Insight into the fundamental rights of human beings grew in many civilizations at the same time as the recognition of the humanity of human beings. Wherever the universal concept ‘human being’ was developed, instead of ‘friend and enemy’ or ‘we and the others’, the rights of human beings were formulated too, together with respect for the humanity of human beings.[1] This was not an exclusively Western idea, although rights formulated explicitly as ‘human rights’ made their way into the American and European constitutions at the time of the Western Enlightenment. They have acquired worldwide acceptance, formerly through the League of Nations and today through UNO. Like other universal ideas, human rights have detached themselves from their especially European development history, and are directly accepted as reasonable by all people who recognize that they are not just American or Chinese, black or white, men or women, Christians or Buddhists, but are human beings.
Consequently, no one in the West can claim to have patented human rights, nor is there any justifiable cultural or religious reason for rejecting human rights on the grounds of their being a Western idea.
The more different peoples, races and cultures enter a shared global history, because they are bringing deadly danger on one another through the nuclear threat and the ecological crises, the more important a consensus about human rights and the rights of nature becomes. In these rights it is possible to discern the contours of a global democracy in which humanity could one day become the determining subject of its survival history.
We find the declarations of human rights in force in the United Nations in the following:
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
2. The International Covenants on Human Rights (economic, social and cultural rights, civil and political rights, the optional protocol) of 1966,[2]
3. The Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989.
The binding force of these declarations in international law was initially slight, for the Preamble of 1948 states only that they are ‘an ideal to be attained together by all peoples and nations’. Nevertheless, in international conventions and transnational legal agreements they have shown an astonishing strength. A binding agreement against genocide was already passed by UNO in 1948. Right up to the end of the Second World War, it was internationally accepted that the question of how a country treated its own citizens was entirely a matter for that country’s sovereign decision. Even though some countries today still reject ‘interference in their internal affairs’ on the grounds of human rights, the way a country treats its own people is also a legitimate matter for the United Nations too, for every one is also bound to observe internationally accepted human rights.
The subdivision and categories of human rights emerges from their history. In 1948 the North Atlantic states, following the crimes of the Fascist dictatorships, formulated individual human rights over against the state. The Eastern states, on the basis of their criticism of class rule and capitalism, introduced economic and social human rights into the International Covenants of 1966. Today demands by the impoverished people in the Third Word for the right to existence and the right to survive are being introduced into the discussion about human rights.
We can therefore distinguish between (1) protective rights to life, freedom and security; (2) rights to liberty, these covering freedom of opinion, freedom of association and freedom of religion; (3) social rights to work, to the means of subsistence, and to housing; (4) the rights to play a part in public life, and to participation in politics, industry and culture.
In the ecumenical discussions between the churches since 1945, interesting shifts of emphasis are emerging. Following the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, religious freedom was at the centre, until it was perceived that freedom of religion can be realized only in the framework of the other individual human rights. The importance of promoting individual freedom of religion and individual human rights, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is shown by those countries where Islam or Buddhism is the state religion. Since about 1960, the questions about economic, social and cultural human rights have moved into the foreground, because racism, colonialism and sexism are seen to be grave infringements of human rights. In a world with oppressions of this kind—where people oppress people—individual human rights can be realized only together with social, political and economic human rights. The ecumenical consultation in St. Pölten in 1974 was a milestone in the history of the discussions in the Christian countries about human rights, because here for the first time representatives from the Third World spoke and were listened to.
At the end of the 1970s we then saw the theological declarations on human rights issued by the major churches. In 1974 the papal commission Justitia et Pax presented its declaration on ‘The Church and Human Rights’. In 1976 ‘The Theological Basis for Human Rights’ was published by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC).[3] In 1977 the Lutheran World Federation (LB) followed with ‘Theological Perspectives on Human Rights’.[4]Unfortunately, up to now there has been no joint Christian declaration on human rights. At the moment a statement by the Russian Orthodox Church, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basic Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights’ (2008) is giving occasion to vehement discussions in the Conference of European Churches (CEC).[5]
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’, says the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal.’ This means all human beings, irrespective of their age, their sex, their race, their religion, their disabilities. In the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic too, Article I, 2 on the rights to freedom enjoyed by the person is followed in Article I, 3 by a statement of the principle of equality and of equal rights. This means that all democracies which have similar constitutional principles have the task of combining, and of realizing, both individual and social human rights.
