Human Rights

Our subject this morning in this Summer Series on the Bible and Current Concerns is “Human Rights”. And how we should be concerned over Human Rights. There is so much argument about the meaning of “human” as well as the meaning of “rights”. The ensuing chaos and confusion means little can be rationally decided - to quote Jon Davies, in his recent book, Small Corroding Words,

Where, for example, are my rights when Mr. Cameron, having promised me that he would repeal the Human Rights Act (which he described as ‘a glaring example of what is going wrong in our society’), exercises his right to change his mind?

Well, with that warning, let me say that my headings this morning are first, WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS?; secondly, THE PROBLEM WITH HUMAN RIGHTS; and, thirdly, A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE.

So, first, WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS?

In terms of history you need to go back to the ancient classical period of the Greeks and the Romans and their concept of “natural law” or “the law of nature”. Aristotle the Greek philosopher wrote:

“a rule of justice is natural that has the same validity everywhere, and does not depend upon our accepting it.”

And Cicero the Roman politician and philosopher wrote this:

“True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, and unchanging and everlasting … We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”

But then skipping 100 years you come to Paul and, as we heard in our NT reading in Romans 2 verses 14-15. Look at that now:

when Gentiles, who do not have the law [that is the “law” as the Jews had it, spelt out clearly in the Bible], do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.).

Paul is saying similar things to Aristotle and Cicero. And because of Paul the early church accepted this concept of a universal standard of conduct, morally binding on all and understood potentially by all. Yes, Christians saw that God had made things clear in the Old Testament especially in the Ten Commandments. And they knew that sin could and did dull people’s perceptions and harden their hearts and consciences against God’s law. Nevertheless, there was a general agreement over this idea or a “natural law”.

Moving on to the time of the Reformation, the Reformers continued to agree with much of the teaching of the early and mediaeval Church on natural law but without some of its elaboration. So in the 16th century Calvin writes:

Natural law is that apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes sufficiently between just and unjust.

At the end of the 16th century the Anglican Hooker, using the term, “the law of reason”, rather than “natural law” said the same sort of thing, when commenting on Romans 2.14. Next, John Locke, at the end of the 17th century and from a liberal Puritan point of view, wrote:

“it is certain there is such a law [the law of nature],and that, too, as intelligible and plain to a rational creature and a studier of that law as the positive laws of commonwealths [i.e. laws voted by parliaments and other legislative bodies].

True, they all knew as Paul has been saying in Romans 1.18 that people can “suppress the truth by their wickedness”. And they knew that “natural law” is not the gospel. But they knew that God in his goodness has provided a moral awareness to all, to restrain destructive human sin. Then, in the 18th century and in accordance with this “natural law”, people tried to spell out more forcefully “natural rights” or what we call “human rights”. This happened in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. With its basis being, I quote, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”, it said:

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 are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [but with ‘happiness’ subject to the principles of ordered liberty and morality].

Then a few years later you had “the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” in 1789. Significantly that declaration only proclaimed these rights

“in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.”

There was no explicit connection of human rights with God’s law. It was not surprising, therefore, that before long, the English atheist utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, described the idea of moral rights as “nonsense on stilts”. This was a watershed. Rights he saw as mere human convention. They are simply “legal rights” that come from whatever parliament votes – or as Locke would call them, “positive rights”. Nor was Bentham alone. Sadly, in the 19th century, and particularly in Continental Europe, there was a growing rejection of God-given natural law.

This was followed by an appalling 20th century with world wars and some of the worst violations of true human rights in human history. However, there was a renewed interest in human rights because of Hitler and the Second World War. People realized that terrible Nazi laws and activities had to be judged by a higher law. This higher law with its human rights could then, it was thought, give grounding to demands for respect for all human beings. So the UN Declaration of Human Rights was agreed in 1948. But these rights were only grounded in the UN Charter and not in any divine law. Article 1 simply makes an assertion:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But endowed by whom? And why have they equal dignity? Obviously that is an echo of a Christian past but it is not explicit. As is well said, if you lose the Fatherhood of God, you will soon lose that spirit of the brotherhood of man. Of course, all the UN rights are based in some way on what Paul says is “the law written on the heart”. And they are good and deal with many rights and freedoms that all Christians can applaud (except that there is no explicit right to change your religion – the one essential right that ensures true freedom). But without acknowledging Jesus Christ and the Christian pedigree of “human rights” such assertions of human rights are very vulnerable. For people can and do, as Paul said, “suppress the truth by their wickedness” at national and international levels. And, again, sadly, since that UN Declaration in1948 (on which is based our 1950 European Convention on Human Rights), in the second half of the 20th century there have been terrible violations of genuine Human Rights. Let me list some places where this had happened – I do so alphabetically.

