Rights, economics, & the Trinity

...The fundamental right is the right to do so...

...Our interest is not in political argument but theological comment...

...Hunger, disease, physical violence, excessive control of free expression, association and movement, and other such human miseries can be warded off or limited by the establishment of certain rights...

...The appeal must then go out to the wider community -- all fellow persons...

...God," i.e., the Mystery which grounds and surrounds all existence, is pure self-gift...

...In medieval Europe, no one would have claimed a right to formal education as necessary for entering into hun~an community...

...As the second draft of the episcopal letter states: "The basic demands of justice are spelled out in greater detail in the human rights of every person which are affirmed by Catholic social teaching...

...14 March 1986:139I N ORDER TO safeguard and enhance the foundational human right, it is necessary to develop strategies which foster human community...

...In order to carry out responsibilities, rights arise...

...He concludes that "the language and imagery of economic rights is filled with a subtle disdain for human freedom and creativity...

...The point, then...

...Such communities require a basic level of material weU-being, and national government is the usual means through which each person fulfills part of the duty to safeguard the human rights of our brothers and sisters...

...Thus, humanity and relatedness are directly proportional...

...the idea of 'economic rights.' " This idea is in error for two reasons: it distorts the meaning of human rights, and it does/nothing to help the poor...

...God is the One only because God is the Three...

...Consequently, rights to overcome, or protect against, the sources of misery can be the legitimate concern of government with less controversy than if the state were to define a person's life plan...

...Human rights have a social dimension because self-giving leads to mutually enriching communal relationships...

...sight...

...The fundamental responsibility is to give oneself away as perfectly as possible...

...We do not conclude that the right is non-existent...

...Once the idea of human .rights took hold, however, it became central to the social teaching of Roman Catholicism...

...There is a need to distinguish between those goods which are basic conditions for the possibility of a community composed of self-giving persons, and those goods which are less pressing, less directly related to the fundamental right of participation in the life of self-giving...

...T HERE ARE TWO commonly held objections to the theory of social and economic rights...

...What constitutes that necessity will vary from age to age...

...The extent to which the American bishops employ the biblical witness in the draft of the economics pastoral is notable...

...Criticizing governments that put bread before freedom, Simon noted that "a lot of contemporary Catholic thinkers and activists have become infatuated with one of the I REVEREND MICHAEL J. HIMES is academic dean and professor of historical theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York...

...God" is the name of a relationship and the poles of the relationship...

...With regard to the second objection, the history of rights, it is not true to say that earlier generations knew nothing of economic rights...

...In this sense, Christianity teaches that so is God...

...Human rights, in this schema, are viewed as claims to those goods which allow people to act upon the responsibility to be self-gift...

...If that recipient is other than God, a creature, then creation is necessary for God to be God...

...William Simon is mistaken, we believe, in saying that economic rights necessarily lead to people becoming wards of the state, and that including economic claims among a roster of human rights entails a "disdain for human freedom and creativity...

...The liberal tradition starts with the individual...

...The Christian trinitarian understanding, in contrast, is' communitarian, both theologically and politically...

...And yet, since the time of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, the Trinity has gone largely untreated and unexplored: when the This is the aentred Christian in...

...It stresses the necessity of community for humans to grow in the image of God, to engage in acts of self-giving that can become truly reciprocal...

...Their responsibility, as that of all theologians, is to the full panoply of Christian theology...

...God" is community, relationship, Trinity, agape...

...There is no convincing reason why in themselves economic goods should be ruled out as legitimate objects of human rights claims...

...But several words of caution must be raised...

...In frequently used patristic imagery, God is the lover, the beloved, and the love between them...

...Thus religious symbols do not only resonate within the sanctuaries of souls...

...Our relational nature, therefore, constitutes both a promise and threat...

...First, there is the question of practicality -- whether we can realistically claim that all people have a right to things like food, health care, clean water and education...

...While it is true that some of the fights-claims of recent vintage may be excessive, not all of them are self-evidently so...

...but freedom is too narrowly defined in this perspective...

...A political theory shaped by the Christian tradition can only understand the person as an individual in community...

...the broader and deeper that network of relationships, the more truly human the community and the individual...

...When the Trinity is presented in preaching and catechesis as information -- odd but authoritative -- about the inner life of God, the central Christian symbol is robbed of its depth and transformative power...

...Rights, economics, & the Trinity I I central ideas of these miserable systems...

...It has not been merely an element in credal statements, but classically the very form of such statements, the organizing principle of Christian faith since the fourth century...

...During a speech last fall at the University of Notre Dame, William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, spoke of the problems he has with the idea of rights as found in the pastoral letter on the American economy presently being written by an episcopal committee under the direction of Archbishop Rembert Weakland...

