Sometime this past week the number of pageviews for my blog crossed the half-million mark. "Pageviews" doesn't mean a great deal in the world of SEO's but it's something. And it's free. A Moving Trueman is my number one post if anyone cares to know.
Today I want to link to the YouTube lecture by Oliver O'Donovan titled "Love, Values, and Rights." (O'Donovan's lecture begins at the 9:00 mark.) As some readers may already know, I count O'Donovan as the greatest living Protestant moral theologian. I have posted about his work more times than I care to count or link. This lecture, the bulk of which is devoted to an account of love, is causing me to rethink what I concluded in "What's Wrong With Rights? Part 4".
In short, drawing on nineteenth-century German jurist Friedrich Stahl, I found in the notion of the fear of God a means by which to resolve the conflicting accounts of the foundation of an orderly social life of O'Donovan and American philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. O'Donovan argues that a right-order has priority over rights while Wolterstorff contends for the reverse.
But what if, I am now wondering, the higher order principle by which the accounts of these two heavyweights can be harmonized is not in the fear of the Lord but instead is in love? The fear of the Lord certainly entails love of God but does not, standing alone, require love of one's neighbor. Following O'Donovan's lecture it begins to seem that the virtue of love--of God and my neighbor--can bring together without remainder an account of a rightly ordered society together with subjective rights of its individual members.
I hope to follow up as I continue to work out this matter. Until then, keep those pageviews coming!
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