“Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; he who does not love does not know God.”
1 John 4:7–8
Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Lest anyone be confused about what “all” means, Article 2 presents an exhaustive list of inclusions:
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3 continues with three specific rights that flow from the “rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration”: “the right to life, liberty [sic] and security of person,” language clearly reminiscent of and indebted to the Declaration of Independence. (The authors of the UN Declaration inexcusably omit the Oxford comma in that sentence; nevertheless, grammatical heterodoxy does not compromise their inherent and equal dignity.) Articles 4–12 lay out the protections that guarantee the right to life, liberty, and security, but I would summarize the list thus: “Under no circumstances is it morally permissible for one person to violate the inherent dignity of another person.”
Thus, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first principle of all natural law is “Every person possesses an equal and inherent dignity that ought never be violated.” As a consequence, every person on earth should believe this principle because the failure to believe it inevitably results in injustice, oppression, exploitation, and violence. That is the necessary axiom.
My thesis is that this principle needs no divine sanction to be true or binding; it is a self-evident proposition and the basis of all moral reasoning. Indeed, the character of God should accord with this principle: A God who adheres to and is bound by an attachment to universal human dignity is superior to a god who does not. A god who plays favorites is not God. We cannot imagine loving a god who is arbitrary and unjust. We might fear such a god and bow our heads in abject terror, but we could not have a friendship with it. That C. S. Lewis concurs is clear from his famous letter to a Mr. Beversluis,
Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on…Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s…) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
When Lewis subordinates scriptural inerrancy to God’s good character, Lewis tends toward universalism more than many Christians are willing to admit.* But the “Letter to Beversluis” is not the only example of Lewis’s “heterodoxy.” When Psyche goes about saving Orual’s soul in Till We Have Faces without Orual’s knowledge or her consent, Lewis intimates that our salvation may be the result of our soul’s activity “behind the veil.” Or consider Aslan’s statement to Emeth on the threshold of Heaven, “What good you did in the name of Tash was done for me, and what evil you did in my name was actually done for Tash” (my paraphrase). I cite these examples, not because I need Lewis’s authority to support my argument—again, it is self-evident that a Supreme Being who “plays fair” and loves all people equally according to their inherent moral dignity is morally superior to a Supreme Being who takes sides—but to indicate that my argument has a place within the Christian tradition.
Indeed, Christianity, in spite of its insistence on belief in Christ (whatever that means to individual believers) as necessary for eternal salvation, contributed to the concepts of equality and inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration precisely because Christian thinkers like Aquinas, Grotius, and Pufendorf subscribed to the natural law philosophy of Cicero and Aristotle while later Christian writers like Hutcheson, Burlamaqui, and Elisha Williams developed natural law theory in light of the Enlightenment, most notably the writings of John Locke. More important, of course, are Christ’s teachings that “the last will be first, and the first last”; “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven”; and similar statements that radically subvert the hierarchy of values associated with material wealth and social distinction. And, finally, at least for my purpose, is the Pauline teaching that in Christ there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, freeman and slave, male and female. These Christian doctrines coupled with natural law theory and Enlightenment thought laid the foundation for the Declaration of Independence, and while it took two centuries to extend basic rights to Blacks, women, indigenous peoples, homosexuals, etc., the philosophical foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been laid.
However, it is of even greater importance to recognize that human rights were not extended universally as a result of reason or religious doctrine: No, the most significant advances in 20th century moral law were a direct consequence of the Holocaust, the horrors of World War II, and the invention and deployment of the atom bomb. We didn’t embrace the fundamental principle of human justice until the most egregious violations of justice and the possibility of global destruction drove us to it, and even then, there are resisters and detractors, many of whom are Christians and other ostensibly religious people.
And that will lead us to further considerations.
Maybe I’m wrong about my argument concerning God and the natural law, and we’re doomed regardless of any arguments. No one knows, not even those of you who speak with greatest certainty. For my part, I am but a Prophet of Possum-abilities, a Hillbilly Heresiarch, and a Mourner of Men, and in my darkest days of doubt, my only hope is that Julian of Norwich is right: “All will be well, and all will be well.”
*In his essay “The Poison of Subjectivity,” Lewis renews his argument against ideological subjectivism and for natural law by drawing on many of the points he made in The Abolition of Man. Contrary to my thesis, however, Lewis argues that the notion of a Law to which God must submit creates a “cosmic dyarchy, or even [makes] God himself the executor of a law somehow external and antecedent to his own being” (8). Given the historical and apparently inevitable human tendency to claim God “for our side,” I’m sticking to my guns: It’s “better” to conceive of God as committed to “the equal and inherent dignity of every human being” than it is to, as Lewis says, insist that “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God” (9). And by “better” I mean that a self-evident principle of justice is more likely to save humankind from itself than an attempt to persuade disparate groups of people to agree on the character of God. One could counter that Lewis’s argument and mine amount to the same thing, but as I say, a survey of history reveals that the concept of “God” is so malleable (and contentious) that it is shot through with the very subjectivism Lewis decries in his essay. Posit the natural law principle first and then talk about God: The same law that protects an unborn child by affirming his or her inherent dignity protects a minor from being subjected to “gender affirming care” while it also demands an end to the slaughter of Gazans and Somalis and Nigerian Christians and the Rohingya in Myanmar, and ultimately leads to the abolition of all nuclear arms and the recognition of universal human rights, regardless of who or what a particular human community believes about God. ↩︎