In the prophetic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the freedom and equality of all human beings is based on belief in creation. They are grounded in the concept of the human being as being created in image of God. Among many peoples, in their myths about rule, only the ruler is God’s image on earth; he is ‘the Son of Heaven’, over against the children of earth. The Babylonian Mirror for Princes says that ‘The shadow of God is the ruler, and human beings are the shadow of the ruler’.[6] If, as Genesis 1.26 maintains, God created human beings to be his image on earth, this is an early universalization and enduring ‘democratization’ of ancient oriental ruler ideology. All human beings, just like queens and kings, are God’s image on earth, made in order to correspond to God’s goodness and righteousness, and to cultivate and preserve his earth. With this, the rule of one human being over other human beings is in principle called into question: ‘God has created and formed men on the pattern of himself, and redeemed them through his Martyr, the one like the other. . . . According to my understanding, I am unable to comprehend that anyone [is the property] of another’, we read in the mediaeval Sachsenspiegel.[7]
In European political history, this led to the development in principle of the democratization of all rule, because only then can the liberty and equality of all the members of a state be ensured. Equality before the law subjects rulers to the law as well. The sovereignty of the people is the modern political means of giving effect to the character of all human beings as the image of God.
However, the Western history of freedom was one-sided, because it stressed the individual rights of human beings where political rule was concerned, and neglected their social equality. Thus liberal democracy was increasingly developed, but social democracy was given a back seat. The liberty of individuals was protected but their solidarity was still neglected, Private property was sacrosanct, common property enjoyed only feeble protection.
Here we see an error in the history of Latin European belief. According to Augustine, the human being’s likeness to God is seated at the summit of the soul.[8] It is in the subjectivity of the bodiless soul that the God-like dignity of the human being is supposed to lie. But that is not what the biblical account of creation says. It is not the bodiless individual soul that is the image of God and is supposed to correspond to God; it is the human being together with other human beings; for ‘male and female he created them’. Nor does the Christian doctrine of the Trinity make the isolated individual soul the imago trinitatis, the image of the Trinity; the image is the community of the church in its mutual recognition and love.
If we take the relationship between the sexes as the primal image of human sociality, then human solidarity has the same divine dignity as human personhood. Neither is the person there ‘before’ the community, as Catholic social doctrine says, not is the community there ‘before’ the person, as socialism maintains. It is rather that person and community are equally primal and condition each other mutually, just as, in the context of development history, a human being’s individuation and socialization come into being at the same time. This means that in principle individual human rights take no precedence over social human rights, although this is always assumed in the Western world because only the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is read. The person’s rights to liberty can only be realized within a just society living in solidarity, and a just society will only be realized in the rights of every person.
The ‘free development of the person’ (Basic Law 1,2) goes together with the free development of solidarity in the community. If this is correct, then an integration of the Universal Declaration of 1948 and the International Covenants of 1966 is urgently required.[9]
Leading a life in dignity is part of human dignity in general. Minimum social and economic preconditions belong here, such as protection from hunger, illness and homelessness, as well as the right to work, the right to personal property and the right to have a say in public life. Just as in the political sphere to be permanently made the object of state power contravenes human dignity, it also contravenes a person’s dignity if he is only regarded economically, as working and purchasing power. In order to live his ‘quality as determining subject’ in the economic sector too, human beings must be given a just share in the social product. The concentration of the means of production and living in the hands of a few, and the oppression and exploitation of the many, infringes human dignity. A worldwide economic condition in which millions go hungry is unworthy of humanity and, in Christian terms, is an offence against the glory of God, which can be found in the likeness to God shared by all human beings. Without more justice through a democratization of the world’s economy there will be an economic, and then also an ecological, catastrophe to the human race, because growing exploitation and indebtedness will force the peoples of the Third World to cut down their rain forests, and to exploit their arable and grass lands immoderately, so that through the increase in steppes and deserts a large part of what provides the foundation for the life of humanity as a whole will be destroyed.
Ecological limits have been set to the fundamental economic rights of humanity. Economic growth is only possible within limits.[10] But that means viewing human beings as bodiless subjects, and nature as an object without a soul. There is no community and no bond between the bodiless subject and the soulless body. Aristotle was still able to talk about ‘the soul of plants’, ‘the soul of animals’, and ‘the soul of human beings’, because for him a ‘world soul’ embraced and differentiated all the living. It was only the mechanistic world picture of the modern industrial society which drove out the ‘world soul’, so that nature might be subjugated.
