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by John Fielding

As we follow up on the matters raised in my annual address published in the last issue of The Christian Statesman, we need to reconnoiter the need for a Christian Theory of Rights, or if there should be such a theory. After all, if "rights" are conceived merely as the effort of autonomous man to carve out an "area of rebellion" against God and His authority, perhaps the enterprise should be well enough left alone. The secular world, after John Stuart Mill, defines a "right" as an area to which no authority may speak and which no authority may invade. On the other hand, if the totalitarians are correct, there is no area exempt from authority. Mussolini and Hitler would see that there is no place for individuals; nothing exists outside of the state, since for them, the end of the matter is the State.1

From the beginning, then, we see that the relationship of man to authority implicates the problem that Cornelius Van Til would call "the one and the many." Thus, Lawrence Pratt refers to the "pattern of oscillation between individualism and statism" that results from man positing two alternate sources of authority apart from God: the individual or the state.2 The oscillation between libertarianism and conservatism in "right-wing" politics partakes of the same "one and many" analysis.

A General Analysis of the One and the Many

Van Til described the problem of the One and the Many as man's trying "to find unity in the midst of the plurality of things."3 Specifically, without God's authority providing laws amidst facts, how does one relate unity to the facts? How do we know they are not just unrelated particulars?4 Man learns from an early age to categorize facts that he encounters in the world. Where do the categories exist? Do they exist in the world or just in man's mind?

Frame points out that a child begins classifying items by relationships.5 For example, he begins with his relationship with a particular item, Fido. Little by little, he realizes that Fido belongs to a group of similar items known as "dogs." We do this by noticing certain properties they all have in common. As we advance up the ladder of classifying items by common traits, we gradually lose that which makes the items individual, even though we may be considered to be penetrating deeper into the essence of things. Finally, we reach the final level of "being" in general which simply has existence as its common trait. This is not very descriptive; it is too "abstract" to be. Frame states: "As Hegel pointed out, 'being,' as a general or abstract term, is indistinguishable from 'nothing'.... To say that Fido is a 'being' is to say almost nothing about him."6

Likewise, to head in the other direction in search of Aristotle's "prime matter" by breaking things up into smaller and smaller items means further analysis to produce the "ultimate stuff" of the universe. If this "stuff" could be defined, however, it would be able to be analyzed in terms of constituent elements and would not really be "ultimate." Thus, based on our limited abilities, the search for "ultimate reality" by resorting to either ultimate unity or ultimate particularity is an attempt to elevate an aspect of the creation to godhood, much as the current scientific search for a grand unified theory of physics, a "theory of everything," is a search for a God replacement.7

Van Til proposed that the One and the Many dilemma is solved in the Triune God. Frame comments:

God stands in contrast to these idolatrous concepts. His plan is perfectly unified; nothing is out of order; nothing is unknown to him. At the same time, his omniscience does not compromise the reality and intelligibility of the particulars, the individual details of his plan. Nor do the details compromise the overall unity. The ultimate unity is a person, not a principle or an abstract concept. Therefore, the unity is not without content. And the ultimate particularities, the ultimate details, are also divine, as God's plan is his own self-expression.8

As a result of this analysis, we learn that unity and individuality are equally ultimate. Therefore, neither unity nor individuality may be exalted over the other. This has application in the area of law and politics, and, therefore, rights.

Specific Application to Law and Politics

As stated above earlier, the history of law and politics is similarly the history of an oscillation between individualism and statism. As I pointed out in my earlier article comparing libertarianism and conservatism, libertarianism opts for maximum freedom for individuals, but at the expense of law.

At a debate in 1998, the chairman of the Berks County, Pennsylvania Libertarian Party stood and asked what all the candidates thought of the Libertarian Party. Always one to be politic, I said, "It is the no-party party. It advocates no ethical principles that can be applied across the board." I later followed it up by picking on a Libertarian candidate who attempted an exposition of the Pennsylvania motto, "Liberty, Independence, Virtue." He expounded at length on liberty and independence, but then stopped. I quipped, "Isn't that just like a Libertarian: always leaving out virtue." After the debate, the Vice-Chairman of the Libertarian Party took me to task for the ethics remark. I told him that the Libertarian Party, with its anti-coercion membership clause, had guaranteed that the party could never take a position on anything that it could enforce with party discipline, nor could it present a legislative agenda if its candidates should happen to be elected to anything. I reminded him that one could not run a country on two hundred and sixty million versions of liberty of conscience. The point of all of this is that the Libertarian Party, believing as it does in individualism to the exclusion of anything else, cannot muster the unity even to rule the country should it win. Traditionally, as a result of this belief, libertarians have emphasized the rights of individuals at the expense of any sort of unity, conventional or otherwise.

