Religious Law in Modernity. The Canonical Validity Theory between Theonomic Universalism and the Plurality of Ecclesial Legal Cultures

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With the thesis of an end of Natural law in the actual debates on the foundational theory of law the idea of prepositive norms as validity sources of law is identified as questionable. Naturalistic arguments that does not convince secular and pluralistic societies any more, nevertheless, are still relevant in the legal theory of theonomic legal systems, although no longer beyond dispute; dissonances that are related with the natural reasoning increasingly also arise in religious legal orders. The legal theory of Canon Law as the law of the Catholic Church is above all faced with problems of legal acceptance and effectiveness that finally raise the validity question. As the discipline that deals with validity issues of the canonical legal order the fundamental theory of Canon Law is confronted with the task to look for foundational arguments that might convince the increasingly pluralistic members of the Church. This challenge is somewhat similar compared with the problems that secular scholars of legal theory face: both ecclesial and secular legal scholars have to evaluate the value and performance of validity claims raised in pluralistic societies. As in the secular also in the canonistical debates initially the culture paradigm becomes of interest, insofar as the local churches and their local cultures in their relevance for the development and application of canon law are more and more taken into account. A positive reference to culture as a validity source, yet, is hindered by the fact, that the phenomenon of cultural difference is ecclesiologically hard to digest in the canonical foundational thinking: For to protect the unity of faith and the truth claim connected with it the canonical foundational theory sticks to the idea of a fundamental unity of the law. In this tension between the local differences and pluralities and the ecclesial unity and its claim of the universal and the absolute the recent canonical validity questions have to be dealt with. The study analyses the potential of the culture argument as a validity source of Canon Law and models a theory that constructively combines the demands of difference and unity, plurality and universality, as well as of culture and nature.