...There are clearly situations where the response of individuals and even voluntary associations are woefully inadequate to the human rights violations in question...

...One of the more serious reservations voiced about recent Catholic statements on social questions concerns its use of the language of "rights" to discuss economic goods like food, shelter, employment, and minimum income...

...This is achieved by recognizing that self-giving arises from and creates a setting of communal relations...

...This applies to economic rights as well...

...He insists that, "Instead of being free, independent, moral, and economic actors, citizens become wards of the state...

...i HI II I i mR i theological agenda is determined by polemics, what is accepted by everyone is discussed by no one...

...The fundamental human right is the right to give oneself away to another and ultimately to the Other...

...This correlation of symbol and experience for the sake of mutual illumination has been at the heart of the development of Christian doctrine from the New Testament era to the present...

...This challenge has been pressed by figur~ of some prominence in the American Catholic community...

...But it is a caution against excessive rightslanguage, not a decisive argument opposing such rights, including economic fights...

...But the foundation of such rights-language is theologically strong and the appropriateness of such language in the Catholic tradition is clear...

...But today, since society is able to provide considerably more care, thanks to remarkable advances in medicine, .personnel, and resources, we alter our understanding of what is the extent of the right to health care...

...What is lacking in the letter is an exposition of the way that the central symbols of Christian faith should be interpreted so the public meaning of faith is brought into clearer focus...

...Political theology is not a specialization within the theological discipline...

...This is not an absolute principle, but a good rule of thumb...

...It is also clear, however, that the draft letter relies on the communal wisdom of the church as found in numerous other somces...

...We should be careful about dismissing certain rights because they call for major reform of the status quo...

...The problem with the bishops' economic rights-language is not their embrace of it, but the lack of preparation they have given for employing it...

...Obligations to meet the duties imposed by a rights claim fall upon those best able to assume them, and in most cases the assumption is that the national government is the agent suited to protect the fights of those living within its borders...

...It was not until 1963 in Pacem in Terris that Pope John enumerated those human rights that the church endorsed...

...This emphasis on community flows from the political theology of the Trinity...

...To call something a right is to say that it is acknowledged as a necessary empowerment for people to participate in community...

...The foundation of created being would then have to be divine eros, for God's love would necessarily seek fulfillment in creating...

...In the Hobbesian war of all against each, the goal of human life is the achievement of sovereign independence...

...For if God is triune, if God is the perfect relationship of the lover and the beloved and the love which unites them, then to maintain that the human being is created in the image of God is to proclaim the human being capable of self-gift...

...Roman Catholicism has employed the language of human rights to articulate the framework within which a just strategy for establishing community must operate...

...It is so because no smaller group can properly respond to the duties generated by the right itself...

...In contrast, a trinitarian vision sees the individual and community as co-existent...

...Being is being related...

...here is the significance of the observation that liberalism is the political equivalent of unitarianism...

...The mistaken grounding of rights by Hobbes, Locke, and others, highly significant in the making of a particularly American mindset, is understandable, given liberalism's agnosticism on the nature of the human good...

...rather we call the circumstances extreme...

...David Hollenbach, a perceptive commentator on the church's social teaching, has suggested that the cause of human rights is now the "prime focus" of the "ethical teaching and pastoral strategy" of the papacy in the realm of justice and peace...

...The use of economic rights by the bishops, or for that matter any comment on economics at all, may seem foreign to many in the Catholic tradition...

...By the same token, political theologians must not restrict their attention to only a few of the powerful symbols of the Christian tradition...

...Unless we recover the import of the Trinity for thinking about God, we will not think wisely about the human person...

...I POLITICAL THEOLOGY & THE PASTORAL MICHAEL I. HIMES & KENNETH R. HIMES T HE CATHOLIC CHURCH was slow in coming to an endorsement of the rights that were promoted by the European revolutions of the nineteenth century...

...The letter exhibits a thorough and balanced command of previous church social teaching...

...The doctrine of the Trinity is an elaborate spelling-out of the most basic Christian metaphor for God, represented in numerous ways in the Synoptic Gospels and by Paul, and finally given simple but classic expression in the Johannine documents: God is agape (1 John 4:8, 16...

...Denying instrumental rights that secure necessary conditions for human community seriously weakens the opportunity to exercise the fundamental right of self-giving which is the expression of our nature and dignity...

...And while some symbols are more central to the tradition than others, and may therefore be assumed to correlate with a wider range of experience and yield richer insight into the heart of the tradition, no religious symbol of any significance is devoid of public meaning...

