My comments follow below this exchange:
At 08:47 AM 1/3/2007, David Opderbeck wrote:
>Hi, Don. You said: however I never discussed
>whether any laws were positive or not.
>
>I think you misunderstood what I meant by
>"positive" law. "Positive" law, in legal
>parlance, is simply law that is officially
>encoded and enforced by a sovereign, such as
>statutes. We use this term to contrast
>"positive" law to other sources of regulation,
>such as private contracts, social norms, and
>ecclesiastical structures. "Positive" law in
>this sense doesn't imply that the particular
>rule in question is "good" or "bad" policy.
>
>And: However, I am saying that the primary
>purpose of laws should be individual rights and
>group issues should be secondary
>
>I'm not sure I can fully agree with this as a
>general principle. I'd agree that individual
>"rights" are important -- thought I'd prefer
>terms I might consider more Biblical, such as
>"personal dignity." However, I think the
>Enlightenment tradition (and its libertarian
>offshoots) overemphasizes this notion of
>individual "rights" and tends to deify the
>individual. It's an unfortunate quirk of
>American Evangelicalism, I think, that Western
>Christianity has come to be so tightly
>identified with an essentially libertarian ethic and jurisprudence.
>
>It seems to me that the Biblical pattern is to
>emphasize the community to a greater extent than
>the individual. Certainly this is true within
>the Church: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition
>or vain conceit, but in humility consider others
>better than yourselves." (Phil. 2:3). I think
>a similar principle is reflected in Biblical
>social ethics, from things like the OT jubilee
>laws to Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
>
>So, I'd suggest that a thoroughly Christian
>jurisprudence has to account for the dignity of
>each individual as created in the image of God,
>but cannot have as its focus an individualistic
>focus on personal autonomy and rights.
>
>On 1/3/07, Don Perrett wrote:
> >
> > I appreciate your willingness to read what my
> post, however I never discussed whether any
> laws were positive or not. I merely am stating
> that while there are some laws to protect
> individual rights, most laws (around the world,
> not just the US) are designed to benefit the
> group, or "an" individual person. Individual
> rights are secondary in most systems. This
> seems normal and in flow with nature. However,
> I am saying that the primary purpose of laws
> should be individual rights and group issues
> should be secondary. Rights of the leader
> should not exist individually except in that
> the leader is an individual and is entitled the
> same rights as anyone else. Many laws, even in
> the US, are made simply to protect bad behavior
> of our leaders. When the same crime is
> committed by an individual it is not overlooked.
> >
> > Nor did I say that groups are not allowed or
> that civil authorities shouldn't exist. They
> should exist simply to ensure that one
> individual does not infringe on the rights of
> another individual. They should not be as
> concerned with group survival. Quite often
> leaders will sacrifice individuals (rights and
> lives) to ensure the survival of the
> group. This to me is counter to scripture. If
> all individuals are taught to be self
> responsible and accountable, and show agape
> towards one another, then the group will
> survive through the "natural" human behavior of
> each individual. Groups consist of individuals
> and if individuality is removed, of what then
> does a group consist? Your last paragraph is right on target. ~ Don
[snip]
@ Any comments on what I'm posting below? :)
August 01, 2005
When is Social Justice Just? by Scot McKnight
"...I post here a paper I gave to our Faculty
this Spring. I'm concerned that our sense of
justice be Christian and not cave in to the US Constitution.
So here it is...
When Social Justice is Just - Reflections
Scot McKnight [[[ who also posts here: What is
the Emerging Church? Postmodernity http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=516 ]]]
Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies North Park University
Here are the key ideas I want to excerpt from his
"social justice" screed which show that he doesn't have the first clue:
God’s Politics
"Before I proceeds to such, however, we need
to observe just how difficult it is to pull this
off. Jim Wallis, whom I have been reading since
the mid-70s, and whose books The Call to
Conversion I consider one of the finest tracts
ever on how Christians should operate within the State......"
But, frankly, Jim Wallis not a sociologist or a
theologian but a pastor and a political activist
and an editor, and he has a voice in the public
forum and I like what he has to say – most of the
time. ... It is largely because of Wallis’
work in the last thirty years that I have chosen
to give this lecture (and now permit it to take
on a printed form) on justice: ..
There is something present in both Aristotle and
his medieval reincarnation in Aquinas that is
totally missing in the modern sense of justice:
justice for both of them, and for the Bible, is
communal and not just individual. ...
