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Introduction
Eminent Professors,
Distinguished participants,
It is a great joy and honour for us to be this morning together with you at this prestigious Law School of the University of Oxford. We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Oxford Centre for Law and Religion and to its Director Professor Peter Petkoff for organising this esteemed Round Table of experts to discuss matters of concern related to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its sacred mission in the contemporary world. As an introduction to stimulate your deliberations, we would like to share with you the official position of the Church of Constantinople on the question of the relation between human rights and the Eastern Orthodox Church, one of the most timely issues in the field of law and religion studies and one of the most pressing matters for the encounter of Christianity with modernity.
Human rights are rightly regarded as one of the greatest political achievements in human history, a crucial step towards a freer, fairer and more humane world. They entered the world arena in the second half of the 18th century, with the American and French Revolutions. Ever since their classic declarations of 1776 and 1789, they have stood, more or less explicitly, at the centre of political affairs — a valuable instrument of humanism in politics and law, as Ariadne’s thread from the dark labyrinths of the time. Their journey in the international legal order begins with the Universal Declaration by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, a humanistic manifesto after the greatest catastrophe in human history, claiming to be “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (Preamble).
In our days of wars and displacement, AI, and an ever-declining agreement on values — on marriage and family, on formation and education, on good and evil — human rights offer themselves as an instrument for overcoming the global crisis of freedom. As Heiner Bielefeldt has put it, “the human rights response to the crises of modernity, initially found in the West, seems to have become unavoidable in many parts of the world today, due to analogous experiences of injustice and crises.”[1]
In the memory of peoples and individuals, human rights remain the symbol of the struggle for human dignity, for freedom and justice; a sign of hope for a better future for humankind. People know that freedom and peace do not come naturally as a result of economic development, rising living standards, and advances in science and technology.
I. Religion and the Challenge of Human Rights
Since their emergence, human rights have faced opposition from the Christian Churches. “There is hardly a development in the modern spirit that has not initially encountered resistance from the Churches and theology,” says Jürgen Moltmann.[2] For Church and theology, human rights were “the expression of a hopeless self-empowerment of man,”[3] even a falling-away from Christianity. Only after the catastrophic consequences of the twentieth century did the Western Churches make the humane goal of human rights their own concern; today, as Konrad Hilpert observes, “the current Catholic Church sees the observance and realization of human rights as a central concern of its activities,” a judgment that “also applies to the Evangelical Churches and the large ecumenical organizations.”[4]
In our day, human rights are once again confronted with religion, this time the non-Christian religions, for whom the encounter is certainly not easier: human rights do not belong to the traditional good of religions, although great impulses for protecting human dignity have emanated from them. The main arguments raised against human rights by non-Christian religions are these: that they remain Western cultural assets whose claimed universal validity is a new form of Western hegemony; that they function, even against the Churches’ own will, as a subliminal Trojan horse of Christian mission; that they express an individualistic view of the human being that shatters the anthropological foundations of community-centred cultures; and that their secularism and anthropocentrism are incompatible with the theocentricity of non-Western cultures, aligning the human rights movement with atheism.
Much of the future of human rights depends on the attitude of religions towards them, and no solution can be found here without the dialogue of religions with human rights.
II. The Orthodox Teaching on the Person
The challenge of human rights also affects the Orthodox Church, whose fifteen Autocephalous Churches do not speak with one voice on the subject. Some circles in the Orthodox world see modern human rights as a “fundamentalism of modernity,” an “imported discourse.” But this does an injustice to both human rights and Orthodoxy, for it forecloses every possibility that Orthodox theology can make a positive contribution to the subject, and is rather a path to self-marginalization that feeds the clichés which identify Orthodoxy with sterile traditionalism, a religious culture alien to the West — clichés such as Samuel Huntington’s judgment that “Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin.”[5]
The difficulties of the Orthodox Churches with human rights are not primarily theological, but, in reality, result from historical contexts and negative experience with modernity. Chief among these is the thirty-year “war for souls” that followed the collapse of Soviet power, when foreign missionaries entered the formerly communist states, whose prevailing religion was Eastern Orthodoxy, and local Orthodox Churches, resenting this new marketplace of religious ideas, pressed their states to adopt anti-proselytism laws and other restrictions that have since drawn the attention of the European Court of Human Rights.[6] We must be candid: this was not, in every instance, a defence of religious freedom, but too often its restriction, however understandable the wound felt by an ancient Church confronting missionary rivals on her own canonical territory. Human rights norms alone cannot resolve so deep a theological disagreement over the nature of mission and conversion; but neither can the Orthodox Church invoke the protection of her “spiritual territory” to deny to others the very freedom of conscience she rightly claims for herself. Christ’s commission to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19) must be held in balance with His Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12); only that balance, and not legislation alone, can temper the dogmatism on both sides.
