Covenant Fidelity and Culture Wars
This chapter grapples with the evolving and sometimes contradictory ways in which Paul Ramsey approaches secular law in his efforts to work out the relationship of love and justice. Over the course of three decades, Ramsey moves from treating the law as a rich locus of insight on the concrete requirements of that relationship, to viewing the law a more or less neutral field ripe for the application of Christian norms, to depicting law as the menacing subject of a hostile takeover by secular liberal values. The chapter contends that this last stage is a harbinger of the legal strategy used by socially conservative culture warriors in later decades. It also argues that Ramsey never fully confronts the question of how law should respond to the phenomenon of human sinfulness.