbers, the references are to the New Revised Standard Version.) I have cited various commentaries etc, some of which will be available currently through Christian bookshops and for others a theological library may be your only hope.

Following the background notes, I have identified some issues I perceive as relating to being a Christian in the legal profession, to help focus practitioner discussion and prayer. I have also provided some ‘stimulus’ material, for any wishing to explore more deeply.

 I look forward to our time together in Christ!

 The Revd Canon Dr James McPherson
Director of Ministry to the Legal Profession
Parish Church of St James, King Street, Sydney

 

Study One - The Lord’s Prayer: The heart of praying

Luke 11.1-4

Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial. Amen.

Introduction

Familiarity need not breed contempt - but it may certainly soothe, lull, hypnotise, anaesthetise...

 Two reasons why this text is so familiar:

  1        It purports to be an actual form of words from the Lord himself, teaching his disciples ‘how to pray’ (Mt 6.9-13, in ‘The Sermon on the Mount’; Lk 11.1-4 at the disciples’ explicit request); and

2               From frequent recitation in the liturgical branches of the church. (This latter affects everyone who attends an ecumenical gathering, or attends a funeral liturgy.)

 CG Weeramantry (Judge of the International Court of Justice, The Hague, formerly of Monash University) in 1998 published The Lord’s Prayer. Bridge to a Better World, exploring the Matthean text and addressing – in a practical way – the major themes of ‘trespass’ and ‘forgiveness’. I also refer to Chilton Jesus’ Prayer and Jesus’ Eucharist (1997), and to Johnson’s 1991 commentary on Luke’s gospel.  

Matthew’s version is longer than Luke’s. The other two gospels make no reference to it at all. The Didache, our earliest non-biblical liturgical text, basically follows Matthew’s version [Didache 8.2], and adds the doxology ‘...for yours is the power and glory, for ever and ever’. The Didache recommends that the prayer be said three times daily [8.3]. The development from Luke’s asperity to Matthew to the Didache is in the direction of liturgical fixture.

 Matthew’s text is more explanatory - it fills out the details. It is set in a more liturgical context involving communal issues: almsgiving, 6.2-4; places of prayer, 6.5-6; avoiding mechanical repetition, 6.7-8; the Lord’s Prayer itself (as a contrast?); forgiveness 6.14-15; and fasting 6.16-18. Luke’s version suggests the prayer is to be learned and recited.

 Can we see the Lord’s Prayer not as a ‘set piece’ for devout recitation (Lk, Didache) but as a template, a generative form, the core (critical minimal content) of the types of prayers Christians should utter? And secondly – by way of intriguing contrast - to see its original outline as best represented by its Lucan rather than its Matthean text?

 It is a first person plural prayer. The person praying belongs to the community of those who with Jesus himself call God ‘Father’ and together, through this prayer template, pray with one heart and will.

 This template is distinctively Christian prayer – it distils in memorable and compact form the essence of what Jesus claimed, taught, and did. Its logic is that if you call God ‘Father’ (which Jesus’ disciples can all do equally), you must yearn for the hallowing of God’s name and the coming of God’s kingdom, work for it, and rely on God for provision of all needs: physical, relational, spiritual.

 Chilton 1997 at 28: ‘Jesus here offers a systematic practice for the vision of God. Pray in this manner, he promises his disciples, and you will realise in your experience the kingdom which I have been representing.’

 Johnson 1991 at 179: ‘The prayer Jesus teaches his disciples authenticates his prophetic mission, for it shows that what he proclaims and what he performs in his ministry expresses the deepest reality of his own relationship with God.’

 The text

 Luke’s form then has two key features of ‘address’ and ‘petition’:

·                Address to God (1) as father, with (2) ‘hallowing’ of God’s name (petition?/affirmation?), and with (3) earnest longing for the coming of God’s kingdom (petition?/affirmation?);  

·                Petition for (1) bread, (2) forgiveness, and (3) steadfastness.

