| Jack Straw has intimated that the United Kingdom is moving towards a written constitution. It is a momentous step after centuries of flexibility, but it may be a good one. Sometimes, the executive can bend practices its own way, and that is not a recipe for principled government. The recent demise of collective Cabinet responsibility may not have been for the best.
Yet a written constitution can take many forms. Its formulation can be dry and tedious, not bringing out the principles by which we are to be governed. Or, better, it can bring out the spirit and principles of how we are to be governed.
The written constitution should not be opaque, but should give all of us a sense of how government should operate. There is a strong argument for saying that constitutional law should first be in ordinary language for the people, and only subsequently in lawyers’ more precise expressions.
Christians, and others, often refer to Christian influence on our laws and constitution, but stop vaguely at that. Surely, through ordinary democratic processes, Christian constitutional understandings should enter this seminal deliberation. The books of Moses represent the greatest constitutional document the world has ever known, and the 17th-century Puritan revolution was the biggest seedbed of constitutional formation in British history.
Yet Christian contributions from Hooker, Coke, Cromwell, the Levellers, Rutherford, Milton, and hosts of other later figures have hardly been fashioned into a coherent Christian whole.
Constitutionalism in the United States owed much to the early Puritan settlers. Yet here in the UK constitutional theory is piecemeal, and Christian constitutional awareness limited. We might mumble Acton’s dictum that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” without knowing that it comes from Christian constitutional reflection. The time has come to make a coherent contribution, one such as can last 1000 years.
Such principles cannot be dissociated from theology. They will, of necessity, relate to God, and profound political lessons will come from Christ. One of the most important lessons Christ taught us is that government is the servant of the people, not its overweening master. He exposes the rulers who control “their” people, and then with a sharp “Not so with you” sets up the model of service that, by and large, shapes our conception of government and office (Matthew 20.25-28).
In every area similar principles emerge. The rule of law grows from the Mosaic Law. It includes the idea of impartiality, because God is no respecter of persons, even to the forbidding of partiality to the poor. This is an astonishing emphasis, when in most countries partiality to the rich is still embedded in the system.
There are many other such principles. One important area of debate is the idea of sovereignty. There are now various traditions arguing that neither the state, the people, the monarch, nor the party is sovereign. But, already, there is a strong Christian tradition that recognises that the sovereignty of God and the gentle rule of Christ deny sovereignty to any human power. As Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Prime Minister and theologian, said: “When you bow the knee to God, you do it to no one else.”
Christian principles are always voluntary: Christ never imposed anything on anyone. We might therefore think about the constitutional principles embodied in our faith, and proffer them to our neighbours. They are free before God to accept or reject them, but they may be the best on offer.
Dr Alan Storkey is the author of Jesus and Politics (Baker Book House, 2005). |
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