Religious Law or Religious Regulatory System? On the Question of Terminology

Definitions of law depend on the subject of knowledge’s preferred concept of legal understanding. Within the framework of a narrow positivist approach, legal norms are closely linked to the state, and are issued and repealed by it. A broad (anthropological) approach to law considers legal norms as various systems of mandatory group regulations that form the actual social order and do not always depend on the will of the sovereign. The problem of defining law includes at least three aspects: 1) research (law as a phenomenon); 2) status (naming group norms “legal” to reflect the place and role of the community in society); 3) ideological (discussions about the supremacy of one or another normative system over others). The broad approach used by some researchers of religious value- normative systems (archpriest Vladislav Tsypin, A. M. Osavelyuk, A. A. Kanevsky, L. R. Syukiyainen, etc.) has a right to exist, since it reflects a centuries-old research tradition, within the framework of which the phrase “religious law” was often used without any critical analysis. However, upon closer examination of the theoretical constructs proposed by the authors, substantiating the legal content of religious norms, it turns out that “religious law” is no different from, for example, ethnic or subcultural customs, which casts doubt on the possibility of using this term, since it does not allow one value- normative system to be clearly separated from another by objectively existing features. Therefore, author believes that it is more appropriate to speak not of “religious law” as a legal phenomenon, but of a “religious regulatory system” that stands out against the background of other social regulators: customs, corporate regulations and legal (state) regulations. The article was prepared on the basis of a report made at the scientific and theological conference on church law “VIII Barsov Readings”, organized by the Society for the Study of Church Law named after T. V. Barsov (Barsov Society) of St. Petersburg Theological Academy of the Russian Orthodox Church on December 6, 2024.