The Calvinists, .....had a theory of a
progressive millennialization of the world
through due process. The irony of this view is
that it seems to be what both the social
conservatives and the social liberals believe in
the USA today, and now both may be upset with me
for suggesting they are Calvinistic in their understanding of justice.
So, then, how shall we live?
My suggestion is that Christians need to
operate on the basis of their Christian sense of
justice –.......hold to an ideal that transcends
the opportunistic and narcissistic tendencies of
personal freedoms and rights, and that will work
instead for a society where humans are given back
the opportunity to become, once again, Eikons of
God, in union with God and in communion with one
another. And it is Trinitarian. ....
What this will mean is that justice first of
all has to be redefined, ..... Social justice
is only truly just for the Christian when it is a
justice not based on equality and freedom, but on
Eikons designed for love of God and others,
designed to be played out in relationships and in
community. Until our rights are subsumed under
God’s right, we will distort our sense of justice.
Posted by ScotMcKnight in URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2930973
Some comments to Scott with which I would agree (excerpted):
"...In my assessment, we need to recover the
particularity of the christian conception of
justice for our logic within the church. But I
think it is a mistake to take that conception,
fully fledged, into the public realm as the
standard for assessing the nature of the
organization of social structures that are shared
by people of different religious- and life-perspectives.
My reason is this: when assessing the norms
involved in the practices that Christians share
with non-Christians, if we attempt to enforce the
concepts of eikon and love for god, we will run
into some severe problems that are rooted in
epistemology. The root cause of these problems is
this: in a pluralistic setting, people can be
rationally justified in not believing in the
christian narratives. In many cases, they do not
have reason to accept that narrative, nor the
specific concepts that precipitate out of it
(e.g., love for god, eikon relationships). So if
the Christian holds these concepts as the
standards by which he/she judges and debates the
norms of practices shared by non-christians (or
christians of different persuasions) then the
invevitable result will be the attempt to
coercively impose these standards on people who have no reason to accept them.
Our concerns with public or social justice need
not be rooted in an ontological analysis of
justice, liberal atomistic or otherwise. The
basis for such concerns is simply the fact that
we share space, resources, and institutions with
people of differing religious- and
life-perspectives. Despite what Hobbes and
Nietzsche might say, people (Christian and not)
have capacities to share, exhibit empathy, and in
some cases, even strive to minimize bias and
partiality. This gives us reason to suspect that
Hobbes' and Nietzsche's conceptions of human
nature are, perhaps, overly simplistic. In
assessing the nature and quality of our shared
practices, we need to be multi-lingual enough
that we can arrive at solutions that do not
involve coercing people into accepting Christian
standards for which they are not, and should not be, accountable.
Posted by: Steve B/ | August 03, 2005 at 10:55 AM
Steve, Thanks for this. What I am trying to say
is that, though Christians will have to operate
on a different set of public forum conversational
premises, the Christian should not adopt those
premises as Christian premises. In other words, I
may argue for pluralism in the public without
affirming pluralism as something I believe in. My
concern is the all-too-quick attempt by so many
Christians to adopt the premises of the US
Constitution and never to challenge it as a
foundation for what they are actually believing. ..."
Posted by: Scot McKnight | August 03, 2005 at 01:40 PM
Scot, "...but the Christian definitely has to
enter the public sphere as, first and foremost, a
Christian. But what I don't see much of in the
contemporary scene is a willingness for
Christians to recognize that others do not adhere
to Christianity (or the particular version of it
in question) and that they are rationally
justified in not doing so. A serious recognition
of that would motivate us, .... to seek to find
cooperative solutions with others who don't share
the particular conception of the good that we do. [Edited]
Posted by: Steve B. | August 03, 2005 at 02:20 PM
"...While I understand, and agree, that the US
Constitution and Bill of Rights is not precisely
a spiritual document, it has proven to be the
single best liberator of people to act freely on
their moral choices in human history. The
Constitution and Bill of Rights is there "to seek
to find cooperative solutions with others who
don't share the particular conception of the good that we do."
Posted by: Phil | December 17, 2006 at 02:31 AM
Source:
http://www.generousorthodoxy.net/thinktank/2005/08/when_is_social_.html#more
~ Janice
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Received on Thu Jan 4 11:27:41 2007
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