Text, Doctrine and Tradition in Law and Religion

Abstract

We inhabit different normative universes.1 We traverse different symbolic worlds.2 Symbolic worlds help us to orient ourselves within the flux of experience and supply us with coherent normative universes within which we can meaningfully live.3 Our symbolic worlds are constructed by our discourses—by the way we talk, argue and reason among ourselves about our norms and their meaning. Law and religion are the exemplars of symbolic worlds which are sustained by our legal and religious discourses. This article will focus on the legal discourse of constitutionalism within a common law system and the religious discourse of Western Christianity.4 It aims to probe and penetrate these discourses in order to understand their modes of operation. How are they structured? More specifically, what are their constitutive elements, and how are their constitutive elements related? For someone whose primary academic interest is in law, simply ‘staring at paradigms...