Biblical Texts Engaged
Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008) marshals an extensive range of biblical texts to argue that the concept of natural rights -- rights that cannot be conferred or revoked by states, that belong to persons simply by virtue of what they are -- finds its most coherent grounding in the biblical understanding of the worth of persons in relation to God.
Luke 12:6-7 -- 'Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows' -- is for Wolterstorff the key text for understanding inherent human worth. Jesus's argument moves from God's particular care for each individual sparrow to his particular care for each individual human being. Every person is the object of God's loving attention -- not merely as a member of the species but as this particular individual. This particular, irreplaceable care grounds human worth not in any feature that persons possess (rationality, moral agency, beauty, usefulness) but in their relationship to God.
Genesis 1:26 -- 'Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness"' -- provides the doctrine of the imago Dei, which Wolterstorff argues gives human beings a worth that grounds their rights. But he is careful to resist the temptation to identify the image of God with some specific human capacity -- if rights are grounded in a capacity, then those who lack the capacity (infants, those with severe cognitive impairment) lack the full grounding for rights. Wolterstorff argues that human worth is grounded not in any capacity but in the relationship of being loved and called by God, which every human person has.
Psalm 8:5 -- 'You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour' -- reinforces the biblical sense that human beings occupy a special place in the created order, one of dignity and worth that derives from God's creative intention and ongoing regard.
Core Argument
Wolterstorff's central argument is a historical and philosophical demolition of alternative groundings for natural rights and a constructive case for the theological grounding he proposes. The secular philosophical tradition has tried to ground natural rights in various features of human nature: rationality (Kant), the capacity for autonomous agency, interests, or sentience. Each of these groundings has well-known problems. If rights are grounded in rationality, what about infants and those with severe cognitive impairment? If grounded in sentience, why do humans have more rights than animals with equal sentience? The utilitarian tradition rejects rights altogether, but this leads to notorious violations of individual dignity in the name of aggregate welfare.
Wolterstorff argues, drawing on the historical scholarship of Brian Tierney, that natural rights theory emerged in the Christian West specifically because of the biblical conviction that each person has inherent worth in God's eyes. The concept of subjective rights -- rights that belong to the person as an individual, not merely objective norms that govern how persons should be treated -- first emerged in canon law discussions that were explicitly grounded in biblical conceptions of human dignity.
His constructive proposal is that the most coherent grounding for natural rights is what he calls 'worth-bestowing love.' God loves each person with a particular, irreplaceable love -- the love that Jesus describes in Luke 12:6-7. This love bestows worth on its object: to be loved by God is to have worth that cannot be taken away. Rights are then understood as protections of this inherent worth. To violate a person's rights is not merely to harm them but to act against their God-given worth -- to treat as worthless what God regards as precious.
Legacy
Justice: Rights and Wrongs has been widely recognised as a landmark contribution to political philosophy and legal theory. Its combination of rigorous philosophical argument with historical scholarship and theological depth is characteristic of Wolterstorff's work across multiple decades. The book sparked a significant debate about whether natural rights require religious grounding or can be sustained on secular foundations -- a debate that intersects with Jurgen Habermas's parallel argument about the role of religious traditions in sustaining the moral commitments of liberal democracy.
The book's analysis has been influential in Christian political philosophy, international human rights law, and the philosophy of religion. Its argument that the biblical tradition's particular, particularised love -- God's care for each individual, not just for humanity in the abstract -- provides a more stable foundation for human rights than any universalising philosophical abstraction remains a provocative and important contribution to one of the central questions of contemporary political thought.
Wolterstorff and the History of Rights
Wolterstorff's historical argument in Justice: Rights and Wrongs engages directly with a major scholarly controversy: did the concept of natural rights originate in the secular Enlightenment, or does it have medieval Christian roots? The standard secularist narrative, associated with Leo Strauss, places the origin of natural rights in Hobbes's and Locke's break with medieval Aristotelianism. Brian Tierney's influential historical scholarship (The Idea of Natural Rights, 1997) argued, by contrast, that the concept of subjective natural rights originated in twelfth-century canon law discussions of individual entitlements, embedded in a theological framework.
Wolterstorff endorses and extends Tierney's argument. The canonical discussions that first articulate subjective rights -- the idea that individuals have claims that cannot be overridden by social utility or institutional authority -- are explicitly rooted in biblical conceptions of human dignity and God's concern for each individual person. The concept of rights without this theological grounding is, Wolterstorff argues, philosophically unstable: there is no secular account of inherent human worth that can do the work that the imago Dei and God's particular love for each person do in the biblical framework. Contemporary human rights discourse typically papers over this instability by relying on moral intuitions whose theological origins have been forgotten, but Wolterstorff argues that intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the theological foundation.