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Christian community in the shadow of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Fukuyama

By Peter Sellick - posted Monday, 10 February 2003


Paradoxically, although the idea of human rights is based on theism it is profoundly atheistic in that it denies God's demand for justice. Instead of understanding the wellbeing of human beings as vested in God, the language of human rights makes it a property of the individual.

If we do not accept the premises of natural theology and the existence of self-evident natural law, then human rights have no basis other than ideology. Secular people, who have no faith or belief in God, continue to chant the mantra of human rights with no understanding of their origin. Indeed, the language of human rights has crippled ethical discussion because the warrant for them is hidden: they rely on simple assertion to carry the day. These assertions have grown from the original three, of liberty, fraternity and the right to property, to include anything that seems like a good thing in the councils of the United Nations. The assertion of rights produces not community and cooperation but a jostling for precedence among overlapping and conflicting claims. As Walker Percy has pointed out, such language easily leads to convoluted ethical outcomes as when the unborn or the old are killed because they have a right not to live lives of senseless suffering.

Human rights also breed a dependent mentality. This has happened because the original Judeo/Christian tradition about freedom has become ideology, in theological terms it has become an idol and idols never produce freedom and life but suffocation and death.

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Fukuyama tells us that there will probably be no advance in political systems beyond that of liberal democracy and thus he proclaims the end of history. I must admit that I find his argument convincing. However, he is ambivalent about the man who has to live in "post historical times". This man lives in a time in which politics consists of economic management. In liberal democracies there is little or no change in the fundamental structure of government. There will therefore be no revolutions, no sweeping aside of old regimes, or in Fukuyama's terms, no history. This leaves the last man who lives in this time no outlet for passion or what he terms "megalothymia" since all of the great political questions have been resolved. With so many aspects of life being taken over by the state, causes are pushed to the periphery of the mainstream as in the animals rights movements or radical environmentalism or directed towards the body as the proliferation of disease associations attests. The thirst for justice is directed towards obtaining absolute egalitarianism in gender issues, the disabled or of people of colour. The passion for coalition formation is siphoned off into sport.

We are obviously not content to live as consumers and must set ourselves artificial goals in order to convince ourselves that we are alive. My problem with this is that there seems to be no more to say. History has ended and from here on there will only be economic activity and minor adjustments of distribution and equity. But it seems to me that the individual life is absent from this. Fukuyama's last man is an abstraction.

Despite the end of history and the continuation of liberal democracy we still must live out our lives and confront our deaths. The old joke about Hegel is pertinent here: he explained all things except how we must get through the day. My recent reading of Walker Percy underlines this. Our science is able to explain the macrocosmic and the microcosmic but we find ourselves "left over". We must still struggle with the mystery of our own lives. Stable government may bring an end to war and revolution and establish a soft welfare net but the journey towards God, discovered in the ancient accounts and in our own lives must still be embarked upon. This is why the end of history in liberal democracy may not be likened to the end of history described so luridly and mysteriously in the book of Revelation in which Christ becomes all in all.

Hegel located the event that signalled the end of history as the battle of Jena in 1806 at which the basic principles of the liberal democratic state were seen in their full form although not in their universal application (we are not there yet). The church, on the other hand, proclaims a different date and event, the crucifixion of a wandering teacher by the Roman authorities in AD 30. This is the hinge of history from which there is no turning back that directs all events towards a culmination in the kingdom of God, that earthly reality in which human freedom and justice and peace will be complete. That would be a real end of history, not just the end of political evolution. It shares with Hegel's end of history the continuing tension of the now but not yet, of the end being seen in the present in an incomplete form yet glimmering on the horizon to beckon us on.

May we understand the establishment of liberal democracy as being a part of the journey towards the Kingdom? But then why not see the invention of penicillin or electrification or any number of technologies as being a part of our progression towards the Kingdom? We could well point to the materialism of Israel being the necessary precursor to scientific thought in a similar way that we point to the egalitarian content of Christianity being the precursor to the liberal democratic state.

The parable of the ferment of the yeast is apt here. The yeast remains invisible in the dough but produces the leavening that makes the bread delicious. Just so the gospel ferments in culture to produce good things. It is not there for itself but for the ferment that it produces.

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So there is a way that we can see liberal democracy as a fruit of the gospel, but it is not the gospel itself. As such it is not any kind of end or telos. History or geography may still sweep Western culture away, even end the species. We would be mistaken to identify our cozy position in life with the kingdom. Such a conclusion would pre-empt the kingdom and close the future. It would also strengthen the hubris of the West. The establishment of liberal democracy does not end our waiting. For as John says in his first letter:

Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
(1John 3:2)

This is the arrow of history, this waiting and not knowing, this leaning into an unknown history to reveal what we already know in part that we will know in full.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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