In light of the ongoing clash between the US president and the Judiciairy, what is below should prove useful for lawyers and other citizens.
In the realm of law it is hardly known that “individual freedom and rights are most prevalent where Christianity has had the greatest impact”, nor are human rights advocates often aware of the philosophical dilemma of defining and justifying inalienable human rights minus a transcendent and reliable/credible revelational source such as the Bible with its foundational doctrine of human beings uniquely created by and in the image of God.
On what other basis, but the concept of creation by and in the image of God could we, non-arbitrarily, elevate the interests of humans over the interests of other animals or plants or even inanimate objects?
If one operates with an evolutionary philosophical and scientific framework it will be difficult to assign essential or superior dignity to the evolutionary accident called ‘human being’—the result of chance, natural selection, mutations and time—and it would be impossible to escape the racism inherent in, and argued from, the evolutionary view that the earlier species of ‘humans’ were inferior to later species.
Where, then, do we get the idea on which contemporary human rights theory rests: that ultimate value resides in the individual, independent from and even prior to participation in any social or political collective? The earliest suggestion of this idea occurs in the Hebrew account which describes Adam, whose name means “humanity,” as being created in the “image of God.” …This account implies the essential equality of all human beings, and supports the idea of rights that all enjoy by virtue of their common humanity.
The legally entrenched idea that no one is above the law had its genesis in an encounter between an emperor and a bishop in the 4th century AD and got two other shots in the arm by the British Magna Carta in the 13th century and a bombshell of a book written by a clergyman in the 17th century.
In A.D. 390 some people in Thessalonica rioted, arousing the anger of the Christian emperor, Theodosius the Great. He overreacted, slaughtering some seven thousand people, most of whom were innocent. Bishop Ambrose, who was in Milan—which was also where the emperor lived—did not turn a blind eye to the emperor’s vindictive and unjust behavior. He asked him to repent of his massacre. When the emperor refused, the bishop excommunicated him. After a month of stubborn hesitation, Theodosius prostrated himself and repented in Ambrose’s cathedral, bringing tears of joy to fellow believers.
The emperor too was under the law and Ambrose would not allow the emperor or others to forget that.
Nor can we forget the significant influence of the Church, through the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton and his Christian colleagues, on the British Magna Carta (the Large Charter) of 1215, which gave new rights to barons and the people in general and which also challenged the notion of the king being above the law.
The Revd. Samuel Rutherford, a Presbyterian, wrote his Lex, Rex: Or the Law and the Prince in 1644. The main thesis, as implied in the title, is that the law is king, and so the king is under the law and not above it, a notion that was regarded as treasonously contrary to the tradition of the ‘divine right of kings’.
This is an excerpt from my recorded public lecture in Barbados years ago, titled “The Church’s Impact on Western Civilization”. The audio version is available as a down load from my website:www.thechisholmsource.com