Someone on the ASA list made the following comment about the role of law:
the primary purpose of laws should be individual rights and group issues should be secondary.
Here are some thoughts I have concerning that commonly held proposition:
I’m not sure I can fully agree with this as a general principle. I’d agree that individual “rights” are important — thought I’d prefer terms I might consider more Biblical, such as “personal dignity.” However, I think the Enlightenment tradition (and its libertarian offshoots) overemphasizes this notion of individual “rights” and tends to deify the individual. It’s an unfortunate quirk of American Evangelicalism, I think, that Western Christianity has come to be so tightly identified with an essentially libertarian ethic and jurisprudence.
It seems to me that the Biblical pattern is to emphasize the community to a greater extent than the individual. Certainly this is true within the Church: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3). I think a similar principle is reflected in Biblical social ethics, from things like the OT jubilee laws to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
So, I’d suggest that a thoroughly Christian jurisprudence has to account for the dignity of each individual as created in the image of God, but cannot have as its focus an individualistic focus on personal autonomy and rights.