Ethna Regan's key argument in Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights is that the language of human rights is an essential, if insufficient, part of Christian theological reflection about society and justice. As a “boundary discourse,” human rights provide essential protections for the vulnerable. At the same time, Regan suggests that rights-talk does not displace the traditional concepts of theological ethics. Rather, theological ethicists should adopt the language of human rights, recognizing the marginal protective role of human rights while combining that discourse with ideas of eudaimonia and theological virtue. In this way, the discourse of human rights allows theology and secular ethics to converge in one conversation. By focusing on the protective role of human rights, theologians can then move to a discussion and defense of what human rights should and can protect, what is involved in the idea of human dignity.
Regan's book is both a defense of theological engagement with human rights and an example of how that engagement can happen. She ably reviews the history of the major human rights documents by the United Nations and the history of Catholic social thought and Catholic engagement with human rights, as well as contemporary Catholic and Protestant theological ethics. Her positive theological proposal centers on the possibilities for human rights thought in the doctrine of the imago Dei. Interpreting the theological conception of the human person in Karl Rahner's theology, Regan concludes that Rahner's idea of the “anonymous Christian” was a recognition of the “implication of all human goodness” in an expansive understanding of God's grace and incarnation. The human dignity implied in God's grace in the incarnation and the individual's unique and irreplaceable place in existence is concrete, “embodied, gendered, and historicized” (85). Here, Rahner's theology intersects with the discourse of human rights, in his focus on protecting the depth and dignity of the human person. Regan also engages with the contemporary German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, an example of how theology can engage concretely with human history.
The arc of Regan's vision of theological discourse with human rights ends with liberation theology. By focusing on the rights of the poor, concrete and systemic forms of injustice, and the “historicization of ethical theory,” liberation theologians are able to realize the universality of human rights within the actual circumstances of suffering and pain in human history. The possibility of resolving injustice in these contexts stands as a correction to postliberal theologians who reject human rights discourse. To those, Regan points to the example of liberation theology as well as the provisional character of human rights discourse.
While postliberals who reject human rights may not be convinced by her argument, Regan is an able guide to the development of human rights and the kinds of theological engagements that are possible. Her conception of human rights as a “boundary discourse” preserves the distinctive contributions that theology can make to moral and political discourse, while persuasively recommending that Christians observe their citizenship in the civitas terrena as closely as their citizenship in the civitas Dei.
CJM
