Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:17:02.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Questions from a Canonist’s Point of View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2019

Judith Hahn
Affiliation:
Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany
Get access

Summary

In modern societies' competition of ideas, the church’s positions are taken to be increasingly unconvincing when based on neo-scholastic natural law (ahistoric understanding of the law, positivism, voluntarism). Neo-scholastic natural law struggles with the historicity and culturality of norms. This is a theological problem, as an ahistoric understanding of the law misses the incarnatorial structure of divine law. It is a sociological problem, as an ahistoric and supercultural perception of the law conflicts with the secular understanding of it, creating communication problems between the church and society. Neo-scholastic thought also struggles with the modern idea of freedom. As individual freedom is mistrusted as tending towards relativism, perceiving the truth is handed over to the magisterium, whose findings the faithful are to receive with obedience. Yet, as the magisterium is likewise confronted with the problem of perceiving the naturally just, the question arises why church hierarchy would be better suited to recognising a prepositive normativity than other faithful. Modern theology cannot provide a satisfactory answer to this question. The theory of the sense of faith rather strengthens the idea that perceiving the truth is a competence possessed by the entire people of God.
Type
Chapter
Information
Church Law in Modernity
Toward a Theory of Canon Law between Nature and Culture
, pp. 59 - 115
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×