There have been serious violations in the Balkans, Burma, Cambodia, China, the Congo, Egypt, India, Israel, many Muslim countries, Nepal, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, South America, the former Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Uganda and the list goes on and on. And there are now infringements in Britain against Christians for their moral stands, small by comparison but real nonetheless.

So the 20th century declarations on Human Rights undoubtedly have been of value. But at best they only get you so far. The bad news, however, is that some are now going in a sub-human direction in the West in terms of rights. For now, in the 21st century, some so called “human rights” have been established that validate not what is good and needs to be protected but what the prophet Isaiah would call, “evil, dark and bitter” in the realm of morality and true Christian freedoms. Isaiah had to say, as we heard in our Old Testament reading:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

So that brings us to our …

… second heading and THE PROBLEM WITH HUMAN RIGHTS

Everything that is good, can be perverted. That is true of money, sex, education, religion and, indeed, human rights.

At the time of the beginning of the modern recovery of the idea of human rights in the 1930s and 40s, William Temple, later the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, warned about the way rights had developed and were developing. He saw that there was a danger of reverting to an ultra-liberalism. That is where the supreme goal in life is to have rights to be totally “free” – untrammeled by anything - and to live just as you please.

But liberty can never be absolute. All law implies some restraints. And the Bible teaches that the supreme absolute for the Christian is not “freedom” but “God’s goodness and grace”. So the great goal is not for a man or woman to stand alone at the top of a mountain shouting, “I am free”. That was an old Greek ideal. No, the great goal is for a man or woman by faith to be yoked to, and united with, Jesus Christ, whose service is perfect freedom.

The modern world has been wanting just, “freedom from”. But Temple saw that you needed “freedom for” creative and selfless living, as God intended. Democratic rights, therefore, should not be just for having a say in public life, but for positively contributing to the common good. So instead of the French slogan, “liberty, equality and fraternity”, Temple said we wanted, “freedom, fellowship and service.” For Jesus taught that we were to serve one another as he serves us. That means there needs to be an emphasis on “duties” rather than “rights”. Of course, duties are just the other side of rights. So the duty for one man (for example, that he observes a no-parking sign) is another man’s right (that his driveway is not obstructed). “But,” said Temple,

“the difference in the temper of the movement that rests on rights will be aggressive, violent, contentious; [but] the temper of a movement that rests on duties will be persuasive, public spirited [and] harmonious.”

Temple was echoing the clear teaching of the New Testament. The New Testament doesn’t really have a word for rights. The nearest thing is the concept of “power” or “authority” that a person has.

For example, Jesus has “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 20.18). So he had a right to command “twelve legions of angels” at the time of his arrest (Matthew 26.53). And Paul had authority as an itinerant apostle. But Jesus and Paul taught, explicitly and by example, that often duty means not exercising this authority or right. So Jesus did not command angels to come and fight for him at the time of his arrest. Nor did Paul claim his right to food and drink (1 Corinthians 9.3). And he says the Corinthian Christians should follow him. They should not claim their rights to bring law suits against other Christians (1 Cor 6) or eat meat when it would upset the faith of weaker Christians (1 Cor 8). The Bible certainly has an emphasis on duties rather than rights and not just for Jesus and the apostles.

Another example is in Ephesians 5 and relates to husbands and wives. For the wife is told to focus on her duty of submission (with all the qualifications the Bible means for that word) to her husband, and not to focus on her right to have from him self-sacrificial love. Similarly the husband is told to focus on his duty of self-sacrificial love for his wife, and not his right of her submission. That is the Bible way.

