Imputed Rights: An Essay in Christian Social Theory - Hardcover

Andelson, Robert V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0856832782 ISBN 13: 9780856832789

Verlag: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Thoughtful and informative, this essay is an analysis of the basis and nature of human rights. Arguing that human rights is an issue that is often invoked but seldom intelligently considered, this record examines concrete, immediate, moral, and social issues, including birth control, taxation, welfare, private behavior, and military service. Noting the inadequacies of non-Christian positions—such as the radical-humanist, utilitarian, and self-realization approaches—this account develops an original thesis in which the absolute ground for rights is the will and grace of God.

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Robert V. Andelson was an ordained Congregationalist minister and a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. He is the author of From Wasteland to Promised Land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World and the coauthor of Critics of Henry George: An Appraisal of their Strictures on “Progress and Poverty.”

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Imputed Rights

An Essay in Christian Social Theory

By Robert V. Andelson

Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd

Copyright © 2010 The estate of Robert V. Andelson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85683-278-9

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Foreword, 
Foreword to the First Edition, 
Preface, 
Prolegomena, 
Part 1 — The Foundations of Human Rights, 
Chapter 1 - Axiology: Rights and the Ground of Worth, 
Chapter 2 - Teleology: The Vocation of Man, 
Chapter 3 - Anthropology: The Nature of Empirical Man, 
Chapter 4 - Soteriology: The Social Significance of the Atonement, 
Part 2 — The Community of Covenant, 
Chapter 5 - The Primal Right as the Bond of Covenant, 
Chapter 6 - Particularizations of the Primal Right, 
Chapter 7 - Maintaining the Covenant, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Axiology: Rights and the Ground of Worth

Let us begin with that which man reveres but does not choose, that which carries as its sign intense and boundless suffering, that which the untutored consciousness proclaims as holy, that is, separate from itself. It cannot be, as Feuerbach thought, a projection of human desires, however lofty, for it constitutes a challenge and a threat to those desires. Let us begin with absolute value, sternly uncompromising in its unconditional demand, yet gracious in the very fact of its self-disclosure. Let us acknowledge it as that to which we must seek to reconcile our ideas of God. Let us acknowledge it, therefore, as God. Let us recognize that it cannot be stated propositionally, that it cannot be defined analytically, and that it cannot be compassed rationally. But let us recognize that it is.

There are those whose sophistication will be intolerably affronted by such acknowledgment and recognition. Let us leave them with their sophistication and go our way, wishing them a good deliverance. We cannot tarry in a vain attempt to prove that which can only be experienced. It has other and more pressing claims upon our efforts.

The quest for meaning is itself meaningless except as an endeavor pursued in the service of some value structure. Even the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake rests upon an antecedent value judgment about knowledge. Therefore, if we are to get at the meaning of human rights, our ultimate starting point must be a discussion of value. Yet, since all reasoning presupposes some judgment of value, we cannot reason about value without commencing with something "given." Such reasoning, if carried far enough, will point beyond itself to the idea of perfection, which reason cannot circumscribe. In Irwin Edman's words,

Even the most stringent thinking begins with what is precedent to thought; it culminates in what is beyond its operations. At the beginning and the end the thinker knows what he cannot prove; the process of thinking is bounded at both ends by the ineffable.

We need not hesitate to employ the term God to signify the ineffable perfection which bounds the realm of thought. But God cannot be reduced to a logical presupposition or deduction. St. Anselm's famous ontological proof was an attempt to establish God's actual existence as a necessary inference from the idea of perfection. If his critics are correct in their rejection of this method as fallacious, they have merely demonstrated that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, that the human mind cannot autonomously arrive at the ground and fulfillment of its own activity. Although God's existence may be a necessary idea, only personal encounter with the living Word reveals it to be more than an idea. Faith cannot be rationally coerced: it is, in the final analysis, a gift.

The apprehension of value in a formal sense is, as Kant discerned, a universal innate fact of consciousness, which he identified with duty. Starting with duty, Kant postulated God's existence as an external means of reconciling the dutiful disposition with happiness, the latter being ruled out as a motive for the former, but asserted as requisite to the underlying harmony of the rational and moral universe. In these passages, at least, God appears to be brought in as a sort of after-thought, a logical agent for rendering the good will ultimately productive of felicity. Yet since Kant insisted unequivocally that "nothing in the world, indeed nothing even beyond the world, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will," and since he would not have been willing to concede that God can be anything less than absolutely good, his own premises give rise to the inference that God should be identified with the good will itself. There are, as a matter of fact, passages in the Opus Postumum which suggest that at the end of his life he may have consciously moved toward such an identification, although scholars are in disagreement on this point. In any case, the concept of God as essentially the good will is eminently fruitful regardless of whether or not it was explicitly set forth by Kant, and need not be equated, if the good will be interpreted in a more comprehensive sense than his, with a fundamentally immanentist view of deity. It is also profoundly faithful to the Biblical teaching that the nature of God is best described as love.

The idea of duty implies something more ultimate than itself, in terms of which it exists. If duty is to have any moral significance at all, one must define it as that which value commands. The good will may thus be understood as transcendently self-contained on the divine level, and as reflected on the human level as obedience to the duty of conforming to it for its own sake. Here the obedience of Jesus becomes intelligible as the good will revealing itself dialectically in a movement of unconditional demand and response which fulfills and validates the life of man by raising it above itself. Man transcends creaturehood only as he accepts it in obedience to the demand which absolute value makes upon him, and in his acknowledgement that this very acceptance represents absolute value working in him, that it is truly God who speaks when man sincerely prays: "Not my will but Thine be done." Kant was correct in his assertion that duty predicates freedom; he was also correct in identifying absolute value with the dutiful response, at least for man. If the good will consists in obedience to the claim of value yet is itself identified with value, its human exercise in freedom is a paradox unless value be regarded as basically immanent in man. Thus Kant characteristically speaks of the good will as the disposition of finite rational beings to act in accordance with laws which they prescribe to themselves as expressions of their own rational nature. But faith is not afraid of paradox. And it is only proximately that value can be equated with the dutiful disposition, for it involves a focus which is liberal rather than dutiful, magnanimous rather than punctilious. To define God as ineffable perfection would be sterile were it not for the recognition that perfection, while self-contained, is nonetheless dynamic, revealing itself in a gracious self-disclosure which constitutes at the same time an unlimited claim. It reveals itself in a good will which is both creative and constitutive of value.

Henry Nelson Wieman, whose value theory culminates in an empirical theology, considers it imprecise to attribute personality to absolute value or God, because he mistakenly conceives personality to be something creaturely and relative. Hence, he speaks of God...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0856832782
• ISBN 13: 9780856832789
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar