When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? 2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels, to say nothing of ordinary matters? 4 If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one person wise enough to decide between brothers and sisters? 6 Instead, brothers and sisters go to court against one another, and this before the unbelievers.7 In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? 8 But you yourselves wrong and defraud—and brothers and sisters at that.9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, men who engage in illicit sex, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. – 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 (NRSV)
As I write this, I am a few weeks removed from donning a velvet-striped robe, funny-looking puffy hat (called a tam), and purple doctoral hood to strut across a stage and collect my Juris Doctorate, the degree awarded in the United States to law school graduates. As you’re reading this, I am likely buried nose-deep into any one of the six hefty tomes sent to me to help me study for the Bar Exam so I can be licensed as a practicing attorney.
Getting a law degree comes at the culmination of a lot of hard work: to tame legions of dense material, all to unleash each idiosyncratic legal rule or case citation at precisely the right moment of a flurried exam; to sit and write page after page of memos and briefs and research papers, all adorned with the impenetrable and highly silly citation style of the legal world (known as “bluebook” style after the bright and unassuming spiral-bound book of rules that haunts every law student’s nightmares); to keep ahold of myself in a profession that seeks to render its members anonymous, amoral vessels of some disembodied and disinterested thing called “law.”
All of that to say that I’m exhausted, grateful to be through it, proud of myself, excited for the future, and, oh yeah, having something of a personal crisis. Namely: can you really be a Brethren lawyer?
When I was applying to law school, I was in the midst of my year of Brethren Volunteer Service, working in Elgin, IL in the denominational headquarters’ Youth and Young Adult Ministry office. I remember typing away at my admissions essays during BVS orientation after everyone went to bed. I completed numerous admissions interviews from my office in Elgin and bounded down the halls to tell my wife Marissa—a BVSer for another denominational department—the good news of my first acceptance a few weeks later. When I finally enrolled in a law school, I went out with my BVS housemates for ice cream to celebrate (blueberry, in honor of my new school’s colors). In other words, my path to the law was shaded by many of the hallmarks of being Brethren: service, community, and, of course, finding any excuse to get ice cream.
Part of the standard law school application invites applicants to discuss how they would add diversity (in the broadest sense) to the law school class. I wrote about my background in the Church of the Brethren, about how my “devotion to justice, wholeness, simplicity, and peace—drawn from my spiritual well—[would] serve me as a law student” and offer a fresh and needed perspective to my law school community and the legal profession. “Few Brethren become lawyers,” I observed, to further support that I had something unique to offer the campus culture.
At the time, I had in mind the rare, countercultural perspective that being anabaptist lends us on matters of justice, mercy, policy, and society. Perhaps I should have been thinking more about what it reveals about being Brethren that not many in the church go on to become lawyers. After all, I assume that few Brethren become weapons manufacturers, either, and it’s probably not a coincidence so much as a catechism.
At the most elemental level, being a lawyer is about bending and manipulating the collective power of society to achieve certain goals. Perhaps you can see how that sits uneasily with what it means to be Brethren.
Laws are how we all “agree” to get along. They are handed down by institutions—legislatures, executive bodies, administrative agencies, judges, and so on—whose power ultimately comes from people who together “agree” to be governed by them. And they are backed up by the might of the state, which can take your liberty or your property, or even your life if you break the laws you “agree” to obey.
At least that’s the story we tell ourselves. You might notice the scare quotes around “agree” because, in reality, none of us have ever knowingly agreed to any of this, and there’s no ongoing choice to opt in or out. On the contrary, few people today feel like we have a real say in the laws imposed upon us by institutions that we seldom feel represent us. Bills that enjoy broadly popular support languish in the legislature while laws that seem not to benefit anyone but the already rich and powerful sail through, often with bipartisan support. Unless you’re a lobbyist or someone who can afford to hire a lobbyist, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that you feel you have any stake in crafting the law, even as the yoke of law bears down heavier and heavier upon your shoulders.
So, those are two accounts of what “law” is, one more optimistic and idealized, one more cynical and realistic, but both rooted in the idea that laws are the power of the state (from whatever source derived) written down to set a code of conduct that binds the people within that state. That’s what it means to be subject to the “rule of law.” Whichever account is true, the law is hardly as solid or straightforward as we’d hope. Rather, we’re all swimming in a murky soup of rules and principles we have barely more awareness of than a fish has of water, let alone comprehension.
