Über-blogger Peter Leithart posts here about Douglas Farrow's recently published Ascension Theology. I don't plan to read the book but Leithart's summary sent me to amazon.com where I read what Farrow had to say about the current problem of human rights. His observation is apt: today the Christian church is assaulted for evils that it did more than any other institution to correct – for being misogynist when it “has produced a civilization in which women have enjoyed unprecedented freedom” and for slavery when “for two millennia it has been the primary force of resistance to slavery.”
Like many others, however, Farrow mistakenly traces part of the contemporary problem of human rights to an alleged turn from objective to subjective rights. Readers from 2009 might remember my blogs on Nick Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs, who, along with other, puts paid to this canard.
I urge those who want to know more to wait a few more weeks until the current issue of the Campbell Law Review publishes my piece "Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition." A quick survey of the history of human rights in the West, a critique of a leading contemporary theory, and what I believe is a robust exegetical/theological account for human rights.
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