It is an honor to be asked to give the 2002 annual lecture in honor of James Luther Adams, a great scholar, a great teacher, a great man. I remember him well, and miss his wisdom and his wit. He lives on, not only in his wide-ranging scholarly writings but also in the memories of his many creative actions and of his caring personality, memories still shared by dozens of his former colleagues and a multitude of his students.

It is also an honor to be asked to associate this lecture with the program on Issues of Faith and the Practice of Law sponsored by the Georgia Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism, the Atlanta Bar Association, and the Georgia Justice Project. I have had the privilege of attending some of the afternoon sessions of that program at which there were interesting and useful discussions of the lawyer's calling to bring his religious faith into his work, to serve God in his practice, and not to neglect what Jesus, in rebuking the Pharisees, called “the weightier matters of the law, which are justice and mercy and good faith.”

While the last and most recent of the revealed religions is generally considered to be Islam, religious scholars are gradually recognizing that a religion founded later in the modern era, the Bahā'ī Faith, displays all the characteristics of a universal religion. Whereas scholars working in the field of Islamic Studies tended in the past to treat this religion under the sub-heading “Islamic sects,” and Religious Studies scholars for many years paid little attention to it, more recent research counts the Bahā'ī Faith as one of the world religions.

The present study aims to provide an overview of the revealed law of the Bahā’ī Faith, which is of interest for students of both legal history and religious studies. We are entering virgin territory here, as no attempt has yet been made at a systematic jurisprudence, nor has a tradition of Bahā’ī jurisprudence been established that might compare with the Islamic Usūlu’l-figh. Since the foundations and principles of this law can be understood only within their theological context, and knowledge of this context is rare outside the Bahā’ī community, some basic background information about the faith will be provided first.

Although historically, the phenomenon of spiritual healing emerged as a religious practice within the context of specific religious traditions and has traditionally been ascribed only to mystics, saints, and holy persons, in modern times, a variety of spiritual healing practices unconnected with traditional religion have entered mainstream professional health care. These practices are used in a variety of health care professions, from medicine to nursing, dentistry, and other allied health professions.

For example, some physicians either collaborate with (or refer to) spiritual healers or use “‘healing energy’ through touch” without naming a particular style, school, or technique, and a spiritual healing modality known as Therapeutic Touch is part of the curriculum in many nursing schools. Use of caring or healing touch is increasingly described as potentially useful in various health care settings, from acute care, to surgery, to obstetrical nursing practice; and Reiki, a Japanese form of energy healing, has even been used in efforts to help survivors recover from torture.

Several years ago, I worked on a study of gambling for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I expected to find, and did find, substantial opposition to gambling. But in talking with various church groups, I heard a recurrent theme, one that often dominated the conversations: gambling may be a problem, even a serious problem, but our response must avoid “legalism” at all costs. One might explain this fear of “legalism” in sociological terms, as the response of people who were embarrassed by parochial moralisms in the past—prohibitions on drinking, dancing, and card playing. People who left Garrison Keillor's “Lake Wobegon” and moved to the Twin Cities (or worse yet, Chicago) want to be urbane. Or perhaps they simply want to enjoy their weekly lottery ticket or their annual trip to the casino without church-sponsored guilt. But more seems at stake in their hostility toward “legalism.”

I the Lord am your God
who brought you out of
the land of Egypt,
the house of bondage:
You shall have no other gods besides Me.
Exodus 20: 2-3.

It is one of the oldest stories around: A few or perhaps a dozen centuries ago, a person walking by a group of stone masons in a work crew at a half-finished cathedral asked each one in turn, “What are you doing?” The first replied, “I'm cutting stone.” The second said, “I'm earning the money I need to feed my family.” The third answered, “I'm building a cathedral.”

If today our passerby were to make a similar inquiry of three lawyers entering a courthouse, the answers might be, from the first, “I am going to argue a case,” and from the second, “I am working—billing some time—to feed my family.” If the third happened to have been influenced by Professor Thomas L. Shaffer, however, his response might be a bit more arresting. For over the past fifteen years Shaffer has been articulating with increasing clarity his perception that a lawyer is a person “called out of the church, sent out from [a] particular people, to do something that is religiously important.”