Do Natural Rights Exist?..."Pauline notion of koinonia...serving each other as members of the same fellowship, not as individuals [rights] protecting their material interests against the claims of others... incompatible with biblical morality"

The Presbyterian theologian Douglas Wilson, whom I recently chatted with on the Chronicles podcast, railed against natural rights thinking as destructive of Christian community. The Pauline notion of koinonia, according to Wilson, rests on people serving each other as members of the same fellowship, not as individuals protecting their material interests against the claims of others. Such a self-centered, self-interested view of the social good, according to Wilson, is incompatible with biblical morality.

My own major concern in this matter may be more mundane. I’ve noticed that the laundry list of supposedly inborn individual rights has continued to expand to include claims that Mr. Anton and I would both reject out of hand. Since the rights belonging to the individual in the state of nature in Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government reflected the age in which it was produced, why shouldn’t that list be expanded in light of our growing moral awareness? For example, why shouldn’t we have a natural right to transgender surgery as well as a right to liberty? And why shouldn’t we include gay marriage among the forms that our “pursuit of happiness” should take?

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/featured/polemics-exchanges-september-2023/?oly_enc_id=8808I0476578B2R

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