Robert E. Rodes – författare

According to Robert Rodes, liberation theology—with its concern for the individual's to respond to building God's kingdom; its demand that Christians align themselves with the oppressed and work to reform or dismantle unjust social structures; and its recognition of the Church as a sign of God's salvific and liberating purpose—gives to the pursuit of justice through law an eschatological significance independent of any immediate or predictable consequences. Rodes assigned new importance to laws that symbolize aspirations they cannot fully implement, and laws that confront destructive forces they cannot fully implement, and laws that confront destructive forces they cannot fully contain. He begins by briefly discussing the basic tenets of liberation theology and relates them to goals that traditional jurisprudence has assigned to law. In later chapters he develops agendas for ameliorating some of the major problems in contemporary American life, rootlessness, powerlessness. He addresses each in light of past perceptions, how a Christian should respond to them today, and how law can respond to them.

Throughout his academic career, Robert E. Rodes, Jr., has tracked the legal history of the peculiar church-state relationship that has prevailed in England since the gospel was first preached to the Anglo-Saxon kings. Here he examines the legal materials (cases, statutes, canons, and measures) used in the English experience of updating the medieval synthesis of church and state.This volume begins with the restoration of the monarchy (and the Anglican Church) in 1660. The first chapter describes the relatively peaceful century and a half-from the Restoration to the reform agitation of the early nineteenth century-when the spiritual condition of the nation was more closely reflected in the institutional patterns of the church than it had ever been before or ever would be again. The next two chapters detail the painful juridical adjustments that had to be made when the old synthesis finally came unstuck and the church had to take its place among the other institutions of a modern, efficient, and pluralist state. The last chapters show the equally painful and far more tumultuous adjustments of the laws governing the church's doctrine, liturgy, and internal affairs to accompany its changed position in society.In addition to close examination of the legal materials, Rodes analyzes the anomaly of having an "established" church in a pluralist society, and deals with the dialectical tension between two ecclesiological emphases he calls "Erastianism" and "High Churchmanship." Using the English example, he also sets forth some thoughts on how a church-state relation should be structured. His professional legal analyses, fortified with extensive notes, will be clear to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.