We consider these difficulties surmountable, especially since the basic principles of the Enlightenment, freedom and reason, are not alien to Orthodox anthropology. The fundamental concept of Orthodox anthropology here is the concept of the person, at home in the patristic tradition, expressing the creation of the human being in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). Being a person gives the human being the highest dignity, which is inalienable. Whatever destroys or degrades this absolute uniqueness of the person by turning it into a mere means to an end is unacceptable, even where that end is itself accounted sacred: “Nothing is more sacred than the person.”[7] When Orthodox theology speaks of theosis, of the deification of the human being by grace, and defines him as a “deifiable being,”[8] it confirms this highest value and names his true humanization through the grace of God in the community of the Church.
For Orthodox Christianity, being a person always means being with, being in community with other people. “One person is no person,” said the late Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon.[9] In this way, Orthodox anthropology resists individualism and the smug insistence on “my right” that opens an abyss between human beings. The Encyclical of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete, 2016), whose tenth anniversary we celebrate this year, draws attention to this truth: individual rights can turn into individualism and a demanding attitude, at the expense of the social content of freedom (§16). Yet the Council’s Message also rightly emphasizes that “greatest of all is love” (1 Cor. 13:13, §10); for Orthodox theology, the highest ethos is self-sacrificing love, the voluntary renunciation of one’s own individual rights in the name of one’s neighbour. This in no way devalues human rights or their implementation; on the contrary, the believer has an additional motivation to stand up for the rights of fellow human beings.
Orthodoxy has a deep sense of the social content of freedom — what Georges Florovsky called the “strong social instinct” of the Eastern Church.[10] It is not an exaggeration to claim that the God of Orthodox Christianity is the most “social” God, “God of relations.”[11] This sharpens the Orthodox view not only of the individualistic narrowing of human rights, but also of the endangerment of human individuality within social, economic, political and technological superstructures, as well as within the radical communal orientation of some cultures. What, Metropolitan John Zizioulas has asked, will remain of the sacredness of the person in an age when genetic engineering can reproduce identical human beings, or when states and private actors alike can gather personal information by technical means of inconceivable precision, beyond any possibility of control?[12] The Magna Carta of Orthodox Christianity is the “law of personhood.”
III. Personhood and the European Idea
The law of personhood is also an invaluable contribution of Orthodoxy to European identity. For us, Europe is not a “brainchild,” but a vision and an impressive form of concrete “progress in the consciousness of freedom” — a freedom to which equality and fraternity are indispensable, as the first article of the Universal Declaration itself affirms: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights … and should treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
The Charta Oecumenica, whose revised 2025 edition was co-drafted by the Orthodox Church and co-signed by our Archbishop Nikitas of Thyateira and Great Britain here present, as President of the Conference of European Churches, declares: “Based on our Christian faith, we work towards a humane, socially conscious Europe, in which human rights and the fundamental values of peace, justice, freedom, tolerance, participation and solidarity (Isa 1:17) prevail” (§7). “Affirming the dignity and rights of every human being, we denounce any form of forced migration, modern slavery, and particularly, human trafficking: all of these we consider to be crimes against humanity” (§13). Human dignity, the normative basis of human rights, includes the equality of all human beings and the inalienability of fundamental rights — which is why the term is used only in the singular in all human rights documents.[13]
The European idea cannot be limited to economic objectives or pragmatic-technocratic orientations; it has a spiritual, humanistic and cultural aspect as well. For us it is of fundamental importance that the spirit of Europe, together with human rights, is nourished from that deep Christian freedom, freedom through faith, expressed as selfless love — a freedom that can mobilize infinite forces of solidarity in the human being, and spur him on in the fight against injustice and for a more humane world.