 If Jesus taught the prayer originally in Aramaic or Hebrew – rather than Greek - address (2) could equally be translated: ‘may your name be hallowed’ [= petition, ‘jussive’ third person imperative], OR ‘your name will be hallowed!’ [= affirmation]; similarly (3).  

Notice how the prayer’s focus changes from fulfilment for God’s honour in addresses 2 & 3, to petitioning God regarding our needs [second person imperative].  

Chilton discerns an ordered correspondence between the address elements and the petition elements. God is the creator, the loving Father, who will provide the essentials of life for his children, and the petition for ‘bread’ represents childlike reliance on God’s desire to provide.

 The hallowing of God’s name highlights the contrast between God’s holiness and our failure. Forgiveness is release from sin’s power to distort, disfigure, divide people from each other, and to destroy. Its human equivalent is comparable to release from a debt and debtors’ prison (Mt 18.30 uses almost exactly the same Greek word as 11.4b; cf the vivid imagery of Col 2.14). Forgiveness is also about restoration to relationship and therefore to community. Note that Jesus understood God’s passion for forgiveness to be so totally compelling that God would forgive those who extended forgiveness to others, and withhold it if such forgiveness was withheld (Mt 6.14-15; 12.31-32; 18.15-18, 21-35; Mk 3.28-30; 11.25; Lk 12.10; 17.3-4).

 The coming of God’s kingdom is accompanied by stringent judgment – can we remain steadfast until then? The temptation/test Jesus identifies, says Chilton [at 49], is ‘failure of integrity: forgetting who one’s father is, where holiness is located, that God’s kingdom is coming.’ Testing is both a chronic and an eschatological reality for Christ’s disciples, eg Lk 8.13, 22.28, cf 22.40&46 (Mount of Olives).

 How do you pray? Some people prefer the set texts of literary prayer (sometimes seeing such texts as springboards for their own meditations); some pray in tongues; some prefer to hold up various people/images consciously in God’s presence... The Lord’s Prayer virtually commends itself to any and all such approaches –it is a serviceable template for use by each and every Christian.

 Textual Note.

Some early manuscripts of Luke add a variant after ‘your kingdom come’, to pray ‘your Holy Spirit come on us and make us pure’.

 Note on translating 11.3.

The word translated ‘daily’ in the expression ‘our daily bread’  [epiousios] is not found anywhere else in Greek literature, so its translation is hazardous. Realistic options include ‘daily’, ‘future’, and ‘necessary’. So Johnson: ‘Give us every day the bread we need’, noting that Luke’s narrative context underlines the disciples’ need to depend on hospitality and grace for sustenance (11.5ff; also cf 10.1-7).

 Issues

  1.             ‘The prayer Jesus teaches his disciples authenticates his prophetic mission, for it shows that what he proclaims and what he performs in his ministry expresses the deepest reality of his own relationship with God.’ (Johnson) .

How do your prayer life and your professional life intersect and/or cohere?

  2.             The Lord’s Prayer commits us to mission as we align ourselves faithfully with Jesus’ own driving sense of mission and seek to further it (‘your kingdom come!’).

 How do you see mission in the context of your professional life?

3. Praying for ‘bread’. For centuries, commentators have interpreted this both literally and figuratively.

In a society where for many (but by no means all!) abundance is more of a problem than subsistence, what does it mean to pray for ‘bread’?

If (as some maintain) Christianity is concerned exclusively with spiritual wellbeing, can you pray for ‘ordinary’ and physical things, such as the outcome of a court proceeding? Justice? Peace? Human Rights?

4. The Lord’s Prayer at its heart raises searching questions about  the core of Christianity!

  To what extent can you see your work assisting or hindering (or  relating in any way to) the coming of God’s kingdom?

 Stimulus – A Prayer

 Father,
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.

Whatever you may do, I thank you;
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures –
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.  

Charles de Foucauld (1858 – 1916)

Study Two  - The Song of the vineyard:

The heart of justice

 

 Isaiah 5.1-7

 1   Let me sing for my beloved
    my love-song concerning his vineyard:
  My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.

  2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;
  he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;
  he expected it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded wild grapes.