Postmodern views, on the other hand, are now starting again from the body-soul totality of human beings, in order to develop the idea of a cosmic community into which human beings are integrated, out of the bodily needs and sensory relations of human beings with other living things. The modern split into soul and body, subject and object, person and thing, does justice neither to the totality of human beings, nor to their natural living community with the earth. If the modern fissure is rigorously pushed through, human bodiliness is destroyed and the natural community of life is ruined. Modern anthropocentrism is deadly for human beings themselves. Even though there can be no way back to agrarian economic cosmocentrism, it will nevertheless be possible to integrate a new ecological culture into nature. Remarkably enough, the Orthodox theology of the Eastern churches has never gone along with these Western European divisions, because it saw the human person not as standing over against objective nature, but as a hypostasis of nature.[11] In the human being, nature gathers itself together into a hypostasis; consequently the human being is dependent on nature. In his bodiliness the human being together with all other living things and with all material elements remains bound up with nature. Human beings have been created together with nature and together with nature will be redeemed.
It would be a great advantage if the different declarations on human rights and the Earth Charter of the United Nations were integrated. In 1990, in the World Alliance of Reformed Churches we expanded our theological declaration on human rights of 1976 by a section on ‘The Rights of Nature’.[12]
The Universal Declaration of 1948 sees the human being as an individual belonging to the species human being. Does this mean the spread of urban individualism and Western cosmopolitanism, as is feared in Asia and Africa? If this were so, this declaration would be unrealistic, for it is not only in traditional societies that human beings have a strong social identity and only a weak individual one. They feel themselves to be members of their family, their clan, their people, their culture and their religious community, but they do not see themselves as individual examples of the human race; for their social security depends on their specific social ties, and these cannot be assumed by humanity as a whole. Nor do human rights exist in order to abolish or replace the specific, local and national civil rights. But they do bring a new dimension to the local ties and civil rights, which on the one hand are global and cosmopolitan and on the other hand affect the innermost being of every human being. In dictatorships, human rights groups fight not only for global concerns but also for the human right of every individual in his local ties and obligations. Specific civil rights can be called to account in the forum of human rights. To take a concrete example: the right to emigrate is a human right, but the former Socialist GDR (East Germany) punished emigration as ‘flight from the republic’, and thereby made itself guilty towards its citizens of severe breaches of human rights. Whoever stood up for his right to leave the country was standing up for a human right. The way a country treats its own people is no longer solely that country’s own affair. It is also a matter for the community of states, and a matter of general human solidarity. In the question about the relation between civil and human rights, we advance a step if we ask about the goals of the declarations on human rights:
Can we see in them the first outlines of a global, cosmopolitan democracy? Are human rights designed to be trans-national and hence also post-national rights?[13]
Or are these international legal agreements between sovereign national states—agreements, that is to say, based on the sovereignty of the national states and under their protection, because only these states are in a position to enforce them?
Ought the sovereignty of individual states to be restricted by way of human rights, so that they may one day be absorbed into the trans-national sovereignty of a world government? Or should they as trans-national rights merely further the interdependence of the now existing states? Through their realization, is something like the global governance of the community of states in sight?
In this political conflict between the advocates of a democratic cosmopolitanism and the supporters of national sovereignty, between internationalism and trans-nationalism, it would seem obvious to remember the old principle of subsidiarity: it is only when smaller and limited social units are no longer in a position to solve the vital problems of their people that larger and more extensive social and political units are permitted to intervene. Today the particular states are faced with global challenges and have to build up transnational structures of law and authority in order to respond to them. So fundamentally speaking they do not surrender their existing sovereignty, but create new, transnational sovereignties in response to the global challenges. So the sovereignty argument is not really a weighty one. In 2009 an international climate summit was held in Copenhagen, but the necessary agreement about the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions failed to be reached, largely because of the egoism of the sovereign states. That shows on the one hand that transnational obligations must be built up, but also that the sovereign states must fulfil them.
There is some degree of agreement that severe infringements of human rights, such as genocide, must be punished on a global basis. The international arrest warrant and the international court of justice are first steps on the road to a trans-national institution. Severe injuries to nature, such as lasting damage to the earth’s climate, correspond to infringements of human rights. Since wherever they begin locally these have global effects, they must also be punished on a global basis. But from this the international system of states is still far removed.
