Universal Declaration of Human Rights

http://www.un.org/en/udhr-showbox/

Human rights through an Anglican lens

excerpt:

 

Today (10 December), we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the newly-established United Nations organisation in the aftermath of the Second World War. Some Christians sit uncomfortably with the growth of the modern human rights movement, seeing it as a “secular religion” which threatens to displace our faith, especially as Christian belief and practice declines in the countries of the Global North.

Speaking as one from the Global South, I have no such discomfort – especially coming from a country in which our faith was perverted by Christian churches to propagate the notion that separating people on the basis of race and ethnicity is necessary to peaceful human co-existence, thus denying our conviction that “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galations 3:28).

Let’s look at human rights through an Anglican lens, using Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience to interpret our context. Taking those touchstones seriously, using reason to consider our experience in the light of scripture, it seems to me that when we seek guidance from our faith on how to we should live in the world, we can begin with God’s words in Genesis: “Let us make humankind in our image” (1:26).

For if each one of us is made in God’s image, then as Desmond Tutu has said, we are God-carriers, and to treat any one of God’s children as less than this is not simply unjust, it is not simply painful for the one so treated, it is “blasphemous – like spitting in the face of God.”

Read the Archbishop of Cape Town and Primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Thabo Makgoba's powerful words here. 

A prayer:

O HOLY GOD, you love righteousness and hate iniquity: Strengthen, we pray, the hands of all who strive for justice throughout the world, and, seeing that all human beings are your offspring, move us to share the pain of those who are oppressed, and to promote the dignity and freedom of every person; through Jesus Christ the Liberator, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.