More Than Education
For the local church to follow its mission there are several important ingredients. Some of the are only provided by the Holy Spirit. Some of them are interpersonal within the local body. And some of them are resolved as functions that the church is designed to grow into and perform. It is this that Kerygma Institute desires to work, for the sake of the gospel and the cause of Christ.
What This Is All About
The center column is a series of essays and comments covering subjects pertinent to church education. These represent the mindset that I would bring to a local church when speaking on matters of world view, education, and the advancement of the kingdom of God.
« Galatians 3:15-29

Examining Inalienable Rights

The Declaration of Independence opens with this statement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

We, of course, use the term “inalienable” in the place of “unalienable” and mean the same thing. But what that word means is quite important. The term means simply that these rights cannot be externalized. They lie only with the individual and are not granted by the state.

There are three stated here — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Life” means more than being alive. It means, along with “liberty,” being fully self-determined. Statements like this amount to treason in a monarchy or modern statist system where the king or the government knows best. The “pursuit of happiness” is likewise more than just the satisfaction of the moment but is much more about the freedom to pursue at ones discretion any end that one desires (within law and decency, of course).

And then there is the social contract component that cannot be missed. The governed give their consent to government. Throughout history there have been changes in government based on the level of satisfaction within a nation. Few totalitarian states survive at the expense of their people. But then again, in human history few states survive long anyway. There is a sense where this statement hints of an optimism that may not be well-founded in history.

This social contract occurs when people choose to externalize their rights — to surrender them to agreed-upon ends in the success of a society. We place limits on how far our personal liberties might take us. In the US we may not, for instance, remove these rights from a segment of society without due process of law. But even here is a limit. We have outlawed not only slavery — the involuntary removal of natural right — but also voluntary, indentured service. Our system does not tolerate the removal of internal rights, even voluntarily.

The older emphasis on “property” which was replaced by the “pursuit of happiness” is an interesting one. There was some interaction between Franklin and Jefferson regarding this (ref Hutchinson) that would lean toward including only internalized rights in the enumerated list. This list, also, is not complete as it says that these three are “among” other rights. But the speculations are many and the truth is difficult to discern here. Was it also a question about slavery and a way to just not talk about it? Or was it a method for making certain that property ownership was always an external right and thus subject to government control?

Of interest here is the clear presence of “positive liberty” to be self directed. It seems that the Constitution does not address this because that is not the Constitution’s goal. The Constitution can only deal with those matters in it purview — managing matters of external rights. Nor is it capable of doing so if positive liberty is a matter of natural right/natural law and not of either legislation or declaration. Thus it seems that the Constitution cannot function in the field of positive liberty.

But there is a theological component which should not be missed or dismissed. If rights are from the Creator then they are apparently provided as a matter of creation and are thus granted by a higher authority. This makes them not exactly natural but instead regular. They can be expected to be present, but even life itself is externally subject to the Creator’s control. Likewise liberty and individual pursuits are subject to the Creator’s providential management of human society.

There is a point where Christian theology separates itself from government in its view of humanity. And there is a point where government’s co-opting of theology can prove damaging to religious beliefs as well as seductive to religious adherents. If we are God’s slaves (δοῦλος) then we are not fully free to ourselves. Our rights are His alone, and not even ours, even by nature.

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« Galatians 3:15-29

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