One of the Church of England’s Protestant features is that it lacks a Magisterium. This makes the task of describing what the Church has to say about war and peace less than straightforward, since it is host to many voices, each commanding a different degree of authority.
To describe these deaths as “collateral damage” is to say that they were not intended, but that they were the unwanted results of a deliberate attempt to stop and reverse the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovar Albanians by damaging the Serb forces responsible. In so far as these death are effects outside Nato’s intention, but simultaneous with its intended effects, they were, literally, co-lateral.
The Church exists for the sake of the world. Its raison d’etre is to love the world and seek its highest good. Therefore, it must enter into the life of the world in all its complexity and ambiguity. Where its Lord has gone, the Church is called to follow.
The entrenchment of rights language in contemporary discourse is beyond dispute. No less significantly there are indications that the concept of rights is itself passing beyond dispute. The concept of subjective rights, or rights ascribable to individuals and groups, has entered contemporary political and legal currency primarily through the liberal contractarian tradition. Consequently, the meanings of the term ‘rights’ cannot be properly ascertained in detachment from this theoretical context. For these meanings are embedded in a constellation of political-legal, philosophical and theological concepts with a complex history. Thus, to appraise the contemporary vocabulary of ‘rights’ is to appraise the dynamic theoretical complex that has given rise to it. If such an appraisal seeks its standard of judgement in the Bible, then it is bound to proceed theologically.
My impression is that theologians often engage in a naive and facile appropriation of the language of rights.
Most citizens of this country and of other advanced western and westernizing nations approve of human rights, some more guardedly than others; and most perceive rights to belong to the moral, political and legal fabric of modern liberal democracy. By rights, I mean rights attributable to subjects, to persons, whether individual or collective ‘persons’. To suggest that rights, freedom, and democracy go together (as does the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which has been the template for subsequent generations of declarations) is a modern truism, which, like most truisms, is largely true. Less clearly perceived, I think, is the extent to which human rights and democracy are bound up with liberal economics and free-market capitalism.