...in twentieth-century America, however, it is inconceivable that a person would be denied a basic formal education and still be said to have the same ability as others to participate in community...

...It is a promise in that the possibility of true communion is congruent with the nature of our being, indeed, with the nature of all being, subsisting as it does in the Triune God...

...Briefly put, those evils which threaten human community are more easily agreed upon than enumerating those goods which foster human happiness...

...Yet the magnitude and complexity of some human rights, especially when a whole group seems deprived of a specific right, leads us to conclude that the agent for satisfying such claims will frequently be the national government...

...In order to draw out the political theological meaning of the Trinity, two consequences of the doctrine must be noted...

...The deprived person or group makes claims on other people in the name of shared humanity...

...Government may, and should, acknowledge other groups' rights to act on behalf of the community...

...5:43-48), the purity of the self-gift which is named "God" is significantly revealed...

...Like other aspects of its teaching, the human rights position of the Catholic hierarchy is subject to critical scrutiny...

...The bishops have not provided, and cannot presume Catholics already have, a foundational political theology to support the ethical claims made in the present draft of the economics pastoral...

...There are rich resources in our heritage for deepening, supporting, and supplementing what the bishops espouse...

...This is not to settle the nettlesome question of how best to overcome the injustice, but to point out that it is the ethical legitimacy of a claim that makes the struggle to overcome the problem a moral imperafive...

...This is the extraordinary claim which undergirds the Synoptic Gospels' linking of the commandments to love God and to love the neighbor as being exactly equivalent, and allows the Fourth Gospel to collapse the two into one new commandment: "Love one another...

...to be" and "'to love'" are synonymous...

...In parable after parable, statement after statement, the meaning of "God" is revealed as the one who is perfectly self-giving...

...Coming into communion with others is not subsequent to existence...

...Human rights are ultimately claims of everyone against everyone for some assistance in the establishment of participatory community...

...is that we should hesitate before granting too much persuasive power to the practicality argument...

...All other rights are derivative...

...Commonweal: 138This is the central Christian insight: "to be" and "to love" are synonymous...

...Recent decades have witnessed a revised sensitivity to the political dimension of the theological task...

...As Augustine argued again and again, God loves because that is the divine nature, not because creation deserves it...

...The individual does not precede the community: The individual and the community give life to one another: as the individual is more truly intelligent and free, more truly human and so more completely self-gift, the network of relationships in which the individual exists is furthered and enriched...

...One way of addressing the matter might be to rely on Barrington Moore's thesis of "the unity of misery and the diversity of happiness...

...T O SUM UP, human rights are moral claims to some good which can be provided, and which should be provided in light of the moral ideal of establishing communities where people can mirror the trinitarian life of self-giving...

...We refer, of course, to the Trinity...

...God" is the name of the relationship of an endless perfect mutual self-gift: in our traditional imagery, the Father gives himself totally to the Son, the Son gives himself totally to the Father, and the Spirit, proceeding from both, is the bond of that pure agapic love...

...Being at all is being with...

...It must not be forgotten that in this framework there is true mutuality...

...It is relationship...

...If God is agape, then some recipient of the divine self-gift is necessary...

...Not only is the other diminished by the denial of his or her fights, but I am likewise lessened because of the absence of full participation in communal life...

...And second, there is the issue of history -- how is it that these particular rights were unknown to, or unclaimed in, earlier ages...

...Serious deprivation on any one of these levels can threaten the integrity of human community...

...As human effort and resources come to affect the conditions for participating in community, the instrumental rights themselves undergo change...

...In earlier times, the right to health care was limited to such public health measures as quarantine...

...The most fundamental human right is the right to exercise the power of self-giving, the opportunity for entrance into relationship, for deeper participation in the life of the human community...

...It was an era of religious individualism, and strikingly unitarian...

...Throughout the eighteenth century, the defenders of what was, on the one hand, presumed to be orthodoxy emphasized divine sovereignty in order to defend God's independence, while religious liberals like the deists, on the other hand, in order to defend the universe's independence, stressed God's non-intervention in the smooth-running mechanism of creation...

...But these are matters we will not explore here...

...God is the very fullness of relatedness...

...Therefore, it is imperative that the foundational role of political theology in relating faith and justice be clarified in the pastoral so that the derived ethical claims from the letter will be more readily understandable and compelling...

...Far from being a reductionist method which claims that religious language is disguised social, political, or economic discourse, political theology insists that the full significance of religious language be recognized...

...To protect the most important rights, one may have to sacrifice certain of one's freedoms by entering into a social contract clearly determining the relationshhips which will exist between the individuals forming the society...

...The extent of an economic right can be debated...