  3 And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and people of Judah,
  judge between me
    and my vineyard.

  4 What more was there to do for my vineyard
    that I have not done in it?
  When I expected it to yield grapes,
    why did it yield wild grapes?

  5 And now I will tell you
    what I will do to my vineyard.
  I will remove its hedge,
    and it shall be devoured;
  I will break down its wall,
    and it shall be trampled down.

  6 I will make it a waste;
    it shall not be pruned or hoed,
    and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
  I will also command the clouds
    that they rain no rain upon it.

  7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
    is the house of Israel,
  and the people of Judah
    are his pleasant planting;
  he expected justice,
    but saw bloodshed;
  righteousness,
    but heard a cry!

 Introduction

 Isaiah ben Amoz is counted as one of ‘the eighth century prophets of social justice’ (along with Amos, Hosea, and Micah, all of whose works he seems to know). He lived in the southern kingdom of Judah, prophesying mainly 742-701 (?687?) BCE. Those years were decisive for Judah and devastating for its northern sister Israel – Israel was conquered by the Assyrians [‘the fall of Samaria’, 721 BCE] and, according to their consistent policy, its population deported and its land resettled by deportees from other vanquished nations. Judah survived, but as a (nervous!) vassal (2 Chr 28.21). At about the turn of the century, Judah conspired with Egypt against Assyria but Isaiah was scornful (30.1-7, 31.1-3), considering it a rebellion against God (28.14-22).

 Isaiah the man seems to have been ‘well-connected’ to Jerusalem’s political and religious leaders. He was highly literate. ‘No other figure of Old Testament literature shows so commanding a control of the use of irony and subtle word-play. Equally he shows himself to have been a master of hyperbole...’ [RE Clements 1980 at 13]. Other clues in the book indicate he was married to a prophetess [8.3], and they had at least three children [8.18]. Some have seen 6.1-8 as suggesting he may have been a priest in the Temple.

 Here is a man of privilege attacking social injustice as symptomatic of Judah’s tenuous relationship with God. He would have thoroughly identified with the statement of his northern kingdom contemporary, Amos: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities’ [Amos 3.2]. In other words, to be God’s elect was not to have drawn the winning ticket in life’s lottery; instead, it carried awesome responsibilities and any dereliction was heavily punishable.

 The Song of the Vineyard

 The Song best fits the historical-political context of the decade preceding the fall of Samaria. This Song might have been first uttered at the autumnal Feast of Tabernacles/Booths commemorating the wilderness wanderings but roughly coinciding with harvest and vintage time, and a time of rejoicing (Lv 23.34-43; Dt 16.13-15, cf Jn 7). The structure of vv1-3 follows that of a speech of accusation: the obligation between accuser and accused is described, the accuser gives an account of how he has fulfilled his duty, alleges that the accused has failed to fulfil his duty, and appeals to the court for decision. Jerusalem’s inhabitants [v3] constitute a court of popular appeal. If the ‘Booths’ setting is correct, they would be in full party mode, boisterously celebrating the harvest and the vintage and ready to follow any good lead. Obviously the vineyard itself is the problem, since it has received exemplary care but still yielded wild (= small and bitter) grapes.

 But there is another level of meaning. The cultural resonances suggest a wedding context: the singer of the Song is the best man, the friend of the bridegroom; the vineyard is a metaphor for the bride (cf Song of Solomon 2.15, 4.16f, 6.1f, 8.12; Hos 10.1; later developments of this imagery include Jer 2.21, Ezk 19.10-14, Ps 80.8-13). Read that way, the ‘harvest’ is the nuptials, but the bride has proved faithless, so this is a lament over a faithless lover. The crowd would probably have loved every bit of it, made lewd and malicious observations, and been ready to stone the bride for her perfidy (Dt 22.23f).

 Thus the crowd has been lured into vociferous judgment against themselves. The prophet Nathan similarly had King David pass judgment on himself (2 Sm 12.1-12 – a good survival strategy for Nathan, under the circumstances!).

