badgers, mushroom, and links

• Fighting the dehumanisation of the shopping queue, HT
• Luther on Innerancy, while Biologos starts a new series on literalism
• A wonderful meditation on eschatology and time travel
• The peer review/online review conversation continues, HT
• Someone asks if believing in God is evolutionarily advantageous?
• Kevin Vanhoozer lectures on the redramatisation of theology
• Tim Keller lectures on preaching Christ in Postmodernity

Why Waihopai

The trial  is continuing, great photos here, I've not been able to get any updates on what happened yesterday, the court was in recess discussing legal stuff. The trial is starting again today (tues 16th) at 10am, or ten minutes ago now. Adi Leason's defence lawyer, Michael Knowles opened the case for the defence last week with these words:

This is an exceptional trial.  There are times when law, morality and humanity come together to make would otherwise be unlawful.  Those times are when the preservation of human life is involved.  Human life is no less a human life because it resides in a foreign land, or dresses funny, or has a different skin colour.

It’s also an exceptional case because it is in the area of foreign intelligence.  Foreign intelligence is the one area of our society where democracy and free process is not allowed to go.  Where there is a Faustian pact between the government and the intelligence agencies.  Where the government says ‘we won’t ask any questions’ – and the intelligence agencies say ‘good!  We won’t tell you any lies.

 From here. Worth a look at the rest too.

There is still so much complacency in the West about what is being done in our name and for our sake.  I'm praying not just that the Waihopai three will walk free but that this will get the attention it deserves and wake some more out of their complacency.  But Knowles understands the problem, if the people who suffer are different to us or too far away, we struggle to care or admit our responsibility.  For most of the jury I expect this is going to be a radically new concept for them, that a kiwi could (and should) take responsibility for the suffering of people in Iraq, but if they can grasp the message that the Waihopai three are proclaiming in word, and did proclaim in deed, then I cannot see how they could either convict them or fail to be convicted themselves.

Kyrie Eleison

[This is not an offical ploughshares press release, only my own personal take.  See their website for the official word.]

The Missing Elements of Human Rights: A Theological Opportunity?

I've posted a fair bit about human rights and human responsibility, but generally only to be critical. I have yet to try to construct anything useful. Roman Catholic Theologian Anthony Kelly makes the same critique but with reference to some interesting and little know data:

While it is true that the terrible toll of the victims of totalitarian regimes have pricked the conscience of the international community, that conscience has not been uniformly reformed. The moral revolution that was hoped for has been frustrated in innumerable instances. One example is the prevalence of a spurious language of victimhood. Claiming “victim status” has now become a familiar manipulative technique in politics. A contributing factor in this distortion is the missing element in the UNDHR itself. As it framers admitted, there was no accompanying declaration of responsibilities—on the part of persons, groups or institutions—to assume the duty of implementing the basic rights in question. Another document was promised, but never appeared. With no reasoned grounding of universal human rights in universal responsibility, rights-language can be simply taken over by a consumerist culture. If that is the case, the appeal to rights is no more than a political machination, a useful rhetoric for the exercise of power. It balloons out into an uncontrolled assertion of rights, individual or corporate, against others, without any commitment to the common good and of responsibility for the truly powerless. And so it happens that the originally noble conception of human rights for all is trivialised, liable to exploitation by the politically adept few. Shared responsibility for the most vulnerable and powerless is thus compromised. A study by L. C. Keith sought to assess how much belonging to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights affected the promotion of human rights. [Journal for Peace Research 36, no. 1 (1999): 95-118] After examining a hundred and seventy eight countries over an eighteen-year period, his conclusions were not optimistic: observable impact was minimal.

He sees this lacuna as an opportunity for constructive theological work:

The very gap in the UNDHR Declaration and the current confusion as to what constitutes the basis of human rights is an open door for Christian theology, inviting it to recover a distinctive voice. The message would be something like this: Jesus’ rising from the dead undermines the history of mutual blaming and victimisation. For he freely exposed himself to the violence of cultural forces in order to disrupt, once and for all, the old world order based on the victimisation of others. His resurrection is not a new thought, but an interuptive and communicative event. It has its effect in a human community transformed into the image of the self-giving love of God. Jesus is glorified, not so as to glorify the role of the victim, but to unmask the victimising dynamics latent in all societies. The resurrection of this victim has a disturbing but liberating effect in the human community. It demands to be taken as the decisive influence in human relationships, the inexhaustible inspiration of responsibility for those victimised by suffering and oppression. Those who have suffered (victims, martyrs), and those who have caused such suffering (the enemy), are alike enfolded in the originary compassion and forgiveness embodied in the risen One.

Extracts from the article "The Resurrection and Moral Theology".

I think Kelly is working here in the direction that Jurgen Moltmann has already taken, and I'm surprised not to see Moltmann referenced in the article (he has been heavily involved in the ecumenical movement.) The themes of hope and the resurrection' s contradiction of death and violence are Moltmann's bread and butter.

