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

在关于法律基础理论的实际争论中，以“自然法的终结”为主题的先行规范作为法律效力来源的观念被认为是值得怀疑的。然而，不能再说服世俗和多元社会的自然主义论点，在神权法律体系的法律理论中仍然是相关的，尽管不再是无可争议的；与自然推理相关的不和谐也越来越多地出现在宗教法律秩序中。教会法作为天主教会的法律，其法律理论首先面临着法律接受和法律效力的问题，最终提出了有效性问题。作为一门研究教会法律秩序有效性问题的学科，教会法的基本理论面临着寻找能够说服日益多元化的教会成员的基本论点的任务。这一挑战与世俗法律理论学者所面临的问题有些相似：教会和世俗法律学者都必须评估多元社会中提出的有效性主张的价值和表现。就像在世俗中一样，在正统的辩论中，最初的文化范式变得有趣，因为地方教会和他们的地方文化与教会法的发展和应用的关系越来越多地被考虑在内。然而，文化差异现象在教会学上难以被规范基础思想所消化，这一事实阻碍了文化作为有效性来源的积极参考。为了保护信仰的统一性和与之相关的真理主张，规范基础理论坚持法律的基本统一性。在地方差异和多元性之间的紧张关系中，教会的统一及其对普遍和绝对的主张，必须处理最近的规范有效性问题。本研究分析了文化论证作为教会法有效性来源的潜力，并构建了一种建设性地结合差异性与统一性、多元性与普遍性、文化与自然要求的理论模型。

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.