Words on warrants

I get very tickled whenever I remember that Antonin Scalia is Catholic.

A whole lot of Christians misunderstand Judaism. I've been reading up on the Oral Torah, including Klinghoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, as well as a fair number of other interfaith dialogue works by folks like Amy-Jill Levine and Jacob Neusner. The notion is that the Talmud, which is filled with rulings and teaching stories from hordes of rabbis, is the written recording of an oral tradition that God handed down to Israel at Sinai alongside the written law that survives as the five books of Moses.

Not everyone goes along with it. Karaites accept the Tanakh as sacred, but reject all of the oral tradition as the work of humans and therefore not binding in the same sense. Jesus spoke against the oral tradition here, although digging out exactly how far His criticism went is more than I want to take on in this post.

To turn aside to Scalia for a second, I can report that he's the most rabid proponent of the idea that the Constitution ought to be construed only according to its original meaning, and that the legislative intent of Congress is irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a statute. In other words, binding documents are dead, not alive, and people who arrive later and explain their meaning anew using changed circumstance are doing violence to the best way of applying the law. He doesn't believe the Constitution is a living document; it means what it meant in 1787, and no more.

What tickles me about that is that the Roman Catholic church is, of the Christian denominations in the United States, the one closest to Rabbinic Judaism in its treatment of sacred scripture. Along with the Bible, there's the catechism, there's the magisterium, and there's a whole lot of tradition. Catholics include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, and popes, from time to time, announce that by divine revelation they've added to the understanding of what the Bible teaches, such as the immaculate conception and Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven.

Martin Luther's break with the church, with "Sola Scriptura" as his motto, is such a Scalian move. But in matters of faith, Scalia sides with people who want to make the Bible into a pliable, renewable, re-readable document in a way he'd never tolerate when it comes to the Constitution. I guess God is more in need of our help to clarify what He was saying than James Madison is.