THE IMAGE OF GOD, CHRISTIAN RIGHTS TALK, AND THE SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA

Abstract

AbstractThe salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various religious traditions. This article contributes to this religious hermeneutic by turning to the first-generation Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, as important resources for Christian rights talk. These late scholastic thinkers made the image of God doctrine, as transmitted by Thomas Aquinas, the basis for affirming the worth and human natural rights of Amerindian peoples. To highlight the contemporary relevance of the school, the article engages Nicholas Wolterstorff's recent work on rights and his twofold critique of a capacities approach to human dignity and a virtues approach to justice. The School of Salamanca not only addresses the important concerns raised by Wolterstorff but uniquely offers a view of rights inextricably linked to human capacities and Christian virtue that highlights both the patient and agential dimensions of justice. They provide a critical theological challenge to the dominant secular liberal view of rights in a way that Wolterstorff's account does not.