Can only sovereign states enforce human rights? No. Human rights do not offer only protection for the dignity of every human being, but also the right to participation, and hence chances for co-operation in the implementation of these rights.[14] More and more people are participating in civil non-governmental organizations (NGO) as a way of enforcing human rights and the rights of nature. To name only a few: Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Transparency International, Human Rights Watch, World Watch Institute, Villa Campesina.
Numerous private organizations concern themselves with global problems, such as Médicins sans Frontières, Reporters sans Frontières, ATTAC, the World Social Forum, and many others. These make it possible for individuals to participate in the solution of global problems. Non-governmental organizations of this kind are not powerless. Through publication—through ‘name and shame’—they can effectively combat violations of human rights, the destruction of nature, and corruption. In some global questions they even drive the states forward and by so doing participate in world governance. Human rights are also the rights of everyone to share in the government of the world, and responsibility for the world. This is the sector in which a political ethics can be ecumenically developed; for after all the Christian churches when they join together ecumenically are global non-governmental organizations. It is also the sector where the churches work together with human rights groups and ecological organizations.
These civil and non-governmental initiatives probably do more to promote a global democracy than do the first political steps toward a worldwide state, whether in the form of an imperium or as a transnational superstructure. Both these concepts would lead to a Leviathan—a global surveillance state. Democratic initiatives, on the other hand, can pave the way for a global democracy, and can bring it about.
The Christian churches have had an ambiguous relationship to the discovery and development of human rights. In the struggle for their own religious freedom and the freedom of their congregations from the fetters of the state church, the Reformed churches in France, Holland, England and America very early on became the upholders of human rights and of democratic civil rights,[15] whereas the Lutheran state churches on the continent stood aloof from them for a long time. From the French Revolution onwards, the Roman Catholic church was resistant to the atheistic—or to be more precise the laicist—ideas of democracy. The condemnations in the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 were only rescinded under the Second Vatican Council. Since then, the Catholic Church has been concerned to implement the human rights which had still been condemned in the Syllabus, including religious liberty. The Orthodox churches outside the Western world were prevented by religiously idealized Tsarism, and by the atheistic Stalinism that followed, from playing a part in the development of human rights. We shall therefore begin with the objections to human rights put forward by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2008.
In 2008 the Russian Orthodox Church published their principle standpoints with regard to ‘human dignity, freedom and rights’.[16] Here it was fundamentally a question of the theological interpretation of the basic concept of ‘the dignity of the human being’ as image of God. The declaration rightly starts from Genesis 1.26, and states that God has not merely created human nature but has also endowed it with the attributes of his image and his likeness. That is the general Christian approach. But then the declaration restricts itself to the ‘likeness to God’ and goes on: ‘A human being preserves his God-given dignity and grows in it only if he lives in accordance with moral norms . . . Thus there is a direct link between human dignity and morality’ (I, 5). In saying this, it transforms human dignity into a moral category. ‘Moral acts give the human being dignity, immoral action withdraws it from him.’ But this means that Christian morality precedes human rights. ‘We must clearly define the Christian values with which human rights have to be harmonized (I, II, 1). Otherwise they can encourage ‘abortion, suicide, incest, perversion, destruction of the family, the glorification of cruelty and violence’ (II, 2). The Russian church is thinking of a moral misuse of human rights, but not their political violation. Nevertheless, Russia too has accepted the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Ever since the biblical account of creation, however, a theological distinction has been made between zelem and demuth, eikon and homoiosis, imago and similitudo, being made in the image of God and possessing likeness to God. Imago expresses ontic participation (metexis), similitudo moral correspondence (mimesis). Human life is imago Dei, similitudo means a life in accordance with God. That was the view shared by the Latin and the Greek Fathers of the church. If we understand the two as both being attributes of human nature, the quantifying question arises: how much can be destroyed by sin, and what is indestructible? It is a different matter if we understand the two relationally. Then the image of God (imago) means God’s relationship to human beings: God puts himself in such a relationship to the human being that the human being becomes his image on earth. Likeness to God (similitudo) then describes the human being’s relationship to God. Sin is able to distort the human being’s relationship to God in such a way that human beings in place of God make created things their idols, but it cannot destroy God relationship to human beings. Only God can rescind this, or withdraw it. Consequently the sinner remains God’s image as long as God holds fast to it. The dignity of the human being is to be found in this objective relationship of God’s to human beings; it is therefore non-disposable, inalienable, and indestructible. The child, the old man, the person suffering from dementia, even the criminal: all are God’s image, and in this dignity have to be respected. To be made in the image of God is the universal dignity of every human being; similarity to God, on the other hand, is particular, the sanctification of the Christian life. Consequently universal human rights cannot be made subject to Christian morality; rather, Christian morality moves within this universal context. Nor can Christian ethics be reduced to a global ethic of universal human rights. Christian ethics has its identity in the community of Christ and in the discipleship of Christ, so that there it can manifest ‘the better righteousness’ (Matt. 5.20); but it finds its relevance in the problems and needs of its time. It has a particular point of departure, and aims at general acceptance.