Modern liberals, and some conservatives,9 on the other hand, define rights in terms of collectives. Modern conservatives follow an organic notion of providence in which God's will works itself out in history through nations. John C. Calhoun was the progenitor of this type of conservative in the United States, believing that there were no rights of individuals prior to society or government.10 Calhoun believed that the constitution of a nation was that of an "organism," thus serving as an American exponent of the theory of government put forth by both Edmund Burke and the German romantic philosophers.11 His theory of the federal compact constructs the states as irreducible units, and his theory of concurrent majorities makes "rights" the handmaiden of a minority class. Harry Jaffa comments:

Calhoun's doctrine of state sovereignty--on the contrary--rests upon the denial of any such antecedent natural rights. No rights, to life, liberty or property, have any existence independently of society. In this respect--in their assigning an absolute priority of the social to the individual--Calhoun and Mars stand upon identical theoretical ground. Here is one of the deepest causes for the stultification of the present-day conservative critique of communism. Conservatives most often attack communism on the grounds of its rejection of Christian revelation. But they do so in part because the "rationalism" of communism so closely resembles their own. To disguise this fact, they declare that "there is a better guide than reason." This better guide, however, turns out to be not revelation, but the collective prejudices of their communities on such subjects as race, religion, and ethnicity, prejudices which they are at once unwilling to abandon and unable to defend. They are also--it needs to be said--prejudices utterly inconsistent with Christianity.12

In this, he is more related to Hegel and the Marxists on the one hand and the Nazis on the other.13

At the time, of course, Calhoun's theory was opposed by Abraham Lincoln, who adopted the stance of Madison on antecedent natural rights, which had, in turn, been borrowed from Locke. Locke held that men derived their rights from a state of nature, but unanimously and voluntarily consented to give up a portion of them to institute governments for the protecting of life, liberty, and property. However, Locke's view is based upon an optimistic view of man as creator, building society out of nothing, resting upon an "assumption of a state of nature. This assumption is wholly alien to the Bible."14 Thus,

From the biblical point of view, the important distinction is the distinction, not between the state of nature and the state of civil society, but between the state of innocence and the state after the Fall. If there is any place at all in biblical history for Locke's state of nature, the state of nature would begin after the flood, i.e., a long time after the Fall; for prior to God's grant to Noah and his sons, man did not have the natural right to meat which is a consequence of the natural right to self-preservation, and the state of nature is the state in which every man has "all the rights and privileges of the law of nature." Now, if the state of nature begins a long time after the Fall, the state of nature would seem to partake of all characteristics of "the corrupt state of degenerate men." In fact, however, it is a "poor but virtuous age," an age characterized by innocence and sincerity, not to say the golden age.15

Thus, Locke proposed a social contract because he saw that men were not perfect and would not uphold the rights of others in a state of nature. Therefore, men consent together to form a society to escape the state of nature for self-preservation and those things seen as necessary to that preservation, i.e., life, liberty, and property.16 The contract for governance was based upon the "consent of the governed" and the ability of all reasonable men to discern just laws. The purpose of the government was to preserve life, liberty, and property.17 If the ruler broke the contract by oppressing the people, the people had the right to overthrow him.18

In the one instance, therefore, we have a theory of collective rights, i.e., rights belong only to collectives, a theory tailor-made for those who believe in "states' rights" and rights held by minority groups conceived in their collective state. On the other hand, there is a theory of natural rights held by individuals from a "state of nature" that is antecedent to the formation of society and governments, a view reflected in the Declaration of Independence and held by Madison and Lincoln. Both have been held by conservatives in "good standing." Which is the Christian conservative to hold, or is there a third way?

This article is the first in a series recounting the history of "rights talk" in the world and the debates surrounding the attempt to define "rights" and achieve some sort of basis for their assertion. Finally, an attempt will be made to give at least one version of an accounting for a biblical basis for "rights," indeed if any exists. We must do the beginning spadework in developing a distinctively Christian theory of rights, if one can be found to exist. Only then may a proper foundation be laid for a distinctly Christian theory of government. We cannot offer the world a solution if we have none.

John Fielding (M.A., M.Div., J.D.) is the president of the National Reform Association. He is active in politics and practices law in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at jpfielding@verizon.net.

Endnotes

1. As with Hegel, the state is "God walking on the earth."

2. Lawrence D. Pratt, "The Politics of Pragmatism" in Foundations of Christian Scholarship, Gary North, ed. (Vallecito, CA: Ross House, 1976), p. 121.

3. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Third revised edition; Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967), p. 24.

4. Ibid., pp. 25-26.

5. John Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 1995), pp. 71-72.

6. Ibid, p. 72.

7. Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), pp. 51-59.

8. Frame, p. 75.

9. A modern example would be Frank S. Meyer.

10. John C. Calhoun, "A Disquisition on Government," in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, Ross M. Lence, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty, 1992), p. 566.

11. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Seventh revised edition; Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1986), pp. 173-175; Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 329-330.

12. Harry V. Jaffa, Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1994), p. 25 (quoting from M. E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution [Sugden, 1979]).

13. It is of note that President Clinton's left-wing choice for Attorney General, Lani Guinier, had re-proposed Calhoun's idea of "concurrent majorities" as a mechanism for protecting minority rights. Somehow the idea's origin had escaped the notice of the mainstream press.

14. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 3rd. ed. (Chicago, 1965), p. 215.

15. Strauss, pp. 215-216; citing and quoting from Locke, Two Treatises, 1: 'a7'a7 16, 27, 39, 44-45; II:'a7'a7 6, 11, 25, 36, 38, 56-57, 87, 107-108, 110-111, 116, 128, and A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 112.

16. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge, 1965), pp. 330-331 (Bk.2, Ch.8:95); pp. 350-353 (Bk.2, Ch.9:123-131).

17. Locke, Two Treatises, pp.355-363 (Bk.2, Ch.11: 134-142).

18. Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), p. 92.

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