Should Adventists even bother taking human rights seriously? After all, human rights are under attack from all sides. Certainly, strategic realists dismiss human rights. Recently, I was once again teaching International Human Rights at Columbia Union College, and found myself in Border’s bookstore in downtown Washington getting the last available copy of Robert Kaplan’s just published book, Warrior Politics.

That week Kaplan had received a respectful profile in the Washington Post. He was the pundit de jour, holding forth all over town, including the Pentagon and the White House. His message? Human rights are for naïve, short-sighted wimps. It’s time, he said, that we realize evil is tangible and threatening the globe with annihilation. Resurgent tribalism, ethnic hatred, and devastating over-population encompass the planet. What is needed is action, taken by strong, decisive leaders. Instead of indulging in more mewing about democratic rights, America should realize it is the new Rome, with the power to make things right.

Another group attacking human rights are the philosophical pragmatists. Louis Menand concludes his prize-winning study of American pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club, by saying that Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey understood tolerance the way engineers do: the tried and tested tolerance of a piece of steel, not tolerance as in "the Protestant belief in the freedom of each person to worship according to the dictates of his or her own conscience." (441)

Menand says that after Holmes fought in Civil War battles that killed thousands around him, he recoiled from the moral absolutes of the abolitionists. Menand unflinchingly drives his point on through American history. "The great movement to secure civil liberties in the United States during the Cold War arose out of a religious community, black Southern Baptists, and it was founded on the belief that every individual has an inalienable right to those freedoms by virtue of being human—precisely the individualism that Holmes and Dewey felt they needed to discredit. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a pragmatist, a relativist, or a pluralist, and it is a question whether the movement he led could have accomplished what it did if its inspirations had come from Dewey and Holmes." (441, italics added)

Finally, the current theological ethical establishment sees human rights as a discredited vestige of the Enlightenment. Human rights advocates, they declare, foolishly pretend that reason can grasp universal moral obligations. Stanley Hauerwas has pretty much convinced the theological academy that they and the churches should not get involved in debating rights and obligations. Too often, he says, theologians get mired in the quandaries produced by the clash of rights and other obligations. Theology and religious communities should focus on shaping the virtues of their members.

Despite the realists, the pragmatists, and virtue-oriented theologians, Adventists should explore theological reasons for taking human rights exceedingly seriously. Why? First, human rights is the language of peaceful revolution. Those agitating change through moderate means prefer appeals to human rights to tossing Molotov cocktails.

Secondly, our theological tradition contains not only a Methodist concern for forming character and virtue, but also a Calvinist appreciation for obligations—the duties and rights created and articulated in covenants. For some Adventists the Ten Commandments almost obliterate the rest of the Old Testament. That is where Adventist youth locate their distinctive veneration of the seventh-day Sabbath. Academic Adventists appreciate that Calvinist theological commitments to covenant had something to do with America’s support for a Constitution. Adventists enthusiastically venerate a providentially created American Constitution with its Bill of Rights.

Thirdly, Adventist founders, caught up in the attack on slavery, used the language of rights. Anyone wondering whether human rights fit comfortably into Adventist theological reflection will be interested to note that writers on human rights like Michael Ignatieff and Jurgen Moltmann believe the abolition of slavery to be one of the major moments in the advance of human rights.

Ellen White, of course, declared that a person defending slavery could not be a Seventh-day Adventist: "We will not walk with them in church capacity." (Testimonies, 1:360) Both because of God the Creator and God the Savior, "Jew and Gentile, black and white, free and bond, are linked together in one common brotherhood, recognized as equal in the sight of God." (Testimonies, 7:225) Whites must respect black people as brothers and sisters, because "their common relationship to us by creation and redemption, and their right to the blessings of freedom." (Ibid, 223, italics added)

A sentence of Ellen White’s that appears in various writings describes Christian benevolence as enfolding "the human brotherhood in the embrace of God, acknowledging the dignity with which God has invested the rights of man." (letter 10, 1897, italics added) In the book Education, published in 1903, well before she died, Ellen White described a period when people failed to recognize the Divine or regard the human. Consequently, "the idea of duty, of the obligation of strength to weakness, of human dignity and human rights, was cast aside as a dream or a fable." (75, italics added)

Assuming, then, that Adventists appreciate the language of rights, is there any Adventist accent they can bring to the discussion of rights? Yes.

We have, from our founding, invoked rights as obligations. On the basis of the dignity God’s creatures receive both through creation and redemption, Adventists can continue to enter into the necessary debates and struggles over rights as negative and positive obligations. But Adventists can go further.

Because of the Sabbath, the Ten Commandments are never only a set of obligations. Because of the Sabbath, the Ten Commandments always point beyond themselves to the larger reality beyond, to God. The Sabbath invites us to worship the God who was and is and always will be; God the Creator of the cosmos (Exodus) and God the Redeemer of history (Deuteronomy). The Sabbath points to respect for not only one’s own clan, but also the stranger. In the Sabbatical Year and Year of Jubilee, one’s horizon expands further, to regard for God’s less advantaged—the servant and debtor.

In the Sabbath presence of God the commandments go beyond being merely a list of obligations. In the Sabbath presence of God we glimpse what God sees. From the perspective of the Sabbath, obligations, rights, duties appear to be parts of the vast mosaic of God’s creation. Each right, each duty gains meaning from a vision of the whole.

Both critics and proponents of human rights agree that while Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as well as the Protestant Reformation, contributed to an understanding of rights, it is the Enlightenment that truly expresses an appreciation for human rights. To the rational, human rights are self-evident, universal, and harmonious. Humans are fundamentally free, equal, happy and respected. The brotherhood of man is possible. Human rights are pieces in this utopian mosaic. The Enlightenment, so celebrated or condemned for its pretension to being purely rational, actually proclaims rights dependent on a vision. The Empire of Reason is a secular version of the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah and Revelation. The Enlightenment’s confidence in universal human rights depends on its recreation of the biblical vision of the New Jerusalem. Without a vision rights perish.

The moral mission of Adventism is to revive the vision of the prophets and the Seer of Patmos so that human rights are cherished. The moral mission of Adventism is not only to form character and clarify obligations. The moral mission of Adventism must encompass Sabbaths when we experience the whole, when we enter now the shalom of God. Adventists can, with others, clarify rights. But the special challenge for Adventists is to evoke visions of Christ’s universal community of justice and joy. Only then can humanity sustain a hope vast enough to extend human rights to all God’s creatures.

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