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The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism

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Despite the Golden Rule, religious leaders and human rights activists are not always close allies -- but they should be, according to Emory University legal historian John Witte, Jr. in his new book, The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge University Press).

"To ignore religious rights is to overlook the conceptual and historical source of many other individual and group rights. They are a neglected part of the human rights tradition," said Witte, Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and director of Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR).

Human rights proponents, says Witte, tend to believe that religion should not play a large role in the quest to establish rights common to all. They argue that the sacred texts have more to say about commandments and obligations than liberties and freedoms, and that religions themselves have perpetuated as much inequality and violence as they have cultivated peace and justice.

Likewise, many in the religious world are hesitant to fully embrace a theological discourse of human rights, finding this emphasis on secular liberties and religious pluralism in tension with their emphasis on divine law and on the need for structure and orthodoxy.

Both tend to credit the concept of human rights to the political philosophy of the Western Enlightenment, which celebrated reason over revelation, democracy over monarchy, and personal autonomy over communal responsibility.

But Witte explains in his new book, a product of the CSLR's Christian Legal Studies Project, that this is false assumption, that the seeds of modern human rights were cast centuries before, including when the 16th-century Genevan reformer John Calvin developed new teachings on religious freedom.

"There were many human rights in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name," he said. "Indeed, it is now quite clear that the Enlightenment was not so much a wellspring of Western rights as a watershed in a long stream of rights thinking that began more than a millennium before."

The religious rights developed by early Calvinists became the "midwife" of many other constitutional rights, he says. Early modern Calvinists became ardent champions of the rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; of democratic election and representation; of political dissent and civil resistance; and of freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly. They also championed group rights, especially those of the church, family, and school--institutions they considered essential to maintaining faith and order and to buffering the state's tendency toward tyranny.

In his own writings, Calvin called for protection of "the common rights of mankind." He saw it as the state's responsibility to enforce civic norms and the church's responsibility to teach spiritual norms, and urged a democratic process of elections and respect for liberty within the church. "These principles allowed the church to strike a perpetual balance between law and liberty, structure and spirit, order and innovation," writes Witte.

After Calvin's death, leading Calvinist thinkers, writers, jurists, and philosophers adapted and advanced this reformation of rights. Instead of a comprehensive survey of Calvinist teachings about law, religion, and human rights, Witte chose to concentrate on "those figures who stood tallest in times of crisis and challenge" and "permanently redirected the Calvinist tradition toward a ever wider embrace of rights."

The Reformation of Rights tells of the foundations for rights that Calvin built through his work in 16th century Geneva; the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 in France and the decisive response of Calvin's successor Theodore Beza; the Dutch Revolt against the King of Spain in the late 1500s to the early 1600s (which foreshadowed the American Revolution some two hundred years before its time) and the reaction of Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius in crafting a comprehensive theory of law, religion, and human rights; the Puritan Revolution from 1640 to 1660 against the tyranny of King Charles and the remarkable theory of religious, domestic, and civil liberty developed by John Milton; and the challenges facing the New England Puritans as they struggled to create a system of "ordered liberty" within church, state, and society.

"To tell this historical story of rights in early modern Calvinism is not to wax nostalgic about a purported golden age of human rights, nor is it to suggest that all the particular rights premises and precepts of early modern Calvinists be accepted in our day--by contemporary Calvinists, let alone by everyone else," Witte writes ". . . it is instead to point to a rich understanding of rights that is too little known and too little used today, even by many Protestant insiders."

Of course, Witte admits, like many other religions, governments, and institutions, Calvinism has had its own deep flaws and fissures, sometimes acting in the same oppressive, intolerant way it decried in others. "When Calvinists were in the minority, they were proponents of human rights, and when they were in the majority, they sometimes had the luxury of forgetting about the rights of others," he says. "They could take as well as give."

The quest for human rights has been a universal one, he adds, from classical Rome to early modern Calvinism to today. The challenge of the next century will be to transform religious communities from the "midwives" to the "mothers" of human rights, he says, asking them to give birth to their own unique human rights norms and practices.

"In part," Witte writes, "this is a return to prophetic voices of dissent, long purged from traditional religious canons, but, in retrospect, prescient of some of the rights roles that the tradition might play today."

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The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University is home to world-class scholars and forums on the religious foundations of law, politics, and society. It offers first-rank expertise on how the teachings and practices of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have shaped and can continue to transform the fundamental ideas and institutions of our public and private lives. The scholarship of CSLR faculty provides the latest perspectives, while its conferences and public forums foster reasoned and robust public debate.

This is a really well written and informative book. One of the tragedies of revisionist history is that we do not get a correct understanding of how Christianity has influenced the rise of liberty through out history. Calvin and his works played a major role in that history and proved to be a major influence in America's founding. In many ways it parallels the information that Harold Berman presented in his classic "Law and Revolution 1 + 2". The content of the book was presented in a very readable format so it made the information very accessible. Another related book that I recommend that also compliments this book is David Hall's "The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding." The Genevan Reformation and the American FoundingLaw and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal TraditionLaw and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (v. 2)

This book is an interesting and incisive discussion of Calvinist theology and the development of human rights law. The argument is whiggish and Witte never really defines Calvinism in any meaningful way...just how "Calvinist" was Milton and the American colonists is open to debate. I would however recommend this book to anyone interested in early modern constitutionalism. It's smart, well written, and illuminating. I would read this book alongside Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols) and Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform.