It is no secret that more and more for-profit companies and non-profit organizations are using binding religious arbitration agreements as a means to bypass legal liability. It has been reported that entities that have little or no religious purpose, such as bamboo floor vendors and vocation cabin rental agencies, have quietly inserted binding arbitration clauses into everyday agreements. In the event of a dispute the consumers or victims cannot take these entities to a secular court, but rather to a religious tribunal that claims to be capable of settling any dispute using their interpretations of the Bible. A common reaction against these questionable practices follows this line of critique: shouldn’t religious arbitration, if tolerated at all, only be used for disputes concerning religious or spiritual matters on which the secular courts cannot adjudicate? What does buying bamboo floors or renting a vocation cabin have anything to do with Christian doctrines?
Unfortunately, these questions cannot adequately challenge the religious reasoning behind Christian arbitration agreements. This is due to the counter-intuitive fact that, according to relevant biblical texts, disputes settled in a so-called Christian arbitration tend not to be about important spiritual matters, but trivial matters instead. Here is the text pertaining to lawsuits among Christian believers:
“When one of you has a grievance against a brother, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? 2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, matters pertaining to this life! 4 (1 Corinthians 6: 1-4)
At first look, these verses seem to make a strong case for Christian arbitrations. However, upon a closer look, it could be argued that Christians can still settle disputes with others in court under certain circumstances. Verse 1 suggests that Christians shouldn’t “dare to go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints,” but it only excludes the court system if we assume that the judges at the civil courts are all “unrighteous sinners”. What if they’re not? What if some judges turn out to be devout Christians in private or possess “righteous” and “saintly” qualities? The remaining verses all point to the scope of judging powers the believers are entitled to, since they are to judge the entire world and even angels. Nonetheless, the structure of these rhetorical questions is meant to convince the believers that because they are qualified to judge angels, trivial earthly matters should be a piece of a cake. Since the disputes between Christians are not at all about angels or the whole world, these lines essentially imply that the matters that fall under the purview of Christian arbitrations are precisely trivial matters pertaining to this life on earth, not complicated spiritual affairs. Read More