What’s The Big Fuss?

What’s all the fuss about confirming a Supreme Court Justice?  Yes, if confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could be on the Court for the next forty years or more.  But longevity isn’t the issue.  The real issue is very similar to the one religious people have regarding the Bible.  There are the “originalists”—they say everything in holy writ is the literal word of God and must not be tampered with or changed one iota. What it says is what it means.  The originalists would also argue that the King James Version of 1611 is the most valid translation, all others being suspect. Opposite the originalists are the modernists who argue that the Bible is not the literal word of God and that the Book is a living document that must be re-interpreted in each new generation. This divide was called the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy back in the early 20th century and it continues to this day.  Today we call the originalists, conservatives,  and the modernists, liberals.  

This is why the fuss just now and the big fuss that goes on every time there is a Supreme Court seat to be filled.  It is about the meaning of the Constitution.  Is it a living document?  Or is it only to be viewed from the founding fathers’ “original intent” (whatever that was)? The Democrats favor a “living Constitution,” one that must be re-interpreted with the changing times and new circumstances.  The Republicans, or the “originalists,” believe the document speaks for itself  and is to be taken quite literally, “and should be taken as something only slightly less compelling than holy writ.”

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) served on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991 as the first African-American justice. Marshall saw the Constitution as defective and needing amendments to fit new times and circumstances.  He was critical of the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution because their original intent (as he saw it) favored a government  that advanced slavery and prevented blacks and women from exercising the right to vote.  The Constitution, he said, was “defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”  In a 1987 speech, Marshall said that the 14th Amendment was a form of justice that the Founding Fathers had never envisioned, never intended, and never wanted.  The framers of the Constitution, he said, “could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave.”

In a nutshell, the big fuss going on right now is about whether or not we make the Founding Fathers  gods and their Constitution a God.  It is precisely the same situation among Christians with the Bible—do we make the Book god (Biblio-idolatry) or see it as a document that leads us to the Living God?