It is Worse than You Think

I held off posting this until a series of postings across several facebook forums convinced me that Christians haven't really faced the challenge posed by a modern conception of human rights. The culture of traditionalist Christianity is ultimately inimical to human rights, and will always deny them to some persons. Only a revolution in understanding the work of Christ on the cross will open the door to true human equality and full human rights.

In the last 70 years or so there has been a serious theological debate among American Christians about human rights. Specifically it was a debate about whether, from a Christian perspective, the assertion that humans are endowed by God with the rights guaranteed them in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

If a debate about human rights seems strange then you haven’t really wrapped you mind around how badly the enlightenment disrupted not only the Christian worldview, but that of all axial age religions. This isn’t merely a matter of science versus scripture. The Enlightenment understanding of the human person as possessing rights, even if the claimed source of those rights was “nature’s God,” was a direct affront to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ as taught for nearly 2000 years of church history.

In classical Christian thought, indeed in classical theism, God is the sole possessor of rights. Humans possess only responsibilities. After all, who are humans to question God or the lot to which God has assigned them? The futility of Job’s fist shaking or Paul’s cookware protesting its condemnation is the Bible’s answer to the claim of human rights. Yes, God sets us free: to serve God’s command and accept whatever destiny God assigns. 

It is logical that creatures have no rights vis a vis their creator, as Paul so clearly states. 

But it is worse. The Bible has no concept of a social contract, only of an imposed covenant in relationship to which the only human choices are obedience and disobedience, not negotiation and modification. Moses and Paul would have been shocked by the idea of electing rulers or questioning the laws they made. In the Bible humans can be miscreants and martyrs, but not free agents engaged in political change. That again would be an affront to God’s sovereignty - as Israel was so clearly taught when they tried to take their political fate into their own hands by demanding a king. 

From the traditional interpretation of the Biblical perspective when humans try to rule themselves they get what they deserve: disaster.

Is it really that bad? Are modern understandings of human rights so completely out of sync with the Biblical worldview? There are two arguments seeking to link the Bible to modern conception of human rights. 

One is that the positive obligations that God’s law places on humans in relation to one another creates human rights in the form of legitimate claims on those obligations. One can see this worked out in the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights by the Organization of Islamic States. https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/FMRpdfs/Human-Rights/cairo.pdf And it is echoed in Roman Catholic teaching: http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.cfm. And Orthodox teaching. https://mospat.ru/en/documents/dignity-freedom-rights/iii/, The Orthodox are the most honest about the implications here. 

Ultimately these efforts to describe human rights in terms of moral obligations don't work, because God doesn’t ever require that humans give each other freedom of speech, or conscience, or religion. And this is why in traditionalist Methodism, the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodoxy, and in most Islamic states there is no freedom of conscience or speech.

To the contrary, what God requires of those with power is the strictest exercise of that power against false religion. Heretics and idolaters have no rights in the Bible, and had no rights in traditional Christianity either in the larger society and or in the church. Nor does God ever grant humans political agency, which is the reason that Roman Catholic teaching came late to the table in support of democracy (post Vatican II), Islam even later (The Marrakesh Declaration in 2016) and the Orthodox not yet.  

A second and more common Christian approach is to argue that the inherit dignity given humans in the Bible is a potent force in favor of human rights, and ultimately paved the way for contemporary understandings of human rights. This is the argument made in Roman Catholic documents since Pius X. The problem with this argument is twofold. 

First it seems a lot like a retro-fit. For most of the history of Christianity neither the church nor Christian rulers granted their subjects basic human rights, and long after they were claimed for Christians in the West they were denied those humans under the subjugation of colonialism. If Christians traditionally believed in human rights they certainly did a poor job of showing it. Indeed, the American Christian approach to African Americans was largely one that denied them not merely their dignity but their humanity. The Roman Catholic Church gave up on that a couple of centuries earlier, but not without debate. 

More importantly, possessing dignity is not the same as possessing rights. Understanding this will bring us to the core of the problem faced by Christians today. 

Dignity is always granted in relation to two closely related aspects of being human in society. The first is the end; the telcos of the human person. Dignity (and this fits Paul’s arguments) derives from what we were made for, and each human possesses the dignity appropriate to the purpose for which they were made. 

