Date of Award
8-19-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Systematic Theology
First Advisor
Joel Biermann
Scripture References in this Resource
Genesis 1; Genesis 2; Genesis 3
Abstract
The language of subjective, individual rights has become the primary way of speaking about the rights and wrongs of human life together. Since the end of World War II, one subset of this language—that of human rights—has achieved a global influence. The various Christian traditions of the west have, in large part, adopted this language of human rights to articulate and supplement their assorted social teachings. Yet, the adoption of human rights language has been contested by a dedicated cadre of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians concerned about the potentially anti-Christian implications inherent in the grammar of rights. Christian rights proponents have argued against these critiques, yet the arguments against rights remain compelling to many. This dissertation examines the arguments for and against rights language within the church through the lens of the Lutheran tradition. Historically, the Lutheran tradition has had little influence upon the development of rights language and so has rarely been drawn upon as a resource either for or against the inclusion of rights in the church. Yet, I suggest that many of the most compelling critiques of rights language can be resolved through the resources of this rarely heeded tradition. Throughout this project Alasdair MacIntyre serves as my primary rights antagonist whose critiques of human rights language I employ as the yardstick against which various Christian articulations of human rights language are measured. Each chapter examines one of MacIntyre’s four critiques of human rights: the question of justification (Ch. 2), the need for specification (Ch. 3), their relation to community (Ch.4), and rights autocracy (Ch. 5). After a critical examination of MacIntyre’s critique, I introduce a variety of Protestant and Catholic rights proponents as they address the problematic issues MacIntyre identifies. Informed by the various attempts by Christian thinkers to overcome these challenges, I develop a Lutheran approach to these challenges by drawing upon the distinctly Lutheran theological loci of the Two Kingdoms, Vocation, and the Three Estates. From these Lutheran commonplaces new opportunities become available for avoiding, mitigating, or overcoming MacIntyre’s legitimate critiques of the problematic usage of modern human rights language. Armed with these new possibilities, the church will be better equipped not only to protect itself from deficient and potentially dangerous articulations of human rights language, but also to refine and enrich its own account of human rights.
Recommended Citation
Dollar, Christian B., "Tradition, Critque, and the Modern Moral Lingua Franca: a Lutheran Articulation of Human Rights Language" (2025). Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation. 160.
https://scholar.csl.edu/phd/160
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
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