Whilst Christian theology is familiar with questions about the relation of church and state, divine and human law, little attention has been devoted to questions of international law. Esther D. Reed offers a systematic engagement with contemporary issues of international law and its relevance for modern theology. Reed discusses numerous issue driven topics, including: challenges to classic just-war thinking from so-called fourth generation warfare, peoples and nationhood within divine providence, the ethics of territorial borders and the militarization of human intervention. By discussing selected biblical texts Reed helps to move the issues of international law higher up the agenda of Christian theology, ethics and moral reasoning.

This collective volume brings together contributions by academics in various fields of law and the humanities, in order to tackle the complex interactions between international law and religion. The originality and the variety of approaches makes this book a must-have for academics planning to approach the topic in the future.

This cross-disciplinary collaboration offers historical and contemporary scholarship exploring the interface of Christianity and international law. Christianity and International Law aims to understand and move past arguments, narratives and tropes that commonly frame law-religion studies in global governance. Readers are introduced to a range of confessional and critical perspectives explicitly engaging a diverse range of methodological and theoretical orientations to rethink how we experience and find ourselves caught within the phenomena of Christianity and international law.

In Political Theology and International Law, John D. Haskell offers an account of the intellectual debates surrounding the term ‘political theology’ in academic literature concerning international law. Beneath these differences is a shared tradition, or genre, within the literature that reinforces particular styles of characterising and engaging predicaments in global politics. The text develops an argument toward another way of thinking about what political theology might offer international law scholarship—a politics of truth.

One of the great tasks, perhaps the greatest, weighing on modern international lawyers is to craft a universal law and legal process capable of ordering relations among diverse people with differing religions, histories, cultures, laws, and languages. In so doing, we need to take the world's peoples as we find them and not pretend out of existence their wide variety. This volume builds on the eleven essaysedited by Mark Janis in 1991 in The Influence of Religion and the Development of International Law, more than doubling its authors and essays and covering more religious traditions. Now included are studies of the interface between international law and ancient religions, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as essays addressing the impact of religious thought on the literature and sources of international law, international courts, and human rights law.

In this book Christoph Stumpf investigates theological influences upon the legal theory of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who is regarded by many as the "father of modern international law". The author analyses how Grotius has contributed to the transformation and further development of international law from its roots in Christian theology to a trans-religious law of nations. From the theological substance in Grotius' views on international relations the author concludes that Grotius' legal theory can be perceived as a theological system of international law.

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern. This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.