Asked what the churches' attitude to human rights is, many would imagine it as, at best, a rather grudging support in deserving cases. Others would have good reason for thinking that its attitude was one of hostility born of the suspicion that rights-talk (bad) was opposed to duty-talk (good), and has become a cover for self-centredness and moral anarchy: a supreme instance, surely, of the claim by one researcher to have discovered that the chief difference between church members and the rest of the population was that the former were grumpier. That rather jaundiced view has, of course, to be set against the evidence of heroic struggle in diverse settings undertaken in the name of the gospel of Christ for those deprived of their rights, their freedoms and even their lives. The study of human rights is inevitably therefore a study of passionate intensity and at the same time of considerable ambiguity, a major theological challenge.

We are fortunate that Professor George Newlands has risen to that challenge with a work of enormous breadth and depth, which reverberates with the conviction that Christian faith, and the doctrine of Christ in particular, has something distinctive and transformative to bring to the discussion and safeguarding of human rights. What it has to bring is precisely the commitment represented by Jesus Christ to humankind, and specifically to those located at the margins of society.

That is the theme to which Newlands returns frequently, with biblical and present-day references. In the process, he engages with rights through philosophy, and through the history of interpretation, political development and culture, demonstrating just how pervasive has been the effect of the emerging rights tradition on almost every aspect of human thought and endeavour. The range of his erudition is immense, which sometimes leads him to use shorthand expressions that he assumes all his readers will understand.

Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in Newlands' excursion into law, and there as elsewhere there is a careful reflection on the ambiguities of the role of law in the declaring and enforcing of rights. His engagement with rights critique is, especially for readers who may not previously have examined it, of particular interest. It is, for instance, disturbing and salutary to reflect on the way in which, in a legal rights culture, in the words of Robin West, whom he quotes,

So rights culture deserves a critical response, even if not a grumpy one. It accords with Newlands' main theme that he points up the critique of rights law as becoming a double-edged sword, favouring radical individualism because of the roots of much rights thinking in eighteenth-century conceptions of rights as belonging entirely to individuals and not to groups. Rights therefore need to be held in balance with a substantive conception of the good society – and that would certainly not include one of the more baleful outcomes of the US Bill of Rights, the ‘right’ of individuals to carry arms. Nonetheless, Newlands concludes that, whatever may be the criticisms of the concept of rights and their entrenchment in law, radical thinkers (not least those advocating feminist and gay liberation) are right that it is a concept that we cannot do without and that still has the potential to achieve liberties that will not be safe without a legal basis of rights; with Helena Kennedy he judges that contemporary rights culture is based on a ‘careful and sensitive balance between respect for the individual and support for community’ (p 135).

Newlands judges this careful and sensitive balance to be supported by a Christology that takes the narrative of Jesus with full seriousness. The vision of Christ engenders ‘Christomorphic solidarity’ (p 82), an engagement with fellow human beings shaped by the ministry of Christ, avoiding all use of the language of faith to engender terror or justify the demeaning of persons. For this reader, at any rate, some of the connections that Newlands makes work better than others, though all are adventures in thinking that provoke further thought. For example, his connections between the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the vision of Christ understood as the paradigm of the perfection of humanity shows well how an essentially ‘secular’ text contains much that the Christian inheritance can own. On the other hand, his reflections on the cross as making torture unacceptable in any circumstance seems a somewhat forced one, though with an obviously uncontroversial conclusion.

These connections draw Newlands and the reader towards a contemporary world of rights in which ‘the Christomorphic tradition continues’ (p 93). This is supported by the life and death of such figures as Bonhoeffer, who, although he did not speak of human rights, clearly lived for them and died for them. Like others, he withstood massive human rights violations, and, like them, contemporary emancipatory theologies such as feminist theology witness to the connection between Christ's humanity and the development of rights.

This valuable study makes its connections not in one ‘theological’ chapter but throughout the book, and that is one of its principal values. On the negative side, there is as a direct result some jerkiness of style as the complexities of legality and the philosophy and history of human rights are juxtaposed with an account of Christ that, in Newlands' hands, is essentially and profoundly simple. What that way of making connections produces, however, is a book that can engage at different levels lawyers, theologians and activists, all of whom can find here inspiration and education in the task of creating a society that affirms and protects the dignity of all human persons.