...Any accounting of human rights that stresses, as its foundation, freedom as non-interference rather than freedom for self-gift in relationship, f~eedom for participation in community, is a skewed understanding of the ground of human rights...

...In making such necessary distinctions, a serious danger to be avoided is modern society's inclination to utilize the state with its authorized political authority to adjudicate truth-claims about human fulfillment...

...And aid to these people was, and is, not an act of supererogation but simple justice...

...The ministries of the word, delineated by Paul VI in Evangelii Nuntiandi following the 1974 synod of bishops, are four: evangelization, catechesis, liturgical preaching, and theology...

...This is the profoundly theological reason why liberation theology, unlike some Marxist positions, should underscore that the ending of oppression is for the sake of both the oppressor as well as the oppressed...

...The Christian tradition provides a communitarian critique of liberal ideology...

...Both accepted God as removed and largely uninvolved...

...Thomas Paine, in his essay "Rights of Man," defended the idea of welfare rights such as old-age benefits and child support...

...So central is this to the Christian tradition that the principle is both derived from and elevated into the meaning of "God...

...Thus the list of goods that can be appealed to as an appropriate object of human rights claims is extensive...

...But attempts at a consciously political theoloky have confined themselves to the exploration of a certain few symbols drawn from the tradition, notably eschatology ~nd christology...

...It is an expectation, brought to the doing of theology, that the symbols of religious faith carry public meanings...

...What a far cry, this Christian understanding of the human person, from the Enlightenment understanding of so-called human nature...

...Each relationship brings with it responsibilities...

...The human right is not invalidated, however...

...Whatever the "God" of the Enlightenment might have been, he was clearly not triune...

...Is it true that we simply cannot meet a broad range of social and economic claims...

...It is true that our awareness of human rights, like all knowledge, is subject to historical process...

...The issue of practicality raises a legitimate concern...

...According to Simon, in contrast-t6 human rights -- which erect checks against arbitrary state power -- economic rights inevitably lead to the further empowerment of the state...

...Rather, the oft-repeated statement of the Synoptic Gospels is a description, a corollary of the claim that being and loving are identical...

...These victims appealed to other nation states, not in the name of citizenship but in the name of humanity...

...Each is engaged in juxtaposing the symbols of faith with the experience of contemporary believers...

...lic community...

...Entry into any relationship, save that of dominance, lessens one's independence and so undermines one's humanity...

...14 March 1986~" 141...

...The' bishops need to bring the great symbols of the tradition into dialogue with the economic and ethical themes of the pastoral...

...Aristotle observed that the human person is intrinsically political...

...For humanity requires free and intelligent participation in being, and, according to the Christian tradition, the ground of being is perfect relatedness...

...Second, the imago dei motif, which is often the theological base for the use of rights-language in contemporary Catholic social thought, is transformed by bringing it into connection with the central Christian insight given metaphorical expression in 1 John 4:8, 16, and theological elaboration in the doctrine of the Trinity...

...A POLITICAL THEOLOGY of the Trinity provides the deepest foundation possible within the Christian .tradition...

...Uncovering these public meanings is one of theology's and theologians' primary tasks...

...Complaints from conservatives like William Simon about the use of economic rights in Catholic social teaching may stem from a variety of motives, but the critique does point out a need...

...First, if being and loving agapicaUy are identical, as the trinitarian doctrine claims, then existence does not precede entry into relationship...

...Thus, the document illustrates a manner of theological and ethical reflection that combines two major resources within Catholic tradition: the Bible and magisterial teaching...

...The Christian grounding of rights-language seeks to avoid the individualist bias of liberal dogma by placing rights in the context of community...

...For God is not the one, the absolute, the alone...

...God is not a person, if by that we mean one pole of a relationship...

...But Christianity acknowledges no such agnosticism...

...they also give shape to and insight into persons acting publicly with others in the real world...

...Rights take shape with the passing of time as people pay attention to emerging conditions in society...

...REVEREND KENNETH R. HIMES, O.F.M., is assistant professor of moral theology at Washington Theological Union in Silver Spring, Maryland...

...If a person or group is hindered in entering deeply into the life of the community, then all the other members of the community are hindered in actualizing their humanity...

...Unquestionably important as these attempts have been, the most central and accordingly fruitful of all the great symbols of our tradition has been largely neglected in contemporary political theologies...

...To some extent the counsel of professionals in various fields such as health, agriculture, finance, , ,.= . ,i ,, etc., is required to answer this problem...

...That community fosters and sustains the distinct but interrelated levels of human personhood -- the physical, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, religious -- which interact to constitute the human person...

...This is the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity...

