Justice and Rights

Justice and Rights

Blog Article

The aim of this article is to give the reader a synoptic view of justice in the thought of the Christian church and, more briefly, in its practice, over the centuries and today.Scripture is foundational in the thought and life of the church, so the article begins by taking note of the prominent and distinctive role that justice plays in Christian scripture, and explores why some writers hold that justice has been superseded in the New Testament.The biblical writers employed the concept of justice without defining it.

The most influential definition in the Western tradition occurs in the Digest of the Byzantine emperor Justinian: justice is rendering to each what is their right or due.After probing the implications of the Justinian Globalization and democracy definition, the article explores a dispute that arose, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, concerning what one might call the deep structure of rights: are rights all derived as correlatives of obligations imposed on us, or are some inherent in the rights-bearer on account of some worth or excellence that the bearer possesses? Though few writers explicitly reject the Justinian definition of justice, a number Short-term wind power combination forecasting method based on wind speed correction of numerical weather prediction of writers in recent years, Christians prominent among them, have argued that rights-talk has become so debased that it should be discarded in favour of talk about obligations, love, and so forth.The article explores reasons for holding that talk of rights remains important.

It concludes by highlighting the role of justice in the worship of the church, and by pointing to the mixed record of the church with respect to the practice of justice.