The real concern I have is that while such thinking provides an ethic for the Christian it is is not easily applicable to the political sphere where most people live in ignorance of the resurrection of Christ and its implications. Moltmann has been saying this sort of stuff for decades and many Christians have taken notice, but it has had little or no effect on such organisations as the UN because the logic on which it is founded is peculiarly Christian. I have to be honest, in my old age I think I am becoming a Niebuhrian Christian Realist. I don't like it, I especially don't like how close it seems to bring me to being a Lutheran "two kingdoms" kind of thinker, but it is better than classical just war theory (although this guy doesn't think so) because it refuses to relativise the teaching of Christ .

can human rights dehumanize us?

Currently reading a very impressive article "Rhetoric, Postemodernism, and Theological education," by A.K.M Adam writing in To Teach, to Delight, and to Move, 2004, the following quotes are from page 69:

"Modern ethical reasoning speaks "human rights" as its native language, asserting the fundamental interchangeability of any human person - though these are usually defined in markedly particular terms (citizens of the United States have "free speech" as a human right, but not adequate health care, whereas citizens of China have "adequate health care" as a human right, but not free speech)."

This to me is a very important insight, the language of human rights is very relative depending on your cultural location. Hence so much misunderstanding between the West and radical Islam, to the westerner the sexual display of women in public is their human right, but to a conservative Muslim, or orthodox Jew, it is her human right to be covered up and protected from the lust of men, and it is mens right to be protected from her lust inducing potential! Yet most rights campaigners assume that their concept of human rights is universal and that no other possibilities exist. This is most tellingly manifest in the talk we have now in NZ regarding sexual rights. That prostitutes have a right to sell their bodies on the streets and homosexuals have a right to adopt children or marry is the obvious manifest universal truth to the liberal majority, and yet is it really being a reactionary conservative to suggest that these are not truly human rights at all, but rather arbitrary ones?

"To the extent that such a person a hypothetical person is universal, of course, [they are] no one in particular - but the God of Christian theology knows everyone particularly, so that the extent that theologians permit a modern insistence on universality to dominate their doctrines, they collaborate with the modern proclivity toward homogenisation."

This one could really screw with your mind, how do you do theology if you have to accept that God deals with everyone on a case by case basis?! What does this really mean? Is this a demand for situation ethics? Are there not universal axioms that can be applied to the human race? The idea that no person can be interchanged with another really makes the issue of 'rights' a very thorny one, because people 'rights' are always going to impinge on the rights of others. Especially in a world where people don't recognise the subjectivity of those rights.

In this way the idea of 'rights' dehumanizes and puts all the attention on the person as victim demanding to be treated fairly. By contrast we gain our humanity by living up to our responsibilities to each other, often giving to and serving those who in our world might have no rights to our resources and concern. It means nothing to assert that a street urchin in an Indian metroplolis has a right to food. It means a great deal to assert that maybe I have a responsibility to feed her. As a victim whose rights are being ignored, she is dehumanized; just one more statistic. As someone to whom I am inescapably connected she is a human who belongs to me, and to whom I belong. If I meet her rights I place myself above her as her saviour. If I fulfill my responsibilities, she allows me to be who I should be, and we are both beneath the saviour who called me to serve and who blesses her through me.

Just thinking out loud, :-), let me know what you think.

Steve Riley on Human Dignity

[Steve who was interviewed earlier here gives his pub/BBQ answer to the question: What gives a human dignity? Please comment, with questions, requests for clarification, and even rebuttals, he wont mind. I'm hoping this will turn into a good discussion as human rights are something we all talk about but seldom think critically about.]

Contemporary (ethical and legal) usage of ‘dignity’ is still informed (albeit opaquely) by a Christian view of dignity which insists that Man is Imago Dei and, as such, elevated above the rest of Creation. That notion of being our qualitatively different to the other bits of Creation (and even higher animals) seems to me correct and doesn’t necessarily need God or any messy metaphysics. Because of things like sophisticated cultural practices, the meaning that we invest in the world, distinctive forms of consciousness, a distinctive susceptibility to mental and not just physical suffering, means that we are different to other animals. How these facts translate into values is a very different and difficult question.

Christian (particularly Catholic) thought has, via dignity, emphasised the sanctity of humans and all human ‘matter’ (regardless of its capabilities, capacities or potential) generating largely conservative ethical consequences (especially opposition to any ‘intervention’ which treats human matter as material on a par with non-human matter). It seems to me that these conservative consequences probably do flow from Imago Dei, but not necessarily from the ‘qualitative differences’ I identified (culture, consciousness, mental suffering etc.). In fact, I’m not quite sure how we derive values from facts full stop.

What is true is that dignity remains a meaningful part of our moral vocabulary, particularly in terms of articulating violation or inhumanity. To that extent it is something best ‘observed in the breach’: difficult to say what it is, but we can see when it’s diminished or destroyed. More positively, it generally functions as a way of opposing the utility of utilitarianism: talking about human dignity is a way of saying ‘there’s more to human life than what’s useful’ and ‘regardless of the will and needs of the majority, each individual is valuable’.

[So let us know what you think :-)]