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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Elise Harboldt

The Dignity Revolution: Relating to Ourselves and Others the Way God Intends

And I am really glad to be here with you all.

The topic today is the dignity revolution, relating to ourselves and others the way God intends.

I love the topic of human dignity and I actually learned a lot in preparation for this talk.

Okay so I have a little pop quiz for you.

This quote on the right, it says, well I'm gonna read it and I wonder if anyone knows where it's from.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards 1 another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Does anyone know any guess where this comes from?

Here's a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1 of the people who is very influential in drafting this declaration, along with many people from many different countries.

And this declaration was designed in the horrified by the atrocities of the war and they wanted to come up with safeguards so that people's rights would be protected.

And so this document, although it was not legally binding, binds really valuable ideas about human rights, human rights that are influential in many countries around the world in their forming of laws and understanding of human rights as well as in international law and it condemns things like slavery, atrocities, unlawful captivity, racism, it promotes things like education, the right to life, but if they had not happened.

So this notion of human rights, of individuals having human rights, Prior to this, it was more common of a conception that rights were granted upon people by the states rather than having inherent dignity and rights in terms of law, But this document is really coming from a theological premise.

This notion of human dignity is a deeply theological idea, even though it's often shared in secular contexts.

This is Tom Holland, a prominent British historian.

And he argues in his book Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind, that the notion of human dignity that's often taken for granted in secular culture is actually deeply theological.

That in ancient Greece and Rome, that human dignity, the idea of dignity was really about who's most powerful, who's most dominant.

And there wasn't a notion of the inherent worth of individuals.

We're gonna look a little bit more here about some of the dignity violations in the culture from which Christianity grew.

So Holland argues that even though many people appeal to human dignity, assuming that it's just something everyone should understand, that that's actually a theological claim to make, that humans have inherent dignity and that that dignity should be protected.

He says, to believe in human rights requires just as much a leap of faith as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ raised on the third day and ascended into heaven.

These are theological ideas and have been bred specifically of Christian history.

The West has somehow packaged them and marketed them as if they've been somehow removed from the Christian context that gave them birth.

Okay, so let's look at some of the dignity violations that sadly were very common in the ancient world, particularly in ancient Greece and Rome.

Infants were not considered to have inherent worth and dignity.

Infants were seen as the infant or exposed as the infant.

The process of exposure was when when the baby was left somewhere, whether somewhere in the public where someone else might take the baby, maybe the baby would become a slave, perhaps out in nature the wild animals would capture the baby.

To do in certain situations, more female babies were abandoned because females weren't seen as economically.

Abortion was prevalent in ancient Rome and Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, said, we knock mad dogs on the head, we slaughter fierce and savage bulls, we destroy monstrous births, referring to perhaps babies with disabilities, and we also drown our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed.

To separate what is useless from what is sound is an act not of anger, but of reason.

Right, so he did not have a notion of children or babies having human dignity.

Now, thankfully, The teachings of Jesus really impacted the early church, and early Christians became proponents of the dignity of babies and children.

1, Abortion in the Early Church, Christian, Jewish, and pagan attitudes in the Greco-Roman world.

There's very early accounts of Christians condemning abortion, as well as rescuing the babies that had been abandoned and exposed, and raising them themselves.

This book, When Children Became People, the birth of childhood in early Christianity talks about abortion, the exposure practices, and Christians helping to help child slavery.

Because just like infants weren't seen as fully dignified human beings, neither were children.

So this is something really beautiful about what Christians were able to contribute.

Because oftentimes, unfortunately, become highly politicized in our culture, right?

So it's difficult to talk about things like abortion without people assuming that you're coming from a particular partisan perspective and so sometimes we just don't want to talk about things.

Of course there's other issues of human dignity that have been politicized to the other side.

But I think it's really valuable to realize that if Christians choose to be pro-life, which pro-life comes from early Christianity, not from the Republican Party.

And of course, there's many other issues we could talk about, but let's move to how women were treated in ancient Greece and Rome.

They were seen as less intelligent, less capable than men, and their value was primarily domestic.

Of course, domestic gifts are wonderful gifts, but few women were educated or given the same opportunities.