That’s where lawyers come in. Lawyers take this ethereal substance of law and fashion it into instruments—contracts, mediations, lawsuits, defenses, etc.—that help people navigate the uncertainty. Lawyers, in other words, harness state power, as expressed through the law, to help people accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, from starting a business to buying a building to avoiding a prison sentence to recouping medical bills incurred in an accident to dodging a regulation, and so on.
Brethren have historically had an uneasy relationship with state power, to make an understatement. Our first acts as a denomination were all in defiance of the powers that be: meeting in secret to interpreting the words of the Bible for ourselves, then baptizing one another into a fellowship of Christ outside of the state’s official church. Historically, Anabaptists were drowned by the state for baptizing as they do, not to mention worshipping and believing how they do. The Brethren came into being at a time when church and law were largely synonymous, making them, as outsiders of the church, outlaws as well. Unsurprisingly, the Brethren have long professed the virtue of keeping separate the institutions of church and state.
Of course, our enduring witness as a peace church is perhaps the best example of all. Brethren have been jailed and ostracized and distrusted by state and society alike for refusing to buy into the logic of war and the legitimacy of state violence of any form. Uncomfortably, then, state violence supplies another theory for the foundations of the legitimacy of law—states can bind us by law because they alone have the right to use violence. The rest of us use the law to resolve our problems and know that the ax of the state stands ready to fall on us if we resort to other means. But if Brethren believe state violence itself is illegitimate, and state violence legitimizes law, where does that leave Brethren and the law? And where does that leave Brethren lawyers?
These things weren’t on my mind when I applied to law school. What was on my mind is what you can potentially do with a law degree and how those things align with Brethren values—things like standing up for civil rights or environmental justice, helping a low-income person navigate the legal system, or advocating for just and peaceful public policy. Knowing that the law is unfair to so many, perhaps I could be someone using the law to improve the lives of people it often leaves behind, if not downright tramples upon.
I’m sure that’s the right thinking, but I’m no longer sure it’s good enough. After all, if I said I wanted to accomplish any of those same goals with a gun or a bomb, surely that wouldn’t be a satisfactory justification, as a member of the Church of the Brethren or otherwise. We reject ends-justify-the-means logic; that’s just part of the deal of being a peace church. And if the law is itself an instrument of force, being backed up by state violence, is it a plausible means for bringing about the world that we as Brethren would prefer to inhabit?
I really don’t know. Hence, personal crisis.
Then again, legal advocacy, or at least legal-adjacent advocacy, is not unfamiliar to the Church of the Brethren. For instance, our denomination maintains an office in Washington, DC that advocates various public policy issues important to the church, from ending war and reducing military spending on things like drones, to conserving the environment, to supporting programs that reduce hunger and serve human needs. There’s another word for what goes on there: lobbying (gasp!), and despite how loaded that term may be, I find myself grateful that there is an ongoing witness to the Brethren’ point of view on Capitol Hill amid times of war and strife and raging inequality.
To take another example, one of the many great ministries within the Church is the Death Row Support Project, which stands certainly not aligned with, but adjacent to the criminal legal system, seeking to be some kind of balm to the indignity, dehumanization, and destruction that seeps from that institution. Here’s another: annually, high school youth in the COB are invited to attend the “Christian Citizenship Seminar,” where they learn about how the church relates to society and how to bring a Christian witness to pressing social issues through legislative advocacy and other tools.
Throughout the life of the Church of the Brethren, we have grappled with what it means to be mostly outside of, but sometimes navigating adjacent to and within, this hulking and terribly powerful thing we know as the state. Brethren have at times wrenched over whether to, for instance, pay taxes, vote in elections, or even hold elected office ourselves. For that, we can thank our Anabaptist angst–“Anabaptist political theology traditionally centers itself around its version of two-kingdom theology: the kingdom of the world in opposition to the kingdom of Christ.”1
The Schleitheim Confession, one early statement of Anabaptist principles, admonished to keep separate from “the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world” including “civic affairs.” It also declared that it was “not appropriate for a Christian to serve as a magistrate” because “government magistracy is according to the flesh, but the Christians’ is according to the Spirit.” And the Confession forswore swearing (oaths, that is), rebuking binding ourselves to any authority other than God. The Swiss Anabaptists who penned the Confession in 1527 predated American-style republican democracy; voting would have been largely foreign to them. But I can only imagine that voting would not exactly vibe with their separatist sensibilities.
