Faith, The Constitution and Interpretation

There are times when you just feel good that there are others who hold the same ideas about a topic. In this case the Patriot Post had this recent newsletter on the Constitution. It is very good and has mirrored some of my views… the correlation between how the Bible is treated by the lib churches and how libs in the society treat the Constitution.

But what, you ask, does this Bible lesson have to do with the Constitution? In truth, the same fallacies that affect biblical interpretation also affect our interpretation of the Constitution.

The belief in a Constitution subject to the evolving interpretation of the judiciary has as its origin the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall ruled, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” All well and good if the courts would continue to interpret the law exegetically, but as history would soon show, constitutional eisegesis was lurking just around the corner….

By 1987, living constitutionalism had become such the norm that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a lecture, “The Constitution: A Living Document,” in which he argued that the Constitution must be interpreted to the age in which it existed, given prevailing political, moral and cultural norms.

More recently, “living” jurist Anthony Kennedy and court jesters Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens cited “national consensus” as a factor in last year’s Roper v. Simmons ruling. In doing so, they disregarded the Constitution’s prescription for federalism and republican government in the name of unmitigated democracy — and took us one step closer toward what every serious thinker since Plato has described as governance in its most degenerative form.

Just as the problem of biblical and constitutional eisegesis is essentially the same, so too is the solution. For centuries, a fundamental guiding principle has directed proper scriptural exegesis: Scripture interprets Scripture. That is to say, the primary lens for understanding a text is the text elsewhere in the Bible — thus, we interpret the Bible through what the Bible says.

With the Constitution, the concept is easily applied. The Separation Clause certainly calls Marbury into question, and the Tenth Amendment contradicts the Roper decision, not to mention Roe v. Wade and the illusory constitutional “right to privacy.” Further, the constitutional basis for Kelo is simply absent, as are our First Amendment rights under McCain-Feingold. And let’s not forget the myriad laws that infringe upon our rights guaranteed by the Second.

The same detrimental philosophy has undermined the use of the Scriptures and has undermined the authority of the Constitution. The libs have long been attacking the foundation of those in ‘churches’ so that they would buy the same lie about the Constitution. As the old adage goes… if you don’t land on the truth you will fall for anything. We are now seeing its fruits.

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