 But who are the real dramatis personae here? Note end of v6 – only the LORD can command the clouds to withhold their rain. So into v7, which interprets it all. Isaiah here shows his mastery of subtle word-play here, which cannot be conveyed in English. A German commentator has managed to capture the sound-structure of Isaiah’s utterance for German-speakers:

 Und er harrte auf gut Regiment,
doch siehe da: Blutregiment!
Auf Rechtspruch,
und siehe da: Rechtsbruch.

[Duhm 1892, quoted by Kaiser 1972 ad loc]

Regiment = government, rule, suggesting that Blutregiment could be figuratively translated as ‘rule of blood’ or ‘reign of terror’. Rechtspruch = justice, verdict, sentence (depending on the legal context), whereas Rechtsbruch is infringement, breach.

Issues

  1.             Christians proclaim: ‘Our God is a just God’. What is it about ‘justice’ that makes injustice so abhorrent to God? Maybe injustice tears the social fabric so that God’s goals for humans to enjoy wholesome community life are thwarted ... Note such passages as Ex 23.1-9 and Lv 19.15f.

What do you discern there about the function of the law in society ‑ eg, the law as an instrument for maintaining the social fabric and protecting its integrity; the law as confronting, changing, or conforming to community mores? In other words, what do you see as the mission of the legal profession?

2.             There is a strong biblical tradition that every human being has inherent dignity because made in God’s image: eg Gn 1.26f, 9.6; Pr 14.31, 19.17, 22.2; Mt 25.31-46.

How does that undergird the Song of the Vineyard? ... and the Western legal tradition? ... and your own professional practice? [See ‘Stimulus’ below]

3.             As a Christian practitioner, do you have a working concept of ‘justice’ that is true to both your professional experience and your knowledge of God’s character?

4.             To what extent does the combination of your intellectual capacity, background, and educational opportunities constitute assiduous ‘care’ by God - and the legal profession a vineyard assiduously tended by God in anticipation of a good harvest?

I do not wish to suggest a profession can be ‘elected’ and therefore punished for defaulting (cf Amos 3.2), but to explore the idea that membership of a profession carries responsibilities for which the profession corporately and its members individually are accountable to God.

What is your reasonable return to God, here? How does that apply to your daily work context?

 

Stimulus (Dan Edwards)

I had given up Christianity during college ... My real religion had been a commitment to social justice [but for other reasons] I returned to the Church essentially as an experiment. I was looking for a God I had never known.

One of the reasons I rejected Christianity in my college days was that I couldn’t find much connection between the way of life taught in the New Testament and the lives lived by any professing Christians I knew... Now, I was a professionally ambitious lawyer in the 1980s American West, trying to build a law practice while raising two children. Whether I could reconcile my life with the radicalism of the New Testament was even more dubious now than before.

He then recalls the ‘sheep and goats’ passage Mt 25.31-46, esp 25.40; and the 3-page rap sheet of the pseudonymous Juan Alejandro he is about to visit. This occurred several months after his experimental return to the Church.

So perhaps here was something that smacked of Christianity in my practice. I was visiting Juan Alejandro in prison ... and he was surely one of ‘the least’ of Christ’s brothers measured by any standard – political, economic, or moral. That much was clear. Perhaps I was, in some spiritual sense, visiting Christ, notwithstanding the rap sheet. So I thought, but didn’t truly believe it. I just entertained the possibility.

Within a few minutes, I was sitting in the attorney visiting room, a tiny cinder block cubicle with a stool under a naked light bulb. There was a barred window through which I could speak with my client when he arrived. Eventually, Juan Alejandro came to the other side of the bared window, nodded and sat down. He was a small man, thin, with dark skin and a black beard. When I saw him, the first thing I thought of was his rap sheet. I remembered all the things he had done. But I forced myself to balance that thought with a recollection of the Matthew text. I tried to think of my client as having something of Christ in him.