And yet, our 1967 Annual Conference Statement on Christian Citizenship calls on members to be “informed citizen[s], go to the polls regularly, and vote for candidates and measures which he or she considers most likely to approximate Christian standards” and encourages members “to consider seriously the call to public life [meaning, elected office] as an opportunity for Christian vocation and mission.” What does it mean to cast a vote in an election for the commander in chief of the military? Or in congressional elections, when the victors of those elections may be called upon to declare war, and annually will churn out ever-expanding military budgets? Or for a local prosecutor who will lock human beings in cages and might seek to extinguish a life altogether? We can comfort ourselves by trying to vote for candidates we think are more aligned with our values, but candidates from either major party, at the very least, will be imperfect vessels of those preferences. And then there’s the question of how much by merely participating in the process, regardless of which candidate wins, we legitimize and attach our consent to everything that ultimately follows, wars and all.
On the other hand, it’s fair to ask, what does it mean to sit those decisions out, knowing how consequential elections can be for justice, mercy, and peace (or the lack of all three)? As we put it in 1967, “[t]he words, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (Mark 12:17), must never be taken to mean that God does not care what Caesar does or leaves undone.”
Voting in an election is a small-scale version of what lawyers do every day. When we vote, we enter the apparatus of the state to effect our vision of a good and just society. So if the question of voting as a member of the Church of the Brethren can be so fraught, how much more complicated for the Brethren lawyer, whose job is to use the levers of the state to do the same day in and day out.
In 1967, we resolved that “under God, both state and church are to be instruments for expressing love of neighbor.” That’s proven to be more aspiration than reality, for both institutions. But if the state really is to be an instrument for love, I suppose you need instrumentalists with practiced fingers and trained ears to make it so.
Even so, having just become a Brethren lawyer, I’m not at all convinced that the term isn’t an oxymoron. But here I am, and, even if we’re rare, I’m not the only one. And while I might be one of the newest Brethren lawyers, I doubt I’ll be the last. It is on each of us who hold that dubious title to wrestle with the discomfort and contradictions of it and not forget ourselves, our church, or God in the process.
And how dare you take each other to court! When you think you have been wronged, does it make any sense to go before a court that knows nothing of God’s ways instead of a family of Christians? The day is coming when the world is going to stand before a jury made up of followers of Jesus. If someday you are going to rule on the world’s fate, wouldn’t it be a good idea to practice on some of these smaller cases? Why, we’re even going to judge angels! So why not these everyday affairs? As these disagreements and wrongs surface, why would you ever entrust them to the judgment of people you don’t trust in any other way? I say this as bluntly as I can to wake you up to the stupidity of what you’re doing. Is it possible that there isn’t one levelheaded person among you who can make fair decisions when disagreements and disputes come up? I don’t believe it. And here you are taking each other to court before people who don’t even believe in God! How can they render justice if they don’t believe in the God of justice? These court cases are a black eye on your community. Wouldn’t it be far better to just take it, to let yourselves be wronged and forget it? All you’re doing is providing fuel for more wrong, more injustice, bringing more hurt to the people of your own spiritual family. Don’t you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom. A number of you know from experience what I’m talking about, for not so long ago you were on that list. Since then, you’ve been cleaned up and given a fresh start by Jesus, our Master, our Messiah, and by our God present in us, the Spirit. – 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 (MSG)
Emmett Witkovsky-Eldred is a member of the Hollidaysburg (PA) Church of the Brethren and currently resides in New Haven, CT with his wife Marissa, three cats, and a dog who torments them. A former BVSer in the Church of the Brethren Youth and Young Adult Ministry office and a host of the Dunker Punks Podcast, he is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and Yale Law School.
- Ian Dyck, Were the Early Anabaptists Proto-Anarchists? Macrina Magazine (Jan. 4, 2020), https://macrinamagazine.com/theology/guest/2020/01/04/were-the-early-anabaptists-proto-anarchists/.