The Schiavo case is very interesting. I admittedly have not followed the details of the case closely, and thus what I say should be taken with caution. What seems to me is that the court has been very restrained in its actions, treating the issue as one of privacy and legal custodianship for the disabled. The issue seems to be: who can determine what Terry Schiavo would have wanted? Her family? Her husband? The whole issue has been discussed over the issue of "rights" -- who has the right to decide to provide food or not for the disabled? The court does not have a capacity to respond for the Good of Life, but only is left with a language of rights to determine the case. Each individual must decide the good for his/her self -- that is our "right" to privacy. Of course, a good merely for an individual cannot participate in the Good at all. When the courts had the opportunity to be activist, instead they chose restraint in the name of privacy. The autonomy of the individual has been sustained -- the basis for American legal theory.

This seems to miss the issue completely, not legally, but Christianly. Christians must view life, not as a right, but as a gift. Here is one of most vulnerable and weak, so weak that she is unable to feed herself, one of the hungry. It does not seem to me that the Courts have ruled outside the rules of the United States legal system at all -- they have reaffirmed the Constitutions deepest convictions. The decisions shows the fundamental falsity of the US legal system.

Likewise, the New York Times reported that a Colorado state court disallowed a jury decision that condemned a man to death because members of the jury consulted a Bible. Nothing other than the supposedly unformed individual moral conscious could determine the matter.

The irony in this is thick. Obviously those who consulted the Scriptures were not capable of reading the Scriptures as Christians because they would again have realized that life is a gift, not a right to be taken away from anyone by the state. It is not the courts who should have taken the Scriptures away from these persons, but their churches -- if they were part of one (and I doubt that any were deeply immersed in the life of the church in its worship, sacraments, and works of mercy). Yet the courts demand that the person make judgments only as an autonomous human being, a citizen of the United States, not a tradition-based rationality such as Christians affirm that we are, ones that affirm life as a gift rather than a right that the State can give or take away. Here in order to sustain again individual autonomous morality, the Court is inappropriately activist, removing the moral formation of the Church from legal consideration of members of the jury.

In sum, it makes no difference whether courts are restrained or activistic in their decisions for Christians. The presuppositions of the system remind Christians that the judicial and legal system of the United States has no legitimacy for Christians. It is fundamentally a system that cannot reason according to the way things really are -- the gift of a Triune God who has called us through Jesus by the power of the Spirit.