IV. Theses on Orthodoxy and Human Rights
On this basis, we would like to state the following on the relationship between Orthodoxy and human rights:
a) The encounter of the Orthodox Church with human rights occurs within its broader confrontation with modernity, which Orthodox Christianity must finally learn to hold without simple defensiveness. The spirit of the Enlightenment is not in itself a threat to our identity; like total rejection, total affirmation is not the right attitude, and a differentiated approach is required, one that neither confuses that spirit with its distortions nor ignores modernity’s impasses.
b) Encountering modernity requires real knowledge of contemporary realities; without it, distortions are inevitable, chief among them the tendency to mistake modernity’s negative dimensions for its essence — as when the late Greek philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras described Orthodox culture and modernity as “incoincident,” even “opposite” cultures,[14] whose collision produces “a kind of cultural schizophrenia” in the Orthodox world.[15] That inevitable tension between modern and Christian anthropology in no way means these anthropologies are incompatible, or that dialogue between them is unfruitful. The sterile collision of Christianity and modernity that occurred in the West must not be repeated in the encounter of modernity with the Orthodox Church.
c) Our emphasis on the social dimension of freedom does not exempt us from taking individual rights seriously. It is a misreading of the essence of human rights to call them essentially individualistic; individual rights originally refer to the social dimension of freedom, and social human rights clearly include the protection of individual freedom. The dimension of fraternity and solidarity also originally belongs to human rights, a point that has gained new relevance in discussions of the so-called “third generation” of human rights. As Metropolitan John Zizioulas has put it, the Church can only bless and encourage every development of the law that protects the person as a unique, unrepeatable and irreplaceable identity — including equal rights and freedoms irrespective of sex, race, colour, religion, political or other conviction, national or social origin, membership of a national minority, property, birth or other status.[16]
d) Orthodoxy is often accused of ethnocentric tendencies. A more differentiated approach is needed, since undesirable developments in one Orthodox Church do not justify blanket judgments about the whole, which is not ethnocentric in essence. It is true that the Church’s participation in the liberation struggles of Orthodox peoples, and her contribution to the formation of their identity, has given rise to a particularly close relationship between Church, people and state. We must say plainly that this closeness has more than once been dangerously exploited for political ends[17] — most gravely of all in the current Moscow Patriarchate’s condonation of Russia’s war against Ukraine, where religious and national identity have been made to sanctify state power rather than to serve a people’s freedom. This is a betrayal, not an expression, of the Orthodox faith. When nationalism appears in an Orthodox context it has sources other than that faith, and the Orthodox Church has on many occasions denounced ethnocentrism as incompatible with her authentic traditions. Her encounter with modernity and human rights culture is a good occasion to emphasize her supranational, universal values instead.
e) The Orthodox Church and theology must finally accept that human rights are an achievement of modernity with a secular character. This does not mean, however, that their Christian roots can be treated as incidental.[18] The perception of the absolute value of the human being and of his inalienable dignity is not a discovery of modernity: it runs from the patristic doctrine of the image of God, through the Catholic and Protestant jurists and theologians who first gave dignity legal and constitutional form, down to the 1948 Declaration itself. The commitment to respect human dignity flows from the heart of the Christian gospel of love; in the context of Christianity, ethical imperatives are also God’s commandments, which gives them added weight.
f) We consider the idea of solidarity to be central to the encounter between Orthodoxy and human rights. On the one hand, solidarity refers to Christian love of one’s neighbour and to fraternity; at the same time, it is linked to the modern history of freedom and, above all, to the fight for justice and equality. This makes solidarity the common point of reference for Christian social ethics and modern human rights movements alike.
We cannot separate our Christian identity from our identity as modern people. What is expected of the Orthodox Church today is that she act as a positive challenge for modern human being, as a locus of the culture of relational freedom within a global society of progressive de-solidarization. In the face of the great challenges of our time, the Christian Churches and confessions are called to give common witness; a divided Christianity is not a convincing representative of solidarity, peace and reconciliation, and of the protection of fundamental human rights.
Epilogue
Human rights will remain a major concern for humankind. Neither the lack of consensus on their content and limits, nor their denial by non-Western cultures, nor their exaggeration by modern individualism, nor their politicization and misuse, can detract from their relevance.
There is wide agreement on the Christian roots of human rights, which presuppose the heritage of Christianity even though the Churches once saw themselves endangered by their revolutionary impetus and took up arms against them. Of course, a direct Christian origin cannot be claimed: there is both continuity and discontinuity between human rights and Christianity, and the tension between Christian and modern freedom is therefore irrevocable. The optimistic anthropology of the Enlightenment cannot be completely harmonized with a Christian anthropology that understands human being as created by God and his freedom as a gift of grace.
