The Trinity, the “Prevailing Religion,” and the Greek Constitution

Effie Fokas, Senior Research Fellow, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy; Research Associate, London School of Economics Hellenic Observatory

The implications, potential and real, of the references to religion in the Greek Constitution entail a perennial socio-legal conundrum in Greece and the subject of intense legal and political debate. In this post, I will introduce readers to those references to religion in the text of the constitution and explore some ways in which they have both potential and real impact upon Greek socio-legal life.

The Current Greek Constitution and Sacramental Categories

The current Greek Constitution was drafted in 1974 following the end of a military dictatorship; it came into effect in 1975 and underwent amendments in 1986, 2001, 2008, and 2019. Consistently, however, since its 1974 formulation, the Constitution of Greece is  presented “[i]n the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity”; these are the words the reader first encounters under the title, “The Constitution of Greece.” To the general reader, “consubstantial” will be a rather unintelligible theological notion; it means “of one and the same substance, essence, or nature” and denotes here the oneness of the three “persons” of the Trinity—God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. (more…)

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God in Grundgesetz

Justin Collings is Francis R. Kirkham Professor of Law at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School and author of Democracy’s Guardians: A History of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 1951-2001 (Oxford University Press, 2015)

God is in the Grundgesetz—Germany’s Basic Law or postwar constitution—and right there at the beginning, the first proper noun in the entire document. “Conscious of their responsibility before God and man . . . ,” the preamble begins, and God comes first.

By putting God in the preamble, the Basic Law’s framers were not simply following tradition. The Weimar Constitution made no mention of God, nor did Bismarck’s Constitution for the German Empire, nor did the abortive “Paul’s Church” Constitution of 1848. And nor, most famously, did the U.S. Constitution of 1787, the oldest written constitution of them all. So what led the Basic Law’s framers to invoke—or at least to mention—God in the Constitution of 1949?

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God in the Irish Constitution

Dr. David Kenny is Assistant Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin

Upon first reading, God, and some of his consistent personages, plays a striking and prominent role in the Irish Constitution. But like many things, the meaning and effect of this is not as clear and as obvious as one might think, and the real story of the God in the Irish Constitution is more complicated than one might initially assume.

A Godly Preamble

In their first week of law school, I have my Constitutional Law students read the Irish Constitution and ask for their impressions. For almost all of them, it is their first time reading the text in full. Every year, multiple students note the religiosity of the text as the most striking feature. Before even that most common invocation of popular power “We, the people,” our Constitution’s Preamble begins with a very different invocation:

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