Can human rights survive secularization? Nicholas Wolterstorff really wants to know, because he’s not sure they can.
Wolterstorff, the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School recently presented a lecture at the National Church in Washington, D.C., to address this question. Sponsored by the Reformed Institute of Metropolitan Washington, his comments reflected research presented in his most recent book, Justice — Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press).
Formerly a professor at his alma mater, Calvin College, it was evident that the speaker is committed to being a Reformed Christian intellectual who is seeking to address issues of great significance to Christians in the public arena.
Wolterstorff’s address began with his personal story. A 1976 conference sponsored by Calvin College took him to South Africa, where he encountered the anger felt by the Dutch church leaders toward the South African situation, particularly toward the Afrikaners, who were expressing an equally intense anger at the Dutch. “Then the so-called blacks and coloreds who were at the conference began to speak up — less in tones of anger, and more in tones of hurt. Woundedness. They spoke of the daily indignities heaped upon them. They issued a call for justice. And, the response of the Afrikaners that I shall never forget was ‘Why are you so angry at us? We do lots of good things for you. In fact, the apartheid system is aimed as a project of benevolence; it’s aimed at each nation — there are 11 nation-peoples in South Africa — to allow each nation to achieve its own identity. … You people, you never express gratitude. Why aren’t you more loving?’ And they adamantly insisted that the realm and category for thinking about South Africa was charity and not justice. Benevolence. I had never in my life so starkly seen benevolence being used as an instrument of oppression.”
A similar conference on Palestinian rights, this one held in Chicago, crystallized his sense of mission to apply his study of theology and ethics to the particular topic of justice.
“I was never before confronted with the faces and the voices of the wronged. Not just newsprint. I think something happens to us when we are confronted by the faces and voices of those who are wronged.” He acknowledged that a person’s empathy can be blocked by “what the Scripture calls the ‘hardening of the heart.'” But his heart was broken and changed. Up to that time, he recounted, his career had not ever focused on matters of justice. “It has never been an academic assignment of mine to teach political social justice.” But, “I’ve done it because of these two experiences, and I think of my work in justice as speaking up for the wronged of the world.”
He said, with a smile, “If you jump to the middle of my new book there, and you start reading, you’ll say, ‘This is preposterous. This is abstract philosophy, and this guy says he’s speaking up for the wronged of the world? He must be talking about some other book.'”
In that spirit, he dug in to ponderous thoughts. “What accounts for the fact that I don’t have a right to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom but do have a right to walk unmolested on the mall in Washington?”
“Rights,” he said, “are grounded in two facts: that humans have worth, and that the way of treating a human being may or may not be fitting of that person’s worth.”
“Rights are what respect for worth requires.”
He acknowledged that some Christians are resistant to the notion of rights. “It is commonly said that rights talk expresses and encourages one of the most pervasive and malignant diseases in modern society, possessive individualism … focusing upon one’s entitlements to the neglect of others. … Rights talk is said to be for the purpose of claiming entitlements.”
Others claim that human rights arose out of the individualistic political thought of the “secular” Enlightenment. “They did employ the idea but did not originate it,” he said. “Actually it first appeared four centuries earlier.” In the 14th century, William of Ockham, an English friar and scholastic, stood for human rights in the course of defending his fellow Franciscans from the extremely hostile attacks of the current popes. Canon lawyers of the 12th century also argued for human rights.
But that’s not all. The notion of human rights is rooted all the way back to the church fathers, he claimed. In January of 388 or 389, John Chrysostom of Antioch, in preaching on the parable of Lazarus, declared that the failure to share with others one’s goods is theft. “Just as an official in the imperial treasury, if he neglects to distribute where he is ordered, but spends instead for his own indolence, pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute it to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his need requires, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants. Therefore let us use our goods sparingly, as belonging to others.”
All the way back to Scripture, Wolterstorff argued that the notion of Christian forgiveness is founded on the principle of rights. God has a right to our praise and obedience, and graciously grants forgiveness after that right has been violated. ” … I can forgive you only if you have deprived me of what I had a right to and I recognize that you have. In attributing forgiveness to God, the writers of Scripture recognized that God has rights.”
Correspondingly, he added, “Suppose I am right, that the ascription of forgiveness to God by the biblical writers implies their recognition of the fact that God has been wronged by us; then Jesus’ injunction to us to forgive implies Jesus’ recognition that we are wronged by each other. Jesus tells us that we are to forgive those who wrong us.”
Further, still, ” … just as the biblical writers ascribe worth to God, so also they ascribe worth to us. We are created in the image of God; on account of being so created, our place in the cosmic hierarchy, says the Psalmist, is just a bit below the angels. On occasion, the biblical writers explicitly connect our worth with how we are to be treated. In a well-known passage in Genesis 9:6 we read, Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.” And in his gospel, Matthew reports Jesus as justifying his healing on the Sabbath with these words: Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep? (Matt.12:11).
Having laid the Christian foundations of human rights, Wolterstorff then contemplated the title of his address, “Can Human Rights Survive Secularization?” He was not optimistic. “There have been a good many attempts to find a secular basis for the worth we human beings have that accounts for natural rights. In my judgment they all fail.” The most common approach is to ground rights in a person’s potential, but given the wide variation in real potential in lives, including that of the mentally disabled, those rights get measured by probable performance. And the reality of flaws in humans easily generates hostility, a direct route to denial of rights. Judeo-Christianity, he reminded his hearers, faces up to those flaws and redeems them.
“Can human rights survive secularization?” he asked. “I fear that they cannot. Our moral subculture of rights is as frail as it is remarkable. If modernization does indeed produce secularization, I fear that our recognition of human rights will prove to have been a brief shining moment in the odyssey of human beings on earth.”
Nevertheless he concluded with a note of optimism. “As for myself, I do not fear. Not only is the modern world obviously not becoming secularized. I believe that God has planted the recognition of himself so deeply in the human heart that the knowledge and worship of God will never disappear from the face of the earth.”