Yet this tension can be beneficial for a fruitful dialogue, for our humanistic movements cannot be properly understood without reference to Christianity. We therefore consider talk of a “post-Christian” Europe inappropriate: our present remains a dimension of a Christian-inspired past that cannot easily be annulled, and the expectation of a totally secularized culture has proved utopian. In a wholly secularized Europe, commitment to human rights would itself weaken. As Hans Maier has warned: “Do we know whether the culture of the welfare state would survive the demise of compassion and love of one’s neighbour? … Are there still human rights when humanity and its Creator are lost in a ‘clash of civilizations’?”[19]
Even so, the Orthodox Church is not an escapist institution awaiting only the coming Kingdom. She has always given her testimony in the world, courageously; but witnessing in the world has never meant identifying with the world and its culture. Even today, the Church’s commitment to human rights must not lead to her own secularization. As we Orthodox like to say, our witness to the world is a “liturgical diakonia,” a “liturgy after the liturgy,” a constant reminder of the limits of secular freedom on the basis of the life in Christ.
Nor should this commitment tempt Orthodoxy toward the opposite error. There is a temptation today, among Christians of many traditions and not only our own, to answer the real excesses of a self-centred rights culture by constructing a wholesale narrative against rights themselves, as though the remedy for an overextended freedom were no freedom at all. This we must resist. “Rights need healing, not replacement.”[20] Whatever is justly said against the individualism and private stretching of human rights language must never become an excuse to avoid serious engagement with human rights or to deny their normative claim upon us.
The relationship between non-Christian religions and human rights will likewise remain central and difficult, and much depends on it for the witness of religions and for the protection of human rights themselves. Human rights are not, after all, a self-evident expression of Western values; they were formulated at a moment when the Western world itself was in crisis, marked by absolutism and by religious and social conflicts, as a response grounded in the protection of human dignity.
There is no place today for triumphalism: alongside every advance in the protection of human rights, their disregard and abuse continue. They are not a secure possession, but an ongoing task — one that remains, together with our commitment to their implementation, an essential priority for our Churches: to be the place of that freedom whose core is not the claiming of individual rights, but love and diakonia, the freedom that is not a work of the human being, but a gift from God.
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1.H. Bielefeldt, Philosophie der Menschenrechte. Grundlagen eines weltweiten Freiheitsethos, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998, p.38.
2.J. Moltmann, Was ist heute Theologie?, Herder Verlag, Freiburg/Basel/Wien 1998, p.15.
3.W. Huber, Gerechtigkeit und Recht. Grundlinien christlicher Rechtsethik, Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Gütersloh 1996, p.433.
4.K. Hilpert, “Die Menschenrechte in Theologie und Kirche”, in: M. Durst/H.J. Münkl (Hrsg.), Theologie und Menschenrechte, Paulusverlag, Freiburg/Schweiz 2008, 68-112, p.68.
5.S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, London/New York 1997, p.158.
6.See J. Witte Jr, “Human Rights and Orthodox Christianity: Learning From Our Differences”, in N. Doe and A. Nikiforos (eds), Legal Thought and Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Addresses of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024) 59-68, at 61-64.
7.J. Zizioulas, The Law of Personhood, Academy of Athens, Athens 1997, p.599 (in Greek).
8.Ibid., at 591.
9.Ibid.
10.G. Florovsky, “Das soziale Problem in der Östlichen Orthodoxen Kirche”, in: ders. Christentum und Kultur, Pournaras Verlag, Thessaloniki 1982, 165-180, p.166 (in Greek).
11. J. Zizioulas, Orthodoxy and Contemporary World (Kozani, 1991), p. 21.
12.J. Zizioulas, The Law of Personhood, Academy of Athens, Athens 1997, pp.601-602 (in Greek).
13.Cf. H. Bielefeldt, “Was sind Menschenrechte?”, in: Una Sancta 62 (2007), Heft 2, 130-139, pp.132-133.
14.Chr. Yannaras, Die Inhumanität des Rechts, Domos Verlag, Athens 1998, p.134.
15.Chr. Yannaras, Die Inhumanität des Rechts, Domos Verlag, Athens 1998, p.136-137.
16.J. Zizioulas, The Law of Personhood, Academy of Athens, Athens 1997, p.599 (in Greek).
17.See A. Pin, “Better Human Rights: The Orthodox Lesson”, in Doe and Nikiforos (eds), Legal Thought and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 69-78, at 75-76; J. Witte Jr, ibid., 64-67.
18.A. Pin, “Better Human Rights: The Orthodox Lesson”, 70-73.
19.H. Maier, Welt ohne Christentum – was wäre anders?, Herder Verlag, Freiburg Br. 1999, pp.148-151.
20.A. Pin, “Better Human Rights: The Orthodox Lesson”, 78.
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