And Jesus had a high view of women and this is found in multiple of his interactions with women, the way he treated them, and we could talk about this for hours, but 1 story I just want to highlight is that of Mary.

Martha is busy in the kitchen, busy serving, and Mary is sitting at Jesus's feet.

And Martha gets frustrated that Mary isn't helping her.

So she says, Jesus, can you please tell Mary to help me?

And Jesus says, Martha, Martha, you're worried and troubled about many things, but 1 thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.

Now usually when we talk about this story, we say, see, all of us get so busy and we need to slow down and have our donations and sit at Jesus's feet.

And that's certainly 1 good application of that story, but there's more going on here.

The fact that Jesus let Mary sit at his feet meant that he believed in her intellectual abilities because in that culture to allow someone to sit at your feet, but basically you were you were their rabbi, you were their teacher, and you believed that they were intelligent enough to understand what you had to say and also to share it.

So Jesus had a high view of women, their ability to learn, and their ability to contribute to the church or to his kingdom in a wide variety of ways.

Jesus also had a high view of sick people and disabled people.

And of course, we already know from the stories of scripture that within Jewish culture there were a lot of negative attitudes and stigma towards the sick and disabled.

It was believed that disabled or sick people perhaps had sinned and that's why they had this condition.

Some people were shunned and ostracized from the community, but Jesus intentionally touched people and cared for them.

And of course, in the broader Roman culture, there were also very problematic views towards the disabled in many cases.

But Jesus showed dignity to these people and the early church also continued this notion that the disabled should be treated with dignity.

After Christ, there were several plagues in the Roman Empire, unfortunately, where many thousands of people died.

And just like we saw in the COVID pandemic, unfortunately, sometimes poor people are disproportionately affected by pandemics.

In the plague of Cyprian, which was around the middle of the third century, at its peak, about 5, 000 people were dying each day in Rome.

And many wealthy, affluent people who could just fled the city because they wanted to get away from it.

But many Christians voluntarily stayed even though they could have left because they wanted to help care for the sick.

It's kind of like those touching stories we saw at the beginning of the pandemic where some health care professionals voluntarily stayed and helped patients and ended up sacrificing their lives to do that.

And so because of this, because of this love and care, many people at that time converted to Christianity and Constantine.

Now you may remember from church history that Constantine's conversion of the Virgin Mary became the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Now of course, countries don't actually convert to Christianity and this was highly problematic and his own kind of conversion was questioned as well.

But certainly Christianity became more prominent in the Empire because of Constantine.

His nephew thought that Romans should go back to and a return to paganism rather than Christianity.

That's why he's known as Julian the Apostate, the reverence due to the gods.

So he's saying if we want people to respect the pagan gods, we have to be generous and kind too because the Christians are doing that.

These accounts of Christian charity, Christian compassion, are not just coming from Christian sources, but rather from some of the opponents of Christianity.

Now, We talked about Tom Holland making the claim that human dignity is a theological idea.

Someone that agrees with that is Peter Singer, but he doesn't actually believe in human dignity.

He's a utilitarian or consequentialist ethicist.

And what that means is that while some branches of ethics, such as the ontological ethics or divine command ethics, come in regardless of the outcome.

So it's ethics, I'm kind of, you can tell if something's right or wrong depending on the results.

If more pain, I mean if more pleasure and good things will come out of a particular action than pain, then it's good.

And this can be very problematic because it sometimes justifies cruel actions based off of how much good they could cause.

So Peter Singer actually rejects the notion of human dignity.

And Peter Singer will say things like, 1, animals are just as valuable as humans.

And he thinks that he blames the Bible for promoting this idea that humans are above the animals.

Of course in Genesis when God gave humans dominion over the animals it was with a command to lovingly care for them, okay, And we haven't always done that, right?

So people like Singer just wanna do away with Christianity in part because he thinks that it promotes speciesism and that all living beings are created equal and if we did away with human dignity, we would care for the animals better.

But he also says things like infanticide in certain situations could be okay because the pain that the mother would experience or that the family might experience in particular situations outweighs the pleasure and it won't cause very much pain to the infant to be put to death and therefore that could be morally justifiable.

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The Dignity Revolution: Relating to Ourselves and Others the Way God Intends

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