If we look at the beginning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it talks about all human beings having inherent dignity and worth and inherent dignity. Worth is something that, when we think about it, means that being human gives you something. It gives you dignity to have rights to some particular things. It gives you worth and this it comes out of the Christian worldview. Where we believe that all human beings are made in the image of God and to be an image bearer means two things in particular.
The first thing that it means is that as image bearers we have inherent dignity and worth regardless of anything else in life — regardless of our ethnicity, regardless of our socioeconomic status, regardless of our intelligence level, regardless of socioeconomics. We all have inherent dignity and worth as image bearers and then also as image barriers we have capacities to actually image or reflect God in some ways. We have capacities to image goodness. We have capacities to image freedom. We have capacities to image justice, righteousness, peace. These things that God is he gives distinctively to humans over anything else in all of creation.
Human beings have the ability different from puppies or cabbages to actually display their image bearer-ness and these different attributes of peace or love or goodness or justice here. So, when we're talking about the Christian worldview we're specifically saying here that we believe first off that there is something inherent to all humans where we know that there are things that are right or wrong and, second, we believe that all human beings have inherent rights to dignity and worth. Many other worldviews affirm this. This is why as I said the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came about because people said “actually, we can't say that people should be marginalized or put aside or murdered or oppressed because of particular things.”
And so, when we think about the Christian worldview, specifically, how do we live out these things? How do we live out our natural law? How do we live out the moral law of the universe or specifically our capacities as image bearers? One of the things that all Christians are called to do is to live up to some of these capacities. We're to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly. When we distort these things, we're distorting part of what we were created to do but even more so than that. What I would argue is what we see in Galatians 6:10 is that we do good at all times especially to those in the family of believers and so as Christians we're called to actually walk into this goodness.
We're called to humanize people and by humanizing we allow them to live up to their capacities. Where they are made to experience peace capacities. Where they are made to experience justice capacities. Where they are made to experience goodness and so we live out our image baroness by doing these things.
Also, we humanize others by allowing them to live out their capacities in these ways, so we do good to all especially to those in the family of believers. So, if we are a Christian and we're talking about human rights we primarily seek to help our brothers and sisters, our family of believers. This should be our first organizing factor. Over and above political lines, over and above other things, is that when we see an image bearer who has been distorted, we are, one, upset because we do good to all, but we particularly move to help other Christians.
We are obligated to them as family members to care for, to pray, to help, to come alongside of and to mourn with those who mourn, to rejoice at times with those who rejoice. When we're talking specifically about Christianity and about human rights what we see is that Christianity is committed to human rights inherently to creation in Genesis 1. God gives humanity his image which means that they have the rights to justice and goodness from their creator; of course, this gets distorted in the fall.
Other image-bearers take away the rights for these things. We see that the world does not function and all of the goodness that it's supposed to, but this is what human beings were created for. They were created for dignity and worth and they were created to be able to reflect these things and receive these things.
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