A Silent God Would Be Silent on Rights 

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 13 September 2012

So I have made a distinction between certain negative rights (leave me alone in these specified areas) and positive rights (free chocolate milk for everybody). But surely it is more than how it is stated, whether negatively or positively. Couldn't a master of circumlocution cast gay rights as a "leave me alone" issue? The answer to that is "certainly," and so it is not simply a matter of abstract individual rights, negatively stated.

We have no right to be left alone across the board, in every area. We have the God-given right to be left alone in specified areas -- gun purchases, for example. Free speech for another. Free assembly for another. But you don't have the right to be "left alone" in the production of child porn. You don't have the right to be left alone with that abortion decision. The child is present, which means that you are not alone.


Rights come from somewhere, and it isn't the government. If we assert the doctrine of rights anywhere, we have to be prepared to defend the content of what we have said. The Declaration addresses this question quite well when it says that men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Note what this presupposes. It presupposes that atheism is wrong, that rights come from God, not the government, and that the rights cannot therefore be legitimately taken from someone. It presupposes that atheistic evolution is not the case. If there is no God, then whatever "rights" we may have are granted by mankind collective, which is to say, the government, and it also means that your particular case will be handed from department to department up to the final arbitration group, affectionately called the Death Panel.

If the state gives rights, the state can take them away. If God gives us our rights, then other men cannot take them away. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. But if God gives us these rights, then we have to be prepared to answer questions about how we think we know what God did.

The answer has to be that He tells us. God reveals Himself. A God who exists, but who is silent, cannot be appealed to as the source of any rights whatever, because the question "how can you know that?" will shut every conversation down. A silent God is a God who is silent on the subject of rights. A God who speaks on the subject of rights is the God of revelatory religion -- which means He is the Father of Jesus Christ.

So God does reveal Himself, and He tells us that we have rights because we bear His image. We have rights because the image of God is to be respected and honored. Moreover, He also describes for us the nature of this image.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:27).

When we think of the imago Dei, we ought to think less of things like the capacity for abstract rationalization, and more about boys and girls.

Jesus teaches us the importance of this image-bearing when He is discussing the believer's relationship to Caesar -- which interestingly is the same topic that is before us now in this discussion of gay rights.

"And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him" (Mark 12:16-17).

If it has Washington's image on it, as your quarters do, it is appropriate to ship it off to Washington. But if it has God's image on it, it may not be rendered to Caesar, and must be rendered to God. What has God's image on it? Mankind, Adam, male and female together. Endowed by their Creator . . . Male and female created He them.

This means the locus of rights, the place where God's image must be centrally respected, is the holiest place in the temple. Where do we find His image most clearly represented? In the creation, we find it in marriage, and in the gospel we find it in the marriage of Christ and His church. The gospel is a marriage, but it is not a homosexual marriage.