Human Rights: What and Why?
June 28, 2010
John H. Armstrong
Human Rights: What and Why?
John H. Armstrong
The subject of human rights has gained a great deal of attention in my six-plus decades of life. Following World War II the world community began to engage in significant discussion of this idea. Until more recently I have personally considered the subject very little. I was aware of the term, and even acknowledged the danger of various threats to human rights (whatever they were), but I saw little or no organic connection between the modern movement and the message of the Bible
Human Rights
Human rights are generally defined as the “rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). Proponents of the concept usually assert that everyone is endowed with certain legal entitlements by reason of being human. Both legal rights and international law have sought to provide a moral and legal justification for such rights. The problem is that abstract discussions of the concept and meaning of human rights have created intense disagreement and, in some cases, even considerable harm. It may be for this reason that many Christians have avoided the subject, especially when they see it being cast so broadly by extremely liberal social movements.
Few historians disagree that the modern conception of human rights developed after World War II, especially in response to the Holocaust. This discussion culminated in the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The phrase "human rights" may be modern but the intellectual foundations of the concept can be traced throughout the history of philosophy and the concepts of rights and liberties, all the way back to Greek and Roman Law. The more recent forerunner of this human rights discourse is found in the thought of European Enlightenment philosophers John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Both men clearly influenced the United States Bill of Rights, thus paving the way for the development of the modern ideas that we now accept when we hear talk about human rights.
The Biblical Tradition
There is also a strong biblical emphasis on the ideas that have influenced the development of the modern human rights discussion. As is so often the case Christians have failed to understand this strand of teaching, or to care deeply about it, while non-Christians have overlooked it.
The biblical foundation for human rights is the imago Dei, the image of God in man. This is developed in the Old Testament in the commandment to show justice to all and in the New in the revelation of God’s love and provision for outcasts as revealed in Jesus Christ. Beyond this biblical emphasis the early church fathers wrote about this same theme. The conciliar tradition of the Catholic Church kept this thinking alive in the Middle Ages and following the Protestant Reformation the free-church movement, including the Puritans and the Anabaptists, expressed the same thinking.
This biblical emphasis, joined to the post-World War II influence of Enlightenment claims for a universal grounding of human rights in all people, created a deep opposition to Nazism, Communism, colonialism, segregation, apartheid and genocide.
The Free Church Movement
I have been persuaded for many years now that the first true development of a modern concept of something we can rightly call human rights came in the free-church struggle for the right of religious liberty in Puritan England in the 1640s. Baptists and Anabaptists were the primary bearers of this biblical message. In historical terms I believe this is their greatest contribution to the church catholic and one far too easily missed by Christians from other traditions.
Ethicist Glen Stassen, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, traces the intellectual argument back to a book by Richard Overton (1645) which openly advocated what moderns would call human rights. Overton’s arguments are deeply rooted in the Bible, especially the New Testament. Overton not only appealed to natural law but he argued from a historical perspective that persecution causes wars, divisions and wide-scaled bloodshed. It promotes hypocrisy among Christians and led to tragic events such as the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that killed one-third of the people of Germany who fought over which form of Christianity would control the affairs of their culture and which form would be rejected. Overton believed that advocacy of human rights in the matter of religion would promote peacemaking and end the need to make one expression of faith dominant over another. Stassen further notes that Overton was concerned about justice for the poor, a concern which had been intensified by his involvement with the poor who were jailed (for debts). Cell mates, or fellow sufferers, often turn on each other or find a way to create a community that results in meaningful solidarity!
In 1647 Overton wrote another treatise that still stands as a Christian witness to human rights long before the modern era. “An Appeal . . . to the Free People” included not only religious liberty as a goal but civil liberty as well. But this was not all. Overton appealed for a just way to meet basic human needs and to defend economic rights, such as the right to not be imprisoned for debt and the right to trade internationally without restrictions by monopolies and governments. He also argued for the right to a free education for everyone and even addressed the right to proper housing and care for the poor and orphans. Finally, Overton appealed for the right to choose a government that was responsive to the people and their common good.
You may not think these historical facts all that important. I beg to disagree. If an “enlightened” biblical Christian in England was appealing for these things as early as 1647 then the whole modern debate needs to see how deeply it was shaped by Christian thought and biblical theology.
The Enlightenment Changed the Argument
In reaction to religious wars and bloodshed John Locke sought to ground human rights in universal human reason. (Here is the rub. What is this and how do we discover it and appeal to it?) This shifted the debate from the church speaking prophetically, which to large extent the church had failed to do time and time again, to saying the church had a more narrow role in society, namely to base all public appeals not on divine revelation but rather on universal human reason. This kind of thinking moved Thomas Jefferson profoundly, thinning out the role the church would ultimately have in this discussion. In America we built a nation with “the soul of a church” (Mead). The mixture of the two strands has always created debates about freedom and human rights in America and in the 20th century the ordinary Christian allowed human reason to take the public square. When Christians decided to re-engage the public square in the 1970s they made so many mistakes that the biblical word was almost lost to serious public discourse.
Many modern Christian academic philosophers have argued against the concept of human rights precisely because of this Enlightenment concept of human reason. Alisdair MacIntyre is one such thinker. He believes the claims to universal human reason undermine the concept severely. Advocates disagree with MacIntyre, arguing from work like that of Richard Overton, that this is the fallacy of confusing the source with the intention. If human rights originated in the Free Church tradition of Christianity then they have been advanced through “diverse faiths and contextualized narratives. The sources are historically particular and diverse; but these particular traditions each have universal intent; they intend to affirm the dignity and human rights of all persons, universally” (Stassen, in Global Dictionary of Theology, eds. William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Karkkainen, 408).
Conclusion
Stassen’s argument is extremely important for modern Christian leaders. If the biblical claim that all humankind is created in the image of God is a particular biblical claim, and one that should be abundantly clear to all serious Christians, then the universal dignity of all human persons is affirmed. Read that sentence again slowly. This is the basis for the dignity of all races, for women and even for homosexuals. (More on this later but for now let this point sink in and think quite a bit more before you simply react!) To quote Glen Stassen again: “Universal intent can be affirmed from particular ground” (408). Christopher Marshall calls this an “almost universal language of moral debate.” I agree thus I have come to believe that the human rights debate is extremely important for Christian leaders. This is especially true in a society where Christians have all but lost the right to speak in any meaningful public way. What is needed is a public affirmation of human dignity that does not need a universal, rationalistic grounding in human beings nor a common agreement about divine revelation. Christians become true salt and light when they live their faith in this way rather than argue for exclusive moral claims based only on widely debated points found only in divine revelation. For the Christian revelation will always be more important than reason. The question is how we present our case for human dignity to people when they have rejected the claims of divine revelation. This concern will land us right in the middle of a major missional-ecumenical moment if we have the foresight and grace to see it.
Next Week: The Catholic Recovery of Theology and Culture
"This concern will land us right in the middle of a major missional-ecumenical moment if we have the foresight and grace to see it." -- EXACTLY what I was thinking as I approached this sentence! Vital to authentic Church unity.
