PREFACE
The Role of Canon Law in the Church
In the Name of God. Amen.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The opening words of Scripture are the root of Canon Law, the first recorded piece of divine legislation. The language of legislation is used throughout the creation story; “God said, ‘let there be light: and there was light,’” in God’s first command to humanity: “’Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it,’” and God’s first prohibition: “’Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat.’” Throughout the Old and New Testaments God’s law is revealed, culminating in the summary of the law given by Jesus. And when Christ bestowed the power of the keys and the power of binding and loosing to the Apostles, He delegated His law-making authority to the Church as part of its mission.
The legal authority of the Church has been exercised in different ways at different times in history. Canon Law is now an ancient and elaborate system, sometimes administered by the state, and sometimes administered as a private body of rules. The laws of the United States permit Churches to govern themselves – in their legislative, executive, and judicial actions – within the broad outlines of civil law, and inside that sphere of autonomy our Canon Law functions. The Minnesota legislature has gone farther, in some instances granting statutory force to Canon Law, a remarkably humble gesture for a powerful civil government in a nation without established religion. By doing so the State both complements and supports the constitutional guarantees of free exercise of religion, guarantees that would otherwise be brittle and porous.
Our Canon Law reflects centuries of experience and wisdom in church governance, both in England, and back to the early days of Christianity in the Western World. It is an important tool with which to grasp the self-government offered us by our nation. Refusing this opportunity would injure the Church’s mission by subjecting it to unnecessary outside control and curtailing our freedom to act. Nor is Canon Law contrary to the Gospel of love and liberation. Mature, complex communities such as the Church retain the bond of love, but for that bond to be effective there must be structures to acknowledge and resolve conflicting claims. If freedom is not freedom in structure, then it is no freedom. A community without boundaries, in which anything could happen, would not be liberating, but rather anxious and ineffective. Both authority and freedom are required in community life, and both are necessary to one another. Structure and law are not the opposites of freedom. The opposites of freedom are absolutism and tyranny. From the finite world still being created by God conflicts arise, conflicts which will not be resolved until the future age when God is all in all. Until that consummation, our structures of law and government, informed by the Gospel, carry forward the Church in mission. To the degree we cooperate in that structure, we respond to the great command to make disciples of all nations.
