The retirement of a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court affords the nation an opportunity to reflect on the nature of its laws and the practice of their interpretation.

In the minds of those who tend to think about such things, two camps present. There are those, represented by Justice Antonin Scalia, who insist on an "originalist" approach to law: we must always seek to interpret the Constitution according the intentions of the Founders. At the other end of the spectrum are those, like Justice Stevens, who see the Constitution as a "living" document, the meaning of which must be unpacked progressively, according to the changing situations of changing times.

Neither of these views is correct; nor are they entirely wrong. Both have some legitimacy; and both are inadequate.

Neither view is correct because, not to be too brief, we can never be quite certain what the Founders intended; at the same time, we must not fail to consult their wisdom in order to discern, as best we may, how they may have judged the changing circumstances of our own times. They remain, after all, the Founders of the greatest independent republic the world has ever known.

Both views therefore have some legitimacy: we must strive to understand the thinking of our Founders, and the laws in which they encoded their views; likewise, we must not be so foolish as to think that they could possibly have anticipated every nuance of application that subsequent historical circumstances might present.

However both the "originalist" and "living document" views of the Constitution are inadequate, alone or if, by some trick of legal alchemy, they may be combined. This is because the "spirit" of the Constitution emanates neither from the minds of the Founders nor the changing values, morals, and circumstances of any era.

The "spirit" of the Constitution - like it or not - arises both from the Law of God and the practice of that Law within the parishes of the Christian Church over the past two thousand years.

Dissevered from the Law of God and the voice of the Church, the Constitution is like a rugby ball. It is the temporary possession of whichever political philosophy possesses it, for as long as they may control and advance it toward their goal. The battle for the Constitution is a rough-and-tumble affair, with many scrums and laterals and collisions of bodies and tactics, yielding an occasional "score" for one side or the other, to the approving howls of one set of fans the audible moans of the other.

Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, the Church hands out tracts, pickets what it regards as the violence and folly of the game, and goes home after each contest convinced it's done all it can to make a difference.

But if the Church will neither teach the Law nor obey it; and it if persists both in ignoring the social and cultural heritage of our forebears and focusing instead on a narrowly pietistic "gospel", none of its protests or proselytizing will amount to anything other than harmless, albeit irritating, distractions in the parking lot of life. The struggle for the Constitution, and for the meaning of law itself, will continue apart from the input and influence of those whose heritage is both the provenance and the hope for law and morality.

T. M. Moore