We discussed the case, but we conversed with difficulty because he had little English and I had less Spanish. There were long pauses as one of us would try to think of the words, and the other would watch and wait expectantly. I don’t remember what I’d asked, or even if it was the answer to a question I was waiting for. I only know that Juan Alejandro was silent, and was looking at me quite openly and honestly, and I was watching his face closely and expectantly. Then I noticed the words rolling spontaneously and uninvited through my mind, ‘Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I was staring silently into the face of this prisoner with the three and one-half page rap sheet, praying to Christ in him to forgive me.

A decade later, in a Jesuit retreat centre across the continent from that Western jail, I had an equally powerful sense of Christ’s presence. But at no other time in those ten years did I have such an experience. At no other time did faith materialise into such a palpable reality.

After ten or more years’ legal practice, Dan Edwards is now an American Episcopal priest in Georgia, USA. This excerpt is from ‘Reflections on Three Stories: “Practicing” Law and Christianity at the Same Time’, a homily to a Faith and Law Symposium whose proceedings appeared Texas Tech Law Review vol 27 no 3. Reprinted in book format, Thomas Baker and Timothy W Floyd (eds) Can a Good Christian be a Good Lawyer? Notre Dame Press 1998.


Convention Service (Saturday Night)

The heart of discipleship

Romans 12.1-8

  I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ² Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.

  ³ For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. ⁴ For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, ⁵ so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. ⁶ We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ⁷ ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; ⁸ the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

 The first two verses are memorable, well known, often quoted – and incredibly compressed! They begin a new section of the letter, which gives them a special added contextual force. The ‘unpacking’ then begins at v3.

 I think it most straightforward to begin with vv4 & 5:

 For as in the one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

 The figure of the body as a unity made up of various members occurs frequently in ancient literature, but Paul gives it a new twist ... one body in Christ. Whatever other social or other human unity the Christians in Rome may have enjoyed, the unity to which Paul appeals is that which they have only by virtue of what God has done for them in Christ. The rest of the ‘body’ simile here is that although like the members of an organic body they differ from each other and fulfil different functions, all are necessary to each other and equally under an obligation to serve one another, because they all belong together in a single whole.

 The ‘body’ simile can equally be used of the legal profession, and vv6-8 adapted accordingly. But this is precisely what distinguishes Paul’s imagery! Respectful mutuality for colleagues in your profession, with the appropriate acknowledgment of their gifts and experience and achievements, is based on personal achievement. Whereas the unity to which Paul exhorts the Roman Christians is based solely and completely on the unique unrepeatable and totally sufficient achievement of Christ - as the only one with standing and capable to make it - to which we, even at the zenith of human potential, can contribute nothing. ‘The body of Christ’ is therefore a great equaliser (just as is the address ‘Father’ in the Lord’s Prayer), because it depends entirely on what has already been done for us in Christ.  

For by the grace of God given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.  

The sting is in the tail. RSV, NIV, REB all supply a pronoun (eg RSV ‘... which God has assigned him’). This clarifies the Greek, but obscures the meaning. The ‘measure of faith’ is external and objective - it is what God has done in Christ. It is not internal and subjective – as though, ‘the stronger your faith, the more sober should your self-assessment be’ (although I believe that in itself enunciates an important principle of discipleship!). Rather, Paul is insisting here that God has already established the benchmark, once for all. Its import is that Christians recognise themselves to be all on the same level, not comparing each other’s relative faith strength but eternally grateful that any have faith at all and that God has provided the opportunity for them to have faith in the first place. The internal evidence suggests this was a problem for the Christians at Rome. Some Gentile believers looked down on their Jewish fellow-believers (see 11.13-31). Some Jewish Christians had scruples about eating meat, drinking wine, and observing the sabbath (see 14.1-23; note especially the principle enunciated in 14.10, none of us is competent to pass judgment on another believer, we will instead all be accountable before God ourselves). Here (12.3) Paul insists on God’s unique benchmark for Christian self-assessment. Hence the importance of the opening clause, ‘by the grace of God given to me’ ... Other than or outside that grace, he has no grounds for appeal to them. (V3 merely begins with ‘I say to you...’, whereas v1 begins with the very strong expression ‘I appeal to you ...’)  

