Historically, the very idea of human rights and the related idea of equality emerged over many centuries in a theistic and specifically Christian culture. In the West, major milestones include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791). A specific anthropology emerges from these documents with greater and greater clarity. Human beings are made in the image of God, and as such, should be accorded special rights and dignity manifested in law.
Then there was Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Richards:
if materialism holds, the libertarian credo doesn’t hold water. If, on the other hand, some libertarian moral commitments do hold water, if they are truly about something, then materialism is false.
The status of individual rights, freedom and responsibility, reason, and moral realism are quite different in a theistic context. The point may be obvious, so I won’t belabor it. But let’s sketch the outline. Theism is the idea that ultimate reality is an eternal and self-existent, perfectly transcendent yet fully present, personal God who freely creates everything else. The material and the non-divine spiritual realms are real, but derivative. Biblical theism also maintains that God has created human beings in his image. Each of us, therefore, has an intrinsic dignity, equality, and purpose.
Freedom flourishes in this framework. God exercises freedom in the purest sense by creating the world without help from anything outside himself. But he has not made a world of automata. God gives his creatures, as St. Thomas said, “the dignity of causality.” And to human beings, his image bearers, he has granted us not just causality, but intelligent agency, rationality, and freedom. Our reason is appropriate to our status as finite embodied creatures; but as image-bearers of the all-knowing Ground of reason, we have a basis to trust in the general reliability of our cognitive faculties.
God has given us a freedom so expansive that we are capable of destroying each other and rejecting him eternally. That same freedom and agency, however, make us responsible for our actions, actions that can be judged in light of an eternal and transcendent moral standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment