Deeper Longings The Relevance of Christian Theology for Contemporary Rights Theories

This essay argues for the relevancy of political theology for contemporary natural rights theories. The belief that human beings have rights that cannot be denied or abrogated has evolved in the West for at least the past six hundred years. Standard accounts hold that natural rights theories have their origins in medieval natural law ethics, which sought to understand the nature of human dignity in terms of the final cause (telos) that was held to be the Divine person of the Holy Trinity. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of final causes had lost philosophical respectability. It was no longer possible to hold that political communities were ordained by God’s Providence to serve the ends of eternal peace and justice. A new tradition of political theory developed that sought to explain society entirely by reference to efficient causes. It created the idea of a social compact wherein each individual was supposed to have surrendered self-sovereignty to the state in return for guarantees that certain