...The classical doctrine of the Trinity was an attempt to understand the freedom of that self-gift...

...Human rights help delineate the claims we have against others and the community...

...Political theology requires us to examine the full range of the consequences of claiming that a religious symbol is true...

...But if God is agape, and the nature of agape is to be entirely free, God, being God, must be pure s elf-~ift, without any necessary reference to creation...

...The someone, the somewhere, and the somewhen which will be affected by the symbol's being true or not are'human beings engaged in multiple relationships at particular times and in particular places...

...for the rejection of the individualistic bias which can distort the ethic of human rights as it is commonly understood...

...This is precisely what has happened in cases of Russian dissidents such as Anatoly Shchransky and Andrei Sakharov, as well as Southeast Asian "'boat people" and starving Ethiopians denied basic material benefits...

...Just as we debate the extent of the rights to free speech or religious expression, or the right to life itself, so, too, we can debate the extent of what a right to food, shelter, or health care entails...

...To hold onto life is to lose it...

...The moral weight of any human rights claim, then, is contingent upon the relation of the good that is sought to human community, the historical locus and creative expression of self-giving persons...

...So if a society, acting through its government, decides that as the result of an exceptional situation -- e.g., a drought -- the right to food cannot be fully implemented, we should not conclude that the right does not exist...

...Some claims, of course, are such that governments conclude they are unwilling to live up to their responsibility, or simply deny it exists...

...No belief is more central to the Christian tradition than the Trinity...

...We are urged to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," and when we discover in the preceding verses that the Father's perfection consists in his not making a "distinction between the good and the wicked, on both of whom he makes the sun shine and the rain fall (Matt...

...to give it away is to see it become everlasting life...

...In the case of social pronouncements, politically conservative voices have frequently been raised in dissent...

...Liberalism sees the end of politics as focusing on the free individual...

...We do not have a moral claim to everything and anything...

...These fundamental rights are prerequisites for a dignified life in community" (# 83...

...The communitarian vision offers an outlook where the basic idea is that people accept their interdependence both as empirically and normatively true, thereby enhancing a shared sympathy and purpose, and accepting responsibility for the well-being of one another and the community...

...Christian revelation thus sheds a broad and dazzling light on the true nature of humanity, precisely by its understanding of the nature of God in whose image we are made...

...A constructive political theology is a necessary correlative to the fine scholarship already evident in the drafts of the letter...

...A human right, however, cannot be an unlimited claim...

...The attention this task has currently aroused is not due to mere theological trendiness, but to the need the church experiences to balance an existentialist 14 March 1986:137theology that rightfully emphasizes the radically personal meanings of religious symbols...

...The human person is the point at which creation is able to acknowledge gratefully the divine self-gift and to respond by giving oneself in return...

...In situations of extreme scarcity, the language of rights Commonweal: J40reminds us that the reason no one fails in her or his moral duty to help another in distress is not that the deprived person has no claim but that circumstances have prohibited the securing of the right...

...God must eternally be giver and receiver and gift...

...What we can conclude is that the exceptional circumstance is just that -- exceptional...

...Simon then points to Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, and Poland as examples of "what happens in countries where economic rights are proclaimed...

...Rights are the primitive property of the individual and must be preserved from society's encroachment...

...At least in theory, however, the perfectly free, fully human being, will be totally independent, and absolutely self-determining...

...This juxtaposition of symbol and experience illumines both: the symbol gives form and context to experience, and experience gives new insight into the content of the symbol...

...It is not an acceptable state, and it must be remedied because it is offensive to a human right...

...What may have to give way is not the voice oYthose denied their rights, but the economic and political structures which make justice "impractical...

...This is not an ethical ideal...

...Political theology takes William James's pragmatic principle with utmost seriousness, that if something is true, it makes a difference to someone, somewhere, somewhen...

...All consequent rights are claims to the preconditions for community, the locus of selfgiving...

...The "God" who undergirds such an ethic is the sovereign Individual...

...Given the nature of some claims, the government, representing all of us in a given society, strives to meet the claims made by individual members of that society...

...But such a position is not only incipiently pantheistic, it ends by making God less than agape...

...But it is a threat insofar as failure to establish community entails a dimunition of human life, not only for the marginalized, but for those who prevent the inclusion of all in participatory community...

...On this level we find Simon's speech wrongheaded, but understandably so...

...Political theology, as we have come to know it today, emphasizes the need not to impoverish this work of correlation by unduly limiting the range of human experience which must be interpreted by the great Christian symbols, and which in turn enriches our insight into the very depths of those symbols...

...just as I have loved you, you also must love one another" (John 3:34...

...There is no being apart from relatedness...