As we have said, human rights were discovered and resolved upon in the actual injustices of a violent world. Inherent in them is their idealistic motivation. According to the preamble of 1948, they formulate ‘ideals’ which the peoples and nations are supposed to strive for. If we gather together all human rights and all the rights of nature, what emerges is indeed the wonderful picture of an ideal world.
Christian eschatology differs from this idealism through the realism of its hope. Its point of departure is the reality of Christ, and it discloses the future horizon of this reality; for this reality of Christ is of concrete universality. According to Colossians 1.15-20, in the crucified and risen Christ both the mystery of creation and the mystery of redemption become manifest in the midst of the history of this unredeemed world. The Epistle’s first chapter encapsulates in a few sentences the heart of the Christian doctrine of creation and its doctrine of the future: ‘In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth’ (1.16). Just as in the prologue to the Gospel of John, the divine that is manifest in Christ is called the word of creation: ‘All things were created through him and for him’ (1.16). So through him God ‘has reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross’ (1.20). From this reconciliation of the universe there follows the hope for the redemption of all things from the wreckage of the world, which they, and not only human beings, have brought about with their relative freedom.
Christian ethics moves in a world already reconciled by God, in spite of its deadly contradictions. It surmounts the violence of friend-enemy thinking and refuses to recognize the subject-object split between human beings and nature. But the future of this world, which objectively has already been reconciled in Christ, is the redeemed world, the world newly created in righteousness. Its symbols of hope are ‘new creation’, ‘new earth’, ‘the indwelling of God and his righteousness in all things’, ‘the resurrection of the dead’, and ‘the bringing again of all things’. Orthodox theology calls the goal of creation and the future of all things ‘the deification of everything created’[17] through the indwelling of God in them all. In this total concept of the world reconciled in Christ and of the future of the whole creation in the reconciling and redeeming righteousness of God which puts all things right and makes them live, human rights and the rights of nature fit together organically, as necessary and hopeful steps on a great path. They are immediate goals which correspond to the goals that are still far off.
Just as Christian ethics has to move in the framework of human rights if it wants to become relevant today, so Christian hope for the world integrates these rights into its total vision. On the one hand the Christian hope for the world, since it is at the service of reconciliation, is closer to reality than the idealism of human rights; but on the other hand it is wider in its vision of the future rise of the divine righteousness. In the service of reconciliation it takes over its own task in the world of perpetrators and victims; in its passion of hope it already anticipates today the hoped for future, according to what is possible and realizable, while relativizing at the same time all anticipations of the future. There is no ‘end of history’ before the resurrection of the dead and the annihilation of death in the presence of God, not in an ideal ‘global state’ either, or in a hegemonial imperium; for they themselves, after all, are in need of redemption.
1. J. Hersch, Les Droits de l’Homme d’un point de vue philosophique (Paris, 1968). ↵
7. Landrecht Buch 3, Article 42. ↵
9. Jürgen Moltmann, Politische Theologie—Politische Ethik (Munich: Kaiser, 1984), 170–72. ↵
The ideology of modern civilization maintained that it is only the human being who exists for his own sake; everything else is there for the sake of the human being, and for his use. Cosmocentrism was the foundation of the pre-industrial agrarian society, but anthropomorphism is the foundation of its modern industrial counterpart. If the human being’s dignity is seen only in his ‘quality as determining subject’ and if this quality is ascribed to the human being alone, human rights which are built up on that dignity are a threat to nature, and hence ultimately to the ability of human beings themselves to survive. The European concept of the determining subject stems from the division of the world into subject and object, and it was intended to secure the central ruling position of the human being himself.[18]See chapter III, 3, 4. ↵