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The ‘appeal’ is not an imploring or an inviting to consider - it has urgency, earnestness, and authority. It is an authoritative summons to obedience issued in the name of the gospel. (Cf eg Acts 2.40; 1 Cor 1.10, 4.16; Php 4.2; and many others!)

The concept of a ‘living sacrifice’ is not oxymoronic. The OT recognises that the terminology of ‘sacrifice’ may be applied to the worshipper’s inward disposition of prayer and praise (Isa 1.10-17; Hos 6.6; Amos 5.21-24; Ps 51.15-17, 141.2; cf Mic 6.8!) and the NT see Heb 13.15 (cf Php 2.17f). Here, it is the Christian’s self (as represented here by ‘bodies’) which is to be offered - but of course, not destroyed. The offering itself is of ongoing self-surrender. By using the terminology of ritual sacrifice, Paul suggests that ‘the body’ (as agent of the total self) passes from the offerer’s possession at the time of offering, into God’s possession.

Thus the action of ‘worshipping’ is given content – the continuous offering of our whole selves in all our concrete living is our ‘logical’ (NRSV, ‘spiritual’, mg ‘reasonable’) ongoing action of worship. It is ‘logical’ in the sense of being utterly consistent with a proper understanding (perceiving the logos) of what God has done for us in Christ.  

Conformation/transformation requires a renewing of the mind –cognitively, volitionally and morally. The dynamics of cultural pressures, whether overt or covert, tend towards conformation. The Christian must therefore be alert, and discerning. From chapters 7 & 8, it is clear that this work of renewing is that of the Spirit of God, who in turn facilitates discernment; also that it is beyond the power of the individual. Thus it is the Spirit’s work. Not that the Christian is merely passive! The believer is a responsible sharer in it, yielding freely to the Spirit’s leading, having already offered and continuing to offer his/her body ‘as a living sacrifice ... to God’.  

The integrity of the passage 12.1-8 is clear. The benchmark is what God has done for us in Christ; we dare not sit in judgment on each other or disparage fellow believers. This was a problem for the Roman Christians. Paul indicates that once they grasp the essence of the gospel and the levelling it brings, they are to offer themselves to God totally (in all their relationships with each other, as well as in the other concrete details of their lives); then, led by the Spirit, their minds will be renewed and their discernment enhanced towards mature discipleship. No longer will they need to sit in judgment on each other. Christian discipleship and community revolve around what God has already done, and the only reasonable (logical) response open to us, of continual self-offering. As far as Paul is concerned, that is the only possible starting point; and, starting there, the rest locks into place.  

Issues

  1.             As a member of a profession with significant educational entry requirements, you have already experienced something of a ‘renewing of the mind’. You have learned cases, arguments, principles, and precepts. You can frame an argument in the appropriate legal style and according to requirements. You can critically evaluate a legal argument. You can realistically assess whether there is value for anyone in bringing an action. You can conduct yourself appropriately according to the ethos and values and ideals of your profession.

How does the legal profession (and maybe other professions) resemble - or differ from - Christian ‘profession’, ie discipleship? Do they complement each other? Inform each other?


2.             How has your membership of the legal profession helped shape your character? Your understanding of Christian faith and discipleship? What have the good bits been, and how have you handled the not-so-good bits?

3.             ‘Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice ...’. This can sometimes be the lifestyle command imposed by employers.

How do you respond to such pressures? What limits might be appropriate? How can you discern conscientious commitment from slavery, inappropriate ambition, or various symptoms of dysfunctionality?

4.             How can/should Christian lawyers relate to each other as Christians when they meet in different legal contexts (eg as opponents in court; across a negotiating table; etc)? Is there an ethic of Christian professionalism? Can there ever be such an ethic?

5.           What do you see as the mission of a Christian in legal practice and of the body of Christians in the profession - what does the Lord require of a Christian legal practitioner? What can you do, individually? What can you - as Christian lawyers - do to share understandings, support each other, mentor new practitioners, mentor lawyers who are new Christians, and generally relate to each other ‘in Christ’?