My approach to human rights has as its premise, the biblical theology of the kingdom of God as enacted inaugurated eschatology. It would burden this paper if I began to describe a theology that is well known here. I will therefore add an appendix, with a text that I use to introduce most of my shorter publications for Vineyard Institute textbooks.
Three implications follow from this premise that are relevant to our subject.
- The church lives in the world, in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet”.
- Therefore, two extreme positions are no longer feasible: the extreme of utopianism, where Christian have the naïve belief that they can impose the Christian worldview and way of life on entire populations, and the extreme of withdrawal, where Christians give up on being salt and light and retreat into a social or epistemological safe zone, impervious from worldly influence.
- The kingdom paradigm also makes various forms of dualism impossible.
When viewed from this perspective, and especially when viewed in the light of the long history of the struggle for human rights, the following arguments can be defended:
- Human rights did not suddenly land on the planet, from nowhere, in the late 1970’s, or during the Englightenment.
- In their long history and development, there are both Christian and non-Christian sources, but the Christian faith has played a major role and has a major stake in human rights.
- While secular humanists are very zealous about human rights, they are less able to justify them morally.
- If the church withdraws from this field, the resulting vacuum gets filled with destructive ideologies (like Fascism, Marxism, secular humanism and radical Capitalism), with disastrous consequences.
The full paper is attached to this post as a PDF.
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