Art is love creating new worlds; justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.

Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it. English

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself.

And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in—but instead is only about coming to faith in the present and going to heaven in the future, then we must reply that something has gone very, very wrong in their thinking.

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.

As our world shudders like a plane suddenly hitting a flock of geese, we badly need people who will learn that sense, and learn it quickly, not simply or even primarily for their own benefit but because our world, God's world, needs people at the helm in whom courage, good judgment, a cool head, and a proper care for people—and, if possible, faith, hope, and love as well—have become second nature.

It took not only genius but considerable [70] chutzpah to see, and to say, that the symbol which spoke of the horrible 'justice' of Caesar's empire could now speak of the restorative justice of the true God.

The Bible is part of God's answer to the ancient human quest for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty. Read it and see.

Have you any right

As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.

Lived out consistently, postmodernism leads to complicity with evil and injustice.

The only basis for genuine human rights and dignity is a fully biblical worldview.