But tragically things have gone seriously pear-shaped in Britain in the 21st century and in the West in other countries. We now have a rights and not a duties culture. That is why David Cameron may have said the Human Rights Act is “a glaring example of what is going wrong in our society”. And you should add, what has flowed from that Act, namely the Equalities Act 2010 and especially its progenitor the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (the EHRC). This 2010 Act both protected and extended the duties of the EHRC and its status as one of only three publicly funded bodies (the other two being the Electoral Commission and the BBC) which have a statutory guarantee of independence from the government. With 14 unelected commissioners and including a former director of Stonewall (the homosexual activist group) as a commissioner but without equally having a senior executive of the Christian Institute on the Commission, it is no surprise that homosexual privileges have now become Human Rights and embedded in nearly every area of life.

But the right for same sex intercourse can never be a fundamental “human right” as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared them. For Article 29 asserts that rights should be limited by

“the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

And mainstream historical “morality” has universally judged such activity wrong. Certainly it is seen as very wrong in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

But once such rights and so protections and privileges are granted, as a matter of fact, protection and privileges are denied to those adhering to the Judaeo-Christian tradition with its morality that undergirds common-sense human rights. And, yes, a good number of Christians are now having their jobs threatened and worse and their human rights denied. There are indeed problems over human rights.

So, thirdly, and finally A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE.

This homosexualization of human rights and other initiatives of the EHRC is devaluing the currency of human rights. But this is the consequence of the relativistic, secular world view that is being taught in our schools and dominates our media. As the late John Stott put it:

It threatens to leave the traditional human rights community with little ground to stand on in absolute support of human rights.

He then quoted Gary Haugen, the former director of the UN’s genocide investigation of Rwanda:

The truth is, the secular human rights movement is philosophically committed to cultural relativism, and it is simply a matter of time before repression finds comfort in the moral vacuum. Since World War II, the traditional human rights community has taken a courageous stand for justice out of a passionate moral intuition that is rooted, consciously or not, in the Judaeo-Christian commitment to ethical absolutes. The human rights activists of the 1990s [when he was writing], however, are the children of a secular philosophy of moral relativism, multi-culturalism, and radical pluralism. Consequently, when push comes to shove in the new disorderly world of the next century [i.e. now], the international human rights movement may find it increasingly difficult to navigate its way without a moral compass, to avoid moral confusion, or to avoid being captured by the political fashion of the day.

So what is the moral compass we as Christians can provide? What can you say from the Bible? Well, you can begin by saying something of what it means to be human and what the Bible teaches about that. For human rights depend on the right definition of the human.

For a starter you can say Genesis 1.27 tells you that we were all made “in the image of God”. So we are all God-like, although not always Godly. We have rational, moral and spiritual qualities animals don’t have. For we have been made for a relationship with God. That implies certain human rights. Since you learn about God from evangelists and the Bible, there should be a basic right to hear the gospel and read the Bible. And there should be freedom to express and propagate your faith and freedom for worship and fellowship.

Then when Genesis chapter 2.18 says, “it is not right for man to be alone” that does not only lead to a right to marry and for marriage to be protected. It also implies a right for all (peaceful and moral) human associations and meetings.

And the command in Genesis 1.28 to “fill the earth and subdue it” implies a right to bring up a family and to work. These are all rights for true human being.

But they have to be set in the context of faith in God. For your and my human dignity depends on our worth and value to God. But that is enormous. It is worth Christ, the divine Son of God, giving his life for you and me and everyone else, for our sins on the Cross of Calvary. That is how much we are worth to God. And that, of course, makes us all equal.

But – and it is a big ‘but’ - it also means that human rights are not unlimited. They are limited to what relates to your being the human person God made you to be. And you discover that not by looking inside yourself but in the teaching of Jesus and his apostles, which, for us today, means the Bible.

I must conclude.

I do so simply by saying that, yes, try to help people see something about true human rights and how without a Christian world-view they are so vulnerable. But remember that such rights will simply protect them and you from the destructive effects of human sin. So they also must then be told of two further essentials: one that through trusting Jesus Christ as their risen and reigning Saviour and Lord, there is forgiveness for sin; and, two, that by his Holy Spirit, there is new life to help overcome sin and so live more as God intended.

And never forget that Paul teaches about natural law in Romans 2 not primarily to secure human rights (which it does) but to show that all of us sin – the pagan Gentiles of Romans 1 with their homosexual sins and the religious hypocrites who condemn them of Romans 2. That is why we and all the world need the gospel of Jesus Christ. So let me finish with a question: is there anyone here this morning who has never yet faced the claims of Christ and the gospel and with all that it implies in terms of human rights?