Abstract
Having examined several areas of social concern within the Seventh-day Adventist church, a need for a systematic and coherent theology of human rights emerges. The Adventist church, like most other Christian bodies, has never attempted to produce a comprehensive theological basis for human rights. There were sporadic attempts within Christendom to justify the notion of human rights on the basis of the doctrines of creation and incarnation and on the basis of so-called natural law. Most of these were of an apologetic character. Lately, in Reformed circles, Jürgen Moltmann has engaged in theologising about human rights via theologies of hope and the future aspect of the Kingdom of God. A more comprehensive theology of human rights, taking into consideration all these ideas, and also more peculiar Adventist theological contributions, has not yet been attempted. This is the purpose of the last part of this volume.
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Notes
Jan Milic Lochman, ‘Ideology or Theology of Human Rights?’, The Church and the Rights of Man (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979).
Carlos Santiago Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
Harlan Cleveland, ‘The Chain Reaction of Human Rights’, Human Dignity: The Internationalization of Human Rights ed. Alice H. Henkin (New York: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1979), pp. IX–XII
James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
Roy Jenkins, What the Churches Can Do About Human Rights (London: British Council of Churches, 1989)
Richard Harries, ‘Human Rights in Theological Perspective’, Human Rights for the 1990s, ed. Robert Blackburn and John Taylor (London and New York: Mansell, 1991), pp. 1–13
R. J. Henle, ‘A Christian View of Human Rights: A Thomistic Reflection’, The Philosophy of Human Rights: International Perspectives, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (London: Aldwych Press, 1989), pp. 87–94
Jürgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope (London: SCM Press, 1975), p. 152.
Cf. Joseph Raz, ‘Right-based Morality’, Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 186–90
Bert B. Beach, Bright Candle of Courage (Boise, Idaho: Pacific Press, 1987), pp. 13, 47.
David Lyon (ed.), Rights (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1979), p. 11.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1978), pp. 171–2.
Jo Renee Formicola, The Catholic Church and Human Rights: Its Role in the Formulation of U.S. Policy 1945–1980 (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1988), p. 3.
Jürgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 8.
Patrick J. O’Mahony, The Fantasy of Human Rights (Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1978), p. 65.
Some of the most important theological writings of this century have been concerned with the doctrine of man. See, for example, Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1939)
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941, 1943)
Marianne H. Micks, Our Search for Identity: Humanity In the Image of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982)
Wolfhart Pannenberg, What Is Man? Contemporary Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970).
R. C. Sproul, In Search of Dignity (Basingstoke: Pickering & Inglis, 1984).
Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless (London: SCM Press, 1983), p. 47.
Garrett Barden, ‘A Dialectic of Right’, Understanding of Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary and Interfaith Study, ed. A. D. Falconer (Dublin: Irish School of Ecumenics, 1980), pp. 68–9.
N. Goodall (ed.) The Uppsala Report 1968: Official Report of the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1968), pp. 5–6.
Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).
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© 1998 Zdravko Plantak
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Plantak, Z. (1998). Philosophical Basis for Human Rights. In: The Silent Church. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26649-4_9
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