Close related to this is the dignity give by an individuals place in society. Far from being inherit in the individual it is a place given by God; who creates the social order by fiat. Indeed the argument that God grants dignity depends on the idea that God is the orderer of human society. 

In pre-Enlightenment culture both the king and the serf were owed the dignity appropriate to place in society because, as Paul argues in the book of Romans and Philemon, each has been given by God a specific place in human society. The same can be said of men and women, masters and slaves, and persons of different ethnic origin. Each has a place in God’s ordering of humanity and thus possesses the dignity due them in their place. Naturally this protects those with a higher, or more holy, place from being brought to justice when the violate the dignity of those whose place is lower; a consistent pattern in both the political and church worlds until very recently. 

What one cannot find in pre-modern Christianity or the Bible is a concept of equal human rights or indeed any individual right to determine one’s own end and one’s own role. Neither Peter nor Judas chose their role in Christ’s ministry. God chose one to lead and the other to betray, and if Paul is right the betrayer should have rejoiced as much as the leader in being given a role to play by God. 

Understanding this we can see why Christians have been so reluctant to admit equal rights within the church. Far from springing from concepts of human dignity, equal rights within the church challenge and overturn the very concept of human dignity as found in traditional readings of scripture. 

(Pause - you may be saying that I'm giving too much weight to a hyper-Calvinist reading of tradition. After all, it can be argued that the Bible (in some Christian traditions) teaches that humans have freedom and agency. Which is true: but not in relation to God's fundamental ordering of society or its end. In the 20th century one can find Christians who will allow the measure of human freedom necessary to create secular democracies. Rarer are those willing to allow democracy in the church. And those willing to grant humans the freedom to actually create the social order and their personal place in it are a tiny minority.)

This is most obvious in those Christian traditions that are “complementation” with regard to the dignity of men and women. Such traditions affirm the dignity of women, but only as appropriate to women. Nor is this a merely a debate about ordination or leadership in the church. The question of abortion is often posed as one of the rights of the child, but if rights were the issue the mother would have rights as well. In reality both Catholic and Evangelical approaches to abortion are based in a theological anthropology of dignity. A woman’s dignity is rooted in her capacity to bear children; the role assigned her by God according to scripture. Therefore bearing a child, when possible, becomes an absolute obligation to do so. In this understanding a woman's dignity is actually wounded by giving her the right to have an abortion.

The dignity based approach to human rights within the church is also at the root of the traditionalist stance toward LGBTQ persons in the UMC and more widely among Catholics, Orthodox, and Evangelical Protestants. Such persons have the dignity granted in God’s order to every human person; which is to be loved by God and either obey God’s law or rebel against it.  But because their sexuality has no place in God’s order as understood in Christian tradition they have no right to express that sexuality. The dignity given every human being with regarded to sexuality is limited to being cis-gendered and either married or celibate. In traditionalist Christianity the sexuality of those who are not cis-gendered has no end but destruction and no role that must be respected. LGBTQ persons may have some generic human dignity, but as sexual beings they have no dignity. And as we can see in the UMC, they are given none.   

Ever since the Enlightenment declaration that nature and Nature’s God grants humans equal rights there has existed an as yet unresolved crisis for Christianity, and indeed all axial age religions. It is a crisis that has not been and cannot be resolved by an appeal to the dignity granted humans in God’s ordering of the world. However that order may be conceived it will always exclude some humans from possessing dignity and thus rights. 

The solution to this crisis is the one inherit in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and the inauguration of a new people of God. This new people, the Church, are different from the old Adam. That primal human was given the task of being a steward over God’s order in creation. The new humans are given the task of creating a new order in creation as they follow Christ and are guided by God’s Spirit. Ours is not to merely recognize the dignity the old order gave humans in society, it is to create dignity and human rights for all by a re-ordering of human society. Ours is not stewardship over an imagined Eden, it is the preparation for the New Jerusalem.  

This is a task fraught with the possibility of failure, but we can undertake it knowing that the same Jesus Christ who gave us this task justifies those who take it up faithfully before God, even as his Spirit sanctifies us for the work.

An addendum: Human dignity does not derive from the human place in God's order so much as it derives from God's command that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Human dignity and human rights are gifts whose origins are in the synergy between the human freedom to love and the Divine command to love.